Talk:Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory
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Some common points of argument are addressed in the FAQ below, which represents the consensus of editors here. Please remember that this page is only for discussing how to improve this article. Frequently asked questions about Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory
Q1: Why is this topic called a "conspiracy theory" in the title?
A1: Because that's what the reliable sources call it, and Wikipedia follows what reliable, independent, secondary sources say. See the sources listed in the footnotes in the lead of the article, for example. Q2: Why is it labeled "far-right" and "antisemitic" in the first sentence? Doesn't that show a biased, leftist point of view?
A2: See answer #1; because that's what the reliable sources call it; see the citations for the first sentence. Q3: Dworkin (1997) has the term in the title of his book, so the field clearly must exist.
A3: Not if he's the first one to talk about it. Dworkin said (on page 3) that "My account is the first intellectual history to study British cultural Marxism conceived as a coherent intellectual discipline". If he's the first, then either it's not a preexisting field, or no one has discovered or named it before him. Either way, that would be a different topic; this article is about the conspiracy theory dating to the 1990s. Q4: I came here to read (or edit) about scholars who apply Marxist theory to the study of culture.
A4: Much of this is covered at a different article, Marxist cultural analysis. Q5: Why is this labeled "antisemitic"? Plenty of people involved with the Frankfurt school were Jewish!
A5: This article is about the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory dating to the 1990s, and the reliable sources consistently identify it as antisemitic. The Frankfurt school is a different topic, and dates back to Germany in the 1920s. |
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A warning about certain sources: There are two sources on the subject of "Cultural Marxism" that represent a citogenesis or circular reporting risk to Wikipedia as they plagiarize verbatim directly from an outdated draft that came from Wikipedia, which can be found here (2006 revision here). The sources are N.D. Arora's Political Science for Civil Services Main Examination (2013) and A.S. Kharbe's English Language And Literary Criticism (2009); both are from publishers located in New Delhi and should be avoided to prevent a citogenesis incident. |
Usage in The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025
Yesterday an article released by Salon, and carried by Yahoo News, explicitly pointed out that the conspiracy theory "Cultural Marxism" is part of the thinking behind The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 (which is to be expected, considering Paul Weyrich's involvement with both the conspiracy theory, as well as Heritage's foundation).
I'm shopping for opinions on whether this information is pertinent to the article, and whether it might be included.
The Salon paragraphs that contain the phrase "Cultural Marxism" are as follows:
This is evident throughout Mandate for Leadership, the 920-page manifesto published earlier this year by the Heritage Foundation-led 2025 Presidential Transition Project (or Project 2025), which aims to recruit and vet up to 20,000 potential staffers for a future Republican administration after the anticipated purge. Writing in the book’s introduction, project director Paul Dans, who served in Trump’s Office of Personnel Management during his final year, breathlessly proclaims that the “long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass,” giving credence to a notorious conspiracy theory that has long floated around white supremacist circles. With the federal government ostensibly captured by "cultural Marxists” and “globalists,” Dans frantically proclaims that it has been "weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before.”
Republicans have been harboring fantasies about gutting the federal government since the Reagan era. But what distinguishes today’s right from the past is its greater willingness to employ explicitly authoritarian means to achieve their ends. Indeed, a growing number of conservatives now appear convinced that the next Republican president must be granted something close to dictatorial power if their movement is to stand a chance against the “cultural Marxists” who allegedly control the state.
With the now widespread acceptance among conservatives that the federal government and other major institutions have been captured by "cultural Marxists,” “globalists,” and “wokeists,” Republicans are now pre-programmed to accept more authoritarian leadership. This is especially the case among a younger coterie of Republicans who have come to prominence in the post-Trump era. Unlike some of their older Republican colleagues, these young Trumpians are more open to employing post-Constitutional or “extra-Constitutional” means to achieve their reactionary goals.
Interestingly enough, the Project 2025 policy document ("Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise") only appears to use the phrase cultural Marxism once, on the second page of its general introduction:
It’s not 1980. In 2023, the game has changed. The long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass. The federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before. The task at hand to reverse this tide and restore our Republic to its original moorings is too great for any one conservative policy shop to spearhead. It requires the collective action of our movement. With the quickening approach of January 2025, we have two years and one chance to get it right.
