>Stratfor is something to worry about.
I think they're a little paranoid and feverish. Back in 1992, Stratfor boss George Friedman and Stratfor publicist Meredith Friedman (then Lebard) published a book on The Coming War With Japan, which turned out to be pretty badly wrong.
Wierdly, eleven years earlier, Friedman published a book on the Frankfurt School.
[...]
Modern radicalism in the West appears to us a movement of intellectuals, both within and without the university. These intellectuals have been perpetually bemused at the indifference of the mass to its importunements. No amount of complex theorizing can conceal the fact that it is the intellectual and not the working class which resonates to the critique of bourgeois life. Workers have no quarrel, in principle, with the bourgeois. Theirs is a debate between people of the same sort. Wealth and comfort motivate both; the issue between them is the technical one of distribution and, as such, is soluble.
Between bourgeois and intellectual there yawns an abyss, however, for their debate is between kinds of men. The bourgeois is obsessed with use and ornamentation and cares little for reflection. The intellectual is obsessed with a graceful and reflective ornamentation, which is appreciated for its useless beauty. The intellectual looks upon the bourgeois with contempt and fear because the dull bourgeois, buttressed by the unassailable standard of usefulness and bolstered by the strength of an unreflected life, is impregnable. His children, however, are not. Without reflection, the bourgeois trains his children to be ornaments to his life. As ornaments, the children, are, by their nature, graceful and useless. They become intellectuals, finding personal affirmation in the vivid contempt they feel for their fathers.
Thus, bourgeois and intellectual engage in an ongoing and utterly unequal struggle. Each triumphs absolutely. In generation after generation of modernity - Voltaire, Flaubert, Marx - the intellectuals absolutely reject the bourgeois. In graceful theory, they lay bare the emptiness of bourgeois life. Alas, aside from a mild unease or a titillating self-loathing, the bourgeois is unaware of defeat. By nature, they do rather than reflect. Their victory is absolute in their own realm. They look on the intellectuals now with benign con-tempt, now with a savage fury. The worker, who used to deal with whichever side promised more, now deals with whichever side delivers the goods. The triumph of the bourgeoisie is that they deliver.
That they deliver and no more condemns the bourgeois in the eyes of the intellectual. What the intellectual loathes far more than human suffering is human indifference to it. The philistinism of the bourgeois sensibility and not bourgeois practice itself is what nauseates intellectuals and drives them to their radicalism.
This repugnance lies at the heart of the Frankfurt School. Their project, in part, was to teach the children of the bourgeoisie, sent to them to become ornaments to their dull fathers' lives, to take arms against the emptiness of those lives. As the true progenitors of the children's revolt of the 1960s, the Frankfurt School took on as its political project an attack on bourgeois philistinism. Their loathing was not for poverty but for the affluent society, not for brute suffering but for subliminal dehumanization. Aesthetics and not economics was their political arena. This is not said to denigrate the Frankfurt School. On the contrary, it is praise for their singular insight into the true rather than mythical functioning of politics in the twentieth century.
[...]