When Norwegian right-winger Anders Breivik invoked “cultural Marxism” as the reason for his 77-person killing spree in 2011, many observers placed the notion in the same category as the killer—the fringe. But since the election of Donald Trump, Brexit and the rise and re-election of other far-right governments around the globe, “cultural Marxism” has become a well-known nationalist buzzword, alongside “globalism”: Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro denounces it, and the media empire of former White House advisor Steve Bannon revolved around fighting it.
The phrase is seeping into mainstream media discourse, a far cry from its former days as an extremist catch phrase, and it’s creating a dangerous situation with an ominous historical context.
David Brooks (New York Times, 11/26/18) explains the “generation gap” by invoking a buzzword ultimately derived from Nazi propaganda.
Doing his usual shtick of a more refined version of Abe Simpson, columnist David Brooks (New York Times, 11/26/18) lamented that today’s youths “tend to have been influenced by the cultural Marxism that is now the lingua franca in the elite academy,” giving them a “clash of oppressed and oppressor groups” worldview. Also in the Times, contributor Molly Worthen (4/20/19) quoted the phrase “cultural Marxism”—not approvingly, but not explaining what it meant, either, just offering it as an example of what “conservatives” were complaining about. A Times story in 2017 (8/11/17) about a former White House aide reported that the aide believed “globalists” would “impose cultural Marxism in the United States”—again, without defining for the layperson what that might mean.
The Washington Post (like other newspapers) invoked the phrase in its reports on Bolsonaro’s rise to power last year, and even on the hipster styles of the new wave of American white nationalists: In November 2016, the Post (11/30/16) reported that the style of shaved sides with long hair combed back is “worn by men who feel their whiteness has been infringed upon by the ‘cultural Marxism’ of the Americas.” And opinion-haver Andrew Sullivan took to New York (2/9/18) to denounce “cultural Marxists” for inspiring social justice movements on campuses.
What does cultural Marxism mean for the far right? In the modern iteration, in spaces like Breitbart or Infowars, it is the belief that a failure by communists to topple capitalism through worker revolt has led to a “Plan B” to destroy Western society from the inside. By tearing down the gender binary, de-centering Christianity values, championing the weak over the privileged and creating a multicultural society, revolutionaries have unanchored traditional Western order. Everything from gay rights to Muslim immigration is, in the language of the far right, part of a plot to finish the job that radical worker organizing could not.
Suffice it to say, this is a most paranoid fantasy. Most Marxists don’t speak in these terms, and people who do advocate for immigration, multiculturalism or secularism do so out of a certain regard for human and civil rights. But the far right still obsesses that this is a historical cultural struggle.
Like others on the right, the National Review (8/9/18) saw proof of the plot in the Frankfurt School, which
was born out of a psychological need to explain why communism had failed to take root, initially in Germany but more broadly in the West. The answer that Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and others settled on—after borrowing some ideas from Freud and Nietzsche—was that the structure of capitalist society (which they perversely and ludicrously equated with fascism) was even more totalitarian than they had realized. In other words, communism couldn’t take root because fascism already had.
It’s far from a cultural grappling with the Frankfurt School’s actual ideas, which live mostly in academia. As Spencer Sunshine, an associate fellow at Political Research Associates, points out, the focus on the Frankfurt School by the right serves to highlight its inherent Jewishness. “A piece stands in for the whole,” he said.
This isn’t one of those “yeah, it could be interpreted as antisemitic” things—it’s straight from Nazi ideology, with just enough cosmetic changes to make it acceptable for the modern right. “Cultural Bolshevism” was the term used by Nazi critics of modernist art, which they believed to be rooted in Jewish decadence and thereby, according to Nazi logic, connected to the communist specter. As Dominic Green (Spectator USA, 3/28/19) wrote in a conservative critique of conservatives’ complaints about “cultural Marxism”: “For the Nazis, the Frankfurter School and its vaguely Jewish exponents fell under the rubric of Kulturbolshewismus, ‘Cultural Bolshevism.’”
