Note: Read the complete essay
by Martin Jay, Dialectic
of Counter-Enlightenment: The Frankfurt School as Scapegoat of the Lunatic
Fringe
 |
| Horkheimer and Adorno |
In
a recent Op Ed piece in the New York Times, Samuel Moyn, a professor of Law and
History at Yale, pointed to the dangerous role that a neo-fascist conspiracy
theory, once confined to the lunatic fringe, is now playing in the broader
culture. The conspiracy in question has direct kinship with traditional
anti-Semitic conspiracy theories dating back to the Middle Ages and having
their most noxious resurrection in the Nazi era. It is a tale of the eternal
wandering Jew who has no “natural roots” but who tries to poison and subvert
the culture and traditions of Christian society with its doctrine of elitism
and cosmopolitanism, all the while in service to a hidden agenda of world
domination. After the Russian Revolution this conspiracy theory took the form
of the plots by “Judeo-Bolsheviks” to conquer the world. The current avatar of this conspiracy theory
is the denunciation of something called “Cultural Marxism” which is ubiquitous
on Fox News and the sewers of alt-right and fascist web sites.
Moyn
writes that whereas right-wing fantasies paint a picture of the existential
threat of “Cultural Marxism”,
“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.” [1]
The
origins of “Cultural Marxism” according to this right-wing meme is identified
with an intellectual movement that sprang up in post-World War I Germany, the
Frankfurt Institute.
It
should be kept in mind that when it comes to discussions of the Frankfurt
Institute on Fox News and right-wing web sites what we are talking about is
something far removed from a scholarly study of an intellectual movement that
was launched in Weimar Germany by a group of social scientists who believed
that the application of the methods of historical materialism could open new
paths to the understanding of culture and ideology. We are rather talking about
a conspiracy theory that strings together a few largely uncorroborated facts
for which it then finds a connection with a mysterious agency hidden from view
and working with a hidden agenda having the most ominous implications for
ordinary people. Like many other recently concocted conspiracy theories, such
narratives rely on scant evidence mixed with a heavy dose of fear and suspicion
of the “other”. The difference was
nicely put in an article by Jamin Jérôme,
“In concrete terms, next to the history of Cultural Marxism as a
well‐documented theory, developed by Marxist scholars and thinkers
within cultural studies from the 1930s, another theory has emerged during the
1990s, and is particularly influential on radical forms of right-wing politics.
It claims that the main goal of Cultural Marxism was much less honorable than
merely academic research trying to understand the cultural dynamics of
capitalism, and to many, it is seen as a dangerous ideology that has sought “to
destroy Western traditions and values.” Since the 1990s, this particular
interpretation has been promoted through a literature mixing conspiracy
theories, academic sources, and conservative political stances. This literature
has had its own life in some specific circles, reviews, and websites, moving
beyond individual nations and languages, and is now quite independent of
Cultural Marxism as a well‐known theory linked to the
Frankfurt School.” [2]
Moyn
provides a few examples of the spread of this meme in the Trump years:
“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.”
Moyn
also points out that the logical step from fulminations against “Cultural
Marxism” to terrorist attacks against its perceived agents has already been
taken by neo-Nazi terrorists egged on by the fulminations of Fox News and
Breitbart News.
“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... 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.”
We
can add to this list of terrorists inspired by their hatred of “Cultural
Marxism” the man who sent explosive devices in the mail to leaders of the
Democratic Party and to George Soros.
How
is “Cultural Marxism” understood in the narrative parlayed by extreme right
conspiracy theories? A good definition was provided by the neo-fascist William
S. Lind, the author of a fantasy novel featuring the slaughter of humanities
professors in his alma mater, Dartmouth College. He writes,
“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.”
It
also dovetailed neatly into traditional anti-Semitic propaganda given that many
of the leaders of the Frankfurt School were of Jewish heritage and had
recognizably Jewish names. Martin Jay, who wrote the first history of the
Frankfurt School describes the genesis of this meme:
“Larouche and his followers have, to be sure,
always remained on the fringe of the fringe, too confused in their ideology to
be taken seriously by either radical left or right, with little, if any
significant impact on the real world.
