The paranoid style in American life
No, cultural Marxism is not a racist conspiracy theory
“American politics has often been an arena for angry minds,” the historian Richard Hofstadter once wrote. Writing at a time when McCarthyism was burning through the body politic like a California wildfire, anti-communist panic was eating up the air, and the rise of Barry Goldwater’s populist conservative movement was smashing through the layers of the establishment like the Juggernaut, Hofstadter cast his mind back to earlier red scares and nativist panics to identify a disturbing pattern in American life. What he understood was that America has never quite been the Agoran forum of measured debate that it imagines itself to be. We are something rougher, something closer to the old Athenian Assembly, where men shouted each other down during speeches, heckled, and cheered — the analog X, you might say — and for Hofstadter, this represented not a marketplace of ideas so much as a therapist’s sofa, a projection of our cultural anxieties, and what he had to say about it cuts right to the heart of the culture wars we see today.
An arena for angry minds
Born in the city of Buffalo to a Jewish father from Poland and a Lutheran mother from Germany, Hofstadter was raised Episcopalian, but later identified more with his Jewish roots. In 1936, he began his doctoral studies in history at Columbia University. In 1938, he joined the Communist Party USA, but was repulsed by Stalinism, as well as the Hitler–Stalin Pact, and soon left the party. He went on to become an influential figure on the left, capable of calling balls and strikes with regard to conservatives and leftists alike. And this gave him the ability to make some incredible insights. That line above, for instance, is the opening to his famous 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” in which he describes how certain groups in America, from time to time, become hysterical with passion for their cause, making victims of themselves when they aren’t ones, and accusing others of oppressing or targeting them, when no one really is. He referred to this as a “paranoid style” of thinking, and although he was describing the right, I would argue that everything he goes on to say in the following sentences applies, all the more so, to the progressive orthodoxy of today:
In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated […] how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression “paranoid style” I am not speaking in a clinical sense […] the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant. […] nothing really prevents a sound program or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style. Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed and advocated than with the truth or falsity of their content.
Those last two lines are particularly important because he’s basically saying there’s no limit to what the paranoids will advocate for, so long as the demand is presented in the correct style. Today, you cannot get wokes to openly subscribe to racism or colonialism, given that they explicitly and vehemently oppose both, but if you use Marxist superstructure analysis to argue that, due to systemic oppression, nonwhite people cannot be racist, and if, instead of talking about the need to genocide white people, you talk about eradicating “whiteness,” then you’ve already done half the work. Or, you simply claim Israelis are white settler-colonists, and woke activists will happily justify one of the most horrifically oppressive colonial forces in all of human history — Islamic imperialism, which to this day carries out antisemitic genocidal violence, punishes women for being raped, slaughters gays, and enslaves blacks.
In Hofstadter’s analysis, this “paranoid style” of thinking repeatedly pops up in American history during times of rapid change or uncertainty. But fellow historian Christopher Lasch, who respected Hofstadter, pushed back on how liberally he applied the label. Lasch felt Hofstadter came off as dismissive of ordinary people’s legitimate fears or grievances, essentially calling them all a bunch of paranoids. In our own time, disrupted as we are by social media and AI, consider how the woke embody this “paranoid style,” or how many on the left, like Hoftstadter, dismiss the legitimate concerns of ordinary people on the right. Think of the way elites sneered when parents objected to CRT. The refrain was, you don’t even know what CRT is — it’s just American history, you racist. A similar thing happened when parents objected to drag shows for kids, or trans ideology targeting minors. So Hofstadter was mostly right, but the person who calibrated his observation from overstatement was Lasch, whose views on America’s culture of narcissism I recently wrote about in the essay below.
Is cultural Marxism a conspiracy theory?
With this on my mind, the other night, reader John Anthony wrote to me:
A little while ago I went to Wikipedia to look up cultural Marxism. The first paragraph:
“Cultural Marxism” refers to a far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory that misrepresents Western Marxism (especially the Frankfurt School) as being responsible for modern progressive movements, identity politics, and political correctness.