William Lind meeting with Donald Trump (American Conservative, 10/17/16).
It came into the American sector through paleoconservative writers William S. Lind and Paul Weyrich, who in a series of articles recrafted the Nazi idea of “cultural Marxism” as a scare tactic for the American right. “These guys were all Jewish,” Lind told a Holocaust denial conference in 2002; Lind would later be cited as a prominent influence on Trump’s nationalist agenda.
As Sunshine noted:
It is deeply disturbing that it is used by mainstream conservatives when it’s clearly antisemitic…. They attribute it to all these things, anything from Black Bloc to Hillary Clinton, any kind of social liberalism.
It’s not too surprising that the nationalistic right still clings onto such fascist anachronisms; it’s clearly helping them at the voting booth, from the United States to Europe to Brazil. It’s an important mobilizing call for the far right, depicting things like immigration and secularism not simply as liberal values, but as far-left revolutionary tools.
What should be shocking is the cavalier way some traditional media, like the Times and the Post, are allowing it to live on their pages. Brooks 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.
And it’s not as if the Times doesn’t know this. In 2018, Columbia University historian Samuel Moyn wrote in a Times blog post (11/13/18):
That “cultural Marxism” is a crude slander, referring to something that does not exist, unfortunately does not mean actual people are not being set up to pay the price, as scapegoats to appease a rising sense of anger and anxiety. And for that reason, “cultural Marxism” is not only a sad diversion from framing legitimate grievances, but also a dangerous lure in an increasingly unhinged moment.
Newspapers should be responsible with such phrases, and it’s easy to do that. It is common—and good practice—for mainstream journalists to avoid imprecise phrases like “pro-life,” and instead call the position “anti-abortion.” Reuters has tight rules for using the word “terrorist,” because the label is too often thrown around. For those with strong feelings about terrorism, it might have seemed insensitive, but for the sake of straight reporting, it was necessary. Brooks shouldn’t have used “cultural Marxism,” not because he should be censored, but because what he meant was “political correctness” and not (we hope) a century-old antisemitic trope.
It would be sensible, when the term is invoked by far-right extremists, to provide readers with a definition of the phrase and its origin. And unless it is invoked in a quote, writers like Brooks should be encouraged not to use it all. “They should define it as an antisemitic conspiracy theory with no basis in fact,” Sunshine said of mainstream news editors.
Failure to do that, as places like the Times and Post are guilty of, has bitter consequences. “It is legitimizing the use of that framework, and therefore it’s coded antisemitism,” Sunshine said.
Featured image: Illustration of “cultural Marxism” from a neo-Nazi website.
As someone that considers himself far-left on many topics, I cannot help but amaze at how the Western mainstream media and Western thought in general has failed to grasp the reasons for the rise of the new/alt-right in Europe especially. For the United States, immigration – and mass immigration – has always been part of the grand bargain. We’re a nation of willing and unwilling immigrants. But for Europe, it makes total sense to me why a rightist group would rise in Sweden or Germany or the UK, all three of which have been faced with waves of immigration/asylum seekers primarily from the countries destroyed by the United States and its “coalition of the willing” – in service at least partly to the far right, or rather hawkish, members of Israel’s government.
Did the people of Sweden or Germany get to vote on radically altering their countries with massive waves of immigrants that sprung forth from American wars and the so-called Arab Spring (which was also greatly facilitated by the U.S., U.K., France and Israel)? I seriously doubt it, and in the case of Sweden, it’s a nation of less than 10M people, total. So the influx of Muslim immigrants represents a truly radical shift in demographics – and by whose choice and stemming from what cause? Hence the terms “diversity” and “globalist” have been successfully conflated with “neolib/neocon” as well as – in a more fringe fashion – “cultural marxism.”
Do the liberal people of Sweden truly wish to remake their societies with foreigners of drastically different religious persuasion, customs and values? Is it fair to them in the same way that we accept that it’s fair for the U.S. to EXPECT immigrants because of our long-held ‘give us your tired, your hungry….’ paradigm? In one sense the United States DESERVES to take on the burden of providing new a new homeland for the peoples’ whose homelands U.S. economic and foreign policy have systematically destroyed over the past 50 years.
