Reading A.J.A. Woods’ fascinating history of right-wing (mostly) American fantasies about the malign influence of the Frankfurt School, I flashed back thirty years to a staple of grad-school life—the Theodor Adorno reading group. Of course we had been made to study Adorno before, and I feared up ahead a looming duty towards his Aesthetic Theory (1970). All the while, the doomed-freelancer mystique of his sometime friend Walter Benjamin felt more compelling, for both writerly and revolutionary reasons, than Adorno the professorial scold of pop culture and whistleblower on the Enlightenment. But the urgency of reading Adorno et al. in the mid-1990s was this: the Frankfurt School critics appeared to offer still (or once more) a scalding analysis of America’s imperial fusion of war machine and spectacle, incipient fascism and affordable fun. Decades later—decades in which “Frankfurt School” and “Cultural Marxism” came to stand in the conservative mind for a concerted assault on certain values—a friend from the reading group said to me that in a way the conspiracy theorists were correct: Adorno and we his readers really did have it in for “Western Civilization.” And we could have gotten away with it too.
Something of the real energy of writings by Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse persists in The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy, even though Woods has not at all set out to correct misreadings of that work, or offer pointers to its utility today. The contemporary matters, however: “This is not a scholarly disagreement about the legacy of the Frankfurt School; it is a struggle to determine what kind of world we want to live in.” In fact they lay out early on an approach to intellectual (if that’s what it is) history owing as much to Michel Foucault as the Institute for Social Research; this will be a story of structures, forces, and regimes—not of specific anti-heroes. Woods goes so far as to say that “this is a book that de-centers the individual brain”—an unwittingly comic assertion, given some of the prize dopes on show later—in favor of the migration of terms and ideas among disaffected leftists at the end of the 1960s, the renovated right a decade later, and the online-addled chancers who now govern the US or dominate its culture. And yet far from the systemic, ideological critique Woods has in mind, The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy is most obviously a litany of ill-motivated individuals engaged in wide-ranging lies.
As a phrase meant to denote both the specific sins of the Frankfurt School and a general “permissive” strain in postwar American culture, politics, and private life, “Cultural Marxism” has a history both obvious and occluded. In 1938 the Nazis’ antisemitic term “Cultural Bolshevism” (Kulturbolschewismus) was translated by the British Union of Fascists as “Cultural Marxism”—but this likely remained an obscure turn, unknown to later American critics of what they saw as a perverting European influence. Woods reveals that the first wave of anti–Frankfurt School polemics in the US came from the far left, where Marcuse was suspected of being a CIA plant at a series of prestigious universities. According to one Lyndon LaRouche, founder and leader of the cultish National Caucus of Labor Committees, the student movements of the 1960s were actually orchestrated by “Rockefeller fascists,” and furthermore Marcuse and Adorno had submitted their student Angela Davis to a “CIA zombie brainwash program.” Some of the wilder accusations leveled later by the right against the Frankfurt School—they urged their students towards alcohol and promiscuity, they encouraged the excesses of feminism and antiracism—have their origins in a lapsing-leftist notion of academic decadence.
There follows a detailed (dispiriting and sometimes hilarious) account of later generations of right-wing conspiracy about the campus radicals—who were either dead or leading emeritus lives back in Germany. The narrative centers on William Lind, whose increasingly deranged claims about the Frankfurt School filled many books and heated articles, and still circulate on YouTube and elsewhere online. As often with conspiracy-mongers, Lind relied first on hopeless precis of the actual ideas of Adorno and Horkheimer, but crucially also on slight, accidental, or tenuous connections between figures in this lineage and others on the left, or among feminists, gay rights campaigners, Black intellectuals. The true believer sees a pattern and a coterie, but ignores history itself: Lind and his New Right acolytes pretended not to notice the effects of rapacious capitalism on American lifestyles, ethics, and family life—instead, a gang of Jewish émigrés had laid the poison in the 1940s.
Woods brings all of this up to date with a more familiar array of ideological operatives, from the Tea Party to the present Trump administration, who can now simply assume the online proliferation of the conspiracy theory when they employ the term “Cultural Marxism” and related fragments of malignant simplicity: DEI, Antifa, woke (see also woke mind virus), globalist, and so on. The American tale that Woods tells—the conspiracy behind the conspiracy—is persuasive, but they are on less certain and less complex ground when recounting the British reception of this vocabulary and its implications. While “Cultural Marxism” may have tempted various Tories and followers of Nigel Farage, it was not fully embraced, in part because of its antisemitic history, but also surely because mid-century movements in critical theory do not loom large in the minds of British politicians and theory advisors. Or do they? Woods’ chapter on the United Kingdom is largely a rehearsal of recent Conservative rule, Brexit, and the rise of the far right, when a more thorough investigation of British anti-intellectualism might have said more about how we are made to live now and how we might live in the future. From 1990s paranoia about deconstruction at the University of Cambridge, through former education minister Michael Gove’s railing against experts a decade ago, to recent crackdowns on student protest, the idea persists of an academic enemy within, far away from American think tanks and podcasts.
A.J.A. Woods’ The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West is published by Verso Books.
