The Threat, The Cure… Cultural Marxism In America
By DEACON MIKE MANNO
Last fall two of the Heritage Foundation’s fellows, Mike Gonzalez and Katharine C. Gorka, issued a report that everyone should read. It is entitled “How Cultural Marxism threatens the United States — and How Americans Can Fight it.” I’ll provide a link to it at the end.
The report succinctly lays out the case against the Marxist left, its origins in Communist political thought and how it has morphed — with the help of the Academy — into the movement that threatens the viability of our precious nation. It begins:
“In 1989, as the Soviet empire was crumbling, The New York Times noted an interesting new development: While millions who had lived under the brutal rule of Communism for decades were finally throwing off their yoke, Marxist professors were taking over American academia.” Then quoting the Times article, it concluded:
“As Karl Marx’s ideological heirs in Communist nations struggle to transform his political legacy, his intellectual heirs on American campuses have virtually completed their own transformation from brash, beleaguered outsiders to assimilated academic insiders.”
Here, in a nutshell, is what happened: Marxism and Communism lost their clout in the United States over a very simple point: Capitalism worked. It had proved itself capable of doing what Marxism and Communism was unable to do: Provide for the needs of all. Marxism, on the other hand, relied on the proletariat to rise against their oppressors, the bourgeoisie, those owning property and the means of production which labor lacked.
The rise against the property owners would need to be violent.
But that violent rebellion was no longer necessary. Capitalism had proved that men could rise above their lowly conditions to provide for themselves and their families. Thus, being a member of the proletariat class was not a permanent status. Capitalism had shown that while not all might be able to obtain great wealth, they could rise their standard of living within the system, and could even become rich themselves.
Since the lower class could improve their situations, the allure of Marxism lost its shine. They then must re-package this whole ideology to find a substitute for the proletariat, who were not tied to the class struggle as much as the Communist propaganda had relied upon.
In short, the ideal new “class” were people who could not leave their tribe, those who had immutable characteristics which could not be thrown off as poverty could. Thus, the cultural Marxists focused on race, sex, national origin, emphasizing the “cancer of human history” is the white race, thus creating non-whites, women, and racial minorities as the poor and oppressed, the new proletariat.
While this was bubbling up during the 1980s, the American Marxists had been spending generations infiltrating college and university campuses with scores of tenured professors ready to heed the call for Cultural Marxism, the result of which we are seeing today, as the report notes:
“Today’s cultural Marxists believe that the reason economic, social, cultural, academic, and health outcomes (to name just a few) show persistent racial disparities is because of a pervasive, systemic racism that can only be eliminated by smashing the system itself. The quickest way to do that is to create a never-ending number of racial and country-of-origin categories (such as Hispanics and Asian Americans, both created by government fiat in 1977 at the insistence of leftist activists), the members of which would be instilled with grievances about the disparity of these outcomes, to the point that they will want to become active soldiers in smashing the system.
“The Marxist narrative that all of society for all of history has been divided into categories of the oppressed and their oppressors is played over and over. The government, and all society, the purveyors of CRT say, must thus treat people not as individuals with liberties, but as categories that deserve special treatment and benefits as members of these categories.
“What is happening today, therefore, is nothing more than this age’s identity category version of Marx’s 19th-century claim that, because individuals have different abilities, and because they belong to different classes, their rights must differ. According to Marx, if government or society in general were to grant people equal individual rights (such as to consumption and services), material inequality (the bugaboo of all Marxists then and now) would ensue.”
Or, as the “anti-racist” Ibram X. Kendi stated, “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” Thus, the government must discriminate in favor of those categories of people deemed oppressed.
Marxism, through its base in the Academy, has been able to spread its tentacles throughout society with concepts such as DEI (Diversity Equity and Inclusion), CRT (Critical Race Theory), the “trans” movement, and the adoption of environmental controls through ESG (Environment, Social, Government) rules which require corporate boards to place greater emphasis on the environment and diversity than on return on investment which is being imposed on markets by asset firms such as BlackRock by using their ability to vote shares of stock over which they have control, but no ownership.
What about cancel culture? The report says, “Because of that absolutism, cultural Marxism cannot tolerate or co-exist with other worldviews. It demands censorship, which began as ‘political correctness’ but has since veered into the far more insidious censorship, which leads inevitably to tyranny (as Marxism always has everywhere it has been tried). It punishes alternative views by attempting to drive those who express them from public life, a phenomenon dubbed ‘“cancel culture’.”
The report did lay out a strategy for defeating cultural Marxism.
Focus locally, it says. While most folks are looking to national trends and politics, most of the damage being done by the cultural Marxists is done on a local platform: school boards, colleges, and local officials who control public funds and operate under the radar. Of course, that is not to diminish the importance of national politics, it’s just at the local level that the rubber hits the road.
Take back education, the writers urge. They point out how Gov. Ron DeSantis used legislative power to retake control of the schools in Florida. That same power can be harnessed by local officials determined to break the influence of the Marxists.
Another suggestion is using existing laws on child abuse to prosecute those who are sexualizing our children. If the laws you need in your jurisdiction do not protect children, work to change them.
There are several other suggestions made, but a twelve hundred word essay can’t cover the richness of the report, so I urge you to read it yourself at: https://www.heritage.org/progressivism/report/how-cultural-marxism-threatens-the-united-states-and-how-americans-can-fight
The co-author of the report, Katharine C. Gorka, is scheduled to be on my Faith On Trial program this week. You’ll be able to find it using the link below, look for Episode 366.
(You can reach Mike at: DeaconMike@q.com and listen to him every weekend on Faith On Trial or podcast at https://iowacatholicradio.com/faith-on-trial/)