But the germ sown by Minnicino was
ultimately to bear remarkable poisonous fruit. The harvester was the Free
Congress Foundation, a paleo-conservative Washington think tank founded by Paul
Weyrich, who was also in on the creation of the Heritage Foundation and the
Moral Majority movement. Much of the financial support came from his
collaborator Joseph Coors, who knew how to turn all that pure Rocky Mountain
water into a cash flow for the radical right. The FCF sponsored a satellite
television network called National Empowerment Television, which churned out
slickly produced shows promulgating its various opinions.” [4]
 |
| Lyndon Larouche |
Moyn notes the anti-Semitic overtones of the
right-wing demonization of the Frankfurt School:
“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.”
One can add George Soros to the pantheon of
evil associated with right-wing attacks against “Cultural Marxism” even though
Soros never had anything to do with the Frankfurt School. But he is of Jewish
heritage and supports liberal causes and that was enough for the terrorist
Cesar Sayoc to send him a pipe bomb in the mail.
"The excerpt [from Estulin’s book]
published by Castro suggested that the esoteric Frankfurt School of socialist
academics worked with members of the Rockefeller family in the 1950s to pave
the way for rock music to 'control the masses' by diverting attention from
civil rights and social injustice." [5]
Castro didn’t know it but the source of
Estulin’s theory of the Frankfurt School was the same Lyndon Larouche inspired
article by Minnicino. Castro was rather
ignorant of the Frankfurt School and did not realize that the narrative he had
bought into about it was the polar opposite of what the Frankfurt School was
doing. To quote Martin Jay,
“The most blatant absurdity in Estulin's
scheme, ... was attributing to the Frankfurt School a position precisely
opposite to what its members had always taken. That is, when they discussed the
"culture industry" it was with the explicit criticism, ironically
echoed here by Castro, that it functioned to reconcile people to their misery
and dull the pain of their suffering. Whether or not the Frankfurt School's
argument is fully plausible is not the issue here, but rather the pathetic
miscomprehension of Estulin and the credulity of Castro in seeing them as
agents of the Bilderberg project to make the world safe for capitalist elites.” [6]
The adoption in recent years of an
ill-informed demonization of the Frankfurt School by nominally left-wing groups
that blame this intellectual movement for a turn away from the ideals of the
Enlightenment is but a mirror image of their demonization by the neo-fascists
who blame the Frankfurt School for subverting the values of Western
Civilization.
More than a decade ago I responded to another
demonization of the Frankfurt School published by an online socialist
newspaper. I noted that the scapegoating of the Frankfurt School in that
publication bore a striking resemblance to the condemnation of one of its most
well-known figures, Herbert Marcuse, by the conservative author Alan Bloom in
his 1980’s book, The Closing of the
American Mind. [7] I was
not aware at the time that the Larouche organization had given birth to a far
more sinister myth about the Frankfurt School than Bloom could ever have
imagined and that this story would eventually go viral in the intellectual
gutter of the extreme right. It is not
the first time that conspiracy theories find a common denominator in both right
and left-wing circles. It should serve as a warning against the use of
historical falsification to serve political ends.
Dec 3, 2018
[2] Jamin Jérôme, Cultural Marxism: A
Survey, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/rec3.12258
[3] All the scholars
who have investigated the origins of the conspiracy theory revolving around the
Frankfurt School ascribe its origin to a publication of the Lyndon Larouche
cult from 1991,
Michael Minnicino,
"New Dark Age: Frankfurt School and Political Correctness," Fidelio, 1(1991-1992); reprinted by the Schiller Institute http://www.schillerinstitute.org/fid_91-96/921_frankfurt.html . See for instance Martin Jay, Dialectic of
Counter-Enlightenment: The Frankfurt School as Scapegoat of the Lunatic Fringe,
http://canisa.org/blog/dialectic-of-counter-enlightenment-the-frankfurt-school-as-scapegoat-of-the-lunatic-fringe. Also Jamin Jérôme, Cultural Marxism: A Survey,
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/rec3.12258
[4] Martin Jay, ibid.
[5] Quoted in Martin Jay, op cit.
[6] Martin Jay, ibid.
[7] Downward
Spiral, Chapter 1, page 24, note 23,
