Illustration from a Book of Hours attributed to an artist of the Ghent-Bruges school (ca. 1400s) | Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library / Public Domain Review / PD Worldwide
A specter is haunting the West—the specter of Cultural Marxism. Or at least that’s what many conservative operatives would like us to think. From military theorist William S. Lind to Texas Senator Ted Cruz, prominent right-wingers deploy “Cultural Marxism” as a catch-all for the forces behind our reputed decline: feminism, queer rights, atheism, DEI, critical race theory. At the center of the conspiracy is the Frankfurt School, a group of mostly Jewish European academics who drew from the ideas of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud to analyze capitalism’s impact on subjectivity and social relations and cultures.
Members such as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Eric Fromm may have died years ago, but many on the Right frame them as supervillains responsible for the wokeness infecting kids’ brains and eroding traditional values today. In their new book, The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy (Verso, 2026), intellectual historian A. J. A. Woods traces the unlikely origins of Cultural Marxism narratives and details the strategies that have made them so effective in the modern culture war.
Recently, Woods spoke with Austin Tannenbaum about the cynicism of belief, the limits of “conspiracy theory” as a label, and how the Left might regain its cultural footing. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Austin Tannenbaum: To start off, what is Cultural Marxism, and why were you compelled to write about it?
A. J. A. Woods: Broadly, Cultural Marxism is a right-wing explanation for why Western societies have declined over the past 60 years. These kinds of narratives tend to focus on the Frankfurt School as the agent of subversion and civilizational destruction. They suggest thinkers like Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse were the evil geniuses behind wokeness and political correctness.
I regret to say that The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy is a Trump book. It’s an idea that came to me in the wake of the first Trump electoral victory. I was living in Portland, Oregon, and participating in a critical theory meeting group. After the election, we decided to focus our discussions on the subject of the alt-right: What were the ideological and sociological impulses and trajectories feeding into Trumpism? As part of that, I would often read articles from Breitbart and other far-right media sources to see what kinds of stories and myths they were weaving. In their articles on the threat of the Left, I would find comments talking about the Frankfurt School, and particularly something called “The 11 Aims of the Frankfurt School,” which was a hoax document circulated on the internet in the 2010s and taken to be a cornerstone of Frankfurt School thinking. It included the promotion of excessive drinking, immigration, the breakdown of the family. I thought, “This doesn’t sound like the texts of Adorno or Benjamin that I’ve read in my studies.” So I decided to investigate how the Frankfurt School had come to be associated with this conspiratorial notion of the decline of the West, the decline of America, and how theory, philosophy, and the humanities are seen as a force to corrupt our kids and introduce the communist dystopia.
Tannenbaum: You name “conjunctural analysis” as your methodological approach. What is conjunctural analysis? How does it differ from other historiographical methods, and why was it useful for telling this particular story?
Woods: Conjunctural analysis is an approach that grew out of a particular interpretation of Antonio Gramsci from the British cultural studies tradition. I’m following in the footsteps of Stuart Hall, who pioneered the approach when he was writing about Thatcherism in the 1980s. The conjunctural is the space where politics happens. Gramsci contrasts the conjuncture with what he calls “the organic,” which are the larger, more permanent structural features of a society that withstand the to-and-fro of different parties competing for power. But if you’re interested in how political or ideological struggle gains momentum and eventually wins power, you want to look at that terrain of the conjunctural to see what’s going on.
I turned to conjunctural analysis because it allows me to contextualize the political organizations and movements that spread Cultural Marxism narratives within their own milieus. What were the battles they were trying to win? What were they trying to accomplish? Cultural Marxisms are not just fancy ideas they’re telling each other for entertainment. They are political weapons. They have a function, not only to accomplish things but also to help these movements conceive what their project is and what they are all about. The work of Gramsci is helpful for understanding the relationship between ideology and political organization, and he would not see them as separate; they’re actually quite reciprocal. What I do throughout the book is trace how the idea of Cultural Marxism changes depending on the political movements that take it up, because it’s shaped by the way they understand themselves and their role in politics.
Tannenbaum: You begin your history of Cultural Marxism in the 1960s, centering Lyndon LaRouche and his National Caucus of Labor Committees. He began as a Trotskyist and ended up on the far right, capitalizing on conservative foundation dollars. In your estimate, how many peddlers of the Cultural Marxism narrative are opportunists versus true believers?
Woods: The LaRouchites have an ideologically ambivalent conception of themselves. The central organizing element of LaRoucheism is elitism; that fundamental feature never changes. It’s the more superficial dressing of the ideology that shifts. I think they are always true believers in their own excellence and superiority and world historical role.
More generally, I think it is a mix. You see this a lot in [Manhattan Institute fellow and far-right activist] Christopher F. Rufo, who will say quite explicitly that he’s not interested in what critical race theory really means, what the Frankfurt School actually says, as long as he can use these misrepresentations of theory for political gain. The cynicism of the political operator is an inevitable consequence of certain kinds of ideological or political practice. When I’m writing about the New Right think-tank intellectual, for instance, the purpose of their work is not to produce lasting texts of philosophical significance. It is to produce snappy, short-term polemics that can be deployed in discourse to move public opinion. Behind that, there are probably prior political commitments, beliefs and values. But there are ways of doing politics where it becomes much easier to sacrifice the truth.
