The Los Angeles Review of Books dropped several essays today that drew my attention. I thought to share them with you.
Red Specters and Right-Wing Fever Dreams by Alexander Billet reviews The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West by A. J. A. Woods. Verso, 2026.
So it is with “Cultural Marxism.” Over the past 15 years—in particular the last decade—the concept has become so overused by the American Right that we almost tune out when we hear it. The same can be said for so many Trumpian talking points—“DEI,” “radical Left,” “Trump derangement syndrome”—that we brush it aside. As with anything so overused, we forget what made the idea potent in the first place.
This, naturally, is the point, and it ultimately works in the Right’s favor. Of course they see Marxists around every corner, we tell ourselves. It’s ridiculous. And it is. But when the ridiculous idea is believed and promoted by the most powerful man in the world (he who is currently and enthusiastically bombing Iran on the flimsiest of pretenses), what does its “truthiness” matter? If, eventually, you are forced to publicly declare I am not a Marxist just to sidestep the furor, haven’t they already won?
Against all this, A. J. A. Woods’s The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West (2026) offers a welcome corrective. The short book—Woods’s first—traces the genealogy and evolution of this right-wing bugbear. Of course, Woods points out, Cultural Marxism isn’t real, at least in the way the Right thinks of it. The idea that Marxists have taken over the educational and cultural apparatus of the United States, of the entire world, is ludicrous on its face. The real question, as Woods frames it, is what kind of society, what course of history, makes it possible for such a flagrantly silly idea to take root and spread so thoroughly?
I never met a Marxist. I am certain that none of my professors at Ball State University were Marxists. The only book by Marx that I ever read was The Communist Manifesto; that took about thirty years. That history was a speeding train towards the dictatorship of the proletariat. It sounded too much of the Calvinism I had already come to distrust, if not despise. But my spotty education about Marxism left me knowing enough that the blather about cultural Marxism was bullshit.
This paragraph gives me even more reason for the hysterical yapping about cultural Marxism:
Before the war, the Frankfurt-based Institute for Social Research had been dedicated to answering why the socialist revolution hadn’t succeeded in Germany. Answers weren’t going to be found only in political economy or revolutionary strategy but also in culture, in psychoanalysis, in the shape of everyday life itself. After the institute’s thinkers—all Marxists, almost all Jewish—had fled the Third Reich, their original preoccupation began to move in tandem with an attempt to understand the success of fascism, and how it might return. Echoes of fascist domination were woven into the fabric of postwar consumer capitalism, and the Frankfurt School sought to highlight these in their research, their scholarship, their philosophical work, and their cultural criticism. This purpose is plain to anyone who reads Adorno et al.’s The Authoritarian Personality (1950), Horkheimer’s Critique of Instrumental Reason (1967), or Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (1964).
Ooh, might not the Frankfurt School scare the fascists by exposing their machinations of acquiring power?
One could argue that this conspiracy theory has come a long way from its LaRouchian origins, but as Woods writes, all iterations and uses of the Cultural Marxism trope contain a core characteristic. For all their anti-elitist rhetoric, for all their appeals to tradition and “human nature,” their ultimate aim is to simply replace one elite with another: a multiracial elite with a white one, sex-positive consumerism with the patriarchal family, a “woke” capitalism with one that has entirely given up any pretense of social equality.
***
Misbehaving students weren’t what really scared the establishment, though. It was the potential that their ideas might spread beyond their ranks. The 1960s are too commonly thought of as just a student thing, a wave of kids rebelling against their own privilege. But the “hippies” versus “hardhats” dichotomy was never as cut-and-dried as it’s been made out to be. The further you fell down the income ladder, the more likely you were to oppose the Vietnam War. And high rates of poverty and deprivation drove many people of color to support groups like the Black Panthers or the Brown Berets.
Nor was Marcuse—by then just about the only member of the Frankfurt School worth a damn to the New Left—quite as dismissive of the working class as caricatures of his work would lead us to believe. His Essay on Liberation (1969) explicitly states that the students couldn’t do it on their own, that the working class is essential to any meaningful revolution. If they, the people most able to materially shut down the flows of capital, could be won over, then what Marcuse called the “new sensibility”—the collective aspiration for utopia—might gain more widespread hold. And thus people might stop fighting for their own servitude as if it were their freedom.
The essay uses a term of which I have not heard:
The logic behind this impulse is, if anything, even more pressing in the current moment. It almost seems as if, before addressing anything like Cultural Marxism, we first need to reckon with cultural capitalism. Today, the ideologies that create consent and even enthusiasm for capitalist domination are kept alive by a cultural-technological infrastructure more complex, more diversely ramified, and more subtly influential than ever. At the same time, those who hold that infrastructure together are acutely proletarianized, subjected to a precarity that bears more resemblance to the conditions of itinerant industrial workers in the 1900s. We need only look to striking writers, casualized university professors, and traumatized content moderators to see as much. And this doesn’t even begin to address the devastations that AI is beginning to exact on these occupations, or the ecological impacts on many communities.
Do we really want to be serfs of the tech bros? Do we really want to build a caste system?
And a caste system can be read into Natural Election by Jonathan Basile. This essay reviews Original Sin: On the Genetics of Vice, the Problem of Blame, and the Future of Forgiveness by Kathryn Paige Harden. Random House, 2026.
