The most recent of incident
of Cultural Marxist commissars refusing
to admit that dissidents are to be treated as fellow citizens is the crazed female professor who accosted
the NPI’s Richard Spencer while he was
exercising at a Alexandria gym. She, recognizing him from coverage of the
election campaign, started haranguing him and calling him a “Nazi.”
Instead
of having her ejected for this behavior, the gym’s management terminated Spencer’s membership.
[Georgetown professor confronts white nationalist Richard
Spencer at the gym — which terminates his membership , By
Faiz Siddiqui May 21, 2017]
Back
in 2011 VDARE posted a commentary of mine on the legitimacy
of the “Cultural Marxist” concept. (I reluctantly accepted the term only
because I couldn’t think of a better one.)
As
I pointed out, this ideology was very far from orthodox Marxism and was viewed
by serious Marxists as a kind of bastard
child. Yet many of those designated as “Cultural Marxists” still viewed
themselves as classical Marxists and some still do.
Exponents
of what the Frankfurt
School called “critical theory”— like Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, and Erich Fromm—were considered by orthodox Marxists to be fake or ersatz
Marxists. But they did adopt orthodox Marxist-Leninist
theory in key aspects:
·
Like orthodox Marxists, they viewed the bourgeoisie as a
counterrevolutionary class.
·
Like orthodox Marxists, they viewed the world, arguably
simplistically, in terms of interest groups and power relationships.
·
Like orthodox Marxists—whose break from Victorian classical
liberalism in this respect was shocking in a way that is easily overlooked
after the totalitarian experience of the twentieth century—they explicitly
eschewed debate in favor of reviling and if possible repressing their
opponents. (This is fundamental to the Marxist method: although it claims to be “scientific”, it is in fact
an a priori value system that rejects debate and its concomitant, “bourgeois science”. Hence
Political Correctness—the most prominent product of “cultural Marxism”.)
·
Like orthodox Marxist, they supported, at least in principle, a
socialist i.e. government-controlled economy.
·
Like orthodox Marxists, they inclined, in varying degrees,
toward the Communist side during the Cold War. (Marcuse, who cheered the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising
in 1956, was an outright Stalinist—as I can confirm from personal knowledge as
his onetime student.)
These
disciples of the Frankfurt School, like Marx, were eager to replace what they
defined as bourgeois society by a new social order. In this envisaged new
order, humankind would experience true equality for the first time. This would
be possible because, in a politically and socially reconstructed society, we
would no longer be alienated from our real selves, which had been warped by the
inequalities that existed until now.
But
unlike authentic Marxists, Cultural Marxists have been principally opposed to
the culture of bourgeois societies–and only secondarily to
their material arrangements. Homophobia, nationalism, Christianity, masculinity, and anti-Semitism have been
the prime villains in the Cultural Marxist script.
This
is especially true as one moves from the philosophy of the interwar German
founders of the Frankfurt school, like Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer and
Herbert Marcuse, to the second generation. This second generation is
represented by Jürgen Habermas and most of the
multicultural theorists ensconced in Western universities.
For
these more advanced Cultural Marxists, the crusade against capitalism has been increasingly
subordinated to the war against “prejudice” and “discrimination.” They justify
the need for a centralized bureaucratic state commanding material resources not
because it will bring the working class to power, but to fight “racism,” “fascism,”
and the other residues of the Western past.
If
they can’t accomplish such radical change, Cultural Marxists are happy to work
toward revolutionizing our consciousness with the help of Leftist
moneybags– hedge fund managers, Mark Zuckerberg etc. Ironically,
nationalizing productive forces and the creation of a workers’ state, i.e. the
leftovers from classical Marxism, turn out to be the most expendable part of
their revolutionary program, perhaps because of the collapse of the
embarrassing collapse of command economies in the Soviet bloc. Instead, what is essential to
Cultural Marxism is the rooting-out of bourgeois national structures, the obliteration of gender roles and the utter
devastation of “the patriarchal family.”
Not
only does Cultural Marxism exist, but it now appears to be taking over
Conservatism Inc. Thus even with Paris burning, National
Review was still attacking the Right. In the second round
of the French election, Tom Rogan urged a vote for Emmanuel Macron on the
grounds Marine Le Pen is insufficiently hostile to Vladimir Putin and is a “socialist”
because she “supports protectionism.” Macron’s actual onetime membership in the
Socialist Party, and his view that there was no such thing as French culture, apparently
was not a problem [French election: American Conservatives Should Support Macron, April
24, 2017].
Conservatism
Inc. goes along because these goals are partially achieved through corporate
capitalists, who actively push Leftist social agendas and punish entire
communities if they’re insufficiently enthusiastic about gay marriage, gay
scout leaders, transgendered rest rooms, sanctuary cities etc.. Wedded as it is
to a clichéd defense of the “free market,” the Beltway Right not only won’t
oppose this plutocratic agenda, but instead offers tax cuts to the wealthiest
and most malevolent actors.