But in what sense does Sweden “deserve” to be fundamentally remade, and given that this is indeed happening – at least on some not-insignificant scale – is it still a *surprise* to my fellow liberals and leftists that a new, radical right has discovered new linguistic tricks to motivate others and drive politics by fear? When it comes to nations like Sweden and Germany, some of me thinks they actually have a point, and that’s not good…..right?
Yeah, You’re not fooling anybody.
If you can’t even entertain the idea that there are negative aspects to immigration, you have ceded the whole point to right wing psychos who certainly have a “final solution” to these kinds of problems.
> “Suffice it to say, this is a most paranoid fantasy. Most Marxists don’t speak in these terms, and people who do advocate for immigration, multiculturalism or secularism do so out of a certain regard for human and civil rights.”
“You have not begun to appreciate the real depth of our guilt. We are intruders. We are disturbers. We are subverters. We have taken your natural world, your ideals, your destiny, and played havoc with them. We have been at the bottom not merely of the latest great war but of nearly all your wars, not only of the Russian but of every other major revolution in your history. We have brought discord and confusion and frustration into your personal and public life. We are still doing it. No one can tell how long we shall go on doing it.” — Marcus Eli Ravage, A Real Case Against the Jews, The Century Magazine, Jan. 1928, pp. 346-350
“But as the Jew assimilates, acquires your languages, cultivates a certain intimacy, penetrates into your life, begins to handle your instruments, you are aware that his nature, once confined safely to his own life, now threatens yours.”— Maurice Samuel, You Gentiles, 1924, p. 144
“We Jews, we, the destroyers, will remain the destroyers for ever. Nothing that you will do will meet our needs and demands. We will for ever destroy because we need a world of our own, a God-world, which it is not in your nature to build.” — Maurice Samuels in You Gentiles by Maurice Samuels, 1942, p. 155
“America and Americans are fully aware of the enormous power that is bestowed in the hands of just a few Jewish oligarchs within ubiquitous industries of media, finance, politics, and culture.” — Gilad Atzmon in Trump Whistles His Dogs, by Gilad Atzmon, Nov. 1, 2016
“Of one thing we can be reasonably certain: any society that attracts large numbers of Jews can expect within a few years to enter a spiral of decadence. Moral anarchy sets in. Sexual promiscuity throws open its Pandora’s box of evils. We saw it in Weimar Germany. We see it gathering pace in America today.” — Dr. Lasha Darkmoon in Sex and the Jews: Letter to a Jewish Correspondent by Dr. Lasha Darkmoon, 2010
Go back to scumfront you cretin.
Die in a fire you Nazi slime.
There’s over a thousand more quotes covering hundreds of years from individuals of different cultures, nations, political views, etc. But according to Jews, it’s not their behavior in their host countries to blame, it’s the host countries people’s fault for not bowing down to the chosen ones. Has there ever been an admission of guilt by a Jew? Even the few Jews who are sent to prison have supporters working 24/7 365 to have their convictions overturned or lobby Presidents pardon Jews (Marc Rich, Scooter Libby). Prime Ministers of Isr. blackmailed Clinton to pardon Jonathan Pollard. Thankfully it wasn’t successful. Whatever, the truth is now defined as anti-Semitism. Welcome to Clownworld
Theres a typo on this page, where it quotes david brooks, the hyperlink says (11/26/19), it should say (11/26/18)
Rainbow flags are featured prominently in the graphic at the beginning and yet the author doesn’t discuss LGBTQ rights and how anti-gay messaging is used to stoke the cultural “us versus them.” I wonder how many readers are aware that prior to Nazi victories in German elections, there had been a burgeoning gay rights movement. Gays had won a degree of acceptance in pre-Nazi Germany, primarily in the bigger cities. The fascists weaponized that, stoked fear among the traditionalists, while they stoked anti-semitism. Me thinks this is like the elephant in the room in today’s cultural wars. As an observer, I believe that “no blacks, no Jews and no gays” is what’s fueling the so-called alt-right movement. Many of those haters will tell you they fear they’re losing their country. When asked for clarification, you’ll immediately hear crap about Mexicans, Black Lives Matter, gay marriage ands gays taking over Hollywood, etc. For the same reasons outlined by the author, I believe newspapers should recognize the multiple components of this current political backlash if they refer to Cultural Marxism.
