Rev Left Radio - The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West

Episode Date: June 8, 2026

Breht is joined by A.J.A. Woods, author of The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West. In this conversation, they explore the genealogy of the "Cultural Marxism" myth, the reactionary forces that shaped it, and the way it continues to animate right-wing attacks on liberation movements, critical thought, and social progress. Moving from the upheavals of the long 1960s through Lyndon LaRouche, the New Right, the Tea Party, and today's panics over "wokeness," CRT, and gender, Woods shows how "Cultural Marxism" functions less as a coherent theory than as a flexible ideological weapon: one that explains away popular struggles for equality and emancipation as elite manipulation, cultural subversion, and civilizational decay. The result is a rich historical and political analysis of one of the contemporary right's most influential myths, and of the broader culture-war terrain on which reaction, neoliberalism, and authoritarianism increasingly converge.   ---------------------------------------------------- Check out our NEW REV LEFT MERCH with Goods For The People HERE Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio https://revleftradio.com/

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, we have on the author A.J.A. Woods, who put out the book recently through Verso, The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy, Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the decline of the West. All of us have heard the term cultural Marxism. Some of us might just dismiss it as some sort of neo-outgrowth of Judeo-Bulshavism, which, you know, there's some truth there. But this Gromshian historical analysis of the superstructural usage of cultural Marxism, how it arose historically, interestingly, through an ostensibly left-wing formation of Lyndon LaRouche and his little sort of authoritarian, sectarian, cultish group at first. It arises in that context, then gets handed over to the right, taken by the new right, and developed. And now we still hear it to this day.

We hear, you know, Jordan Peterson, James Lindsay making a big part of their political rhetoric centered around this idea of cultural Marxism. And we hear, you know, the right wing all the time talking about how, like, neoliberal Democrats are communist or Marxist. I watched this really sad video recently of this young father in his 30s or something. Just kind of talking about the economic hardship. Life's getting so expensive. It's hard. He can't, you know, he has to work two jobs to perform. to provide for his kids.

He's struggling. He can no longer take him on vacation. He remember growing up and his dad used to take him on vacation. He can't afford that. He's just getting by paycheck to paycheck. This genuinely like relatable story that huge swaths of Americans have been and are continuing to go through. And then towards the end of it, this guy says, and this is the consequences of implementing

socialism in America. He talks about the symptoms, you know, meaningfully. and movingly, and then he blames it on socialism. And just this fascinating inversion where the right has taken hardcore American neoliberal capitalism and somehow figured out a way to blame it actually on Marxist, on socialist, on communist. It's disorienting, it's frustrating. And this book, in part, helps us understand the historical lineage of the emergence of that particular rhetorical move, which unfortunately has a lot of power in contemporary American society.

So this is a fascinating conversation. Really excited to share it with you. I'll link to the book and the show notes. Go check it out if you enjoy it. And as always, if you support what we do here on RevLeft Radio, you can join us on Patreon.com forward slash RevLeft Radio for only $5 a month. You support 100% DIY, independent, left-wing media, no ads, no commercials, no big money donors ever and in exchange for $5 a month you get an array and always evolving and changing

array of cool stuff that we're doing on the Patreon. I really make it a point to give back as much as I can on the Patreon for the people that support the show. So without further ado, here's my conversation with AJ A.J. A. Woods on his book, The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy, Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the decline of the West. Enjoy. Yes, I'm A.J.A. Woods. I'm an intellectual historian who lives in Brighton, England, and I'm an organizer for the eco-socialist group and a capitalist resistance, and the author of the book, The Cultural Marxist, Conspiracy Theory, not quite conspiracy, why the Wright blames the Frankfurt School for the decline of the West. Yeah, so I'm really happy to have you on. I really enjoyed the book. I think it's important. A lot of

people in our audience will be familiar with the term cultural Marxism, will have their own sort of quick and fast historical ideas about it. We'll get into that in a bit here. But it is a, it's a really interesting thing to trace out and you do exactly that. So for listeners who've heard the phrase cultural Marxism thrown around for years, but maybe don't actually know precisely where it comes from. What does the right mean by it? And what is the central sort of argument of your book about how this discourse in particular developed over time? The phrase cultural Marxism in right-wing circles usually denotes a particular narrative about the Frankfurt School, who were a group of German Marxist thinkers associated with an institution called the Institute for Social Research.

So they were largely interested in bringing together in a Hegelian philosophy, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Marxist political economy to understand what was happening in modernity. And for the right, in particular, the American New Right. in the 80s and 90s, they see the Frankfurt School as a kind of agent of civilizational destruction, because these thinkers, these Frankfurt School thinkers, came to the United States in the 1930s, and did work throughout the 40s and 50s. Some of them worked at universities. Some of them were involved in various parts of the U.S. security state and intelligence departments.

And for the right, they believe that the Frankfurt School, I'd largely come to the United States to put out a plan to destroy the West either through political correctness, you know, trying to control what conservatives could and couldn't say, through feminism, so sort of liberating a woman from their sort of patriarchal social roles and by sort of taking a more liberatory stance towards people

who weren't straight, who weren't cisgender and also sort of being behind sort of, civil rights and struggles. So when the right are using the term cultural Marxism, they're largely using it to suggest that sort of all the different struggles for equality and for freedom that came out of the 50s and 60s and they're associated with second wave feminism, was black power, with gay liberation, that these groups weren't really fighting, you know, actual oppression or actual exploitation and that they'd been manipulated by a sort of group of German Marxists who had invaded the American nation from the outside.

