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

Having coined the term “cultural Marxism,” the historian William S. Lind should receive royalties every time some conservative pundit repeats it. He would be a rich man. Lind’s original insight about the connection between cultural leftism and Marxist politics spread like wildfire and is now a cliché. 

We should be suspicious whenever this happens.

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

So, Lind should not be held responsible for the misuse of the term he coined. “Cultural Marxism” is certainly useful as a historical description of how Marxists like Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukács wheedled their way into respectable politics by repackaging Marxism with less materialism and more humanism. And if the term is used to emphasize the extremism of today’s “liberals”, I suppose it is helpful, though these days few points are scored thereby. As David Azerrad wrote in his contribution to the anthology Up From Conservatism, “Only the most clueless of Boomers still believe that accusations of socialism carry any weight in contemporary America.”

Still, 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 “wokeism,” 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 so many conservative pundits in column-after-column and video-after-video retracing our woes back to Gramsci, Lukács, the Frankfurt School, and Michel Foucault (invariably without attribution to Lind), as if the genealogy offers some solution.

Conservatives who fixate on Communism misunderstand the dynamic driving today’s left and bringing it to power. They are defending a Maginot Line around which the left has already made an end run.

Important differences between today’s “woke” ideology and standard Marxism have already been identified in this magazine by Paul Gottfried, Alexander Riley, and others, particularly in Chronicles’ April 2023 issue, “Marx Was Not Woke.”

But the term also furnishes the establishment right with an excuse to run away from its battles. So many articles, videos, books, and gratuitous remarks now insist on the “Marxism” of the left with such vehemence that one begins to suspect that “The lady doth protest too much.” (Not accidentally, conservative women often lead the protesting.) Why the need to keep on reiterating a case that almost no one is denying?

Because it keeps us resting safely in our comfort zone. We defeated Communism, after all, so if we just continue fighting the Cold War—vilifying Russia, extolling free markets, and attacking affirmative action—this will stop leftists from mutilating children, starting wars, and imprisoning political opponents, and they will relinquish power. Verbally flogging the defeated enemies of yesteryear provides an excuse to avoid confronting the real enemies who are overrunning the city now—enemies who will hurt us badly if their power is challenged where it matters. 

This helps explain why the left won the war and the right sits by helplessly, trying to extricate itself from the debacle it permitted by doing the same things that got us into the debacle in the first place.

The larger lesson of the subterfuge perpetrated by Gramsci, Lukács, et. al. is that the history of modern ideology is the history of the right repeatedly misunderstanding and being outmaneuvered by the left’s innovations. Leftism is more than Marxism, which appeared relatively late in the history of the left. Today’s most recent innovations have, once again, caught the right asleep at the switch. 

Radical ideology is not universal. No left and no ideologies existed in ancient or medieval politics. The left emerged with modern history in 16th-century Europe. It has reinvented itself repeatedly and does so still, often changing too fast for the institutional right to keep up. It has mutated into various forms over the centuries, from religious to republican, nationalist, socialist, anarchist, communist, and, most recently, sexual.

The left seriously strayed from orthodox Marxism during the 1960s, when the Communist parties of both the West and Soviet bloc were caught off guard by the New Left. Since then, the American left has skillfully exploited the country’s persistent racial divisions, though this is largely a flanking maneuver to divert attention from its truly decisive innovation into sexuality. Whatever one’s political sympathies, it can hardly be denied that the most significant ideological innovation of our time is the paradigm shift from social and economic grievances at the vanguard of the left to sexual ones. This could not be more conspicuous, though fear of confronting the consequences still allows the left to hoodwink the right.

The full consequences of sexual ideology are not easy to understand. Perhaps least noticed is not any particular agenda item but how it has emasculated both society in general and the right in particular. Ironically, it’s in the very process of scolding other men for their supposed irresponsibility, puerility, and lack of “manliness” that the right’s would-be alpha males reveal their own feminization, team up with feminists, and abet the very agenda that they profess to oppose. 

Obsessing over “cultural Marxism” represents another manifestation of the right’s feminization. It protects the political class from what most frightens and dominates them: women. As Aaron Renn observes of the right-wing political class, “They won’t say anything that would get them in trouble with the ladies.” 

“They’re weak,” Tucker Carlson said of Republican leaders in a 2021 interview with Glenn Beck. “They’ve decided, ‘The other side is ascended. The left is winning. I’m not gonna push any buttons that might infuriate them.’ They’re just not lion-hearted.”

Tellingly, Tucker adds, “The only ones who will do it are women.”

