The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West
By A.J.A. Woods
Verso, 245 pages, $24.95
The conservative scholar Paul Gottfried devotes a chapter of his 2009 memoir Encounters to an unlikely mentor: Herbert Marcuse, the émigré German-Jewish philosopher and doyen of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, who taught him as a doctoral student at Yale. “Unlike my Cold War liberal professors and current PC colleagues,” Gottfried recalls, “this graying German radical thrived on debate.” In one seminar, he remembers, Marcuse recruited him to present a critique of Marx’s analysis of the 1848 Paris uprising. A vigorous confrontation of opposing views followed, after which Marcuse praised Gottfried’s “valorous efforts” and awarded him an A. “I am still embarrassed to admit,” Gottfried concludes, “that I learned true liberal intellectual exchange from a declared Marxist-Leninist.”
This fond tribute might surprise anyone broadly familiar with Gottfried’s profile. A retired history professor who edits the flagship paleoconservative magazine Chronicles, Gottfried is perhaps the right-most living American intellectual to have held a tenured position at a liberal arts college (Elizabethtown College) and to have published a sizeable corpus of scholarly works with reputable university presses. He gained wide notoriety around a decade ago for having mentored Richard Spencer and coined the term “alt-right”; last year, the dissident right publishing concern Passage Press honored his career by releasing an anthology of his writing. More recently, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts provoked controversy when he toasted Gottfried as one of the “sages of our age.”
To say that people in Gottfried’s milieu usually don’t have anything nice to say about Marcuse and his circle would be a serious understatement. Indeed, an article in the latest issue of Gottfried’s own Chronicles reiterates a standard view on the right when it asserts that the “critical theorists of the Frankfurt School, including Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer, sought to destroy the cultural foundations of Western civilization from within,” linking to two other articles in the same publication that prosecute roughly the same case.
“The Frankfurt School myth revived traditional antisemitic tropes.”
This oft-repeated charge is not merely false, but grotesque. In reality, the Frankfurt School’s achievement was to offer an enduring account of how and why Western civilization almost destroyed itself from within. In their foundational text, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer argued that the moral catastrophes of the twentieth century—Nazism, Stalinism, and total war—had emerged out of destructive tendencies within the modern West, which could only set itself right by recognizing and confronting these tendencies. Like survivors of a disaster falsely accused of perpetrating it, Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse barely escaped Europe’s near self-immolation—their colleague Walter Benjamin did not—only to be later accused of conspiring to cause the West’s downfall.
The origins and history of this accusation are the subject 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. As Woods explains, the book’s purpose is not to “debunk” the Frankfurt School myth, but to account for the uses to which it has been put. The narrative’s “propagators,” says Woods, are not “stereotypical conspiracy theorists,” but rather “active practitioners of certain kinds of ideological struggle that arise from very particular relationships between social classes, political forces, and superstructural institutions.” Hence, the book sets out to map the ideological terrain of struggle on which narratives about the Frankfurt School became a potent weapon.
The basic outlines of the “cultural Marxism” narrative attached to the Frankfurt School are familiar by now. During their time in the United States, the story goes, these precariously situated Jewish intellectuals somehow implanted their subversive doctrines so deeply in American culture that they can be held responsible for everything from political correctness to family breakdown to rock music—to the extent that, as the anti-woke influencer James Lindsay put it in his 2021 book Race Marxism, “we currently live mostly in Herbert Marcuse’s world.”
Some of the elements of this narrative—such the claim that Adorno composed the music of the Beatles—are so patently ludicrous as not to merit refutation. Others may be worth poking holes in, such as the notion that American liberal academics acquired their “politically correct” intolerance of conservative views from European leftists. William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale already alleged a professorial liberal monoculture in the late 1940s; as we saw, Gottfried found Marcuse “far more tolerant of dissenting opinions” than his “Cold War liberal” colleagues. Nonetheless, Woods is correct that what matters more than discrediting such claims is making sense of why and to whom they appeal in the first place.