Can you, I mean, our listeners will be familiar. We've done episodes on the Frankfurt School in the past, but can you just kind of give us a quick introduction to some of the core thinkers of the Frankfurt School? Yeah, so when we use the term Frankfurt School, we're usually referring to the members of the first generation. So you're looking at Theodorna and Max Holkeimer, who wrote a book together called The Dialectic of Enlightenment,

that was sort of looking at how the ideals of of Enlightenment rationalism had degenerated into the sort of instrumental rationality of modern capitalism. You also have people like Herbei Marcuse, who wrote a whole number of different books, most notably one-dimensional man and essay on liberation.

It was relatively influential on a new left student movement. And then you also have kind of figures like Eric Fromm and Wilhelm Reich and, Volta Benyamin, who are slightly more peripheral, largely because of kind of splits that they had with other members with the Frankfurt School. But all of these thinkers were kind of working on the question of how to revitalise Marxist critique for 20th century capitalism and also incorporate insights from the field of psychoanalysis to understand how sort of capitalism, capitalist alienation affected people subjectively, how it affected them mentally and how it also undermines the conditions

for a certain type of individuality or self-expression. Yeah, absolutely. I would kind of the way I think about it is the Frankfurt School is grappling. One of the things they're grappling with is why doesn't the working class in advanced capitalist societies kind of become revolutionary as more orthodox or classical Marxism might seem to to, to, to, expect and they shifted into really an examination of the ideological superstructure of capitalism, mixing in psychoanalysis, you know, examining the authoritarian psychology, for example, a mass media, family structures themselves. And this kind of developed into what today we refer to as critical theory, sort of a Marxist inspired, not, not Orthodox Marxism necessarily, but a Marxist

inspired approach to like society and culture and philosophy, wrestling with that. And kind of core question of why hasn't the working classes revolted in post-industrial developed capitalist societies? Does that seem right to you? Yeah, especially when they went over to the United States and they were looking at, you know, as something that they called the pre-fascist character that was sometimes referred to as the authoritarian personality. I think they're also kind of interested in sort of like why the middle classes in sort of advanced capitalist nations would turn towards fascism and what kind of psychic urges that fascist leaders were tapping into. I think they were interested in one question

of, you know, sort of what is holding back the working class from performing its sort of revolutionary role, but also interested in sort of what attracts people in other classes to more sort of reactionary political projects. Yeah, absolutely. And certainly in the US, when capitalism, as we're seeing now, fails to sort of produce a decent quality of life and to sort of, it ends class mobility and it sort of puts downward pressure on the middle class. We're getting right-wing authoritarianism much more than we're getting some grassroots insurgents of socialist or communist politics. It's there, of course, there's a left and a right in the United States. But I think we're seeing that problem kind of more or less play out in real time.

And so it's certainly a worthy question to ask and to grapple with. But getting back sort of your book, because that's just kind of the thing that is targeted in your book. what your book goes in a different direction, examining the right wing in particular, using this cultural Marxist idea. And you approach the subject overall through what I think is an interesting and worthwhile, which is the Gromshian sort of method of conjunctural analysis, rather than, you know, just kind of fact-checking the conspiracy claims one by one as, you know, some might, you know, some might do. So what does that method, the Gromshian method in particular, let us see about cultural Marxism as a form of ideological struggle? Why did you use?

think that was the right framework for this project? And kind of what does that approach let us see that a more superficial critique perhaps misses? One of the reasons I wrote this book is that I was quite dissatisfied with the way that other people had written about cultural Marxism as if random conservative, it suddenly thought it up as something amusing to say. And what Grampson conjunctural analysis allows us to do is really contextual why particular specific historical actors engage in certain types of political struggle and figure out what they are trying to do with certain tactics,

do with certain ideas, do with certain strategies. And so, conjunctual analysis allows you to see cultural Marxism, not as a kind of kooky thing that's made by people on the fringe, but something that is a kind of political weapon that has a function for quite sort of seriously organized political movements. Linked to my use of Gramprey's method of conjunctual analysis is revisiting of his theory of the intellectuals. I think that for many years, people have to sort of believe that for Grampetry, there was a kind of clear distinction between the organic intellectual and the traditional intellectual.

and they often then put a kind of moralistic layer on top of that of sort of, you know, traditional intellectuals are bourgeois and bad and organic intellectuals are revolutionary and good. But when you sort of engage with the prison notebooks and get and sort of take a look at the questions and problems that Gramtse was grappling with is that you see all intellectual work, all intellectual and ideological struggle takes place on a sort of spectrum of organetica. He would call it in the original Italian, but in English, they should probably call it organeticity, which is looking at how people produce ideas

and insofar as they're kind of embedded, not only just within the struggle of particular political movements and organizations, but within the struggles of certain classes and class fractions. Why I turn to Gramtri, why I turn to conjunctual analysis, is to show that cultural Marxism is an idea, a political tool that has a certain function

for movements that develop from particular class politics and are trying to push for a hegemonic view of the world that sort of represents and furthers particular interests and projects. Absolutely. So early on, you kind of also push back against this idea, which I think is pretty common, that cultural Marxism can more or less be reduced to a straight rebranding of older anti-Semitic tropes, specifically Judeo-Bulshivism, you know, coming out of the Nazi period, or cultural Bolshevism, kind of. of tying this anti-Semitic Jewish cabal idea with communism and saying that they're actually one in the same, that communism itself is a sort of Jewish conspiracy theory. And cultural Marxism, for a lot of people, was sort of understood as the modern, slightly more subtle version of that. But, you know, and there are obviously overlaps there, but you're saying something more specific than