Until we conquer this fear, the left will tighten its grip, and the Cassandras warning of leftist totalitarianism will be preaching a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Like most of the right’s habitual lamentations, the “cultural Marxism” narrative also provides no guidance on how to stop or reverse the leftist ascendancy. The costliness of the ploy is illustrated in its purveyors’ favorite example. Prominent villains include Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, Columbia University professors who fantasized about mobilizing welfare recipients into a revolutionary proletariat who would rise up and overthrow the capitalist state. It did not happen and never had the remotest chance of happening.

If Cloward and Piven’s vision of an American proletarian revolution was a real risk, why don’t conservatives draw the conclusion that welfare is at the root of the problem and renew their previous determination to eliminate or reform it? Instead, conservatives now ignore the welfare state and have abandoned their earlier efforts to reform it. They’ve done so because—partly thanks to their feeble, even counterproductive reforms—it became a feminist stronghold that they now fear to touch.

In fact, the radicalization of the welfare system did play a key role in the left’s ascension, not because of Marxism, but because it freed them from Marxism’s ideological limits. What really happened demonstrates the futility of both neo-Marxist visionaries like Cloward and Piven, and today’s conservatives who dwell on them.

Welfare was radicalized and then served as the springboard for the left’s coup, not by mobilizing the poor into a revolutionary vanguard but by abandoning any concern with poverty and instead turning welfare into a machinery for sexual liberation. It succeeded because conservatives were fooled and enlisted to help the cause in the name of helping single mothers.

If your concern for the poor is genuine, you do not promote welfare, because everyone knows that welfare causes and perpetuates poverty. Until the 1990s, “welfare dependency” and welfare reform were top priorities for both the right and the left—including Marxists, who saw it as an insidious tool of capitalism to placate the poor.  

What happened to this consensus? 

It was feminists who overturned the anti-welfare consensus by shifting the purpose from relieving poverty to promoting women’s empowerment and sexual freedom. This transformed the welfare matriarchy from a necessary evil into a positive good by intentionally glorifying and proliferating single motherhood. If perpetuating poverty was the price of sexual freedom, they were perfectly willing for others to pay that price.

In their 1986 book, Re-Making Love: The Feminization of Sex, influential feminist scholars led by the socialist Barbara Ehrenreich proclaimed, 

Independence, even in straitened and penurious forms, still offers more sexual freedom than affluence gained through marriage and dependence on one man.

This “empowerment” of single mothers, and especially of female government functionaries, was expanded dramatically as feminist social workers acquired police powers that originated to administer the chaos of welfare communities and single-mother homes: child protection, domestic violence programs, and child support enforcement. These programs elevated the functionaries into plainclothes police and displaced fathers by usurping their roles of protectors and providers for the women and children. 

Indeed, fathers became the principal targets of the new police powers and were demoted in status from merely superfluous to villains. They were transformed from protectors of women and children into “batterers” who abused them, and from providers into “deadbeats” who owed them child support and alimony.

These techniques were quickly expanded throughout the government machinery and into mainstream politics. The military was transformed from a fighting force into a gargantuan welfare state catering to numerous single mothers in uniforms, mostly clerks and lawyers, and expelling servicemen for “sexual harassment.” Universities similarly abandoned their missions in both education and scholarship in favor of activism, administered by lawyers and reinforced with similarly trumped-up quasi-criminal accusations of sexual something-or-other. 

Most devastating of all, the welfare machinery and the underclass it bred expanded throughout middle-class society (debasing judicial integrity in the process) using “no-fault” justice, accompanied by more sexual accusations and producing more dysfunctional fatherless adolescents and “empowered” functionaries.

So successful was this mass feminization that #MeToo expanded operations still further by targeting celebrities and political opponents, like Supreme Court
nominee Brett Kavanaugh. All this furnished the radical left with the weapons and machinery to target Donald Trump, his supporters, and other dissenters, and to stage its coup.

I challenge anyone paying the slightest attention to the politics of the last three decades to say which plausibly describes reality and which has wrought the destruction:  gender-neutral welfare spongers chanting Marxist slogans and rising up en masse to smash the capitalist state? Or feminists politicizing the social-work bureaucracy, weaponizing the judiciary, neutering the opposition, feminizing the society, and generally emasculating all of us.

Only by squarely confronting sexual ideology on its own terms will the power of the left be broken. Rising to that challenge will require the courage to endure social discomfort. 

On the other hand, the anti-communist spin propagated by the professional right is soothing and easy. Most people, on hearing the latest evil deeds of the “Marxists”, continue nodding their heads and sending donations to the political class that covers its repeated failures by hurling verbal invective against the already defeated enemies of the past. This testifies to the intellectual poverty and cowardice of the established right and explains why conservatives continue flailing helplessly as the left consolidates power.