Cultural Marxism has been around as a concept since the 1930s, but only in the past couple of decades has it taken off as a commonly used pejorative against the left in the United States and elsewhere, including Australia. At its core is a catch-all explanation for contemporary social and political decay: the idea that a handful of social theorists from the University of Frankfurt’s Institute for Social Research (aka the Frankfurt School) fled Nazi Germany for the United States and, inspired by the great Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, infected Western societies with dangerous left-wing ideas designed to erode traditional culture and values.
Across the international right-wing commentariat, Frankfurt School theorists including Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and Max Horkheimer are held responsible for converting the 1960s generation of students to multiculturalism, anti-racism, feminism, environmentalism, LGBTQ+ rights and any number of other heresies. For believers in this theory, such causes are not expressions of legitimate and sincerely held political principle but are the product of manipulation by sinister foreigners. It also helps to explain why conservatives have lost control of the culture even while they continue to hold significant political and economic power.
In their debut book, The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy, intellectual historian A.J.A. Woods usefully contextualises these ideas, politically and historically. As they make clear at the outset, the book is not a history of the Frankfurt School; rather, it is “a study of those who argue that the Frankfurt School’s Cultural Marxism is ultimately responsible for civilisational decline.” Woods steps readers through several phases of the term’s use by relatively obscure — often patently racist and antisemitic — figures to show how it came to be routinely invoked by mainstream politicians and commentators.
Surprisingly, Woods’s story begins amid the internecine squabbling of the New Left in the late 1960s and early 1970s. These complicated and tedious battles saw one of American political history’s strangest figures — “pseudo-Leninist-turned-conspiracist cult leader” Lyndon LaRouche — move from the far left to the far right. Although the intra-left aspect is not central to Woods’s account, this pre-history is important in showing how LaRouche’s increasing distrust of the more permissive elements of the New Left eventually led him to find common cause with the right.
Australian readers may be familiar with our own branch of the LaRouche cult, the Citizens Electoral Council (renamed as the Australian Citizens Party in 2020). Founded in 1988 with a focus on citizen-initiated referendums, the fringe party has since run candidates in most state and federal elections. Its members could once be reliably found on the streets of major cities warning of the pernicious influence of banks, Jews and the British royal family. Among other obsessions, the CEC saw Aboriginal land rights and climate action as vast conspiracies imposed on ordinary Australians by global elites.
Continuing his account, Woods demonstrates how elements of America’s left and right came to a “strategic intellectual convergence” in the 1970s and 1980s:
The LaRouchites blamed the Frankfurt School… for the same cultural trends — rock music, free love, feminism, LGBTQ+ activism, the waning of the patriarchal family — that the New Right lamented in their illiberal jeremiads. Of course, the LaRouchites had always been somewhat hostile to the cultural and political expressions of the 1960s counterculture. By the mid-1980s, this hostility had become indistinguishable from the rhetoric of the religious right.
The somewhat esoteric debates about the influence of the Frankfurt School were still confined to the intellectual fringes. Only with the outbreak of the “culture wars” in the 1990s did they spread to a wider conservative audience. Woods argues that the key bridging mechanism was a 1992 essay by Michael Minnicino titled “The New Dark Age: The Frankfurt School and ‘Political Correctness.’”
Writing in the LaRouchite Schiller Institute’s Fidelio magazine, Minnicino alleged a “formal political conspiracy to popularise theories that were specifically designed to weaken the soul of Judeo-Christian civilisation,” with the single most important organisational component of the conspiracy being the Frankfurt School. “In the following years,” writes Woods, “New Right intellectuals would borrow several ideas from Minnicino to construct their anti-political correctness polemics.”
Next Woods turns to the role of right-wing think tanks, especially the Free Congress Foundation. Founded by Paul Weyrich in the mid-1970s thanks to the largesse of beer baron Joseph Coors, the foundation distinguished itself from other dominant right-wing think tanks by focusing as much on cultural as on fiscal conservatism. In 1986, Weyrich appointed William Lind to lead the foundation’s Center for Cultural Conservatism. From this position Lind did more than anyone to popularise the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory.
Building on the ideas of LaRouche and Minnicino, Lind wrote for newspapers and magazines and appeared on television to warn of Cultural Marxism’s dangers and promote his own vision of traditional American society. He urged ordinary Americans to radically reject the rules of political correctness in their language and ways of living:
Those who would defeat cultural Marxism must defy it. They must use words it forbids, and refuse to use the words it mandates… Above all, those who would defy Political Correctness must behave according to the old rules of our culture, not the new rules the cultural Marxists lay down. Ladies should be wives and homemakers, not cops or soldiers, and men should still hold doors open for ladies. Children should not be born out of wedlock. Open homosexuality should be shunned. Jurors should not accept race as an excuse for murder.