The right-wing “cultural Marxism” narrative, Woods demonstrates, didn’t come to prominence until the closing years of the Cold War, when it was pioneered by conservative think tankers like William Lind and Paul Weyrich. On one level, it served as a way of keeping the specter of communism alive as a galvanizing force even as the Soviet menace receded, while also relocating it closer to home. At the same time, it played a useful explanatory role at a time when the right seemed to be winning the war of ideas, but still found itself stymied on the cultural front. Despite the successive defeats handed to liberalism by Nixon and Reagan, conservatives seemed no closer to restoring traditional family values eroded by the cultural revolution of the ’60s. The problem felt even more acute amid the setbacks of the Clinton era.
By Woods’s account, the Frankfurt School narrative offered a means of diverting attention from the contradictions inherent in modern American conservatism’s fusion of laissez-faire economics and cultural traditionalism. “Without a structural understanding of capitalist crises,” Woods writes, “conservatives like Lind needed to locate some sort of external cause for social disintegration,” and “cultural radicalism was the perfect scapegoat.” In other words, precluding any acknowledgement that the market destabilizes traditional social structures created the need for an alternative explanation of that erosion. A narrative of foreign subversion fit the bill.
It is not a coincidence that this story centered on foreign-born Jews, nor that it resembled, in broad strokes, medieval legends about Jews poisoning the wells. At a time when cultural mores no longer permitted overt Jew hatred—a taboo that is now receding—the Frankfurt School myth revived traditional antisemitic tropes in a thinly disguised form, attributing cultural decline to Jewish subversion. As Adorno and Horkheimer themselves noted in Dialectic of Enlightenment, “antisemitism is a deeply imprinted schema, a ritual of civilization.” Its basic narrative framework resurfaces whenever a “false social order” must obscure the causes of its crises by projecting them onto an external enemy.
Woods’s most impressive achievement is to trace the origins of the Frankfurt School myth back to the schisms of the late ’60s left, specifically the Lyndon LaRouche cult, the first incarnation of which was called the National Caucus of Labor Committees. The LaRouche section of The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy reads like a Thomas Pynchon novel, and had me laughing out loud at several points. As Woods recounts, around the same time Students for a Democratic Society was fracturing into rival factions before spiraling into terrorist violence, LaRouche positioned himself as a pseudo-Leninist guru in the New York City radical scene. Pitting himself against the various SDS splinter groups, he promised to train a revolutionary vanguard capable of overthrowing “Rockefeller Fascism,” his memorable shorthand for the American establishment.
LaRouche and his followers were fixated on Marcuse, accusing him of being a CIA-funded plant subverting the left from within. Marcuse’s most famous student, Angela Davis, had been subjected to a “CIA zombie brainwash program” by Marcuse and Adorno, LaRouche alleged. As the 1970s wore on, the LaRouchites’ sci-fi epic became ever more baroque. It was their prolific pamphleteering, Woods shows, that gave rise to some of the more outlandish elements of the “cultural Marxism” narrative, such as the claim that Adorno was somehow responsible for popularizing rock music. Another, less remembered accusation is that the painfully highbrow philosopher had “undermined the morale of the American people through the promotion of soap operas.” As Woods notes, the irony is that these allegations can be read as a degraded imitation of the Frankfurt School’s own critique of the deadening effects of the culture industry.
Eventually, the LaRouche organization drifted to the right, and began circulating its publications to right-wing think tanks; it was at this point that Weyrich, Lind, and others in that realm began to embrace the Frankfurt School myth and deploy it for their own purposes. Eventually, the New Left origins of the anti-Frankfurt School narrative were mostly forgotten, even as elements of the original version (the LaRouchites’ weird confabulation about Adorno and the Beatles, for example) continue to surface in meme form decades later. “The history of Cultural Marxism/s,” as Woods writes, “has always been a story of revisions, borrowings, and recontextualizations.”
“The New Left origins of the anti-Frankfurt School narrative were mostly forgotten.”
This story had a new twist last December, when Villanova professor Gabriel Rockhill published a j’accuse directed at the long deceased philosophers of the Frankfurt School under the title Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? In effect, Rockhill has resuscitated the old LaRouchite “CIA zombie” strain of Frankfurt School mythology, albeit in a slightly less bizarre form. He alleges that Adorno, Horkheimer, and company were a CIA front charged with waging an “intellectual world war on the socialist alternative” by establishing a “‘compatible left’ intelligentsia” in the West to undermine the real socialists in the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba.