Tannenbaum: Drawing on Michel Foucault and Jack Bratich, you talk about conspiracy theories as being labeled as such by “regimes of truth” seeking to protect the mainstream consensus. How does this complicate your notion of the so-called Cultural Marxism conspiracy?
Woods: It makes things incredibly difficult for me. This book is based on my doctoral work, and in the introduction to my dissertation, I discuss how challenging it is to escape the orbit of “conspiracy panic discourse.” What I mean by that is the way mainstream intellectuals dismiss or stigmatize particular ideas as conspiracy theories. I end up putting myself in a trap where I am talking about a series of ideas that have been labeled as the “Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory,” while trying to get away from the approach of thinking about things as conspiracy theories. I reject the concept of conspiracy theory and conspiracy theorists, partially because it belongs to a quite normative or moralistic framework of thinking about ideas and intellectuals. I want to move toward a more analytical one that’s interested in seeing how they function politically and historically.
There is a danger of normalizing the narrative of Cultural Marxism because if I say it’s not a conspiracy theory, then to some people that might sound like I’m saying it’s totally real. I’m just saying that “conspiracy theory” as a concept is not always the best way to approach or understand ideas that are untrue. I think the whole theoretical apparatus behind the notion of conspiracy theory is unhelpful when it comes to actually telling the history of ideas that have been called conspiracy theories.
Tannenbaum: Unhelpful or even harmful. I work in fact-checking, and often, the response to debunking what’s labeled a conspiracy theory is “We have this privileged knowledge that the elites don’t want to know.” It supercharges belief.
Woods: Yeah, I don’t know if you remember the meme that went around of people saying you can tell the information in this post is true because underneath it there’s a fact-checking flag.
Tannenbaum: Right, nice. That segues into my next question: What about the Cultural Marxism conspiracy is conspiratorial? Gramsci and Marcuse did advocate, respectively, for an ideological “war of position” and a “long march” through cultural institutions. Where do the facts end and where does the conspiracy begin?
Woods: What’s wrong with Cultural Marxism narratives are not necessarily the claims about what the Frankfurt School said or did. It’s the attempts to discredit the movements against social oppression that grew out of the 1960s. It suggests that the people who are fighting for Black power, or women’s liberation, or gay liberation didn’t really have anything to complain about, that what was happening before was totally fine, that we should return to those kinds of traditional values. It works to explain away all political conflict and imply that the interests and demands of particular groups are illegitimate and that these groups wouldn’t engage in activism if it wasn’t for these European thinkers manipulating them.
Tannenbaum: Many of these figures promote some version of the late right-wing commentator Andrew Breitbart’s maxim “Politics is downstream from culture.” In other words: Win the cultural debate, win power. How has the Cultural Marxism narrative in particular, and the Right in general, won over electorates in recent years?
Woods: It speaks to people’s values. When people hear Rufo’s stories about critical race theory in their schools, they hear that their child is being told they’re bad because they’re the white oppressor. It thrives on a sense of righteous indignation and also victimhood. The Cultural Marxism story and also the anti–critical race theory scare is all about elites coming for you. It’s a kind of distorted picture of what is really happening. I think people do feel like they’re alienated from the conditions that shape their lives. The process of representative democracy is not really as democratic as it should be. People can relate to stories like Cultural Marxism because it’s about how they can feel out of control, or like they don’t have an influence or say in what’s going on. But it does provide a magical solution to things.
Tannenbaum: You’ve read a lot of conservative literature for this book. Did any of their arguments surprise or persuade you or get you to think differently?
Woods: I admire Paul Weyrich as a political strategist. His writings are really insightful and to read them is to understand how a movement like the New Right got off the ground, and how it became more successful than the old rights and the 1960s conservative movement. It was pragmatic and deeply organized.
Tannenbaum: You quote the cultural theorist Stuart Hall, who says, “It is always the case that the right is what it is because of what the Left is.” What should the Left be? To regain its cultural footing, must it jettison identity politics and focus on class, or is it a matter of forming better narratives around identity?
Woods: I sympathize with left-wing calls for prioritizing workplace organizing. The risk there is missing how expansive movements for the working class have been in the past. It wasn’t just “We’re interested in increasing our wages.” Within working-class communities there were multiple cultural events and activities. In the UK, for instance, you had socialist workers’ reading groups and amateur theater companies and science clubs. It was a way of struggle that became a way of life. The Left has to contend with the wreckage of neoliberalization. In contrast to the workers’ movements of the past, we live in much more alienated and atomized societies.
The identity-versus-class debate has always been a bit of a dead end because it suggests that the fight against social oppression is somehow outside the project to overturn class society. All the identities of identity politics have been forged in the context of modern capitalism and the movements to overturn them. The solution is not to turn away from identity-based struggles but to figure out how to move on from the “progressive neoliberal” form that identity politics took.
Click here to read an excerpt from The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West by A. J. A. Woods (Verso, 2026).
