Franklin Einspruch, A commentator in The Federalist, describes me as a “circumspect conservative” scholar who has written responsibly about Cultural Marxism. I’m also deemed to be a conservative who agrees with other conservative critics of the Frankfurt School on the harmful effects of this group’s radical ideas. But I must part ways with Mr. Einspruch when he tells us: “It’s plain fact that political correctness and multiculturalism derive from notions hailing from the Frankfurt School, which in turn took most of its cues from Karl Marx.” Although I can discern a connection between feminist attacks on inherited gender roles and Frankfurt School views on sexual liberation, I’d have to question whether the present war against Christian, bourgeois institutions can be traced back in any meaningful way to traditional Marxism.

Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer (my teacher), Herbert Marcuse and other members of the Frankfurt School in interwar Germany worked to fuse Marx’s theory of class struggle and the contradictions of capitalism with a Freudian-based vision of erotic pleasure. In this remarkable fusion, it is hard, at least for me, to recognize Marx’s socioeconomic critique. Marx was concerned about man’s alienation from his own work as a result of productive forces over which he had no control. The father of “scientific socialism” never focused on abetting sexual revolt or fighting the emotional repression created by sharp gender distinctions or the failure to give proper social recognition to homosexuals. Orthodox Marxists and Marxist Leninists from the 1920s on vigorously denounced the Frankfurt School and its exponents as social decadents posing as Marxist revolutionaries. Communist regimes would later engage in similar attacks on representatives and sympathizers of the Frankfurt school, such as the Hungarian radical literary figure Georg Lukacs.

They accused their targets of attack of subverting orderly human relations and would have nothing to do with their forced marriage of Marxism and eroticism. Not surprisingly, it was Communist regimes and Communist parties in post-World War II France and Italy that were among the harshest critics of what we now call “Cultural Marxists.” The term “Cultural Marxist” was meant to express derision for this sect; and Orthodox Marxists as well as the European Right seized on it to discredit the Frankfurt School.

In my studies I examine how Cultural Marxists acquired respectability in the U.S., once they set up shop here. They gained recognition for fighting fascism as a cultural and emotional danger and for advocating for a progressive democratic society. Since the Nazis were violently anti-Semitic and since most of the Frankfurt School’s representatives in the U.S. were Jewish, much of the School’s energies after 1933 were focused on “preventing” the eruption of anti-Jewish “prejudice” in their adopted land. But the School also castigated prejudice against other groups, such as blacks, social revolutionaries, homosexuals, and women who were revolting against what they viewed as the patriarchal family.

The best known English work written in this vein, The Authoritarian Personality(1950), an anthology of polemics warning against “prejudice” in American life, was sponsored by an emphatically liberal but also anti-Soviet sponsor, the American Jewish Committee. The same patrons also sponsored Commentarymagazine. Among many others, distinguished sociologist Seymour Morton Lipset hailed TAP (and the series to which it belonged, Studies in Prejudice) as a blueprint for rebuilding American society. Contrary to what some may believe, Lipset was only slightly left of center politically. Even more interestingly, as cultural historian Christopher Lasch points out, Lipset praised the work spearheaded by Adorno in the U.S. as a means of fortifying the U.S. internally to fight Communism as well as the ideological vestiges of Nazism.

Despite the anti-Communist mood in the U.S. at the outset of the Cold War, in the 1950s an Americanized and mainstreamed form of Cultural Marxism made powerful inroads here. Leaders of the Frankfurt school were sent back to Germany by the American State Department to “reeducate” the former subjects of the Third Reich and to make them “good antifascists.” Meanwhile psychological tests were devised for private jobs, government employment, and educational institutions to determine the “f scores” of applicants (as indications of pro-fascist leanings). Equally noteworthy, Frankfurt School pioneers like Eric Fromm became popular authorities on psychological well-being and had their works distributed through Book of the Month clubs.

This was only the initial phase in an Americanizing process for Cultural Marxists that would continue down to the present. Since the 1960s a political and social struggle has been waged here and in other “liberal democracies” to empower disadvantaged minorities in the name of fairness and human rights. Here too the plans and proposals of The Authoritarian Personality are easily discernible: e.g., combatting through sustained political indoctrination antifeminist and homophobic prejudice and isolating the putative Christian poison that has infected the body social. These now familiar initiatives are driven not so much by the claim to be protecting us against mental sickness (although that too has been advanced) as they are by the themes of fairness and “fundamental rights.”

