Cover image for The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West by A. J. A. Woods (Verso, 2026)
In July 1998, Lind was invited to speak at an Accuracy in Academia (AIA) conference. Founded in 1985, AIA was set up to expose instances of political bias on American campuses. Its founder, Reed Irvine, believed that universities were indoctrinating students with progressive ideologies rather than teaching them facts and logic. Although the organization claimed to uphold academic freedom, it instigated several quasi-McCarthyistic witch hunts against left-leaning professors. They recruited classroom spies, compiled databases of progressive academics, and harassed countless lecturers. Ironically, the ideologues of AIA were bemoaning ideological uniformity as they were actively trying to punish anyone who did not conform to their own conservative standards of correct thinking. At the 1998 conference, Irvine assembled a line-up of anti–political correctness speakers who could share stories about left-wing madness on the modern American campus. Lind’s co-panelists included Peter LaBarbera, the leader of the anti-gay lobby group Americans for Truth about Homosexuality, and Christina Hoff Sommers, an American Enterprise Institute fellow whose 1994 book Who Stole Feminism? eviscerated contemporary feminist thought and activism.
In his own talk, Lind promised to reveal the Marxist prehistory of political correctness. He outlined five parallels between classical Marxism and Cultural Marxism. First, Lind said, both Marxisms were totalitarian. Just as communist bureaucrats censored and imprisoned dissidents, college activists penalized anyone who uttered an insensitive comment. The second similarity was their single-factor explanation of history. Whereas classical Marxism insisted that economics determined history, Cultural Marxism held that power—defined primarily in racial and sexual terms—was the sole determining force of historical events. Their third shared trait was an inflexible definition of good and evil. The villainous bourgeoisie and heroic proletariat of classical Marxism had become the infamous white male—the oppressor—and innocent minority—the oppressed—of political correctness. By comparing affirmative action to Soviet dekulakization, Lind tried to convince his audience that expropriation was the fourth link between classical and Cultural Marxism. “Diversity quotas,” Lind stated, expropriated college admissions from talented white students and redistributed them to undeserving Black and Hispanic applicants. The fifth and final likeness was a self-confirming method of analysis. Classical Marxists obeyed the laws of Marxist economics; Cultural Marxists brandished the weapons of Derridean theory.
Of course, these parallels relied on caricatures of the practices that Lind associated with political correctness. He even exhibited some of these so-called Marxist qualities—inflexible definition of good and evil, single-factor explanation of history, self-confirming method of analysis—in his own characterizations of Cultural Marxism. Despite the superficiality of Lind’s account, his list of comparisons served an implicit rhetorical strategy. He assumed that ordinary Americans would refuse to accept affirmative action or literary theory if they believed that these things were simply new incarnations of the old Marxist claptrap. In this 1998 speech, Lind unfolded a timeline of personalities and events to prove that the Frankfurt School was wholly responsible for importing political correctness to the United States.
According to Lind, Cultural Marxism was born in the aftermath of World War I. Contrary to Marx’s predictions, the industrial workers of Western Europe were more willing to don military uniforms and die for their countries than unite with the global proletariat and overthrow their rulers. Several Marxist thinkers felt compelled to figure out why the European working class lacked revolutionary fervor. The theorists Lukács and Gramsci eventually offered a convincing explanation: The workers were too attached to Judeo-Christian values and thus felt no desire to overturn the capitalist system. They urged communists to come up with a strategy that could undermine the West’s cultural foundations. Following Lukács and Gramsci’s advice, Felix Weil established what Lind calls a “think tank” in Frankfurt, Germany—the Institute for Social Research—to devise a Marxist masterplan for destroying Western civilization.
Under Max Horkheimer’s leadership, the Frankfurt School converted the pseudoscience of Marxist economics into the pseudo-philosophy of political correctness. Horkheimer mixed Marxist and Freudian ingredients to brew a noxious philosophical concoction called Critical Theory, which Lind misconstrues as “the most destructive criticism possible, in every possible way, designed to bring the current order down.” Horkheimer’s corrosive Critical Theory became the intellectual basis for women’s studies, Black studies, and queer studies. Those who taught and researched in these disciplines, Lind suggested, were not producing knowledge but, rather, intensifying cultural drift.
Within the mirror realm of Lind’s historical imagination, the Frankfurt School’s Cultural Marxism appeared as the evil twin of FCF’s cultural conservatism. Critical Theory, Lind implied, was nothing more than a set of left-wing single-issue campaigns. Erich Fromm criticized traditional gender roles to argue that sexual difference was a social construct and thus gave rise to second-wave feminism. Marcuse celebrated “poly-morphous perversity” as a mode of sexual expression, which, in turn, inspired the gay liberation movement. Horkheimer, through his writings on materialism and nature, brought about modern environmentalism. Lind’s retrospective readings of the Frankfurt School imply that the feminist, LGBTQ+, and environmentalist movements were mere slaves to an ideology rather than rational people with serious complaints about particular social problems.
