Definition and Culture War usage
In contemporary usage, the term Cultural Marxism refers to an antisemitic conspiracy theory of the far right-wing, which claims that the Frankfurt School is part of a continuing academic and intellectual effort to undermine and destroy Western culture.[49] The conspiracy theory, which emerged in the late 1990s, claims that the Frankfurt School were conspiring to destroy Western civilization by undermining traditionalist conservatism and Christianity, by advocating the Counterculture of the 1960s and multiculturalism, progressive politics and political correctness.[50][51][52] In the U.S., Cultural Marxism conspiracy is an argument of the culture-war politics of religious fundamentalists and paleoconservatives, such as William S. Lind, Pat Buchanan, and Paul Weyrich; and also is political currency among the alt-right, white nationalists, Neo-Nazi organizations, and the neo-reactionary movement.[53][54]
In 1998 Weyrich presented his version of the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory in a speech to the Conservative Leadership Conference of the Civitas Institute, and later published the speech in his syndicated Culture war letter.[55] At Weyrich's request, William S. Lind wrote a short history of his version of Cultural Marxism for the Free Congress Foundation, wherein Lind identifies the presence of openly gay people on television as proof of Cultural Marxist control over the mass media, and claims that Herbert Marcuse considered a coalition of "blacks, students, feminist women, and homosexuals" as a vanguard of cultural revolution.[50][51][56]
In 2014 Lind pseudonymously published Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation Warfare, by Thomas Hobbes, about a societal apocalypse in which Cultural Marxism deposes traditional conservatism as the culture of the Western world. Ultimately, a Christian military victory deposes social liberalism and reestablishes a traditionalist and theocratic socioeconomic order based upon British Victorian morality of the late 19th century.[57][58] The anti–Marxism of Lind and Weyrich advocates political confrontation and intellectual opposition to Cultural Marxism with "a vibrant cultural conservatism" composed of "retro-culture fashions", a return to railroads as public transport, and an agrarian culture of self-reliance, modeled after that of the Christian Amish folk.[59] In the Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment: The Frankfurt School as Scapegoat of the Lunatic Fringe (2011), the historian Martin Jay said that Lind's documentary of conservative counter-culture, Political Correctness: The Frankfurt School (1999), was effective propaganda, because it:
spawned a number of condensed textual versions, which were reproduced on a number of radical, right-wing sites. These, in turn, led to a plethora of new videos, now available on YouTube, which feature an odd cast of pseudo-experts regurgitating exactly the same line. The message is numbingly simplistic: “All the 'ills' of modern American culture, from feminism, affirmative action, sexual liberation, racial equality, multiculturalism and gay rights to the decay of traditional education, and even environmentalism, are ultimately attributable to the insidious intellectual influence of the members of the Institute for Social Research who came to America in the 1930s.[60]