It
is because Cultural Marxism can co-exist with our current economic and
political structure that our so-called “conservatives” are far more likely to
align with the New Left than the Old Right. The behavior of our own captains of
industry shows the rot is deep and that multiculturalism is very much part of
American “liberal democratic” thinking, even informing our bogus conservatism. “Conservatism”
is now defined as waging endless wars in the name of universalist values that any other
generation would have called radically leftist. And
Cultural Marxists themselves now define what we call “Western values”—for
example, accepting homosexuality
The
takeover is so complete, we might even say “Cultural Marxism” has outlived its
usefulness as a label or as a description of a hostile foreign ideology.
Instead, we’re dealing with “conservatives,” who are, in many ways, more
extreme and more destructive than the Frankfurt School itself.
Many
conservatives seem to believe Cultural Marxism is just a foreign eccentricity
somehow smuggled into our country. Allan Bloom’s “conservative” bestseller The
Closing of the American Mind [PDF] contended that multiculturalism was
just another example of “The German Connection.” This is ludicrous.
Case
in point: unlike Horkheimer, or my onetime teacher Herbert Marcuse, leading
writers within Conservatism Inc. are sympathetic to
something like gay marriage.
·
Jonah Goldberg [Gay Marriage vs. goodwill, USA Today, April 1, 2013]
·
Jamie Kirchick, published at National Review and
borderline hysterical on
the issue
·
John Podhoretz [Why John Podhoretz is Wrong on Gay Marriage, by Matthew Schmitz, First Things, November 21, 2012]
·
David Brooks [The Power of Marriage, by
David Brooks, New York Times, November 22,
2003]
Indeed, homosexual liberation
is so central to modern conservatism that the Beltway Right’s pundits urge
American soldiers to impose it at bayonet point around the world. Kirchick
complains we haven’t pressed the Russian “thug” Vladimir Putin hard enough to
accept such “conservative” features of public life as gay pride parades. [Why Putin’s Defense of “Traditional Values” Is Really A
War on Freedom, by James Kirchick, Foreign
Policy, January 3, 2014]
Another
frequent contributor to National
Review, Jillian Kay Melchior, expressed concern that American withdrawal
from Ukraine might expose that region to greater Russian control and thereby
diminish rights for the transgendered. [Ukrainians are still alone in their heroic fight for
freedom, New York Post, October 8, 2015]
If
that’s how our Respectable Right reacts to social issues, then it may be
ridiculous to continue denouncing the original Cultural Marxists. Our
revolutionary thinking has whizzed past those iconoclastic German Jews who
created the Frankfurt Institute in the 1920s and then moved their enterprise to
the US in the 1930s. Blaming these long-dead intellectuals for our present
aberrations may be like blaming Nazi atrocities on Latin fascists in 1920.
We’re better served by examining those who selectively adopted the original model
to find out what really happened.
At
this point we should ask not whether the Frankfurt School continues to cast a
shadow over us but instead ask why are “conservatives” acquiescing to or even
championing reforms more radical than anything one encounters in Adorno and
Horkheimer?
Admittedly,
Conservatism Inc. has drifted so far to the Left that one no longer blinks in
surprise when a respected conservative journalist extolls Leon
Trotsky and the Communist Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. Yet
it’s still startling to see just how far left the Beltway “Right”
has moved on social issues. Even more noteworthy is how unwilling the movement
is to see any contradiction between this process and the claim they are “conservatives.”
And
let’s not pretend that Conservatism Inc. is simply running a “Big Tent.” Those
who direct the top-down Beltway Right are eager to
reach out to the Left, providing those they recruit share their belligerent
interventionist foreign policy views and do nothing to offend neoconservative
benefactors, while purging everything on their right.
This
post-Christian, post-bourgeois consensus is now centered in the US and in
affiliate Western countries and transmitted through our culture industry,
educational system, Deep-State bureaucracy, and Establishment political parties.
The
Beltway Right operates like front parties under the old Soviet system. Like
those parties, our Establishment Right tries to “fit in” by dutifully
undermining those to its the Right and slowly absorbing the social positions
and heroes of the Left.
Occasionally
it catches hell for not moving fast enough to the Left. But this only bolsters
the image of Conservatism, Inc. as defenders of traditional America against the
Left—an image that it won’t lose even as it veers farther in the direction of
its supposed adversary.
In
short, Conservatism Inc. is not just a scam—but it’s become a Cultural Marxist
puppet. And the Dissident Right consists of those who
can see through it.
Paul
Gottfried [ email
him ] is a retired Professor of Humanities at
Elizabethtown College, PA. He is the author of Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt and The Strange Death of MarxismHis most
recent book is Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America.