that, which I think is important. So can you kind of unpack that distinction for our listeners? It's quite an easy mistake to make as the kind of history of anti-communism and anti-Semitism overlaps quite significantly, particularly in the American context. What I want to argue when I'm making that distinction is that it's kind of me wanting to get away from a kind of pejorative way of speaking about the rights or the rights ideas. because I think that people like the argument that cultural Marxism is just a rebranded cultural Bolshevism because then all you really have to say is this is just a neo-Nazi idea. It goes back to the Nazis and we don't necessarily have to take it seriously or try to figure out how it's being used or how it's functioning in a particular political situation.

I think what I want to point out is that with the use of the phrase cultural Marxism, there are actually sort of many different uses of cultural Marxism and how it's used it over time. And the point in history at which sort of cultural Marxism is then kind of linked back to these older discourses and older stories about cultural Bolshevism and Judeo Bolshevism, when the sort of mainstream conservative Reaganite consensus is sort of falling apart in the 1990s. And you're seeing members of a sort of tendency within the conservative. movement called the paleo-conservatives start to be ostracized largely because of their criticism of Israel and their anti-Semitic critiques of certain aspects of American liberalism,

and then sort of entering into alliances with the respectable sort of white supremacist movement. And so it's hard to sort of say that it's just a sort of straightforward rebranding because it's actually more of a story about the real, on the right in the Cold War period and how that then sort of leads to the development of a more nativist right that that ultimately results in sort of Trumpism in the 2010s. Yeah, so I think that's really important to not just reduce it to basically some sort of slur, right, that it's just this Judeo-Bolshevik slur and dismiss it offhand, but trying to understand its genealogy and the sort of superstructural role at play is in this faction on the right that

has emerged and culminated really in our modern, you know, Trump administration situation. And I also agree with that. One of the thinkers of the last 10 or so years that jumped out in my mind that uses this term and clearly not in an anti-Semitic way is Jordan Peterson, who is a Zionist, who is, you know, not an anti-Semite at all, who uses the term or has used, he's kind of MIA lately, but has used the term cultural Marxism for many years to basically explain or attempt to explain progressive social movements, which we'll get into when we talk about, you know, the new right and the new left here in a bit. But that's a, that's a perfect case of a right-wing figure, predominant right-wing figure in American politics, using that term a lot, but clearly not at

all having even the pretense of anti-Semitism or the subtext of anti-Semitism present whatsoever. And I think that kind of is one point in favor of your argument there. Examples like that can be sort of used to rebut the accusation that cultural Marxism is just a neo-Nazi term. You saw this very particularly in the United Kingdom in 2019 when we had a conservative party politician Zuella Braverman using the term and the speech. And in the liberal press, you've got that classic sort of accusation, now you're just sort of using this anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. And in sort of conservative newspapers and magazines in the UK, they tried to say, Well, you know, we very much acknowledge that there are people on the alt-right or there are neo-Nazis on the internet that use this term in a very anti-Semitic way. But when we use it, we mean something very different.

And so what I want to investigate and sort of explore in the book is show that even if there are these very different uses and sort of meanings of cultural Marxism across the right, across the decades, often functionally it's doing the same thing, right? it's the kind of delegitimizing progressive movements and promoting a kind of conservative worldview that can be used to sort of reorder society to help further the expansion of entrepreneurial capital and weaken the sort of power of not just movements against social oppression but also class power.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I have more to say on that but I'll go to the next question because I think we'll get to it here in a bit. But you argue that the real historical backdrop here for the emergence of the modern usage of this term is the long 1960s, right? You mentioned earlier. Feminism, black liberation, gay liberation, you know, the decolonization movements, anti-imperialist struggle, student revolts, all these upheavals that start transforming social life in the West. Why is that historical juncture so important for understanding why the right needed a narrative like cultural Marxism in the first place?

partially because it's the period that they all identify as the moment where everything went wrong for them. And I mean, for the right, cultural Marxism is not always just a story about domestic politics and sort of changes of what's happening in the country. But sort of they're thinking about things on a kind of civilizational scale of, you know, Western civilization itself. And what I write in the introduction, so drawing on the work of Frederick Jameson, is that the 60s really kicked off in the 1950s with, you know, the successive anti-imperialist struggles and the movement towards decolonization in the former colonies. And it's four conservatives, four right-ranking intellectuals. What they're trying to defend or say was better before, you know, the rise of cultural Marxists. or whichever term that they like to use, it is because they want to preserve,

they want to resurrect a kind of form of society that sort of united kind of traditional social hierarchies with kind of geopolitical hegemony. And this is the kind of the vision that they sort of mystify in their notion of the Western civilization. And I think they do choose the 60s, well, the long and global 60s, as the kind of turning point in their narrative,

because, you know, it did represent a quite a significant change in the balance of forces of many different countries. And they have to explain that change without acknowledging the real material sources and causes of social antagonism. It is for conservatives, cultural Marxism is, you know, a story of, you know, the West had this kind of natural harmony before, you know, there was this kind of external or outside agents that sort of really interfered with everything. And so it means they don't necessarily have to reckon seriously with the inequalities

or the unfreatms that were around at the time and actually sort of provoked the movements for liberation and against oppression into existence. And also like in the US context, this is the period of time where you're in the Cold War

where anti-communism is sort of ambient. You know, it's probably overwhelmingly a position of most Americans at that time is just to be unthinkingly anti-communism. And so there is a, there's a strategic move here, whether that's thought out or not, where you're tying these various movements, some of which are explicitly socialist and are certainly a lot of these movements have a socialist or communist edge to their spectrum. But you're tying all these movements to the big boogeyman of communism. So, you know, women's rights or gay liberation or just students getting uppity on campuses are now tied to this horrific thing called communism in the midst of the Cold War.