Woods doesn’t address this latest twist, but the origin story provided by the book makes it seem like a homecoming. As one review notes, to support his insinuation that Marcuse remained on the CIA’s payroll in the 1960s (the exiled philosopher’s wartime work for the OSS, the CIA’s precursor organization, is well-established), Rockhill cites the New Left magazine Progressive Labor, the outlet of the eponymous splinter group of SDS. It was from this same publication’s anti-Marcuse diatribes, as Wood shows, that LaRouche cribbed his anti-Frankfurt School narrative. Many early LaRouchites had previously been members of PL.
The left-wing Frankfurt School demonology Rockhill is reviving, in other words, has the same origins as the much more popular right-wing version. The result, as I have written previously, is that we now have Frankfurt School conspiracy theories of both the right and the left that are perfect inverted mirror images of each other, with the first telling us that this small group of philosophers subverted the capitalist West on behalf of the communist East and the second alleging the opposite.
It is no accident that the absurdities of the sectarian left are gaining new traction alongside the grotesqueries of the antisemitic right. “There is no antisemite,” wrote Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment, “who does not basically want to imitate his mental image of a Jew.” The “portrait of the Jews” as all-powerful puppet masters, in other words, is the “self-portrait” of all those who “long for total possession and unlimited power.” Something like this applies to those who seize today on Frankfurt School demonology: They project their delusional fantasies of intellectual world dominion onto their spectral nemeses. This was blatant enough in the case of LaRouche, who accused Adorno and Marcuse of brainwashing their followers at precisely the moment he was turning his organization into a Scientology-like cult; it is no less true of ideological entrepreneurs trying to game the attention economy today.
There are plenty of reasonable grounds on which to criticize the Frankfurt School. Adorno and Horkheimer’s gloomily deterministic account of the self-destructive tendencies of bourgeois civilization was understandable given the horrors that had engulfed the world in which they came of age, but it left them incapable of perceiving the resilience of the democratic culture and traditions of the nation where they spent their exile. Marcuse remained in America much longer, but also remained largely blind to its virtues, even as he proved overly susceptible to the nihilistic radical chic of the New Left.
“There are reasonable grounds on which to criticize the Frankfurt School.”
Nevertheless, these thinkers’ intellectual legacy in the United States is far more rich and varied than their facile detractors on the right or left have been capable of appreciating. What makes their work compelling was that they were neither simplistically for or against “the West”: They believed that realizing the emancipatory possibilities of Western cultural and intellectual traditions also required acknowledging its internal contradictions and self-destructive potential. This rigorously critical stance is what has made them a ripe target both for right-wing chauvinists and for neo-Third Worldists like Rockhill.
One irony of the Frankfurt School’s reception, as Gottfried briefly notes in Encounters, is that its “attacks on bureaucratic structures and on Enlightenment rationalism … have profoundly conservative implications.” The historian Christopher Lasch, a supporter of the New Left in his early years, credited the Frankfurt School with contributing to his positive revaluation of the family as “the last defense of a rich and autonomous inner life” over and against the market and the bureaucratic state. Similarly, the critical theory journal Telos, with which Gottfried and Lasch were both associated, used the Frankfurt School’s frameworks to critique the managerial liberalism of the “New Class.”
Woods—who otherwise seems broadly supportive of progressive social justice causes—acknowledges the continued relevance of this line of critique. Toward the end of The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy, Woods refers to “the absorption of left-wing concerns into a range of managerial procedures”: that is, the “corporate wokeness” of DEI initiative and HR departments. This is one front, as Lasch saw decades ago, on which the Frankfurt School’s account of how market and state have hollowed out autonomous subjectivity still has much to teach us. Also prescient are Adorno and Horkheimer’s warnings about what happens when “thought … becomes a commodity, and language the means of promoting that commodity”—phrases that resonate anew in the age of Large Language Models, when tech CEOs inform us that “intelligence” will soon be a metered utility.
The “prime cause of the retreat from enlightenment into mythology,” Adorno and Horkheimer wrote in Dialectic of Enlightenment, is to be found less in our seduction by irrational myths than “in the Enlightenment itself when paralyzed by fear of the truth.” That is, when modern societies refuse to confront the contradictions generated by economic and technological progress, ad hoc mythologies emerge to disguise these contradictions. The persistence of the Frankfurt School myth vindicates this essential and disturbing insight.