Within a few years, critical theory scholars like Herbert Marcuse (himself hired by the OSS) did just that. Marcuse founded the New Left and was idolized by the Vietcong-enamored radicals who hated repressive “Amerikka.” Marcuse’s star student at Brandeis University, Angela Davis, was the Communist Party USA’s vice presidential candidate twice in the 1980s. A convicted felon who purchased the gun her Black Panther lover used to assassinate a judge, Davis in 1972 earned three honorary doctorates from Moscow State University, the University of Tashkent, and Karl Marx University in the German Democratic Republic.

For the critical theorists, the movement’s incremental advances were not enough. Marcuse claimed in 1972 that the new zeitgeist was “not (yet) political and economic revolution.” Despite advances, Marcuse wrote, “in the arts, in literature and music, in communication, in the mores and fashions, [where] changes have occurred which suggest a new experience, a radical transformation of values, the social structure and its political expressions seem to remain basically unchanged, or at least to lag behind the cultural changes.” 

The critical theorists and their ideological heirs would have to wait until Barack Obama’s election to see anything approaching such transformation. Now, more than a decade after Obama’s ascent, critical theory has thoroughly infiltrated both the nation’s politics and its intelligence agencies.