It seems to me to be more than a conspiracy theory, but I’m willing to consider it more like shorthand for a collection of academic theories from Marxist scholars (which I consider to be an oxymoron, for which I apologize as in my short time reading you, you do seem to value respecting differing opinions).
How would you respond to Wikipedia’s characterization?
Great question, John. I’ve actually been thinking about that very Wikipedia entry, and its greater significance with regard to sentential logic, for some time. First of all, to call something a conspiracy theory, it’s not enough to show that people are publishing papers or starting activist groups. A conspiracy theory requires a claim of conspiracy. That means a hidden cabal moving the levers of history. This, as opposed to the messy churn of markets and institutions, is the real engine of social change, the conspiracist argues. And yes, of course, these claims frequently include a liberal dose of the most repulsive antisemitism. As the Hebrew saying goes, kakha zeh. That’s how it is.
All of which is to say, if you claim that an organic trend is the product of nefarious collusion, then what you actually have is not a true conspiracy, but conspiratorial thinking. And as you’ll see below, describing cultural Marxism as an antisemitic conspiracy theory is closer to conspiratorial thinking than the idea of cultural Marxism itself. As an academic matter, there’s nothing especially mysterious about it. The Frankfurt School, which analyzed culture through a Marxist lens, included sociologists Max Horkheimer, who developed critical theory, which led to critical race theory, and Theodor Adorno, who claimed popular culture is a form of brainwashing, and the brilliant Erich Fromm, who later broke with the group, and Franz Neumann, who argued in his book Behemoth that the real problem with Nazi Germany was that it was capitalist, and political theorist Herbert Marcuse. More on him in a bit. These men, all Jewish — because communism appeals to oppressed groups for fairly obvious reasons, not because their Jewishness moved them to conspire with each other, as that would be the antisemitic claim here — wanted to know why the revolution hadn’t yet taken over the world, and like any good Marxist, they concluded the problem was not with their theory, but with reality. People rejected communism, so the problem was people. They must’ve been brainwashed, the Frankfurters surmised, and so, rather than conceive of a way to liberate the minds of the masses, they tried to think of a way to brainwash the public in the “correct” direction. That is, if culture was inoculating people against wanting to become communist, then in order to incept communism into their minds, you had to get it into the culture. Marcuse felt this could be done by tapping into the root system of human identity itself. And boy, was he right.
For more on Marcuse, the high priest of the Frankfurt School, as well as how Marxism ties into the ideological roots of CRT, see my essay above. But for our purposes here, it’s enough to know he was the Marxist who finally gave up on the proletariat. Marx and Engels built their whole eschatology on the industrial working class, the “gravedigger of capitalism.” But by the 1960s, the gravedigger was fat, unionized, and driving a Chevy. The workers of the advanced world had no interest in revolution. They were too busy enjoying their brand-new color TVs. In my last essay, below, I lamented the depressing evolution from Plato’s Academy to what I call Axiom humanity. One blissful afternoon, two years ago, I sat on the cold limestone blocks of the Academy myself, shaded by the olive trees that grow there, and read the “Ladder of Love” from Symposium, one of his most beautiful passages, about how platonic love can be used as a means of understanding the divine, with Plato’s own voice steering my thoughts, his syllables in my head, and as I sat shoulder to shoulder with the ghosts of his nephew Speusippus, his editor Philip, and beside me, I imagined, Aristotle, with nothing but a stone and a book, still and all, I felt myself the richest man alive, for what touchless luxury. Would you even be surprised to hear, dear reader, that every time I looked up, every person I saw walking through that sacred space was staring blankly at their phone? But, I digress.