I think your definition of Cultural Marxism, or the definition you claim people on the “far right” use, is actually more congruent with Post-Modernism, another leftist philosophy. As someone with conservative politics, though quite far from the “far right,” I would define Cultural Marxism as the idea that there are the “oppressed” and the “oppressors” (“privileged”) in issues of race, class, gender, etc. and that something should be done (socially or with legislation) so that the “privileged group” becomes less privileged and the “oppressed group” gains some sort of benefit, thus “leveling the playing field,” if you will. This is, of course, based off of Karl Marx’s arguably most famous philosophy that criticized capitalism and became the foundation for modern Socialism (and its cousin Communism) and the whole nine yards, but you know the story I assume? Now I don’t know about the whole “antisemitic” thing, and maybe there’s truth to it that I’ve never heard. I can assure you, though, that people with right-leaning politics—not the white supremacists with flippers and three heads, mind you—are not using the phrase “Cultural Marxism” in an antisemitic way, and also not in the way that you defined in this article.
Except that you can’t make up a definition for something that already has a definition, Grace. ‘Cultural Marxism’ is a conspiracy theory with very little basis in fact, and uses the socially conservative ‘Frankfurt School’ as it’s scapegoat.
This article somewhat failed to convince me of anything. Is it really a surprise that the political right supports fascist/nazi slogans? It shouldn’t be, as the author acknowledges. A term like “cultural marxism” doesn’t exactly seem like a dog whistle either, given that it explicitly includes the loaded trigger word “marxism”. I also tend to think that the right is entirely correct to view Frankfurt School ideas as dangerous to their right-wing programs–Frankfurt School ideas were fully intended to oppose fascism, and capitalism more generally. What this article boils down to is mostly griping over shifts in balances of power, with some sort of implied notion that news outlets like NYT, etc. should exclude right wing ideas (and further suggesting that they should also banish Frankfurt School ideas to “academia”). Why is that the case? FAIR, in general, struggles to explain such highly political assumptions.
As someone astutely wrote, “The difference was not that the past was more ‘truthful’ but that ideological hegemony was much stronger, so that, instead of today’s greater melee of local ‘truths,’ one ‘truth’ (or, rather, one big Lie) basically prevailed. In the West, this was the liberal-democratic Truth (with a Leftist or Rightist twist). What is happening today is that, with the populist wave which unsettled the political establishment, the Truth/Lie that has served as an ideological foundation for this establishment is also falling apart. And the ultimate reason for this disintegration is not the rise of postmodern relativism but the failure of the ruling establishment, which is no longer able to maintain its ideological hegemony.” “Three Variations on Trump: Chaos, Europe, and Fake News” (The Philosophical Salon, 7/29/18). This article seems to join in this lament for the demise of a certain liberal-democratic ideological hegemony. While I share a revulsion toward the right wing concepts that Ari Paul’s article targets, I also take issue with the crumbling ideological hegemony that he implicitly assumes was better.
Before issuing your sweeping judgements about the “reactionary” content of the expression Cultural Marxism, learn about the history of the Western left, explore why and how Western progressives, who were fixated on economic issues (preaching economic nationalization and dichotomy of proletariat-bourgeosie ) began to shift toward issues of culture (primacy of culture, identity, and the dichotomy non-Western “noble savages” and “evil” West). Read Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Post War Britain for a start
https://www.dukeupress.edu/Cultural-Marxism-in-Postwar-Britain
It’s a far-right and reactionary buzzword based on a conspiracy theory. There is nothing else to discuss.