Even self-described conservatives now deplore the unwillingness of the Russian and Serbian governments to allow gay pride parades to take place in their cities, a civic event that I could hardly imagine having been encouraged in the America I grew up in sixty years ago. And I couldn’t imagine even the founders of the Frankfurt School going quite so far in their embrace of “gay rights” as to welcome what we now hail as part of a new political consensus, including the affirmation of gay marriage as a human right and family value. These ideas are admittedly derivative from an older Cultural Marxism, but I can’t find anything here that I would pin specifically on Marx.

Looking at a French nationalist website Boulevard Voltaire this morning, I notice a repetition of the conventional American media account of what occurred in Charlottesville on Saturday. The news commentary explained that a white racist had run down and killed with a vehicle a thirty-two-year-old “anti-racist” demonstrator, Heather Heyer, while injuring other anti-racists who were protesting a “Unite the Right” rally in downtown Charlottesville. The supposed occasion for the demonstration, the removal of a twenty-six foot statue of Robert E. Lee, did not seem to interest the French commentator, although presumably if French anti-fascists were calling for dismantling statues of Charles de Gaulle or Joan of Arc all over France, the writer might have reacted differently. As an American observer of these events, who makes no bones about his utter revulsion for contemporary American “liberal” and “conservative” commentaries (which I find mostly indistinguishable), I think there’s more to the story of what went on in Charlottesville on Saturday than our authorized political sides want us to believe.

First of all, I find no heroes emerging from these events. The police showed no ability or perhaps no willingness to keep the two sides separated; and when they met it was inevitable that these armed partisans who hated each other’s guts would clash. Although the dismantling of Lee’s statue (in May a judge placed a six-month stay on this outrage) may have been only the pretext for obnoxious youth to raise holy Hell, the removal of Confederate statues and the renaming of parks and streets commemorating Confederate commanders is sheer lunacy. It should be opposed by all possible legal means. The NAACP and leftist cranks like Max Boot who push this agenda are the American equivalent of the Taliban. Are we supposed to do the PC cringe again when the usual pests demand that we remove the names of Jefferson, Madison and Washington from every city in this country because our country’s Founders owned slaves?

As for the bloody clash in Charlottesville, it’s impossible for me to read the account provided by neocon princeling John Podhoretz in the New York Post this morning without losing my breakfast. The villain for Podhoretz (as it always is these days when’s he’s not attacking critics of the Likud Party) is Donald Trump who refused “to denounce Nazis and white supremacists unqualifiedly and by name.” It seems that Trump had the “shamelessness” to suggest that there were two sides involved in the clash in Charlottesville. (Donald Trump has since unloaded all his fire on Pod’s target.) The anti-fascist and BLM protestors, according to Podhoretz’s doctored narrative, were merely “responding” to hate; and the president whom Podhoretz wouldn’t back against Hillary and whom he continues to denounce “refused to name the evil in our midst,” thereby showing “the behavior of a man whose moral sense is stunted.” On Saturday evening, Fox-news offered an interview by Julie Banderas of a Weekly Standard senior editor who scolded Trump for not treating the Altright in the same denunciatory manner as ISIS. Both, according to Ms. Torrance, were equally dangerous terrorist organizations.

Needless to say, I’ve never heard our authorized conservative opposition vent the same ferocious denunciations they’re now showing on anti-fascist vandals or on the Bernie Sanders supporter who tried to kill a crew of Republican Congressmen while practicing for a baseball game in Arlington, Virginia. Nor did the authorized leftist media agonize in the same way about left-wing extremism as Fox-news commentators did when they began screeching on Saturday night about right-wing dangers that are comparable to ISIS. The Left acted according to script, when their commentators tried to blame the attempted annihilation of Republican Congressmen on our right-wing extremist president.

But our bogus Right couldn’t leave their pandering to the Left with calls for special vigilance against a pervasive right-wing danger. On Fox’s Judge Jeanine segment we had the pleasure of listening to various Republican Congressmen from Virginia defining their “conservatism” as some kind of diversitarian globalist fantasy. One Latino Republican Congressman described the US as the world’s greatest multicultural success. All the Republican interviewees gave the impression that Charlottesville had been a sleepy serene college town, like a throwback to Monty Wooly’s “Halls of Ivy,” before it was invaded by neo-Nazis. These saccharine comments revealed little about the reality of life in an area controlled by the PC Left and led by a bona fide leftist radical from New York City, Mayor Mike Signer.

