The term "cultural Marxism" is most commonly encountered as a snarl word decrying everything right-wingers don't like, alluding to a conspiracy theory to destroy Western culture. With bonus anti-Semitism.
In academic circles, the term describes the early influence of Marxist thought on cultural studies, notably through the work of the Frankfurt school. Although Marx never wrote at any length about culture (what he deemed "the superstructure"), cultural theorists have often used the lens of class, alongside other factors such as race, gender, and sexuality to understand how culture works to perpetuate social inequality.
Outside of graduate seminars in intellectual history, the term is primarily used by reactionaries to red-bait anyone with progressive tendencies.
The slogan was prefigured in Nazi Germany, where Kulturbolschewismus ("Cultural Bolshevism") was used as a term of political abuse.[1]
In current wingnut usage, the term is a favourite of Pat Buchanan and, to the most dangerous extent, Anders Behring Breivik. It is a Cold Warrior's way of decrying "political correctness" or "multiculturalism."[2][3] It's when capitalism and democracy are still the law of the land, but they don't work exclusively for you anymore.
Despite its widespread popularity among the hard-right, many on the right have thoroughly debunked the concept as not being Marxist at all, including Christian Dominionist Gary North, Michael Acuña from Common Ruin, and How to Paint Your Panda.[4][5][6][7]
It's become a favorite term of many of the nuttier Gamergaters—demonstrating the movement's attraction of many anti-Semites, white supremacists, and MRAs — to explain why those bitch slut whores won't shut up about sexism in video games. They got their collective jockstraps in a knot when discussions on Wikipedia predating their obsession with the term resulted in the "Cultural Marxism" article on Wikipedia being redirected to the "Conspiracy theory" section of Frankfurt School[wp], restored after appealing to the God-King, no consensus after that, then deletion and redirection back to the conspiracy theory.
The term is odious enough that people wanting to use it now apologise in advance,[8] much as nobody behaving in a blatantly racist manner will accept the label "racist".
“”It slowly started off by homosexuality becoming acceptable, now it's starting to justify pedophilia, and eventually will lead to accepting bestiality and necrophilia in the future. America, Europe, Australia and the whole world is doomed. Cultural Marxism is the best weapon the Jew has ever used so far, after realizing Communism will not win.
—Insane YouTube commenter on young boy twerking at a gay pride parade (with a few grammar corrections).[9]
The associated conspiracy theory asserts that the Frankfurt School, instead of being the relatively arcane strain of academic criticism that it was, actually was a Marxist plot to destroy the capitalist West from within, supposedly spreading its tentacles throughout academia and indoctrinating students to hate America and freedom. Thus, rock'n'roll, the Sixties counterculture, the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, homosexuality[10] modern feminism, and in general all the "decay" in the U.S. and elsewhere since the good old days of the Fifties are literally products of this conspiracy.[11] It's also the work of the Jews.[12][13]
"Political correctness" had become the popular snarl word of choice after a 1991 speech by George H. W. Bush, with ensuing press coverage and a Washington Times op-ed by Laurence Jarvik of the Heritage Foundation decrying "storm troopers" attacking "Western culture."[14]
The first usage of the phrase "cultural Marxism" in the conspiracist sense was by William Lind of the Free Congress Foundation in a July 1998 speech to right-wing group Accuracy in Academia, in which he described "political correctness" and "cultural Marxism" as "totalitarian ideologies" that were turning American campuses into "small ivy-covered North Koreas, where the student or faculty member who dares to cross any of the lines set up by the gender feminist or the homosexual-rights activists, or the local black or Hispanic group, or any of the other sainted 'victims' groups that revolves around, quickly find themselves in judicial trouble." Lind made the term's anti-Semitism clear in a June 2002 speech to a Holocaust denial conference in Washington D.C., stating in as many words "these guys were all Jewish."[14]
The conspiracy theory was also pushed around this time by Paul Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation, who spent the 1990s railing against "political correctness", culminating in the 1999 video tape Political Correctness: The Dirty Little Secret, attacking the Frankfurt School.
Pat Buchanan, at an October 2000 campaign stop in Denver for the Reform Party, accused Native Americans attempting to block a Columbus Day parade of "cultural Marxism" in the Rocky Mountain News.[15][16] In his 2001 book The Death of the West, he described "cultural Marxism" as a "regime to punish dissent and to stigmatize social heresy as the Inquisition punished religious heresy. Its trademark is intolerance."
