In an unspeakably dumb piece by Sam Leith, a scribbler who resides somewhere in England, the Right is accused of trying to destroy Marxism through association with “Cultural Marxism.” According to Leith, this is nothing more than a trick for going after Marxism, which obviously can mean more than one thing: “There is no one Marxism, just as there is no one capitalism.” [The latest way to insult the left | You're a "Cultural Marxist." Oh yes you are, by Sam Leith, Prospect Magazine, March 17, 2018] Leith explicitly denounces University of Toronto professor of psychology, Jordan Peterson, who has become an Alt-Lite internet celebrity. It seems that Peterson has been complaining on authorized conservative outlets that Marxists are taking over Canada by backing feminist attempts to control our speech.

As someone who has written entire books on these subjects, it seems to me that Leith and Peterson are equally full of hot air. Marxism does not signify many things, except to sophists and to ignoramuses in the American Conservative Movement. It is a materialist interpretation of history that plots human development in relation to a socialist final age. Feminism, LGBT advocacy, anti-anti-Semitism and antiracism have no intrinsic connection to Marxism and its understanding of economics and history, except as disposable tools in promoting the eventual advent of a socialist society. Communist parties and Communist regimes typically denounced and punished sexual deviants and early Cultural Marxist troublemakers for easily determined reasons: they viewed them as bourgeois decadents who undermine working class morality.

Cultural Marxists, latter day disciples of the Frankfurt School, or whatever else we choose to call our cultural and political pacesetters, are a different story altogether. They are cultural radicals who view white, Christian bourgeois society as a “fascist” enemy and who are determined to erase this presumed curse at almost any price. This zeal does not proceed from Marx’s understanding of the historical process. Moreover, if Cultural Marxists have achieved more than real Marxists in taking over and poisoning Western societies, it’s because they’ve enjoyed widespread cooperation from the political “moderates,” designated minorities, and college-brainwashed women.

The yelping that we hear from Republicans and cuckservatives about the Marxist or socialist danger diverts attention from the far more perilous post-Marxist Left.  Peterson is so beloved to the Conservative Establishment in a way that I (for example) am not because he conjures up a Marxist danger that, in fact, is already past. He doesn’t rattle his sponsors by focusing on the far more threatening successor to the Marxist Left—one that is alive and well and exerting intellectual hegemony over much of Conservatism Inc.

Peterson also speaks positively about feminism and other causes that moved us toward the Left before they “came off the rail.” For example, Second-Wave feminism was great up until the moment it morphed into a Third Wave. Apparently the engines of progress could have been turned off a few years ago; and if they conveniently had, we would have been spared a Totalitarian Cultural Left.

But the rush of recent historical developments rarely stop at the point where our Conervatism Inc. leaders would like them to.