I’ve also come to doubt that the group organized by Richard Spencer et al was more responsible for violence than the anti-fascist side. From the film I’ve just seen it seems conclusive that leftist thugs were at least as ready to rumble as were the white nationalists and neo-Nazis. Whether or not the Left initiated the fisticuffs (and there’s a high probability that it did) those who led it were far from naïve humanitarians who were “shocked” by white racists. Moreover, both sides, including the white nationalists, integrated into their demonstrations basically decent people, who were simply reacting against something they found intolerable, such as a PC police state or neo-Nazi symbols. Such people were used by others on both sides who were looking for trouble. And the police did little to prevent it.

Finally I would observe as a representative of the independent Right that Richard Spencer and his friends did us a horrible disservice by contributing to the confrontation that took place on Saturday. Much of what Richard and other members of the Altright say about the growing indistinguishability of our authorized Right and authorized Left is entirely on the mark. But the way to combat this deplorable situation is not to team up with Nazis and encourage demonstrators to come armed to Charlottesville to protest the leftist Taliban. One has to create a counter-media to what our shared enemies have done and be willing to accept decent people, whatever their race, to combat left-wing totalitarians and fake conservative enablers.

Although I generally agree with the Latin adage “de mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est,” sometimes the death of someone leads one to reflect on the gushing eulogies that are showered on the deceased. The recent premature passing at the age of sixty-five of Peter Lawler, a professor of political studies at Berry College in Georgia and the Editor of Modern Age, is a case in point. Although from all accounts a decent person and a genuine devotee of Southern literature, Lawler provided, perhaps unwittingly, the textbook case of how a “conservative” academic can keep his professional standing without becoming, to use John Derbyshire’s phrase, the new “Emmanuel Goldstein” in our emerging 1984 society.

Lawler’s passing set off an explosion of praise in the authorized “conservative” press. National Review devoted a glowing eulogy to Lawler [Peter Lawler, RIP, by Peter Spiliakos May 23, 2017] The Federalist and Weekly Standard spoke about him even more extravagantly. [In Fond Memory Of Peter Augustine Lawler Upon His Sudden Death, By Yuval Levin, Federalist, May 24, 2017] And there were many others.

From these eulogies, it is possible to infer that Lawler was a faithful Catholic, but one with a sense of humor; he was also a devotee of Leo Strauss (on whom I’ve written an unmentionable book) and was on exceedingly friendly terms with Strauss’s disciples. Above all, he was a “thoughtful” conservative, who was polite about Bernie Sanders, described the notorious John (“Civil Rights icon”)Lewis, as heroic, and was offended by the bullying behavior of Donald Trump. [Lewis Baits and Trumps Trump, by Peter Augustine Lawler, NRO, January 17, 2017]

On the few times I met Lawler, it seemed that he was a low-key kind of person, who liked to talk in a non-threatening way about “values.” Both of us wrote at one time for ISI’s Modern Age, and I noticed that Lawler’s views, unlike mine, were safely conventional. It’s not that Lawler ever landed up in a really cushy job at a distinguished university. But he remained in good standing with Conservatism, Inc. by not taking on what the late Sam Francis once called in conversation with me “the hard issues.”

Let me explain what these hard issues are by providing illustrations of the opposite, starting with those positions taken by “cultural conservatives” that couldn’t hurt their careers because most Leftists don’t give a damn about them. Favoring the wider use of the Latin Mass, proposing more concentration in public education on classical languages, deploring the lack of “values” in the contemporary West, and mixing in the phrase “permanent things” during cocktail conversation all exemplify “soft” stands. These are the stands taken by intellectuals who are trying to navigate through life without Tsuris (go look it up).

Although one can certainly take some of these positions out of genuine conviction, they also provide an easy way out for someone who wants to be known as a genteel “conservative” but who doesn’t want to catch flak as a journalist or academic.

In the political sphere, one can easily recognize the advocates of soft positions, because they abound in Republican think-tanks and throughout Establishment Conservative journalism. They lament the racism of Democrats who refuse to pay for the charter schools attended by blacks (although for some reason blacks don’t seem to mind this outrage and vote overwhelmingly for the “racists” who won’t pay for their charter schools.) Then there’s the one-note “moderate feminists” whom I see on Fox News warning women who wish to be liberated not to vote for the Dems. The Republicans, we are told by these blond-haired adolescent deep thinkers, will do more for “moderate feminists.”

Another soft or safe position for “conservatives” to embrace: supporting the right of the Israeli government to build settlements on the West Bank until this area is made to look like a replica of Long Island. Indeed, being for the right of any Israeli Right to do anything it wants will not likely hurt any budding “conservative” career. Nor will denouncing Islamicist oppression, directed against women, gays, Jews and (oh yes!) Christians.