Harden’s book has been published at a moment when eugenicist and hereditarian thinking inform the ascendant Far Right, particularly through its preoccupation with the “Great Replacement” theory. This conspiracy theory explains demographic decline among white populations by imagining a globalist Jewish elite manipulating everything from immigration to gender nonconformity in order to dilute and disempower “the white gene pool.” Indeed, every political project implicated in the rise of fascism in the United States today—including the “America First” economy, abortion bans, the dismantling of DEI initiatives, attacks on queer and trans people, ICE’s campaign of terror against immigrants and their communities, and the undermining of any international environmentalist response to climate change—can be understood as an emanation of, among other things, this ideological investment in eugenics.
Harden would consider herself opposed to all such political projects. Indeed, much of Original Sin consists of anecdotes and asides that check the right boxes to affirm her political leanings as a Good Liberal. Her project, in brief, is to argue that liberals, in order to accomplish progressive goals, must accept the existence of innate genetic predispositions toward scholastic achievement and criminality. This tactic mirrors a broadly adopted political strategy: appealing to liberals to argue that their political aims can only be realized by embracing the current obsessions of conservatives.
I have read a little on the history of eugenics - one of America's contributions to Nazi race law. It was a pseudo-sceince, and it remains one. The review does not really address what I think is its great error: a self-fulfilling justification for elite classes to retain power. It does say this:
In fact, the stratified society being prophesied already exists—the children of the wealthy already live in a world apart. Everything from their healthcare to their schooling and experiences with the criminal justice system are fundamentally different from the realities of those with fewer resources. At no point in the present or future will maintaining this stratification require the wealthy or their children to be inherently healthier, more intelligent, or more virtuous. Hierarchy is a function of power, amassed within social, historical, and political structures, and resistance requires challenging the belief that social elites are truly the Elect.
What applies to the wider world also needs to be applied in this country.
To name this asymmetry is not to abandon the possibility of universality; it is to refuse a counterfeit version of it. The real question is no longer whether the Global South can see the structure clearly—we have long lived inside its consequences. The question is whether those who claimed custodianship of that order can imagine a world where law is not another name for managed inequality, and where justice is not postponed the moment it approaches the imperial archive. We are not outside the old language yet, but we are listening as its authority falters, sentence by sentence.
The Grammar of Exemption: How the West narrated its own history as a savior, even while treating the rest of the world as its laboratory by Elias Wondimu.
Eugenics, with its fake scientific predestination propping up a hierarchy justifying its control of politics, needs to go the way of the dodo. The censorship of ideas under the banner of Cultural Marxism needs a stake driven through its heart; otherwise, the American creed as written by Jefferson faces a death threat.
CC has disappeared from my life, but her problems keep surfacing. We were talking about homelss meth-heads after church today. Seeing the link to Aaron Bornstein's interview/review, Beyond a Theory of Irresistible Desire of What Would You Do Alone in a Cage with Nothing but Cocaine? A Philosophy of Addiction by Hanna Pickard, I thought, What the hell? Which always leads to me reading.
Of course, there are differences between drug use in addiction and ordinary, day-to-day drug use. In the book, I argue that the crucial difference rests on whether, on balance, drugs are, or are not, good for a person. In addiction, drug use can come to undermine a person’s well-being, which creates what I call the puzzle of addiction—the task of explaining why a person would nonetheless keep using drugs. But the crucial point is that, even when the costs ratchet up, the value of drugs is not eradicated, which is part of why people stay stuck. We therefore need to recognize that value in order to help them. Reckoning with the idea that drug use is not black-and-white but gray is part of the core project of the book.
And in these paragraphs, I see an explanation of much of what I saw running with Muncie crackheads:
So, by engaging in this imaginative feat, you generate in your own mind an alternative hypothesis to the brain disease model. It’s not the power of drugs that made the rats press the lever for cocaine to the point of death. It’s the fact that they were alone in a cage with nothing but cocaine. In other words, it’s the barrenness of their environment and its impact on their psychological state that explains their behavior.
***
I am simplifying, but the take-home message from decades of animal and human research is that if you give rats or people meaningful alternatives to drugs, they take them. Addiction is associated with backgrounds of severe adversity, limited socioeconomic opportunities, and additional mental health conditions. In other words, being alone in a cage with nothing but cocaine is an apt metaphor for the life circumstances faced by many people with addiction.
And the interview gets at what is wrong with treatment: moral police or moralistic police.
Presumably, it’s not offered for political reasons. A lot of people would love for science to be “apolitical.” But in the case of addiction science, we don’t have that option. It is hard not to see a connection among the hijacked brain model, dehumanizing public discourses, and addiction policies. The connection drives ideas around “superpredators” or “meth zombies,” as well as, here in California, “CARE Court”—a dystopian name for a process whereby people diagnosed with a substance use disorder can be sentenced to mandated treatment (which rarely works) and, if they don’t comply, imprisonment. These policies take the paradigm to its logical conclusion. How might a shift to a humanistic and heterogeneous paradigm change this dynamic?
I wrote the book in part because I wanted to make a difference. Your question challenges the scientific community to address these dehumanizing forces instead of cleaving to a paradigm that is nothing more than dogma—not a theoretically coherent model with a solid evidence base. That science is apolitical is a pretense. We need better and more honest science. I think the brain disease model of compulsion has failed people with addiction and served only to entrench certain forms of stigma and discrimination. It is bad science. This does not mean that brain science can’t illuminate many aspects of addiction. Of course it can. But we won’t properly understand addiction if we continue to focus so narrowly on the brain. We need a paradigm that is interdisciplinary, integrating the natural sciences with the social sciences, the humanities, and, crucially, the voices of people who themselves live with addiction.
The Shaping of the Modern Middle East – Dr. Roy | Museum of the Future: Lessons from the Past
I did not notice anything that jarred me with his presentation of the history presented, In fact, the presentation is superb. Would that other teachers of history were this good.
sch 5/3
