By
Sarah Jones,
senior writer for Intelligencer who covers politics and labor
In 2003, the Southern Poverty Law Center warned of a “bizarre” label gaining popularity with the right. “Cultural Marxism” was everywhere, according to believers. Pat Buchanan thought it was so powerful that it could “de-Christianize” America, and William S. Lind, the former director of the Free Congress Foundation, said it was turning colleges into “ivy-covered North Koreas.” The SPLC warned that cultural Marxism, as a narrative, promoted antisemitic falsehoods about a cabal composed of Jewish intellectuals — “nefarious, communistic destroyers” of the American way of life.
Years later, cultural Marxism is still in the news. Jordan Peterson has repeatedly blamed cultural Marxists for corrupting western universities. In 2022, the Heritage Foundation published a report warning that cultural Marxists could soon enslave “the United States to a totalitarian, soul-destroying ideology.” Mike Gonzalez, a Heritage senior fellow, and Katharine Gorka, the foundation’s former director for civil society and the American dialogue, identified cultural Marxism in everything from the rise of the new left in the 1960s to more recent grievances, like “gender ideology,” ESG (or environmental, social, and corporate governance), and the woke-ification of Star Wars and Star Trek. A similar concept shows up in the work of Christopher Rufo, who once linked a supposed “ideological shift” at the New York Times to the political theories of Herbert Marcuse.