Marcuse’s genius, if you want to call it that, was to see that the new revolutionary subject would not be the worker, but the outsider. Racial minorities, sexual minorities, and women. The old Marxism was economic, while the new Marxism was cultural. He understood that the problem with class is that it’s mutable. You are a worker at 20, but if you play your cards right, you are management at 50. Class can dissolve with time, talent, or luck. Identity does not. To be a woman is permanent, to be black is permanent, to be queer is permanent. Marcuse saw that if you could anchor the revolutionary impulse to categories no one could escape, you would finally have a reliable base. This is what he meant by “the radical potential of feminist socialism.” But, of course, if you make a permanent proletariat of blacks, you turn whites into permanent oppressors who must be revolutionized against, and eventually destroyed. If you make a permanent proletariat of women, you turn men into permanent oppressors who must be revolutionized against, and eventually destroyed. And, as I have argued, this project has been largely successful. Cultural Marxism turned feminism from one of the most noble philosophies that ever existed into a conspiracy theory that helped destroy a generation of men, one that is now eating away at the family unit, targeting even children with alphabet identity disorders. The goal being, as Marcuse said out loud, “the disintegration of the patriarchal family through ‘socialization’ of the children from outside.”
‘Get your hands off my identity’
The family was, for Marcuse, fair game, just as much as sex or skin color or anything else. I once heard my good friend Kevin Ray say, “Get your hands off my identity,” in reference to younger gays calling him “queer,” a term not all gay men particularly like, for a variety of reasons. I think of this when it comes to Marcuse. Get your communist hands off our children’s identity, off our families. These things are, in fact, not fair game. But women, politicized as women, became the new proletariat, the inescapable revolutionary class, and like blacks, the endless victim. So, immutable characteristics are being turned into Marxist interest groups. We capitalize “black” because, we are told, it isn’t merely a skin color, but a “political identity.” We shrug, because that kind of makes sense. But we don’t realize the Marcusian origin of politicizing skin color, especially when we only do so with proletariat skin colors, i.e. nonwhites. This is why I recently described feminism as a conspiracy theory:
Academic Marxists convinced feminists that victory was only to be had by speaking in terms of identity politics. This turned feminism from a civil rights movement into a conspiracy theory. The conspiracy theory is simple. It is the belief that men have historically conspired, and continue to conspire, in order to maintain their hegemonic hold on politics, the economy, and culture. One of the primary reasons for maintaining this control is because all men are rapists and have constructed a culture of rape. You may have heard the common radical feminist claim that “America is a rape culture.”
The black rights movement has similarly turned into a conspiracy theory whereby whites, or whiteness, is seen as an all-powerful, conspiring force holding black people down. The Man. And when people talk about whiteness as if it’s some hidden force, orchestrating events, just imagine if they were describing “Jewishness” the same way, as an all-powerful, abstract force driving even the most specific outcomes. Play that back for sound. It would be recognized immediately as classic antisemitic conspiracy thinking. Simply put, ideological groups based on Marxism, Islam, or feminism can be credibly accused of conspiring against other groups. They do have agendas, and thought leaders. They just don’t operate as a monolithic entity. People make this mistake with a variety of “conspiracy theories,” confusing which part is actual truth, which part is lunacy, and which part is sheer bigotry.
Take the Great Replacement theory, or the idea that sympathetic elites will help nonwhites demographically and culturally replace white populations. This is often labeled a racist conspiracy theory, and in the hands of many who repeat some version of it, it absolutely is deployed as a racist conspiracy theory. But that’s not the whole story. Its author, Renaud Camus, is often described as a white nationalist. What they don’t always mention is that he used to be a socialist gay man who marched in Pride parades, picked up four degrees in political studies and the history of law, and had a column in the French gay magazine Gai pied. So yeah, not a Nazi. But then, while editing a guidebook in 1996, he began to realize that, in old southern French villages, “the population had totally changed.” What he was witnessing were more and more North African women in veils, even in remote areas. Muslim immigrants, he believed, were changing the face, and the culture, of rural France. If you’ve been to any major European city lately, you’ve seen the same thing. This is not a racist conspiracy theory, and in fact, in the wake of the 2008 Syrian refugee crisis, the trend has accelerated since. Where it becomes racist is when you posit that “the Jews did this,” or if you view immigrants as bad on an individual level. Ethnic and racial groups do not work together like the Borg. Yes, again, ideological groups like Islam can, but even Islam contains multitudes, so any analysis of it requires at least some nuance and careful unbraiding of its many threads. It’s a story for another time, but as a younger man, I almost married a Muslim, so I’m not the blind critic of the faith one may assume.
