Chronicles

America’s radicalization is being willfully misunderstood by professional conservatives,  whom the left has outflanked yet again and fooled into abetting its ascendancy.

Having coined the term “cultural Marxism,” the historian William S. Lind should receive royalties every time some conservative pundit repeats it. He would be a rich man. Lind’s original insight about the connection between cultural leftism and Marxist politics spread like wildfire and is now a cliché.

We should be suspicious whenever this happens.

Lind is a sometimes dissident conservative once connected with the late Paul Weyrich’s legendary Free Congress Foundation, which was focused on “culture war.” Lind’s work on military history and strategy informed important critiques of American adventurism. Even more unorthodox, his conservative case for public mass transportation deserves to be understood by those sentimentally attached to the private car, especially with today’s weaponization of electric vehicles.

So, Lind should not be held responsible for the misuse of the term he coined. “Cultural Marxism” is certainly useful as a historical description of how Marxists like Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukács wheedled their way into respectable politics by repackaging Marxism with less materialism and more humanism. And if the term is used to emphasize the extremism of today’s “liberals”, I suppose it is helpful, though these days few points are scored thereby. As David Azerrad wrote in his contribution to the anthology Up From Conservatism, “Only the most clueless of Boomers still believe that accusations of socialism carry any weight in contemporary America.”

Still, remembering the horrifying history of totalitarian Communism is important in itself, and understanding how Marxism deceived us by transforming itself into something other than Marxism, thus facilitating the rise of the New Left and “wokeism,” provides perspective for confronting today’s atrocities.

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