Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right

by Elizabeth Sandifer

The ‘Cultural Marxism’ conspiracy theory is enormously popular on this spectrum. Like anarcho-capitalism, it would be superfluous to debunk since it is ridiculous on its face. Nevertheless, it’s worth saying that, insofar as it attributes the origins of the conspiracy to the Frankfurt School, it isn’t just wrong—it’s exactly wrong. The accusation is that Cultural Marxists are deliberately putting anti-family, anti-male, anti-straight, anti-white, anti- capitalist messages (the only grain of truth here is the assumption that, in some sense, all these antis are compatible) into popular culture in order to erode the dominant—and of course proper—institutions and hierarchies of Western culture in order to impose communism. The trouble is that the Frankfurt School’s dominant current believed that revolutionary transformation of Western capitalism was now all but impossible, that the masses were no longer capable of becoming revolutionary subjects, and that this was attributable—to a huge extent—to the inherently paralysing and soporific effects of mass popular culture. Their critique of Hollywood, etc, has some points to make, but it ultimately collapses into a crude and deterministic elitism which sees the only possible ideological challenge to the suffocating web of ‘totally administered’ modern capitalism being high modernist art. And even there, Marxists cannot shape such challenges, they can only elucidate them through criticism. Far from doing this secretly or covertly, i...