Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory
Cultural Marxism is a far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory that misrepresents Western Marxism as being responsible for modern progressive movements, identity politics, and political correctness. The conspiracy theory posits that there is an ongoing and intentional academic and intellectual effort to subvert Western society via a planned culture war that undermines the supposed Christian values of traditionalist conservatism and seeks to replace them with culturally progressive values.
A revival of the Nazi propaganda term "Cultural Bolshevism", the contemporary version of the conspiracy theory originated in the United States during the 1990s. Originally found only on the far-right political fringe, the term began to enter mainstream discourse in the 2010s and is now found globally. The conspiracy theory of a Marxist culture war is promoted by right-wing politicians, fundamentalist religious leaders, political commentators in mainstream print and television media, and white supremacist terrorists, and has been described as "a foundational element of the alt-right worldview". Scholarly analysis of the conspiracy theory has concluded that it has no basis in fact.
Origins
European reactionaries, following their defeat in the culture wars of the 1960s against liberals and Marxists, split from the mainstream conservatism of the "Old Right", forming a loose intellectual grouping that criticised the contemporaneous society and attempted to transform cultural norms and values. In the 21st century, The European New Right influenced the US alt-right to focus on nonviolent ways to delegitimize the liberal status quo. This included criticising the perceived decline of Western culture and the influence of pop culture, which they claimed was the result of a collusion between capitalism and what they called "Cultural Marxism".Michael Minnicino and the LaRouche Movement
Michael Minnicino's 1992 essay New Dark Age: The Frankfurt School and 'Political Correctness' has been described as a starting point for the contemporary conspiracy theory in the United States. Minnicino's interest in the subject derived from his involvement in the LaRouche movement. Lyndon LaRouche had begun developing conspiracy theories regarding the Frankfurt School in 1974, when he alleged that Herbert Marcuse and Angela Davis were acting as part of COINTELPRO. Other features of the conspiracy theory had developed across the 1970s and 80s in the movement's magazine, EIR, according to the researcher Andrew Woods.Minnicino's essay argued that late twentieth-century America had become a "New Dark Age" as a result of the abandonment of Judeo-Christian and Renaissance ideals, which he claimed had been replaced in modern art with a "tyranny of ugliness". He attributed this to an alleged plot to instill cultural pessimism in America, carried out in three stages by Georg Lukács, the Frankfurt School, and elite media figures and political campaigners.
Minnicino asserted there were two aspects of the Frankfurt School plan to destroy Western culture. Firstly, a cultural critique, by Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, to use art and culture to promote alienation and replace Christianity with socialism. This included the development of opinion polling and advertising techniques to brainwash the populace and control political campaigning. Secondly, the plan supposedly included attacks on the traditional family structure by Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm to promote women's rights, sexual liberation, and polymorphous perversity to subvert patriarchal authority. Minnicino claimed the Frankfurt School was responsible for elements of the counterculture of the 1960s and a "psychedelic revolution", distributing hallucinogenic drugs to encourage sexual perversion and promiscuity.
After the 2011 terrorist attacks in Norway by Anders Breivik, a follower of the conspiracy theory, Minnicino repudiated his own essay. Minnicino wrote, "I still like to think that some of my research was validly conducted and useful. However, I see very clearly that the whole enterprise—and especially the conclusions—was hopelessly deformed by self-censorship and the desire to in some way support Mr. LaRouche's crack-brained world-view."
Paul Weyrich and William Lind
and William Lind were prominent figures of cultural conservatism in the United States; Weyrich had co-founded right-wing groups including the Free Congress Foundation, which he led. Weyrich equated political correctness with Cultural Marxism in a speech to the Conservative Leadership Conference of the Civitas Institute in 1998. He argued that "we have lost the culture war" and that "a legitimate strategy for us to follow is to look at ways to separate ourselves from the institutions that have been captured by the ideology of Political Correctness, or by other enemies of our traditional culture."For the Free Congress Foundation, Weyrich commissioned Lind, a paleoconservative activist, to write a history of Cultural Marxism, defined as "a brand of Western Marxism... commonly known as 'multiculturalism' or, less formally, Political Correctness." In the 2000 speech The Origins of Political Correctness, Lind wrote, "If we look at it analytically, if we look at it historically, we quickly find out exactly what it is. Political correctness is cultural Marxism. It is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. It is an effort that goes back not to the 1960s and the Hippies and the peace movement, but back to World War I. If we compare the basic tenets of Political Correctness with classical Marxism, the parallels are very obvious."
Lind employed the conspiracy theory to argue that leftist and liberal ideologies were alien to the United States. He argued that Lukács and Antonio Gramsci had aimed to subvert Western culture because it was an obstacle to the Marxist goal of proletarian revolution. He alleged that the Frankfurt School under Max Horkheimer had hoped to destroy Western civilization and establish totalitarianism, using four main strategies. First, Lind said, Horkheimer's critical theory would undermine the authority of family and government while segregating society into opposing groups of victims and oppressors. Second, he said, concepts of the authoritarian personality and the F-scale measuring susceptibility to fascism, developed by Adorno, would be used to accuse Americans with right-wing views of having fascist principles. Third, he said, polymorphous perversity would undermine family structure by promoting free love and homosexuality. Fourth, he characterized Herbert Marcuse as saying that left victim-groups should be allowed to speak while groups on the right were silenced. Lind said that Marcuse considered a coalition of "Blacks, students, feminist women, and homosexuals" as a feasible vanguard of cultural revolution in the 1960s. Lind also wrote that Cultural Marxism was an example of fourth-generation warfare.
