Cultural Marxism’ might sound postmodern but it’s got
a long, toxic history.
By Samuel Moyn
Mr. Moyn is a professor of law and history at Yale.
Nov. 13, 2018
Anders Breivik seen during the audience in court, in
Oslo, Norway in 2012.CreditCreditPool photo by Lise Aserud
At the chilling climax of William S. Lind’s 2014 novel
“Victoria,” knights wearing crusader’s crosses and singing Christian hymns
brutally slay the politically correct faculty at Dartmouth College, the main
character’s (and Mr. Lind’s) alma mater. “The work of slaughter went quickly,”
the narrator says. “In less than five minutes of screams, shrieks and howls, it
was all over. The floor ran deep with the bowels of cultural Marxism.”
What is “cultural Marxism”? And why does Mr. Lind
fantasize about its slaughter?
Nothing of the kind actually exists. But it is
increasingly popular to indict cultural Marxism’s baleful effects on society —
and to dream of its violent extermination. With a spate of recent violence in
the United States and elsewhere, calling out the runaway alt-right imagination
is more urgent than ever.
Originally an American contribution to the
phantasmagoria of the alt-right, the fear of “cultural Marxism” has been
percolating for years through global sewers of hatred. Increasingly, it has
burst into the mainstream. Before President Trump’s aide Rich Higgins was fired
last year, he invoked the threat of “cultural Marxism” in proposing a new
national security strategy. In June, Ron Paul tweeted out a racist meme that
employed the phrase. On Twitter, the son of Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s newly
elected strongman, boasted of meeting Steve Bannon and joining forces to defeat
“cultural Marxism.” Jordan Peterson, the self-help guru and best-selling
author, has railed against it too in his YouTube ruminations.
“Cultural Marxism” is also a favorite topic on Gab,
the social media network where Robert Bowers, the man accused of shooting 11
people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh last month, spent time. Mr. Lind may have
only fantasized about mass death as a comeuppance for cultural Marxists, but
others have acted on it: In his 1,500-page manifesto, the Norwegian
far-rightist Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in 2011, invoked “cultural
Marxism” repeatedly. “It wants to change behavior, thought, even the words we
use,” he wrote. “To a significant extent, it already has.”
According to their delirious foes, “cultural Marxists”
are an unholy alliance of abortionists, feminists, globalists, homosexuals,
intellectuals and socialists who have translated the far left’s old campaign to
take away people’s privileges from “class struggle” into “identity politics”
and multiculturalism. Before he executes the professors, the protagonist of Mr.
Lind’s novel expounds on his theory to their faces: “Classical Marxists, where
they obtained power, expropriated the bourgeoisie and gave their property to
the state,” he says. “Where you obtained power, you expropriated the rights of
white men and gave special privileges to feminists, blacks, gays, and the
like.” It is on the basis of this parallel that the novel justifies carnage
against the “enemies of Christendom” as an act showing that “Western culture”
is “recovering its will.”
Some Marxists, like the Italian philosopher Antonio
Gramsci and his intellectual heirs, tried to understand how the class rule they
criticized worked through cultural domination. And today, it’s true that on
campus and off, many people are directing their ire at the advantages that
white males have historically enjoyed. But neither the defense of the workers
nor of other disempowered groups was a conspiracy on its own, and never was
there a malignant plot to convert the first into the second — which is what
“cultural Marxism” implies. Deployed to avoid claims of injustice, the charge
functions to whip up agitated frenzy or inspire visions of revenge.
And while increasingly popular worries about
cosmopolitan elites and economic globalization can sometimes transcend the most
noxious anti-Semitism, talk of cultural Marxism is inseparable from it. The
legend of cultural Marxism recycles old anti-Semitic tropes to give those who
feel threatened a scapegoat.
A number of the conspiracy theorists tracing the
origins of “cultural Marxism” assign outsize significance to the Frankfurt
School, an interwar German — and mostly Jewish — intellectual collective of
left-wing social theorists and philosophers. Many members of the Frankfurt
School fled Nazism and came to the United States, which is where they
supposedly uploaded the virus of cultural Marxism to America. These zany
stories of the Frankfurt School’s role in fomenting political correctness would
be entertaining, except that they echo the baseless allegations of tiny cabals
ruling the world that fed the right’s paranoid imagination in prior eras.
The wider discourse around cultural Marxism today
resembles nothing so much as a version of the Judeobolshevik myth updated for a
new age. In the years after the Russian Revolution, fantasists took advantage
of the fact that many of its instigators were Jewish to suggest that people
could save time by equating Judaism and communism — and kill off both with one
blow. As the historian Paul Hanebrink recounts in an unnerving new study,
according to the Judeobolshevik myth, the instigators of communism were the
Jews as a whole, not some tiny band of thinkers, conniving as a people to bring
communist irreligion and revolution worldwide.
The results of such beliefs weren’t pretty. According
to Professor Hanebrink, many aspects of the Judeobolshevik fantasy survived the
Holocaust it helped bring about, just with the role of the Jews implied more
euphemistically or replaced by new adversaries. As in Judeobolshevism, cultural
Marxism homogenizes vast groups of shadowy enemies and assigns them a secret
design to upend society. As in Judeobolshevism, those supposedly under threat
are invited to identify themselves with “the Christian West” and surge in
self-defense before it is too late.
The defense of the West in the name of “order” and
against “chaos,” which really seems to mean unjustifiable privilege against new
claimants, is an old affair posing as new insight. It led to grievous harm in
the last century. And though today’s critics of “cultural Marxism” purport to
be very learned, they proceed seemingly unaware of the heavy baggage involved
in alleging that conspiracies have ruined the land.
That “cultural Marxism” is a crude slander, referring
to something that does not exist, unfortunately does not mean actual people are
not being set up to pay the price, as scapegoats to appease a rising sense of
anger and anxiety. And for that reason, “cultural Marxism” is not only a sad
diversion from framing legitimate grievances but also a dangerous lure in an
increasingly unhinged moment.
Samuel Moyn (@samuelmoyn) is a professor of law and
history at Yale and the author, most recently, of “Not Enough: Human Rights in
an Unequal World.”
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook,
Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Correction: November 13, 2018
A previous caption for this article misspelled the
name of the Norwegian far-right extremist. He is Anders Breivik, not Anders Breivk.
@política @USA
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário
Observação: somente um membro deste blog pode postar um comentário.