And so making those connections can really also devalue those movements while at the same time as you're saying create a nice scapegoat for the decline of the West narratives, which go back so long. I mean, I sometimes think, you know, you can think of like Oswald Spangler and his decline of the West, Nietzsche and the 1800s decrying the decline of the West. after the French Revolution, all conservatives across Europe decrying the fall of the West. It's kind of like a trope in the right-wing worldview that is constantly being updated. They're having to find new ways to talk about it. But this seems like a modern iteration of a very old reactionary idea, right? And it is something that Grampshey wrote about too in the prison notebooks. He was trying to identify what is it that?

sort of makes conservatives think, you know, and this time is definitely going to be the fall of the West. I think that for him I had to do something with, the work it goes into sort of making society running and sort of keep things at a kind of normal state, a so-called normal equilibrium, and it kind of has an effect on people's thinking. That would make them think, you know,

that this is how things should be forever, and this is what sort of normal human existence is, which is all, I mean, sort of very ideological, ideological, right, in the very classic Marxist sense of sort of seeing social life as a sort of natural expression of, you know, how humans are and to not see the societies we live in as a kind of a moving consequence of historical processes. And so conservative thought in its immediate sense is, you know, is a way of kind of naturalizing the world around you. And so then it can lead to you, if you're trying to make sense of historical change or things moving in a direction that you don't like,

you could not see it as anything other than a kind of downfall of, in the sort of the essence of the society in which you live. Yeah, absolutely. Incredibly well said. That's a really central insight into the reactionary mind. But interestingly, the first major case study in the book that you put forward is Lyndon LaRouche. This is an interesting figure, not very well known outside of particular needs. on the radical left in particular that understand this history. We actually have an episode on it, so people want to go back and learn about that period of history. And I think this will surprise a lot of

people. Most people don't associate LaRouche with the genealogy of the discourse around cultural Marxism. So can you kind of remind us who he was, why he matters here, and what role did his movement play in developing these early anti-Frankfort school narratives? I always feel kind of intimidated when I get this question, because, of just how often Lyndon LaRouche kind of changed over the decades. What is sort of pertinent for the story of cultural Marxism is that in the 1960s when he was involved in Trotskyist organizing circles in New York City,

he came up with his relatively novel reading of Lenin's What Is to Be Done and decided that what he needed to do was sort of get involved and the sort of student new left and try to recruit what you called sort of Leninist baby boomers to form a sort of socialist movement, that words, really advanced sort of socialist revolutionary politics in the United States. To do this, he led a class on sort of Marxist economics. And according to everyone that I spoke to

and all of the memoirs of former LaRushites that I've read, And Lee's lectures were apparently very impressive. They sometimes went for seven, eight hours long. And a lot of people were quite impressed by what sort of LaRouche had to say and drawn to him, a kind of charismatic personality. And in the late 60s and early 70s, his group developed into sort of more of a kind of what you would call sort of a political cult with him and as a leader, sort of developing ever more sort of strict rules around what members could do,

what members could say increasingly paranoid about people being brainwashed by various intelligent agencies to assassinate him. And so the Lerush movement became the sort of quite insular, quite suspicious of other groups and quite aggressive to. I mean, there's a famous incident called Operation Mopup, where various LaRoucheites would go to sort of Communist Party or Socialist Workers Party meetings and sort of beat people up with numtucks and baseball bats.

The reason that the LaRouche movements is the site that's sort of originated, the cultural Marxist and narrative, is partially because of factional struggles within the new left itself and how they kind of interpreted the influence of the Frankfurt School thinker Herbe Markuza. So in the late 1960s,

There were a number of articles going around talking about Herbe and Marcuse's ties to various intelligence agencies and state institutions in the United States. I mean, he had worked for the Office for Strategic Services during World War II, developing research on Nazi Germany and then had sort of gone on to work for the State Department. And also then sort of did research at the Russian Research Center at Harvard. which was covertly funded by the CIA. So Marcusa had all of these quite dodgy institutional links. And as part of the struggle between different groups in the new left, groups like the LaRouche movement and also another group called Progressive Labor tried to sort of de-legitimize other factions in the new left

for sort of being associated or being influenced by Marcus's ideas about what kind of emancipatorial, politics in the United States should look like. And the Rooshax in particular felt that Marcoza was part of a CIA plot to turn a student activists into kind of proto-fascist terrorists and then as part of a kind of shock troop operation to prepare the world for global genocide. You could sort of see. the bleeding line between a kind of Marxist critique of fascism with conspiracy culture that was happening in the 1960s and 1970s. I mean, the, the Ruch himself was sort of influenced quite a bit by the