After doing a search on google news, other articles noting the connection can be found from CounterPunch, (1), The Daily Beast. (2), Politico, (3), Truthout, (4), and Washington Monthly, (5). Please feel free to contribute further opinions, sources and discussion below. Some of the questions to consider are, is this worthy of inclusion? What section should the content be in, and what should be said about it given the sources available? Thank you for any opinions you have, or help you can offer. 194.223.39.240 (talk) 09:42, 21 January 2024 (UTC)
- Thank you very much for the sources. I was waiting such sources before mentionning Project 2025 here. Since the mention of Cultural Marxism in its manifesto is only one paragraph and since the media coverture is not yet massive (especially compared ot other endorsements of the Cultural Marxism already mentionned in the wikipedia article), i think that a short mention in the wikipedia article) would suffice, something like one sentence, with all sources of course. Visite fortuitement prolongée (talk) 20:55, 21 January 2024 (UTC)
- I'd say leave it out. I suggest the Salon article at least isn't particularly reliable for analyzing whether Heritage is using the term conspiratorially; I don't think Lynch is like an expert in this subject or something, is he? Also it's considered progressive-leaning, so it could be considered biased when it comes to inferring Heritage's intent. In any case, it doesn't seem like a particularly noteworthy example of someone mentioning the term; we have plenty of other more notable examples in the article: WP:UNDUE. ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 21:41, 26 January 2024 (UTC)
- Notability for the antagonistic role of "cultural Marxism" in the "2025 Project" seems to only be increasing with time: Here's a (very recent) article in The Nation. Excerpt:
[...] In his forward, Roberts warns that the “very moral foundations of our society are in peril” from “the totalitarian cult known today as the “The Great Awokening.” This “woke Marxist” cult, Roberts charges, has infiltrated the military, the corporations, the universities, and the bureaucracy. Big Tech is “less a contributor to the US economy than it is a tool of China’s government.” Paul Dans, director of the 2025 project, writes in his introductory note,
The long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass. [...]
- I would argue this, along with the other sources already mentioned here, warrants inclusion. TucanHolmes (talk) 08:43, 9 February 2024 (UTC)
- This source doesn't argue that 2025 is using it in a conspiratorial way, though, it is instead complaining more about 2025 being bad policy. "focus is a war on equity" i.e. it's using the term in the sense of "synonymous with the 'Critical Theory'" as our article puts it. ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 19:37, 15 February 2024 (UTC)
2024-01 oppressors versus oppressed
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The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it. |
You may already know that conspiracytheories are not grounded in reality so most of conspiracytheories have variants/flavors/flavours. During the last 6 month i have read in reddit many mentions of the «oppressors versus oppressed» variant of the Cultural Marxism narrative. It claim that Marxism is not about analyzing the 19th century economy and concluding that part of the workers work is stolen by factory owners (la plus value), but that Marxism is about viewing society as a fight between oppressors and oppressed persons, so «Cultural Marxism» is just an extension of this framework to other dichotomies such men-women, black-whites, heterosexual-homosexual. I was almost worried that this variant is very little mentioned in Wikipedia, in the wikipedia article about the Cultural Marxism narrative. How fool i was!!!! Today a conspiracytheoric (an adjective i coined this month) reddit user kindly opened my eyes by linking Oppressors–oppressed distinction, which at first look
If the last 2 points are correct, then maybe maybe the page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppressors%E2%80%93oppressed_distinction should become a redirect to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_theory By the ways, among the wikipedia articles linking Oppressors–oppressed distinction is Woke, which include a paragraph about the aforementioned variant (the woke narrative and the Cultural Marxism narrative are similar and related):
Visite fortuitement prolongée (talk) 20:55, 21 January 2024 (UTC)
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“Antisemitic”
This has to be removed from the lead, as clearly one can have a non antisemitic version of this conspiracy theory. For example, the president of Argentina talks about cultural Marxism all the time, and he’s about to convert to Judaism and loves all things Jewish and Israel. 82.36.70.45 (talk) 19:15, 15 February 2024 (UTC)
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