In 2003, the Southern Poverty Law Center warned of a “bizarre” label gaining popularity with the right. “Cultural Marxism” was everywhere, according to believers. Pat Buchanan thought it was so powerful that it could “de-Christianize” America, and William S. Lind, the former director of the Free Congress Foundation, said it was turning colleges into “ivy-covered North Koreas.” The SPLC warned that cultural Marxism, as a narrative, promoted antisemitic falsehoods about a cabal composed of Jewish intellectuals — “nefarious, communistic destroyers” of the American way of life.

Years later, cultural Marxism is still in the news. Jordan Peterson has repeatedly blamed cultural Marxists for corrupting western universities. In 2022, the Heritage Foundation published a report warning that cultural Marxists could soon enslave “the United States to a totalitarian, soul-destroying ideology.” Mike Gonzalez, a Heritage senior fellow, and Katharine Gorka, the foundation’s former director for civil society and the American dialogue, identified cultural Marxism in everything from the rise of the new left in the 1960s to more recent grievances, like “gender ideology,” ESG (or environmental, social, and corporate governance), and the woke-ification of Star Wars and Star Trek. A similar concept shows up in the work of Christopher Rufo, who once linked a supposed “ideological shift” at the New York Times to the political theories of Herbert Marcuse.

But what is cultural Marxism, and why is it such an influential idea? As typically defined by the right, it’s a convoluted and somewhat esoteric conspiracy. Proponents believe a group of left-wing academics devised “a fresh strategy of communist subversion” as early as the 1930s, writes the British historian A.J.A. Woods in their new book, The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West. In this view, Woods explains, scholars associated with the Frankfurt School infested “the cultural apparatus” of western society in order to elevate “the petulant demands of various minority groups,” including feminists and Black civil-rights activists, and build “a Marxist egalitarian utopia” on “the ruins” of Western capitalism and culture. The ideology of cultural Marxism is alien to the West, an infiltration helped along by “political correctness” or more recently, “wokeness,” Woods concludes.

Although the Frankfurt School was real, cultural Marxism is more of a changeling. It is not “a generic conspiracy theory,” Woods argues, but “an ever-changing combination” of narratives with shifting purpose and meaning. In general, it’s a convenient way for conservatives to discredit their critics — especially on campus. Rufo has helped purge the public New College of Florida of ideologically troublesome faculty and staff. The Department of Education is investigating Smith College for admitting trans women while slow-walking the settlement of racial- and sexual-harassment cases. The result may be as transformative as anything the right has pinned on cultural Marxism.

I spoke to Woods about their new book, the past and future of cultural Marxism, and the difficulty of fact-checking a conspiratorial idea.

Why do you say that cultural Marxism isn’t a conspiracy theory?

I tend to approach intellectual history from a Marxist perspective. When I’m talking about conspiracy, and when I’m talking about cultural Marxism as a shifting bundle of narrative elements, I’m pointing out that cultural Marxism hasn’t been the same thing throughout its history. When we use the label “cultural Marxism conspiracy theory,” we tend to treat it as........

© Daily Intelligencer