When young college radicals started to protest the Vietnam War in the 1960s, they fumbled about for some sort of theory to intellectualize their revolt. These sophomoric subversives were not clever enough, Lind judged, to master Marx’s Capital, so they turned to Marcuse’s 1955 Eros and Civilization for inspiration. Marcuse urged these quasi-Marxists to indulge their sexual desires, resist the compulsions of the Protestant ethic, and refuse to conform to existing society. Not only did Marcuse teach his students to rebel against sexual repression, but he also told them to engage in political persecution. To provide his AIA audience with a scapegoat for political correctness, Lind decided to quote the famous controversial line from Marcuse’s 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance”: “intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movement from the Left.” According to Lind, Marcuse replaced parental authority with a kind of paternalistic authoritarianism.
Like the rest of the New Right’s social critiques, Lind’s attack on campus activism was simultaneously and subtextually a defense of “family values.” In the 1960s, New Left activists rebelled against the in loco parentis rules of the capitalist university. As Melinda Cooper explains, these rules transplanted “the intimate normativity of the Fordist family into a wider institutional context, radiating its discipline well beyond the confines of the family home into the liminal social space of the college campus, where students were considered neither complete adults nor children.” The regime of in loco parentis empowered administrators and dorm officials not only to regulate behavior, dress codes, and alcohol consumption, but also to monitor and restrict sexual activity. Female students were subject to strict curfews and clothing rules. Students could be expelled for homosexuality. For Southern Black students, in loco parentis functioned as a semi–Jim Crow regime to discourage civil rights activism. The discipline of in loco parentis was designed to adapt these students to the norms of the new knowledge economy. As noted in the last chapter, graduates were expected to assume professional-managerial roles in industries that supported America’s neo-colonial wars around the world. Instead of accepting their place in this system, college radicals resisted the patronizing rules of in loco parentis and protested the hegemonic order that staged military interventions in Southeast Asia. The New Right’s reaction to this student revolt was partially an effort to preserve the family-based cultural order that legitimated inequality and oppression in the United States and elsewhere.
Even as a young man, Lind saw the New Left as a threat to this civilizational order. In the late 1960s, he was a baby-faced undergraduate at Dartmouth College. While his contemporaries —including future Secretary of Labor Robert Reich—were getting involved in left-wing causes, Lind was running the Dartmouth Conservative Society and editing its journal, The Conservative Idea. In the pages of this student publication, he defended Rhodesia’s white-minority government and pilloried the “black power” movement. His most fiery and trenchant articles, however, were leveled at Dartmouth’s increasingly radical student body. In a February 1968 essay, “The Real Failure of Dartmouth College,” Lind declaimed that “large and growing numbers of students” possessed an “intellectual outlook” that was “totally divorced from reality.” Unsurprisingly, Lind’s positions did not make him popular on campus. Former acquaintances remember him as arrogant and argumentative. Others recall that Lind tried to organize a rally in support of the Vietnam War on the college green. Fifty people turned up with pro-war signs. They were soon outnumbered by 1,500 counter-protesters. For Lind, Cultural Marxism/s may have provided some sort of post hoc rationalization for why so many of his peers turned against conservative politics in the 1960s. The teachings of the Frankfurt School had imprisoned his classmates in an ideological fantasy world where the well-crafted arguments of The Conservative Idea could no longer reach them. Political correctness, according to Lind, was simply the latest phase of this rebellion against the real world rather than a clumsy attempt to relieve the friction of an unequal society.
In the Q&A session after his talk, Sommers pushed Lind to tone down his inflated rhetoric. Dealing with political correctness, she joked, was not as bad as living in North Korea. In a gruff response, Lind retorted that many Americans were living through a period of “quasi-judicial terror.” It was not, in his opinion, a time for moderation. The enemy—Cultural Marxism—needed to be defeated, without delay, before Frankfurt School–inspired tyranny engulfed the American republic.
Unlike other, more well-reasoned critiques of political correctness, Lind’s AIA talk offered a dramatic single-factor explanation of history and attributed all-encompassing cultural power to Frankfurt School ideas. As far as Lind was concerned, there were no broader social or material forces that might explain the contested status of free speech on campuses, the heated debates about revising and expanding the canon, and the introduction of new perspectives into certain academic disciplines. The only possible cause of political correctness in the United States was the arrival of the Frankfurt School in the 1930s. This belief—that “bad ideas” are the principal engine of cultural decline—was a key tenet of US conservative thought. The postwar American right, Nash explains, kept to this position, because it felt “easier to resist one’s age if ‘only’ ideas and not ‘forces’ seem[ed] to be the foe.” If bad ideas caused social disorder, then good ideas could presumably re-order society. After all, the production and popularization of so-called good ideas was the whole point of the New Right intellectual. This is what motivated Lind’s activity: If he could spread his narrative of Cultural Marxism/s to a large enough audience of ordinary Americans, then they would have no choice but to reject political correctness and embrace cultural conservatism. To accomplish this goal, he reduced the Frankfurt School’s theories to soundbites, buzzwords, and other compressed forms that circulated more efficiently through the New Right’s communicative infrastructure. It may be easy to mock Lind’s misunderstandings, but he was merely following Weyrich’s wisdom: Winning power is more important than being right. What Lind’s work lacked in depth of research or rigor of analysis was made up for by its sheer communicability. He simply needed to get the message out there. And a year after this AIA talk, Lind would appear on television to transmit his ideas of Cultural Marxism/s into the living rooms of America.
Excerpted 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). Used with permission.
Click here to read A. J. Woods’s conversation with Austin Tannenbaum on the limits of “conspiracy theory” as a label and how the Left might regain its cultural footing.