paranoia trilogy series of films like The Power lacks of you at the time, etc. So the origins of the cultural Marxism meme itself is really kind of a result of Marxist infighting, the sort of rise of sort of popular conspiracy culture in the 1960s and 1970s and also kind of reaction to the way that sort of certain members of the new left is sort of taking up Frankfurt school ideas. And I remember the course of the 70s and the 80s, the LaRouche movement shifted from the left to the right, partially for expedient reasons of trying to get sort of trying to raise more funds, trying to build alliances with groups on the right, but also partially because their theory of society, their theory of the world really revolved around this idea of there being

a kind of sinister elite working behind the scenes to sort of manipulate world events. And that this vision of history and sort of the public sphere meshed rather well with other far-right groups and sort of other fractions within the Republic. party. Yeah. Yeah, it's so interesting that it kind of comes out of this Lyndon LaRouche, who, you know, was on the broadly conceived socialist left, but in a really weird way. This is an insular, paranoid, hypersectorian, authoritarian, right-wing version of whatever the hell. They're kind of advancing a very cultish version of whatever they're advancing at the time. But it's interesting, and that was one of the revelations of this book, is that that narrative actually is incubated in that context, not outside of it.

And I think, you know, tracing that historical lineage back to there is one of the more surprising aspects, I think, of this book. But from there, as you're implying, the story shifts from this fringe, cultic environment. Again, we have a full episode if you want to learn all about the details of Lyndon Leroux and his movement. It is disturbing, but also fascinating. So if you're interested in that, go check it out. But from this fringe, cultic environment, into the institutional new right, especially through the Free Congress Foundation and figures like Paul White. Rick, I believe you pronounce it, and William Lynde. So what changes at that point?

And how does cultural Marxism get repackaged into something much more politically usable for the broader right? As I write in the book, the LaRouche movement, like the central element of the Ruchian ideology was a kind of elitism. So a lot of the writing that they produced was quite esoteric, quite difficult to work through. if you hadn't already had a university education and sort of weren't quite well-informed about the history of philosophy or music and literature. And this is partially why the Roush movement wasn't sort of a kind of successful mass movement

outside of certain electoral breakthroughs that really had more to do with them sort of doing more populist appeals in their campaigns than really sort of being quite forthright about what they really believed. When, however, these narratives about the Frankfurt School, these narratives about cultural Marxism, are then picked up by the new right, it becomes a much more sort of effective political, ideological, rhetorical tool, really because the character of the new right as a political movement. So the new right really in America gets started in the 1970s. but Paul Rewick is really sort of one of the figureheads of this movement

and the question they're trying to answer is kind of like well how do we make conservative ideas into how do we popularize sort of the conservative ideas that people like sort of William F. Butlerie and his group of intellectuals are talking about in a national review and so they the new writer are a lot more kind of willing to get stuck in to forms of media technologies. There's one guy in the new right called Richard Vigori,

who really pioneers the use of direct mail as a form of political communication. People receiving sort of political messages in their mail and being sort of solicited for donations. And he sort of perfected the method of, you know, developing methods that were a motive, and that would inspire people to sort of put donations towards a particular campaign to get involved.

and sort of considered to politics in their region. And various sort of new right activists, various sort of people affiliated with new right think tanks like the Heritage Foundation or Free Congress Foundation and other institutions like that really worked to sort of develop narratives and arguments and claims that sort of weren't necessarily true, but work I've effective and could sort of agitate people

to vote a certain way. And the person in the new right who really, kind of hyper-charges, cultural Marxism, is William Lind, who was the director of the Centre for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation. And whereas the Lerushites were sort of writing these sort of long articles to spell out every sort of step of the genealogy of how, you know, the Frankfurt School, sort of created political correctness to destroy the West. People like William Lind was sort of quite adept at sort of developing soundbubes.

that couldn't sort of stick in your memory. I don't know if you've sort of ever come across sort of the argument that conservative to use about, you know, sort of the old Marxism is about the redistribution of wealth, whereas, you know, this new Marxism, this cultural Marxism, is about the redistribution of power or status or identity or something like that. And that kind of rhetorical twist is something that William Lind developed and sort of used to sort of kind of help spread this idea of cultural Marxism to make it something that people can lend remember

and you know sort of explain to their friends. So it's sort of became a much more memorizable narrative and a much more sort of compressed story that could be communicated through TV, through op-edged, through sort of direct mail, all of these sort of different more popular media forms and representative politics that was more about kind of just that had kind of retortals.

rhetorical populism to it. Yeah. No, I've heard in the more modern iterations of this is like the James Lindsay's and the Jordan Peterson's of the world, they'll say the, yeah, like what you kind of said is the old Marxism. You know, that's about class. It's about the economically powerless, fighting the economically powerful. And their whole thing is cultural Marxism is this sort of taking of that basic structure and applying it to social identities so that the, the, the, the socially powerless, the most marginalized social groups are confronting and trying to overthrow the dominant social group, the implication being that white Christian men are and should be

on top of that hierarchy. So it's kind of like taking Marxism, kind of stripping it away of what makes Marxism, Marxism, the economic, the political economy, the class struggle, and then applying it to natural social movements inside of a modern capitalist liberal society wherein people are struggling for basic social recognition and social rights. And then that itself is nefarious in the same way that these, you know, Marxist radical revolutionaries who want to overthrow capitalism are nefarious. It's, it's kind of stupid, but it's very effective, obviously. You're just sort of bringing up Lindsay has sort of made me think that when it comes to the uses of cultural Marxism, it's really sort of a spectrum between the La Roushi and the