How, then, did we get from Marcusian theory to BLM-style anti-white racism? One important factor, in my mind, is that Marcuse’s star doctoral student was none other than Angela Davis, who took his logic and ran it through the American racial experience. If Woman could be substituted for Worker, Black could be substituted for Woman. Oppression was now portable, generalizable, translatable into every axis of human identity. From there, it metastasized into the full rainbow coalition of today, in which each group is a permanent revolutionary, and tragically, each grievance a permanent wound. And whether you think the events described above, and the woke movement that has resulted, to quote the Wikipedia entry, is “responsible for modern progressive movements, identity politics, and political correctness,” will depend entirely on whether you think wokeness has spread through our universities, government, corporations, media, news, and entertainment industry. Does anyone reading this deny it? So then yes, cultural Marxism is a conspiracy, but it’s not a theory — it’s historical fact.
What’s an ad hominem fallacy, really?
To review, it’s only an antisemitic conspiracy theory if you’re claiming that cultural Marxism came about because the Jews of the world conspired to make it so. Or, to use the language of modern day progressive black academics, because of Jewishness. But, for the record, that’s no better. In fact, this formulation is arguably even worse because you’re abstracting people by race, de-individualizing them, and therefore in the process, dehumanizing them. It’s ghetto intellectualism. Or, as my black Bahamian uncle puts it, dem people program wrong. But how does this relate to logic? Consider the ad hominem fallacy, probably the most famous of all fallacies, in which you attack the person (ad hominem literally means ‘to the person’). Now, people will often say, anytime you’re having an argument — and you can use this the next time you are — that if you point out a flaw in their character, as opposed to in their argument, that is an ad hominem fallacy. And that’s incorrect, because it’s only a fallacy if you’re using it in your argument to say that their position is therefore wrong, see?
Let me give you an example. A murderer says, “Murder is wrong.” It’s an ad hominem fallacy to claim that, because he’s a murderer, his statement is therefore false or can be dismissed. This is the argument Mehdi Hasan makes in his book Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking, and it’s not quite right. An argument stands or falls on its own merits. Period. But there’s also nothing wrong with pointing out the fact that your interlocutor is a hypocrite, depending on the point you’re trying to make. If you’re having a formal debate focused on the statement itself, ad hominem remarks would be out of bounds, never mind how fond Hasan is, or Christopher Hitchens was, of using them. But, in daily life, people are not having formal debates, and recognizing whether you’re talking to a dishonest or deceitful person may be relevant in a number of other ways that warrant mentioning.
So if Hofstadter warned us about the “paranoid style,” and Lasch reminded us not to flatten legitimate grievances into pathology, maybe the real lesson is that conspiracy theories aren’t dangerous just because they’re false, and in fact many are based on some degree of truth. They’re dangerous because they so often grow out of something real, but then frequently twist it into a bigoted lie. That’s why dismissing everything as “just a conspiracy theory” is as lazy as calling everything racist. So no, cultural Marxism is not a conspiracy theory. But some extreme versions of the theory clearly are, and if we cannot crawl out of this rhetorical mess and have an honest, healing conversation about actual racism, or learn to discern true threats from conspiratorial and antisemitic fabrications, then we’re in far deeper trouble than we realize.
Perhaps I’m old fashioned, but I consider whether something is TRUE to be a lot more important than whether someone can badword it or shoot the messenger.