Well said!! Yet, I would not be so pessimistic. Even in dark times like this, when cultural commanding heights are controlled by the left and when people like the author of the paper on CM are trapped in the leftist ideological bubble, there is some hope. As long as we have free internet and freedom of speech , we ( thinking people both on the right and the left) will be able to intellectually and culturally phase out the regressive left. After all , they had decades of cultural and political domination since to he 1930s.
What planet do Peter and Boris live on? “Left-wing controlled institutions in America (government, media, academia, think-tanks, foundations, NGOs, etc.)”? Name one. Please! When Slavoj Zizek recently debated Jordan Peterson, Zizek asked Peterson a very similar question, and Peterson could not name a single example. “when cultural commanding heights are controlled by the left”? What??? When Boris refers to “thinking people” this seems to be a dog-whistle for partisan political allies meant to obscure a reliance on fabrications and counter-factual assertions that binds together such allies.
Bingo. Spot on. If anyone in the United States of Amnesia knew a fucking thing about history, this would have been obvious. It wasn’t and it isn’t. Thank you, Ari Paul and FAIR.
I wouldn’t call it political correctness either. Political correctness, is what is correct according to the political classes; capitalist oligarchs and those with political power. Do you not think these people support divisions and bigotry? It is what keeps the power in their hands. Racism is incorrect, it is an idea built on a lie, it is abusive and diminishing, but it has nothing to do with political correctness. It is truly not politically correct to say bring down the capitalist system. Bernie Sanders is less politically correct than Donald Trump, who is just abusive and nasty. Can we please STOP using the words political correctness in this way. It gives ammo to the far right!
It is clear, that the rightwing/fascist insurgency intends to overturn all labor laws, safety net laws and regulations dating back to the “New Deal”. Make no mistake TRUMP IS A FASCIST, those who support him are also fascists. (“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” – Benito Mussolini (author of the doctrine of fascism). If you can find a Republican who doesn’t subscribe to this doctrine I would be very surprised. We are on the precipice of losing our democracy! Please pay attention!!!
SJW’s take the Marxist “a person’s relationship to their society is defined by their relationship to that society’s economy” to “a person’s relationship to their society is defined by their relationship to that society’s dominant culture.”
So yeah, completely not cultural Marxism and totally Nazi.
LOL
You should try actual literacy. It’s a good thing for you Master Racists that they don’t actually have literacy tests at the polls, or you’d be laughed out of the building on Election Day. Go back to scumfront.
You really should read a book, Jim.
The American Oligarchy has obviously decided, in the wake of popular manifestations of discontent such as the Occupy Movement and the 2016 election, to embrace and cultivate overt German-style fascism as an antidote or “alternative” for millions of angry downtrodden Americans looking for answers.
It is likewise no coincidence that the US schools for the past several generations have failed to teach students the history of the 20th century in any real sense. The fact that nazi terminology can now be inserted into the so-called “Main-stream Media” is a testament to the level of historical ignorance that prevails. Much of this is by design, as the fascist phenomenon itself was inextricably linked to the rise of militant worker consciousness. In order to teach the true history of fascism, one would have to teach the history of resistance and struggle against capitalism and the still mostly forgotten history of US capital’s early reactions – the plot against FDR being perhaps the most prominent example.
George Seldes, an American journalist who was a founding member of FAIR, wrote extensively on this subject. All who are interested or concerned with the resurgence of these fascist pigs should be certain to find and read the works of George Seldes, most of which are readily available online in such places as archive.org.
This article is unfortunately just one big Etymological fallacy. Etymological fallacy is the faulty argument that the “true” or “proper” meaning of a word is its oldest or original meaning. Because the meanings of words change over time, a word’s contemporary definition can’t be established from its origin (or etymology).
Good try though, cultural marxists!
Actually, cultural Marxism now refers to shaping society around the Marx Brothers films. Sorry, bigot.
Mainstream media’s inability/willful refusal to call a lie, a lie has doomed public discourse in the United States.