A Far-Right Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theory Becomes a Mainstream Irritable Gesture

Earlier this week, David Brooks wrote a column bemoaning a generation gap that he suggests is tearing apart American society.  Channeling Midge Decter – after whose 1975 tract Liberal Parents, Radical Children he named his column – Brooks suggests today’s youth are intolerant extremists who have abandoned “meliorism.” As is typical of Brooks, there’s not much of an argument in the column. It’s largely a series of appeals to conventional wisdom bolstered by pop sociology that is often at odds with simple fact.[1]

But at the heart of this largely rote piece of Brooksian pablum is a claim that deserves a closer look.  “The younger militants,” writes Brooks, “tend to have been influenced by the cultural Marxism that is now the lingua franca in the elite academy.” This is interesting both for what Brooks appears to be trying to say and, more immediately, how he has decided to say it.

Readers of this blog are probably familiar with the phrase “Cultural Marxism.”  I blogged a bit about its history on a couple occasions back in 2011. That summer, the phrase had been thrust into public consciousness when it featured prominently in the manifesto distributed by the Norwegian far-right terrorist Anders Behring Breivik on the day that he murdered sixty-nine people.

Breivik seems to have gotten the concept from William Lind, an American political operative associated with both the Free Congress Foundation and Lyndon LaRouche’s organizations.  Lind’s conception of Cultural Marxism was explicitly anti-Semitic.  As Chip Berlet, who investigates far-right organizations, puts it, the theory is that “a small group of Marxist Jews who formed the Frankfurt School set out to destroy Western Culture through a conspiracy to promote multiculturalism and collectivist economic theories.” Lind began promoting these ideas in the late 1980s and continued to do so throughout the 1990s. In 2002, he even presented them to a Holocaust denial conference sponsored by the anti-Semitic Barnes Review.

Over the course of these years, the idea of Cultural Marxism spread across the American far right. It got a big boost from Andrew Breitbart, who adopted the term and wrote extensively about the danger posed by the Frankfurt School in his book Righteous Indignation (2011).  Just last year, National Security Council staffer Rich Higgins was fired by then National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster for, among other offenses, including conspiracy theories about Cultural Marxism in a number of memos (like Breivik he saw “political correctness” as one of its insidious effects).

Given the genealogy of this term – which, as Samuel Moyn and a number of others have pointed out, also echoes the German Nazi phrase Kulturbolschewismus (“cultural Bolshevism”) – why would a columnist like David Brooks, who is himself Jewish in background (if, perhaps, no longer in faith) and who has tried to build his brand identity by peddling in respectability and civility, adopt the term?

After receiving quite a bit of blowback on social media for his invocation of Cultural Marxism, Brooks went on Twitter yesterday and defended his use of the term. Brooks linked to a piece in the Jewish online journal Tablet by the attorney Alexander Zubatov entitled “Just Because Anti-Semites Talk About ‘Cultural Marxism’ Doesn’t Mean It Isn’t Real,” an article Brooks called “an excellent survey of cultural Marxism. Much more sophisticated than the way the phrase gets thrown around on Twitter.”

Zubatov dismisses the Frankfurt School-related conspiracy theories of folks like Lind (noting that Adorno was a defender of “Western high culture”), only to launch a very similar narrative with a slightly different cast of Marxist characters. For Zubatov, it wasn’t so much the Frankfurt School, but rather György Lukács, Louis Althusser, Herbert Marcuse[2], Edward Said, Judith Butler, Stuart Hall, and, above all, Antonio Gramsci who are at fault. And though this is a more multicultural cast of villains than Lind’s exclusively Jewish antagonists, Zubatov similarly maintains that Cultural Marxism is “a coherent program” and accuses it of many of the same things that Lind does:

It is a short step from the Marxist and cultural Marxist premise that ideas are, at their core, expressions of power to rampant, divisive identity politics and the routine judging of people and their cultural contributions based on their race, gender, sexuality and religion — precisely the kinds of judgments that the high ideals of liberal universalism and the foremost thinkers of the Civil Rights Era thought to be foul plays in the game. And it is a short step from this collection of reductive and simplistic conceptions of the “oppressor” and the “oppressed” to public shaming, forced resignations and all manner of institutional and corporate policy dictated by enraged Twitter mobs, the sexual McCarthyism of #MeToo’s excesses, and the incessant, resounding, comically misdirected and increasingly hollow cries of “racist,” “sexist,” “misogynist,” “homophobe,” “Islamophobe,” “transphobe” and more that have yet to be invented to demonize all those with whom the brittle hordes partaking in such calumnies happen to disagree.

Zubatov prominently cites the English philosopher Russell Blackford in support of his contentions about Cultural Marxism. Blackford does suggest that the phrase “cultural Marxism” predates its use by the American far right and may, in principle, have some utility. But in the very piece Zubatov cites, Blackford concludes that the phrase is so marked by its connection to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that it is, in practice, largely unusable:

In everyday contexts, those of us who do not accept the narrative of a grand, semi-conspiratorial movement aimed at producing moral degeneracy should probably avoid using the term “cultural Marxism.” . . . Like other controversial expressions with complex histories (“political correctness” is another that comes to mind), “cultural Marxism” is a term that needs careful unpacking.

Of course, Zubatov, much less Brooks, is not very interested in carefully unpacking anything. Zubatov and Brooks are attached to a pejorative which they’d prefer to be uncoupled from the anti-Semitism to which it has been usually attached.

But even beyond the impossibility of removing the anti-Semitic connotations from the notion of Cultural Marxism, the underlying story of Marxists in our universities undermining liberal universalism and leading young Americans astray is nothing more than a lazy right-wing myth that goes back at least as far as the Second Red Scare.  If then these tales suggested that professors (and potentially their enthralled students) were a Fifth Column for the Soviet Union in the Cold War, Brooks’s assertion that “cultural Marxism that is now the lingua franca in the elite academy” has slightly different resonances today. Readers are, I think, supposed to be reminded of concerns about the predominance of Democrats among faculty members as well as concerns about the supposed intolerance of the campus left (especially students). Of course, most Democrats (including most Democratic faculty members) are not Marxists.  And concerns about student intolerance are wildly misplaced. Actual social science suggests that people have been getting more tolerant, that people on the left are generally more tolerant than people on the right, and that college graduates are more tolerant than those without college degrees.

“Cultural Marxism” is a toxic expression that entered our national discourse as an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.  It ought to be avoided on that basis alone, especially given the more general mainstreaming of anti-Semitism on the American right today. That the attendant critique of the university is itself devoid of merit simply underscores that fact.