The Ever-Shifting "Cultural Marxism"

In recent years the American right’s been inverting phrases taken from the left, taking something that meant well and turning them into cliches. Triggered. Woke. Social justice warrior. Critical race theory. They use these as a shorthand to mock and belittle, while also reducing the left to something separate and less than. At the same time, these phrases are often ill-defined: what is woke, exactly? One may as well ask who leads the oft-cited but hard to find antifa organization. 

Once one starts looking at how they use these phrases to delegitimize the left, one sees the pattern all over the place: gender ideology, fake news, and perhaps most nefarious of all, cultural Marxism. 

It’s nefarious because not just how often and widely it’s invoked—from the United States to England and down to Brazil, among other countries—but because of the term’s anti-semitic origins in Nazi ideology. It was used by the British Union of Fascists in 1938 as an English translation for the Nazi concept of Cultural Bolshevism. How such a phrase found its way down from the fringes and into the public discourse is the focus of A.J.A. Woods’s new book The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West (Verso, 2026). It’s a brisk, fascinating read that travels deep into the fringes of American far-right thought years and how those ideas have spread across the world. 

Woods begins with a provocative idea: this phrase's meaning isn't irrevocably identical to its origin in Nazi ideology and policy. He writes (p. 5):

It is ahistorical, however, to claim that ‘Cultural Marxism’ is nothing more than a rebranding of these previous tropes. This argument pre-supposes that Judeo-Bolshevism, Cultural Bolshevism, and Cultural Marxism as substantially identical, as though they share a transcendental essence that precedes their historical manifestations.

Instead he argues for what he calls “Cultural Marxism/s,” a little turn of phrase that’s intended to show the myriad ways this idea has manifested through the decades and been co-opted by factions of the right for their own ends, similar to how the right has assimilated other phrases (p. 7). This way of thinking shows how one party can come up with an idea, how a second can spin it to fit their cause, and a third can pick up on it and fold it into their historical project. This follows what Theodor Adorno deemed The Culture Industry: what is edgy today is hip tomorrow and an advertising cliche next Tuesday. Think about how often one sees ads saying “it’s giving (blank)” these days. 

In Woods’s telling, the phrase "Cultural Marxism" has its origins among noted conspiracy theorist and cult-adjacent personality Lyndon LaRouche (p. 49). Originally part of the 1960s left, both LaRouche and his group the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC) steadily drifted further and further to the right while also isolating his followers in the name of socialism. One member would later say that process “what was stripped away was their very identities.” (p. 37) By the end of the 1970s, LaRouche had moved into conspiracies and an obsession with "Western Civilization." Eventually he decided that the Frankfurt School had set out to destroy culture through rock music. Writes Woods (p. 49):

He alleged that the Frankfurt School participated in this conspiracy to destroy tonal music and erode the distinction between humans and animals. No longer were Adorno and Marcuse perceived as simply a couple of CIA operatives who stage-managed some New Left activists. LaRouche’s new version of world history recast these thinkers as the semi-magical practitioners of an Aristotelian secret knowledge and the architects of myths–rock music, free love, drug culture–that hypnotized the masses.

Pretty heady stuff, to be sure, but a challenge picked up by the NCLC and its publications the Executive Intelligence Review and New Solidarity, who promoted claims like the Frankfurt School was run by British Intelligence, the Beatles were drug runners, and Adorno was trying to undermine society through soap operas (p. 50-53). These outlandish claims stayed in obscurity until the 1990s, when New Right thinker and writer William S. Lind crossed paths with LaRouche-aligned ideas and slipped them into an article about the Marines (p. 94). Soon he was promoting them on more mainstream paleoconservative outlets like the cable channel National Empowerment Television (NET) (p. 109), a spiritual forerunner of today’s Fox News. Before long other paleocons like Pat Buchanan had picked up on them (p. 127), and as that section of the Republican Party took power during the Tea Party movement in the late 2000s, these ideas gained prominence until eventually they became talking points for ideologues like President Donald Trump, Governor Ron DeSantis, and other party leaders (p. 133). 

In one way, Woods’s book is almost a shadow history of the American right. But instead of focusing on figures like William F. Buckley Jr., Ronald Reagan, and neoconservatives like Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, or George W. Bush, he tracks the 70's-era New Right through its evolution into paleoconservatism and eventually the 2010s alt-right. Overlooked figures like Lind mingle with Buchanan, spreading ideas lifted from LaRouche’s esoteric style of politicking and allowing them to mingle and spread into the mainstream through modern conservatives like Tucker Carlson, Chris Rufo, and James Lindsay (p. 176-190). One can track the ideas and thinking of Trumpist conservatives through this genealogy: something that was once at the fringes slowly percolates up and into the mainstream through a network of newsletters, satellite TV, and Washington think tanks, eventually ready to be mixed with other concepts like Critical Race Theory and Gender Ideology into a stew of noxious ideas.   

Woods’s book mostly focuses on the United States, but does occasionally look into two other countries: England and Brazil. In England, the idea of Cultural Marxism was borrowed by the far right and dovetailed nicely with post-Brexit ideas of what a so-called True Englishman would be: how they see the world, what kind of ideas they hold, and most importantly, how they treat those different from them. Woods makes a convincing argument that when politicians like Farage use this term, it’s to abnormalize the left and make them seem weird or aloof (p. 196-201). Combined with austerity budgets that slashed funding for arts and culture education, it works to create a population that lacks introspection and compassion. Writes Woods: “conservatives may have bemoaned the woke elite, but they simply wanted to replace it with a non-woke elite.” (p. 196)

When Woods writes about Brazil, he’s a little out of his element and focuses more on recent years. But here too, in a Lusophone country, ideas from the American far right found a fertile home. He explains how Brazilian journalist and thinker Olavo de Carvalho started using the phrase after likely coming across it in Pat Buchanan’s writings. Through people like Ernesto Araujo, these ideas spread to career politicians like Bolsonaro (p. 217). 

Ultimately, Woods’s book is also a reflection on the ways the right has used alternative means of communication to spread their ideology: from newsletters in the 70s, Paul Weyrich’s cable network NET in the 90s, to modern day outlets like Brazil’s media company Brasil Paraledo and England’s television network GB News. These ventures gave the far right a direct line to a mass audience, one they could feed a diet of agitprop and conspiracies to, slowly growing and creating a base for these ideas to take hold.

Woods lays out a convincing polemic in the conclusion, showing the way the right has used the term Cultural Marxism to refer to a series of different, and sometimes contradictory, grievances. Despite several different politicians trying to define it in different ways, it’s something that’s lacking a set definition or meaning, instead being a concept that’s adapted to whatever is politically relevant for them at the time: trans teens, heavy metal, AIDS, and so forth. 

Brainrot is America’s biggest political export. What was once a theory by a crackpot thinker is today shorthand for social policy for right-wing leaders in the G7 and around the world. With some luck, it’ll soon become cliche like earlier shorthands like trickledown economics or shock and awe and join them in the dustbin of history. 

Featured image is "Laroucheobamahitler," CC BY-SA 3.0 Beeblebrox 2012.