Pat Buchanan brought more attention among paleoconservatives to Weyrich and Lind's iteration of the conspiracy theory. Jérôme Jamin refers to Buchanan as the "intellectual momentum" of the conspiracy theory, and to Anders Breivik as the "violent impetus". Both of them relied on Lind, who edited a multi-authored work called "Political Correctness: A Short History of an Ideology" that Jamin calls the core text that "has been unanimously cited as 'the' reference since 2004."
Lind and the Free Congress Foundation produced the video Political Correctness: The Frankfurt School in 1999. It was further distributed by the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white supremacist group, which added its own introduction. The film includes decontextualized clips of historian Martin Jay, who was not aware of the nature of the production at the time. Jay has since become a recognized expert on the conspiracy theory. Concerning right-wing exploitation of his statements, Jay wrote, "Those beans I allegedly spilled had been on the plate for a very long time," going on to confirm that the Frankfurt school were Marxists concerned with culture, and that Marcuse promulgated the idea of repressive tolerance. However, the conspiracy theory presents an "improverished cartoon version" of these ideas.
Jay wrote that Lind's documentary was effective Cultural Marxism propaganda because it "spawned a number of condensed, textual versions, which were reproduced on a number of radical, right-wing sites." Jay further writes:
These, in turn, led to a plethora of new videos, now available on YouTube, which feature an odd cast of pseudo-experts regurgitating exactly the same line. The message is numbingly simplistic: All the 'ills' of modern American culture, from feminism, affirmative action, sexual liberation, racial equality, multiculturalism and gay rights to the decay of traditional education, and even environmentalism, are ultimately attributable to the insidious intellectual influence of the members of the Institute for Social Research who came to America in the 1930s.
Lind's documentary also featured Lazlo Pasztor, a former member of the Hungarian Arrow Cross Party, who collaborated with the Nazis and later served five years in prison for crimes against humanity.
Others
sees a "master plan" in Marxist revolutionaries and Cultural Marxists advocating for or predicting the dissolution of marriage. The charge is that they have a "'master plan' for the overthrow of Western civilization from within, personified by those members of the Frankfurt School ".Popularization
Rachel Busbridge, Benjamin Moffitt and Joshua Thorburn describe the conspiracy theory as being promoted by the far-right, but note that it "has gained ground over the past quarter century"; they conclude that "hrough the lens of the Cultural Marxist conspiracy, however, it is possible to discern a relationship of empowerment between mainstream and fringe, whereby certain talking points and tropes are able to be transmitted, taken up and adapted by 'mainstream' figures, thus giving credence and visibility to ideologies that would have previously been constrained to the margins."Andrew Breitbart, founder of Breitbart News, authored a 2011 book Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World that represents one of the conspiracy theory's moves towards the mainstream. Breitbart's interpretation of the conspiracy is similar in most respects to that of Lind. Breitbart attributes the spread of the ideas of the Frankfurt School from universities to a wider audience to "trickledown intellectualism", and claims that Saul Alinsky introduced cultural Marxism to the masses in his 1971 handbook Rules for Radicals. Woods argues that Breitbart focuses on Alinsky in order to associate cultural Marxism with the modern Democratic Party, and Hillary Clinton. Breitbart claims that George Soros funds the alleged cultural Marxism project. Martin Jay wrote that Breitbart's book displayed "appalling ignorance" of the actual work of the Frankfurt School.
Breitbart News has published the idea that Theodor Adorno's atonal music was an attempt at inducing mental illness on a mass scale. Former Breitbart contributors Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, have promoted the conspiracy theory, especially the claim that Cultural Marxist activity is happening in universities.
In the late 2010s, Canadian clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson popularized the term, for example, by blaming "Cultural Marxism" for demanding the use of gender-neutral pronouns as a threat to free speech, thus moving the term into mainstream discourse. Critics state that Peterson misuses postmodernism as a stand-in term for the conspiracy without understanding its antisemitic implications, specifying that "Peterson isn't an ideological anti-Semite; there's every reason to believe that when he re-broadcasts fascist propaganda, he doesn't even hear the dog-whistles he's emitting".
Spencer Sunshine and journalist Ari Paul have criticized traditional media such as The New York Times, New York Magazine and The Washington Post for their coverage of the conspiracy theory, arguing that they have either not clarified the nature of the conspiracy theory or "allow it to live on their pages." An example is an article in The New York Times by David Brooks, who Paul and Sunshine argue "rebrands cultural Marxism as mere political correctness, giving the Nazi-inspired phrase legitimacy for the American right. It is dropped in or quoted in other stories—some of them lighthearted, like the fashion cues of the alt-right—without describing how fringe this notion is. It's akin to letting conspiracy theories about chem trails or vaccines get unearned space in mainstream press." Another is Andrew Sullivan, who went on "to denounce 'cultural Marxists' for inspiring social justice movements on campuses." Paul and Sunshine argue that failure to highlight the nature of the conspiracy theory "has bitter consequences. 'It is legitimizing the use of that framework, and therefore it's coded antisemitism.'"
Supporters of the conspiracy theory include paleoconservative political philosopher Paul Gottfried. Gottfried was at one time a student of Herbert Marcuse and edited the academic journal Telos. Under Gottfried's tenure, Telos became far-right in its outlook, writing favorably about Carl Schmitt and Alain de Benoist. Gottfried influenced Richard Spencer and has been called the "godfather" of the alt-right. He defended William Lind against accusations that "Cultural Marxism" has anti-semitic undertones. Gottfried identifies as reactionary and questions the value of political equality. Gottfried defines cultural Marxism as "a particular movement for change that combines some elements of Marxist socialism with a call for sexual and cultural revolution". However, he says that the term "cultural Marxism" is not ideal since the connection with Marxism is tenuous. Gottfried writes that the influence of the Frankfurt School lives on in modern left-wing politics mainly in the form of a tendency to conflate the right wing with fascism.