By the late 1990s, even fellow conservatives were becoming alarmed by Lind’s overblown rhetoric. But he maintained his rage, warning that the “quasi-judicial terror” of Cultural Marxism needed to be destroyed without delay. And although Woods is neutral on whether Lind himself is antisemitic, he did associate with white supremacists and Holocaust deniers who enthusiastically adopted his language and ideas as coded attacks on Jews.
The radicalisation of the right continued apace following the global financial crisis and election of Barack Obama as president in 2008. The most prominent expression of right-wing rage at this time was the Tea Party movement, which brought together a variety of discontented groups in a semi-organised collective. But, as Woods shows, the Tea Party was an “awkward ideological Frankenstein” that “never properly settled on a unified and coherent ideological message” out of its three main threads of social conservatism, economic libertarianism and constitutional originalism.
Amid this ideological confusion, Tea Party media entrepreneurs settled on the Frankfurt School’s Cultural Marxism as an all-purpose explanation of American woe. Fed up with the liberal bias of mainstream media outlets, they developed their own alternative media in which the Cultural Marxism narrative could explain to sympathetic ears why they felt so alienated from the dominant liberal culture. This period saw the emergence of Andrew Breitbart’s eponymous website, which promoted the openly racist online “alt-right” and would later — through Breitbart’s successor as executive chairman, Steve Bannon — influence Donald Trump’s political trajectory.
But despite Trump’s election victories in 2016 and 2024, the anticipated conservative overhaul of America’s political, cultural and social order remains incomplete. Like a game of whack-a-mole, new threats from the Cultural Marxists continue to appear, most recently in the form of critical race theory, the Black Lives Matter movement, wokeness and gender ideology.
In 2019, on the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery, the New York Times developed the 1619 Project, aiming to “reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very centre of our national narrative.” Trump responded by establishing the 1776 Commission to develop, in Woods’s words, “a pedagogical cure for the Marxism-infected school system”. The commission’s 1776 Report came complete with a section on the origins of identity politics and critical race theory:
Following Gramsci’s strategy of taking control of the culture, Marcuse’s followers use the approach of Critical Race Theory to impart an oppressor–victim narrative upon generations of Americans. This work of cultural revolution has been going on for decades, and its first political reverberations can be seen in 1960s America.
One is reminded here of an old line from Madsen Pirie, who founded the neoliberal Adam Smith Institute in London in 1977 and, before he knew it, was having a major influence on the Thatcher government: “We propose things which people regard as being on the edge of lunacy,” he said. “The next thing you know, they’re on the edge of policy.”
The Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory has spread well beyond American borders — as Woods demonstrates with case studies on Britain and Brazil — and has also been taken up by the right-wing commentariat here in Australia. Andrew Bolt used the term as far back as 2002, blaming Cultural Marxism in the media and universities for the fact that Jews and Asians were out-achieving “mainstream Australians” in elite schools and big business.
But only in 2015 was the concept really embraced. As derivative and late to the party as ever, Australia’s heavyweight conservative intellectuals — Nick Cater, Cory Bernardi, Chris Uhlmann, Miranda Devine, Mark Latham, Andrew Hastie, Kevin Donnelly, Maurice Newman, Fraser Anning and many more — lined up over the next few years to trot out the new buzzword. Uhlmann, then still at the ABC and widely viewed as politically neutral, toyed dangerously with antisemitic tropes when he wrote that “Frankfurt School academics fleeing Adolf Hitler’s Germany transmitted the intellectual virus [of critical theory] to the US and set about systematically destroying the culture of the society that gave them sanctuary.”
The antisemitic undertones of this rhetoric were noted by Jason Wilson and others at the time. Although those concerns were dismissed by the right as paranoid and fanciful, the language has since become even more inflamed. Addressing an Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London in June, Tony Abbott added immigration into the mix: “To green-left, cultural-Marxist governments, mass migration from the ‘global south’ is not a problem; it’s the plan. It’s the way for supposedly unjustly rich countries to atone for their white privilege and to apologise to poorer ones by becoming more like them.”
As dispiriting as all of this is to witness and read about, Woods has written a fine book on an important subject. It will sit comfortably on the shelf alongside other key scholarly studies of the American culture wars, including James Davison Hunter’s Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (1991), Daniel Rodgers’ Age of Fracture (2011), and Andrew Hartman’s A War for the Soul of America (2015).
Finally, some kudos to Verso for the excellent cover design and striking promotional video posted to social media at the time of publication. In an age when publishers and bookshops are struggling to break even, this kind of innovative promotion of new titles is more than welcome. •
The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West
By A.J.A. Woods | Verso | $34.99 | 245 pages
