Abstract
Paleoconservatives developed the Frankfurt School conspiracy to frame liberal or progressive politics as foreign to the American way of life. The Cathedral, on the other hand, is a term to refer to the expansive institutional complex that produces and regulates public opinion to ensure the perpetuation of the “progressive” status quo. Although both movements have shaped the alt-right worldview, paleoconservatives and neoreactionaries represent incompatible ideologies. Their distinctive ideological standpoints result in two markedly different explanations for existence and practice of critical theory. The Frankfurt School conspiracy developed slowly over the past three decades, and this chapter examines four of the most influential articulations of this theory. Subsequently, the chapter turns to the concept of the Cathedral to investigate how the neoreactionary movement’s rationalization of critical theory resembles and contrasts the paleoconservative myth of Cultural Marxism.
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Notes
- 1.
George Hawley, Making Sense of theAlt-Right (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 11–50.
- 2.
Martin Jay, “Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment: The Frankfurt School as Scapegoat of the Lunatic Fringe,” The Canadian Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, December 22, 2011, http://canisa.org/blog/dialectic-of-counter-enlightenment-the-frankfurt-school-as-scapegoat-of-the-lunatic-fringe
- 3.
Michael Minnicino, “New Dark Age: Frankfurt School and Political Correctness,” Fidelio. No. 1, 1992; reprinted by the Schiller Institute. http://www.schillerinstitute.org/fid_91-96/921_frankfurt.html
- 4.
Minnicino, “The New Dark Age.”
- 5.
Ibid.
- 6.
Ibid.
- 7.
Ibid.
- 8.
Ibid.
- 9.
Ibid.
- 10.
Ibid.
- 11.
Ibid. In an unconventional reading of Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” Minnicino argues that psychedelic drugs, such as LSD, endowed objects with an “aura.” Minnicino goes on to imply that Benjamin promoted the “aura” as a way to discourage people from engaging with objective reality.
- 12.
Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 37.
- 13.
Ibid, 37.
- 14.
Ibid, 37.
- 15.
Free Congress Foundation, “William Lind on the Origins of Political Correctness,” YouTube video, 22:33, posted by “Facundo Soares Gache,” September 18, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_w0TOJspijA
- 16.
Ibid.
- 17.
Ibid.
- 18.
Ibid.
- 19.
Bill Berkowitz, “‘Cultural Marxism’ Catching On,” Intelligence Report, August 13, 2003, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2003/cultural-marxism-catching?page=0%2C0
- 20.
Ibid.
- 21.
Ibid.
- 22.
Robert C. Christopher, Crashing the Gates: The De-Wasping of America’s Power Elite (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), 175. Robert C. Christopher reports that “at elite private universities, such as Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, and Columbia, the number of Jews admitted was rigorously controlled by a quota system.”
- 23.
Ibid, 188.
- 24.
Jay, “Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment.”
- 25.
Ibid.
- 26.
A recent comment on the Youtube page of the Free Congress Foundation documentary suggests that “cultural Marxism” should be renamed “Semitic Marxism.”
- 27.
W Cleon. Skousen, The Naked Communist, (Salt Lake City: The Ensign Publishing Company, 1962), 259–262. For instance, both lists share an emphasis on the disintegration of the family unit and the promotion of homosexuality as part of a communist agenda.
- 28.
Timothy Matthews, “The Frankfurt School: Conspiracy to Corrupt,” Gazeta Warzawska. January 20, 2018. https://gazetawarszawska.com/index.php/historia-2/162-timothy-matthews-the-frankfurt-school-conspiracy-to-corrupt
- 29.
Ibid.
- 30.
Ibid.
- 31.
The article features a bizarre claim that Adorno’s Theory of Modern Music inspired the creation of violent video games.
- 32.
Steffen Krüger, “Barbarous Hordes, Brutal Elites: The Traumatic Structure of Right-WingPopulism,” eflux, no. 83, (June 2017), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/83/142185/barbarous-hordes-brutal-elites-the-traumatic-structure-of-right-wing-populism
- 33.