Another soft position mentioned by John Derbyshire: inviting Leftist professors on to “conservative” talk shows and weeping with them about how badly their more demonstratively Leftist colleagues have been treating them lately.

Thanks to at least nine opposing Republican senators, Congress left for its July 4 break without passing a replacement bill for Obamacare.

The opposition from these Republicans was two-fold: Four conservatives thought the GOP bill on the table went too far in retaining government control over the medical insurance market, while five centrist members complained it doesn’t go far enough in providing federal funding for Medicaid in their states, and would leave 22 million Americans overall without medical insurance.

The free-marketers in the party have countered the centrist Republicans by indicating that many of the 22 million who will not be insured under the new system are young people who were forced to buy Obamacare insurance. Why should they continue to be forced to buy what they don’t want and probably don’t need? Moreover, payment for Medicaid expenses will be left to the states, which will be free to deal with this arrangement as they see fit. And within a few years both medical premiums and the taxes currently being raised to cover Obamacare will fall dramatically. None of these arguments seems to carry weight with Senators Susan Collins (R-Maine), Dean Heller (R-Nev.), Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), Sherry Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), and Rob Portman (R-Ohio), who seem to think they can please their voters by tinkering with Obamacare rather than replacing it.

There may be many reasons why the Republicans can’t muster enough votes to pass this replacement for Obamacare. But high on the list is the fact that the present GOP Congress differs from its Democratic predecessors in a way that hurts them grievously. The Democrats were and are internally unified to a degree that Republicans can’t hope to match. The Democrats passed Obamacare by making sure that every Democrat in the Senate voted for it. The same party in Congress continues to practice exemplary party discipline by standing as a monolithic bloc against anything attempted by the divided opposition. Even those of us who disagree with the Democrats about 99 percent of the time have to marvel at the united front they maintain. The party is not full of warring contrarians like John McCain and Rand Paul; nor does it have to worry that one wing will do in the other.

Part of this difference stems from the fact that most of the media, Hollywood, and the so-called deep state have the backs of congressional Democrats. The more vociferously and ferociously they resist the Republicans, the more backing they can count on from CNN, the national press, and other voices of the Democratic Left. The Republicans have nothing like this massive support system; and even if the chief executive were less reckless in his speech, he would still likely be pummeled by the media since he’s willy-nilly a Republican. (I don’t remember the media showing any special fondness for moderate Republicans like George W. Bush and Mitt Romney.)

But there is another reason that Democrats seem far better unified than Republicans. They are more driven by ideology, and as more and younger Americans are raised in the same ideology, Democrats may be able to create a consensus for what drives them and provides internal unity. This ideology is a combination of statist control of social behavior and an extended welfare state, both in the name of achieving greater human equality. This ideology depends for support on racial minorities, increased immigration, mass education, and radicalized social and entertainment elites. One needn’t like what the Democrats are pushing and what they themselves embody to notice how well it sells in our changing American society. The Republican Party by contrast stands for nothing in particular, except for a more slowly growing federal welfare state, a neoconservative foreign policy except at its libertarian margins, and government incentives for business. Republicans in Congress have a sprinkling of libertarians, mostly on its right, but otherwise it’s an organization that wants to manage public administration, keep down the minimum wage, and get its candidates elected.

In any case I’m challenging the “conservative” talking point that Democrats don’t have a unifying philosophy or program but are a collection of grievance-driven constituencies. Although this observation includes more than a grain of truth, it also understates the ideological unity that holds the Democrats together. We are talking about an ideology of the cultural Left that also attracts, perhaps out of opportunism, Republicans and “conservatives.” In social questions the establishment Right has come to embrace just about everything the other side has advocated. The conservative press is now praising gay pride parades and calling for more anti-discrimination laws to protect the employment prospects of the LGBT community. When Democratic mayors started pulling down the statues of Confederate heroes, objections from the GOP were not even audible. But I did notice foreign policy think tank fellow and leading pro-war neoconservative Max Boot extolling the mayor of New Orleans for his facelift and calling upon Americans to do more to obliterate any token of honor paid to the slave-owning racist traitors in the Civil War. When action was taken to deal with illegals who committed felonies, the initiative came from the populist president who imposed himself on the Republican Party. If left to their own devices, the GOP Congress would in all probability have done little to rectify this problem, lest it be accused of xenophobia or racism.