And what I mean by that is sort of the weirdest sort of more esoteric and complex ways for articulating it and the sort of more populist ones. Because I think that, I mean, Lindsay now is quite, James Lindsay has always been quite weird. I mean, like, if you've ever listened to any of his sort of long rambling podcast episodes, those can come sometimes be about three or four hours, there's something kind of quite LaRouchite about the way that he speaks about, you know, the real meaning of Hegel, the real meaning of all of all of these different. things, you know, how he's basically able to read Hegel better than anyone else. I think that's quite a sort of, that's quite a Lerushite posture, whereas I think the figure who's sort of like, Lind and most sort of like, we've got to craft these stories that reach people and sort of push them to action is more like Christopher Rufo, right?

I mean, he is really kind of much more concerned about almost the mechanics of political communication. I think that when I'm sort of right, when I write about how different intellectuals, right-wing intellectuals, talk about cultural Marxism in the book, I think it's important to sort of see how they sort of think through their own intellectual practice and how that sort of informs their mode of ideological struggle and the kind of world that they're trying to create and kind of actions, they're trying to provoke from their audience or constituency or from the fellow travelers and their movements. Yeah. I'll have a kind of follow-up question. You mentioned the new right.

That term, I'm not sure how that term itself has evolved. The new right in contemporary American politics is like this sort of coming to terms with the fact that we need some economic redistribution, maybe even some social democratic economic changes, married to a deeply reactionary social and cultural view, anti-immigration, anti-trans, patriarchal reformation of the family unit and society at large, etc. the new right that you're talking about in your book, how would you define them and how does that differ from what the new right is becoming in contemporary politics? Yeah, I mean, like, the new right that I talk about in the book is nowadays the old right about two times over, really. I sort of agree in a way with John Gantz,

where he writes in, when the clock broke, that the new right was sort of a branding exercise on behalf of a group of conservative activists in the 1970s. So maybe be a bit more historical about it. I agree with also Mike Davis that the new right was a sort of coming of age of the whole generation of conservative organizers that were kind of working in revolt to the kind of Eisenhower era Republican Party, who were much more wedded to the liberal

consensus that were less antagonistic towards New Deal liberalism. They had kind of gained their experience through a training ground of the sort of Barry Goldwater campaign in 1964. They'd been members of different sort of conservative student societies in 1960s. They were much more combative, but they were also, unlike the kind of post-war conservative intellectuals, there were much less wedded to a sort of aristocratic idea of the right. And they kind of wanted to represent what they saw as sort of the interests of the sort of American white middle class and lower middle class. Paul Rewick talks about having a shift from ideals,

which he saw as the preserve of the kind of, you know, William F. Buckley, aristocratic intellectual to values, which he saw as the kind of ideological outlook of the white lower middle class. At that point in history, we're sort of slowly moving to the suburbs and becoming something that we could call white America.

I mean, before then, white America didn't exist in the same way because, I mean, it was still sort of, you would kind of talk about sort of ethnic whites because of that moved to the suburb and sort of the changes in class relations at that time. And also, things going on the civil rights. I mean, there are multiple factors going in, right? But at that point, there was the subject of the sort of white American middle class emerging. And the new right was kind of stepping in to sort of represent them on a political level. And so the new right activists were kind of sort of giving

an organisational forms to that historical change in class composition and pushing forward for politics that would sort of best represent not necessarily the interests of the American middle class but the sort of interests of certain class fractions within the capitalist class that could then be tied to sort of what the inter-house or the American middle class so they've saw the world working. And obviously it's a socio-cultural reaction to the left-wing movements of the 60s as well,

which obviously I think is a core aspect of it. What was its relationship eventually with the rise of Reaganism? Because that's a very libertarian, economically coded movement, the rise of neoliberalism economically, but also had a lot of the social and cultural views that perhaps the new right helped foster and give rise to. Does that, is there a connection there? Yeah, I mean, the American conservative movement in the post-war era

has always been a kind of weird contradictory coalition. Especially on sort of the more intellectual or kind of institutional level, there's sort of been the tendencies for the libertarians, the high ex, and the neoliberal thinkers. But also sort of having to coexist with sort of more traditionalist, that would sort of be the more kind of philosophical edge of what the new right is stood for. And anti-communism was the, what was the glee of the act kind of held them together, certainly. But just because they had a sort of common enemy in the Soviet Union or, you know, the spread of communism worldwide,

doesn't mean that there wasn't, you know, sort of divisions domestically, especially when sort of Reagan came to power. And the people who belongs to the new right, the sort of more, traditionally minded conservatives, did feel somewhat portrayed by Reagan as they felt that he didn't push hard enough on issues that really, cultural issues in particular that really mattered to them, like school prayer and abortion. And they felt that he was really coming under the influence of neo-conservatism. And it's just a very quick gloss. I mean, the neoconservatives were really, I mean, the classic line from Irving Crystal, I believe, is that a neo-conservative,

is a liberal who's been mugged by reality. And what that was sort of referring to is that these were kind of, well, a lot of them were originally Trotskyists in the inner 30s and 40s and quite sympathetic to sort of the politics of the New Deal. But when it came to the time of the great society reforms and also the rise of the new left, many of these former liberals felt that that move to the left was far too excessive.

