The SPD purge dismantled organized critical publicity, with grassroots acquiescence.

Evidence

What the party executive was therefore expelling was, precisely, a critical public sphere within the organization, initiated by left-wing intellectuals. The party’s grass roots tolerated the executive’s high-handedness in the matter. The expulsion of the SDS stood. Intellectuals were the only ones to criticize the decision. If they were members of the SPD and their criticism took the form of membership of the SDS Sponsors’ Association, they were also expelled from the partyas were Abendroth and Ossip K. Flechtheim, for example. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 590

Categorization

• XREF: Habermas’s ‘Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere’ concept applied here as the explanatory frame for the SDS’s fate.
• DEEPTHINKING: Names the mechanism by which a mass party destroys internal critical publicity while its base consents — the passive complicity theme that recurs across the Frankfurt School’s fascism analyses.