The “Cultural Marxism” Narrative Has Gone Too Far

America’s radicalization is being willfully misunderstood by professional conservatives, whom the Left has outflanked yet again and fooled into abetting its ascendancy.

This article has just been published in the current (September) issue of Chronicles magazine.

Please read it in its entirety there, and comment and recirculate.

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Having coined the term “cultural Marxism,” the historian William Lind should receive royalties every time some conservative pundit repeats it.  He would be a rich man.  Whenever an insight becomes a cliché and spreads like wildfire, we should become suspicious. 

Lind is a sometimes dissident conservative once connected with the late Paul Weyrich’s legendary Free Congress Foundation.  His work on military history and strategy informed important critiques of American adventurism.  Even more unorthodox, his conservative case for mass transportation deserves to be understood by those sentimentally attached to the private car, especially with today’s weaponization of electric vehicles.

So he should not be held responsible if his term is now being misused.  As a historical description of how Marxists like Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukacs wheedled their way into respectable politics by repackaging Marxism with less materialism and more humanism, it is  certainly salutary.  And if the term emphasizes the extremism of today’s “liberals”, I suppose it is helpful, though these days few points are scored thereby.  “Only the most clueless of Boomers still believe that accusations of socialism carry any weight in contemporary America.”  

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Remembering the horrifying history of totalitarian Communism is important in itself, and understanding how Marxism deceived us by transforming itself into something other than Marxism, thus facilitating the rise of the New Left and today’s “Wokism,” provides perspective for confronting today’s atrocities.

The problem comes when the labeling provides conservatives with the excuse to dwell on the past and avoid confronting threats in the present.  Like the proverbial generals, conservative politicos insist on fighting the previous war rather than the one confronting us now.  Excoriating bêtes noires of the past carries no risk, which is why we find video-after-video retracing our woes back to Gramsci, Lukacs, the Frankfurt School, and Michel Foucault (invariably without attribution to Lind), as if the genealogy offers some solution.  (…)

Read the rest at Chronicles magazine…

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If you want to read more analysis of this kind, you can find it in my new book, Who Lost America? Why the United States Went "Communist” — and What to Do about It — available from Amazon.

Stephen Baskerville is Professor of Politics at the Collegium Intermarium in Warsaw.  All his books and recent articles are available at www.StephenBaskerville.com.