And so often found themselves as sort of moving, to the right, not just only on economic issues, but also on cultural ones, while also really leaning into kind of a militant, sort of anti-communism that grew out of their experience as Kropskists, as sort of epic people who are sort of quite anti-Salynist in the 1940s. And so, yeah, the new right under Reagan did feel like those who have pushed out and neglected, and this is what did lead to some of them. coming what would then be called to the paleo-conservatives who were sort of much more sort of staunchly against immigration felt that sort of Reaganite sort of neoliberal politics

didn't really attend to the central task of conservative politics which is the sort of conserving of an organic community or nation. As I said sort of at the beginning of our conversation, this is what sort of led certain paleo-conservatives to then really start getting on with the kind of more respectable side of the white supremacist. and white nationalist movement in the United States. I mentioned in the book that in the 1990s, the Free Congress Foundation, an episode of one of their shows,

where William S. Lynde interviews Jared Taylor, who I think still is the editor of American Renaissance magazine, which is one of the sort of white nationalist publications. That's sort of very much into the kind of race and IQ question and, you know, believes in the sort of things about, like, the genetic and inherent inferiority of certain races, etc. In the story of cultural Marxism itself is this kind of, there is this sort of white supremacist aspect to it

of feeling that in America, especially the white people's sort of so-called natural superiority shouldn't be challenged. And as William Lind gets older, that aspect becomes much clearer in his work to the point where, I mean, I think even in that, interview with Jared Taylor, he sort of defines cultural Marxism as the denial of natural differences, which

I mean, really is the sort of euphemistic term that the right used for sort of talking about the way that they see sort of the hierarchy between different races. Yeah. No, and I think a conscious stated, admitted inheritor of this legacy today in the American political right-wing scene is Nick Fuentes. Nick Fuentes often talks about this period of time, sees himself as a modern iteration of this movement that did kind of lose out in the neoliberal period or felt that they lost out in the neoliberal period.

Perhaps you could argue Tucker Carlson is a softer version of that spectrum. And Nick Fuentes is the harder version of it. But I tie a direct line from those figures. And Nick Fuentes in particular, because he ties it himself, he makes it explicit to this movement. so I think that's just worth noting. Yeah. So kind of bringing it up to the contemporary period a little bit, you have the Tea Party and you have the post-2008 period.

I'm 37 years old. I was politically active and conscious during this entire period. I saw the rise of the Tea Party. I was like 19 years old when the Great Recession hit. It's a common millennial experience, I guess. But we see this discourse at that time mutate again and get absorbed into a wider populist right-wing ecosystem. So how did the financial crisis?

the Obama years, and the rise of the media political machinery on the right in particular help reactivate and spread these narratives in new ways. Yeah. That's such an important question. I mean, I think that the Tea Party movement was kind of a very broad church and often functioned to draw in a lot of the different tendencies within the American and write itself. As I write in the book,

it's, I mean, you could really talk about the tea parties in general. I mean, it was just so many different movements that sort of went under one label. And what I also talk about is the kind of rise of what my friend Robert F. Carley calls the conjunctual intellectual

of people who have particular as the ideological inclinations. and who are already working on doing political work, finding themselves at moments where they're able to take advantage of ideological fragmentation of social antagonism and also sort of rise in different kinds of mobilization. The Tea Party is also a kind of symptom of a sort of rise of a type of ideological entrepreneur that sort of thrives in the period of Web 2.0. So you see the rise of a lot of sort of right-wing bloggers of kind of people who are able to make documentaries and distribute them and screen them quite cheaply of, you know, sort of alternative media sites and spheres that kind of are sort of challenging what is, you know, taken to be the sort of mainstream sort of liberal media.

And so I think that cultural Marxism really sort of comes up again in the Tea Party era, the sort of convergent era of the sort of convergence. of all of these different developments because it is a way to put forward a sort of us and them narrative about the media landscape, particularly in terms of how cultural Marxism is linked to political correctness. And what you see in like the different versions

of the cultural Marxism story that were promoted around the time of the Tea Party is that it's all stories about sort of, how the Frankfurt School infected the sort of baby boomer generation, not only on one hand, to produce these kinds of liberal leading or sort of degenerate media, but also to kind of be profligate and sort of live beyond their means and ultimately cause the financial crisis. And so in the first case, I mean, you can see how it then sort of leads into the part,

politics of Trumpism and really sort of how the media institutions themselves is sort of cast as the enemy and sort of promoting a sort of more direct sort of more immediate engagement with one's constituency or audience is something sort of more immediate and more truthful and more authentic. Yeah, one interesting little flashpoint of that period of time that I remember this is sort of explicitly hitting on this whole history. is that Fox News was going crazy for a few years on Obama's connections to Bill Ayers. Bill Ayers, of course, member of the SDS, a member of the Weather Underground. I've since had dinner with Bill Ayers.

