The entire Leftist movement in the U.S. was increasingly under the influence of forms of Marxism other than the Bolshevik type of Marxism involved in the 1917 Russian Revolution. Theodore W. Adorno published his book, The Authoritarian Personality in 1950. He was a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Another member of the German Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse wrote, among other books, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, which was the "Bible" of the Counterculture. Marcuse was first a professor at Brandeis University and later at University of California at San Diego.
These Marxists, who were not Bolsheviks, were the Transformational Marxists of the American Left. They did not advocate initial violent revolution but taught that first Marxism must infiltrate and take over the major institutions, especially education, the media, and yes. the churches. Many of their followers in psychology and the social sciences do not identify themselves as Marxists. See Dean Gotcher for a list of some of the main American born change agents for Transformational Marxism.
Then on the Right, or Republican side of things, there are the Neoconservatives. You would not think that a group called the Neoconservatives are also Marxists. But they are deceptive. The Neocons originated from a group of Leftists who got together at the City College of New York in the thirties. The original group included Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, and Seymour M. Lipsett. Later Neocon promoters and writers included William Kristol, son of Irving Kristol. Then there are recent guys who are under the influence of the Neocons, such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams and Richard Perle.
Again, the Neocons do not call themselves Marxists. The Neocons are also more interested in politics than the Frankfurt group and their recent followers who are more into psychology and social science, used to change society and culture. And the Neocons are the Leftists, calling themselves Neoconservatives, who are more overtly in support of the Nation of Israel, and therefore would be friends of the dispensationalists.
Some people who have studied and written about the origins of the counterculture have found Transformational Marxist influence on several of the social movements intertwined with the counterculture of the sixties and seventies. These are the movements which weaken the American family and also weaken Christianity in America - feminism, homosexuality and lesbianism.
The New Left also became intertwined with the counterculture, and though it originated in part from the Leftist movements of the thirties, the New Left was also under influence from Transformational Marxism. Transformational Marxism is not the only point of origin of the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and its offshoot the Weatherman Underground which in the Chicago context of Mafia politics had an influence that later became evident in the leadership of the Democratic Party.
So, Transformational Marxism was not the only ideology of the Left which influenced the University of Wisconsin Leftist movement back in the sixties and seventies. But within the major universities, Transformational Marxism, from the Frankfurt School, gained greater influence after the fifties and sixties in American major universities, and especially at Madison.
Michael William Doyle, professor of history at Ball State, wrote Free Radicals and is co-editor of Imagine Nation, essays on the counterculture. One of the academics I know about who wrote on the influence of the Frankfurt School, other than Dean Gotcher, is Keven MacDonald, a psychologist, who wrote The Frankfurt School of Social Research and the Pathologization of Gentile Group Allegiances.
He says "The Authoritarian Personality attempts to show that gentile group
affiliations, and particularly membership in Christian religious sects, gentile nationalism, and close family relationships, are an indication of psychiatric disorder...The opposition of Jewish intellectuals to cohesive gentile groups and
a homogeneous gentile culture has perhaps not been sufficiently
emphasized...another way of conceptualizing the Jewish advocacy of
radical political movements...is that these political movements may be understood as simultaneously undermining gentile intrasocietal group affiliations, such as Christianity and nationalism, at the same time allowing for the continuation of Jewish identification."
"The Authoritarian Personality" is the 1950 book by professor Theodore W. Adorno, the leader of the Frankfurt School Marxists in the U.S.
The later change agents following the Frankfurt School's Transformational Marxism were not all Jews. The list of non-Jews here includes Carl Rogers and Norman O. Brown. The list also includes some Jews, like Abraham Maslow, Irvin Yalom and Erick Fromm. These guys were all psychologists or psychiatrists, and Normon O. Brown was not a psychologist or psychiatrist but wrote Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History.
The counterculure of the sixties was a radical cultural movement with several different cultural strands, all undermining Christianity
and the American family.
