This blogger from The Divided Line explains why. I generally agree with what is being said here. Although I think the Left’s concept of “repressive tolerance” clearly has its roots in Marcuse, it’s overly simplistic to explain totalitarian humanism merely as an inversion of Marxism.

At around 50:00, Mr. Spencer says “the left is the establishment,” and he’s right, but it’s only the cultural establishment. The economic and defense establishment is very much hard right.  It has been since Reagan and Thatcher, since the mainstream bourgeois left opposition which followed them pulled their parties to the right in the 1990s on economic and foreign policy.

The people in power care about money and American military hegemony, not race or culture, and American military hegemony means Western European military hegemony since it is largely still under the American pax that was established after WWII. The establishment uses meaningless left wing identity politics to sell people on right wing neoliberal economic policy. That’s why they keep trying to use “humanitarian intervention” as an excuse to start this or that war.

 

What they care about is hegemony and profit, but the population cares about culture, identity, fairness, race, gender, etc., so they try to advance what is a hard line right wing foreign policy by selling it with a bourgeois liberal and culturally left wing justification. If the population should suddenly lurch to the right in the culture wars, you’ll just get a culturally right wing justification for the exact same policy prescriptions.

Watch, if Shillary gets elected in the United States, we’ll be bombing people over their refusal to allow gay marriage.

It’s interesting because it is almost the opposite of what National Socialism was in Germany. If you were a member of the German ethnic community, the Nazis were offering you a robust public sector for your benefit – that was the socialism part – but the cultural component of their movement was extreme right wing entho-nationalism. It’s the ideological polarity of the West currently only inverted.

Also, Spencer is wrong about there being no risk in being a Marxist. You will absolutely have difficulty finding a job if your employer can see that you’re sympathetic to radical unionism when he finds Wobblies logos and pictures of Lenin all over your facebook page. It would also hurt your career in certain disciplines in academia. In economics, political science, and certain specializations in international relations theory, you’re only going to close career doors by being a Marxist. Goldman Sachs isn’t hiring Marxist economists obviously.

You guys need to stop confusing Marxism and cultural Marxism. Actual Marxism has nothing to do with the culture wars and there is very little Marxism in cultural Marxism. Cultural Marxism is a form of historical idealism, not materialism. Marx, for instance, never would have argued that white supremacy was a motive force of history, the way bourgeois liberals and SJWs do. Marxism by definition denies that ideas alone explain historical outcomes, and white supremacy is an idea. Marxists instead argue that underlying material conditions are what produce ideas in the first place.

Bourgeois liberals think ideas like white supremacy, European Christian jingoism, etc produced the Atlantic slave trade and slave labor system. In other words ideas produce economic reality. Marxists by contrast would say that Europeans needed cheap labor as they colonized the Americas and the racial or religious ideology which justified the emerging slave system came after the fact as a means of explaining that economic outcome to its participants. In other words, economic reality produced the ideology. See how they are opposites of each other?

That is why they believe class conflict produces ideology. SJWs and other bourgeois liberals believe that ideology produces class conflict. There actually is no possible cultural Marxism that would still be Marxism, since Marxism by definition denies cultural explanations for historical outcomes.

So you guys sound like idiots when you’re going on about cultural Marxism and the Frankfurt School. It really amounts to a dopey conspiracy theory that is based on a misinterpretation of some Gramsci and Marcuse quotes taken out of context. SJWs are a product of an older protestant religious moral paternalism which predates Marxism. Marxism didn’t create the secularized version of the nannying and demonizing church ladies or their sexual puritanism which you’ll find on the SJW left. Had Marxism never existed, it would have had some other secular justification. Feminism is political border line personality disorder, an age-old gynocentrism expressing itself in the context of western industrialized and democratic consumer culture, not Marxism.

It seems like almost nobody on the right understands this and it’s not exactly a side issue.  If you guys would just catch on, then maybe we could actually have a productive dialogue about the challenges facing working class men. If you only care about the white working class, fine, at least it’s a start.