Jay, “Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment.”
- 34.
Andrew Breitbart, Righteous Indignation (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2011), 121.
- 35.
Ibid, 135.
- 36.
“Andrew Breitbart on the Frankfurt School of Cultural Marxism (Jun 14, 2011),” Youtube Video, 5:43, posted by “deplorable1,” February 27, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWgkYv-JOGA. While it is true that Clinton wrote her senior thesis on Alinsky, she did not agree with him. She did not believe that violent resistance was the path to social change. Additionally, she did not see Alinsky as a follower of Frankfurt School Marxism, but, rather, as the newest figure in a long tradition of American social activism. For Clinton, Alinsky had more in common with Eugene W. Debs, Walt Whitman, and Martin Luther King Jr. than Marcuse, Adorno, or Fromm. In this sense, Clinton’s thesis contradicts the Frankfurt School conspiracy, because it demonstrates that the New Left and Civil Rights movement grew from American roots rather than German transplants.
- 37.
Gerald Warner, “For the First Time in History, ‘Conservatives’ Are at the Forefront of the Cultural Revolution,” Breitbart, February 4, 2015.https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2015/02/04/for-the-first-time-in-history-conservatives-are-at-the-forefront-of-the-cultural-revolution/
- 38.
Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 2000), 175.
- 39.
Anton Silensky, “The Frankfurt School was not the Cause of Progressivism,” Social Matter (blog), August 25, 2016. https://www.socialmatter.net/2016/08/25/frankfurt-school-not-cause-progressivism/
- 40.
Ibid.
- 41.
James A. MacDonald, “The Dark Enlightenment,” Jim’s Blog (blog), September 24, 2012. https://blog.jim.com/culture/the-dark-enlightenment
- 42.
Free Northerner, “Dictionary,” Reaction Times (blog), date published unknown. Accessed May 10, 2018. https://neorxn.com/dictionary
- 43.
Ibid.
- 44.
Ibid.
- 45.
Spandrell, “Leftism is just an easy excuse,” Bloody Shovel (blog), March 1, 2015. https://bloodyshovel.wordpress.com/2015/03/01/leftism-is-just-an-easy-excuse/Spandrell
- 46.
Ibid.
- 47.
Ibid.
- 48.
Mencius Moldbug, “A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations: Chapter 1: The Red Pill,” Unqualified Reservations, January 8, 2009. https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified/
- 49.
Ibid.
- 50.
Ibid.
- 51.
Ibid.
- 52.
Ibid.
- 53.
Nick Land, “The Dark Enlightenment,” The Dark Enlightenment, February 2012, http://www.thedarkenlightenment.com/the-dark-enlightenment-by-nick-land
- 54.
Ibid.
- 55.
Ibid.
- 56.
Ibid.
- 57.
Ibid.
- 58.
Andrew Jones, “The Alt-Right Revolution in the Early 21st Century,” Geopolitical Economy Research Group, September 2017, 15.
- 59.
Robert J. Antonio, “Immanent Critique as the Core of Critical Theory: Its Origins and Developments in Hegel, Marx and Contemporary Thought,” The British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 32, No. 3, (Sept. 1981), 338.
- 60.
Rachel Ann McKinney, “The False Premises of Alt-Right Ideology: Academics Must Understand How the Alt-Right Sees the World if We Are to Resist It,” in Charlottesville: Before and After, eds. Christopher Howard-Woods, Colin Laidley, and Maryam Omidi (New York: Public Seminar Books, 2018), 135.
- 61.
Ibid, 136.
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Woods, A. (2019). Cultural Marxism and the Cathedral: Two Alt-Right Perspectives on Critical Theory. In: Battista, C., Sande, M. (eds) Critical Theory and the Humanities in the Age of the Alt-Right. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18753-8_3
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