I had a long discussion with him about precisely this. He told me his first person experiences of that time where they had to have, like, security. They were daily death threats against him. But it was this explicit tying of Obama to that exact new left period that helped give rise to the very idea of cultural, Marxism and that this book traces that whole history of. So it's a small inflection point, but I think a revealing one that speaks to your overall thesis quite well. Yeah, I mean, it's also quite funny how that whole claim grow out of, I mean, grow out of an offhanded

joke that Bill Ayers made at one of his talks, right? Someone said, oh, did he write dreams with my father by Barack Obama? And he said, I mean, what did he even say? I think he said, No, I'm not a liberty to answer that, but if you're able to prove it, then we'll split the royalties between us or something along those lines. I think it was, yeah, reinterpreted as some sort of confession. I think that in one of the films that I talk about in particular, I think it's a gender grinding America down, where the filmmaker Curtis Bowers developed this whole sort of massive red string on a cork board chart to sort of highlight the influence. of where Kalma marks through the Frankfurt School and Gramsci onto the weather underground and then sort of onto Obama. I think that there is, I don't talk about this in the book,

but I think it's reflective of a kind of way of sort of processing information that came about through the development of the internet. I think that the internet is great at sort of decontextualizing information, but also linking every bit of information to one another. so if you can kind of travel through hyperlinks consistently to the point where you're able to make connections that aren't actually kind of historically significant but because of the architecture of the World Wide Web it is possible

and so these kind of drawings of connections even if they have no kind of weight in terms of sort of historical causality just by the fact that there is some sort of arguable or vague connection to sort of the keyboard warriors of the right has become significant because that is at that time

and also now increasingly today too the sort of way that information gets tied up and the sort of way that we process it all. Yeah, that's a really interesting idea. It made me think of well first the Charlie from it's always sunny meme where he's in the basin of the mail room connecting dots

but also you remember Glenn Beck in his chalkboard during this time. Oh yeah, the famous yeah, yeah, the chalkboards. Yeah, yeah. And perhaps the lineage of that is culminating today in like a Candace Owens, who will spend all day long making these vague connections and references to things that never actually lead anywhere, never end up with any solid conclusions or evidence, but it's always just this implication that this is tied to

that and tied to that. I mean, she's even talking about Freud and psychoanalysis as being some part of this global conspiracy that's not quite articulated. But yeah, so just knowing that machinery and then seeing the lineage of it throughout the right historically is a fascinating thing. but bringing this discussion fully into the present, this is my last question for you. In the last chapter and the conclusion, you trace the continuity between older cultural Marxism narratives and today's moral panics around CRT,

wokeness, DEI, and gender ideology. What continuity do you want listeners to see there? And how do you understand the relationship between this culture war politics and the broader neoliberal assault on working people that you describe at the end of the book? Yeah, I mean, it's so, well, I mean, I was going to say funny, but it's also, I mean, it's quite depressing that a theory that is all about culture has ended up having such kind of devastating economic consequences. Because even when you look at the White House documents and sort of look at things that are coming out of the office, so budget management, I think it's called, that the Trump administration quite explicitly talks about.

cutting different programs and the language of sort of getting cultural Marxism out of the country. And these are, you know, programs that sort of help cut recidivism, you know, sort of help put people in rural areas and sort of touch with medical help. And so I think that cultural Marxism, as I say throughout the book, it is not just a way to delegitimize certain progressive projects, but it is a way to kind of reorder society around a kind of conservative vision of how we should all act not just individually but towards each other. And to push everyone, you know, sort of essentially back into the household, you know, all of our problems, all of our, all of our struggles are, you know, not something that we can

fix collectively, but something that needs to sort of be borne on our own shoulders. as individuals and all of the difficulties that you know you might go to a union official for or that you could sort of try to form an organisation to try and combat is something that you need to sort of deal with yourself or within a household. It's something that has to be done by a certain division of sort of household labour. In the book I am quite inspired by people sort of like Melinda Cooper who has argued quite cogently that the sort of neoliberal project is, you know, a project of sort of economic deregulation, but also a project of kind of resurrecting, sort of, traditional, as sort of family structures as a way to, kind of compensate for the gutting of the welfare states. And sort of, this is why kind of, you know, neoliberals will sort of talk about, well, we'll introduce policies that on an economic level sort of really disrupt people's, the lives of people's families.

and then in the other side of them I'll talk about the importance of family values. They sort of needs to have this kind of patriarchal familial structure to sort of work as a kind of band aides to the sort of the economic records that they're producing. But I mean, again, the main continuity really is the function that it has as an idea beyond all of its all of the kind of external differences that you can sort of trace out as a historian. I think that politically it's sort of

functions in a relatively consistent way over the years. Yeah. No, absolutely. I think it's a crucial history. You've got to understand this. This trend on the right is not going anywhere. We're certainly in for some hard economic times in the short medium and perhaps long term.

And so, you know, we'll see this, attempt over and over again, taking on new guises, you know, with new figures leading the charge at various times. But it's the same thing. And, you know, one of the conclusions I draw from this is, obviously capitalism is the problem. The response from the right is always this cultural critique, that if we could just get the immigrants out and we could just stop the trans people from being trans and the gay people from being gay, and if we could just put the father back in charge in the household, that all of a sudden these economic problems will be solved. And no matter what the left of center does or says, they're going to call us Marxist anyway.

So we might as well just be Marxist. In this period of time, we should embrace Marxism. It is class struggle. It gets to the root of the actual problem. And perhaps if enough people embrace it instead of running away from the accusation, these sort of things will lose a lot of their rhetorical power over time. So we'll see. But the book is The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy, Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the decline of the West by A.J.A. Woods.

Thank you so much for coming. on the show, sharing your knowledge and everything you learn from this book. And I highly encourage people to get the book, learn about this history, and keep it in mind going forward. So thank you so much for being generous with your time today, my friend. Dee, thank you very much for having me all. It's really been a delight. Thank you.