Unless I’m mistaken, the direction in which social policy has moved for both parties is toward the Left. Republicans have typically followed the Left in this tendency rather than vice versa. The worldview represented by the Democrats has long-term power, while the moderateness and piecemeal concessions featured by the other side betrays weakness and indecision. Appearances in this case are not deceptive. Democrats in Congress look much more cohesive than their opposition because they really are.

I would also note that the incriminatory speaking style of Democrats in Congress and of Democratic Party operatives should not be taken as literally as Republican talk show hosts are inclined to do. When Elizabeth Warren or Maxine Waters rails against the racists, homophobes, sexists and plutocrats in the other national party, their remarks should not be judged by the standards of scientific research. They are engaging in illocutionary rhetoric, a form of speech that politicians often resort to in targeting particular constituencies. These Democrats are “appealing to their base,” something Republicans do less effectively when they promise to “get government off our backs” or insist that “government is the problem.”

The most recent of incident of Cultural Marxist commissars refusing to admit that dissidents are to be treated as fellow citizens is the crazed female professor who accosted the NPI’s Richard Spencer while he was exercising at a Alexandria gym. She, recognizing him from coverage of the election campaign, started haranguing him and calling him a “Nazi.”

Instead of having her ejected for this behavior, the gym’s management terminated Spencer’s membership. [Georgetown professor confronts white nationalist Richard Spencer at the gym — which terminates his membership , By Faiz Siddiqui May 21, 2017]

Back in 2011 VDARE posted a commentary of mine on the legitimacy of the “Cultural Marxist” concept. (I reluctantly accepted the term only because I couldn’t think of a better one.)

As I pointed out, this ideology was very far from orthodox Marxism and was viewed by serious Marxists as a kind of bastard child. Yet many of those designated as “Cultural Marxists” still viewed themselves as classical Marxists and some still do.

Exponents of what the Frankfurt School called “critical theory”— like Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, and Erich Fromm—were considered by orthodox Marxists to be fake or ersatz Marxists. But they did adopt orthodox Marxist-Leninist theory in key aspects:

• Like orthodox Marxists, they viewed the bourgeoisie as a counterrevolutionary class.
• Like orthodox Marxists, they viewed the world, arguably simplistically, in terms of interest groups and power relationships.
• Like orthodox Marxists—whose break from Victorian classical liberalism in this respect was shocking in a way that is easily overlooked after the totalitarian experience of the twentieth century—they explicitly eschewed debate in favor of reviling and if possible repressing their opponents. (This is fundamental to the Marxist method: although it claims to be “scientific”, it is in fact an a priori value system that rejects debate and its concomitant, “bourgeois science”. Hence Political Correctness—the most prominent product of “cultural Marxism”.)
• Like orthodox Marxist, they supported, at least in principle, a socialist i.e. government-controlled economy.
• Like orthodox Marxists, they inclined, in varying degrees, toward the Communist side during the Cold War. (Marcuse, who cheered the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, was an outright Stalinist—as I can confirm from personal knowledge as his onetime student.)

These disciples of the Frankfurt School, like Marx, were eager to replace what they defined as bourgeois society by a new social order. In this envisaged new order, humankind would experience true equality for the first time. This would be possible because, in a politically and socially reconstructed society, we would no longer be alienated from our real selves, which had been warped by the inequalities that existed until now.

But unlike authentic Marxists, Cultural Marxists have been principally opposed to the culture of bourgeois societies–and only secondarily to their material arrangements. Homophobia, nationalism, Christianity, masculinity, and anti-Semitism have been the prime villains in the Cultural Marxist script.

This is especially true as one moves from the philosophy of the interwar German founders of the Frankfurt school, like Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, to the second generation. This second generation is represented by Jürgen Habermas and most of the multicultural theorists ensconced in Western universities.

For these more advanced Cultural Marxists, the crusade against capitalism has been increasingly subordinated to the war against “prejudice” and “discrimination.” They justify the need for a centralized bureaucratic state commanding material resources not because it will bring the working class to power, but to fight “racism,” “fascism,” and the other residues of the Western past.

If they can’t accomplish such radical change, Cultural Marxists are happy to work toward revolutionizing our consciousness with the help of Leftist moneybags– hedge fund managers, Mark Zuckerberg etc. Ironically, nationalizing productive forces and the creation of a workers’ state, i.e. the leftovers from classical Marxism, turn out to be the most expendable part of their revolutionary program, perhaps because of the collapse of the embarrassing collapse of command economies in the Soviet bloc. Instead, what is essential to Cultural Marxism is the rooting-out of bourgeois national structures, the obliteration of gender roles and the utter devastation of “the patriarchal family.”