What conservatives think is "the left" these days

I was recently reading an article by a libertarian who used the phrase "Post-Marx Marxism, which is mercantilist." It's a good thing I wasn't drinking coffee. Since this was the internet, I went to make a snide comment below the article which included "Everything Bad = Marxism."
As if to prove my point, someone replied to my comment with, "Marxism mixed with globalist banksterism/oligarchism/corporatism will get you to mercantilism."

It's not a secret that the right-wing in America doesn't actually know what the words "Marxism", "Communism" or "Socialism" means. After all, if anyone that they knew ever caught them reading Das Kapital they would be subjected to ridicule. Reading the cliff notes of the Communist Manifesto is about as daring as 99% of American conservatives will go.
When all of an ideology that you've been exposed to is a few phrases, and everyone you know, plus every media outlet that you listen to, says that the other side is beyond crazy, is it any surprise that "Everything Bad = The Other Side"?

These are some of the things that I've learned that conservatives believe from reading way too much right-wing articles and comments (note that Marxist, Communist, and Socialist are used interchangeably):

Marxists want people dependent upon the state. (Marx wanted to liquidate the state)

Some billionaires are openly communists.

White collar workers are not part of the working class, and they despise working class people. (class isn't determined by the color of your shirt)

Places like California are beyond saving.

Companies like Blackrock are too leftist.

So how did the right-wing arrive at a set of beliefs that even a casual reading of Marx/Lenin, or a decent knowledge of history, or just a good dictionary would disprove? I believe that it starts with the sneering classism of wealthy liberals.

Have you ever wondered why you can say "white trash" in any crowd without fear of social consequences, but you can't say "[insert any other racial group] trash"? If you talk to a liberal, it's OK because whites have it so good. But then five years ago we started seeing reports that life expectancy for working class whites was declining.
Now if the life expectancy of any race, gender, species, or genus began to decline, any scientist studying that group, let's say harbor seals, would immediately conclude that the species was under stress. What no scientist would ever do is assume that the harbor seals were asking for it. Yet that's what the media concluded in this case. A quick Google search will give you results like "Deaths of Despair: A Toxic Side Effect of Racism for Whites?"
Conservatives noticed this cultural elitism from wealthy liberals. I say wealthy because when is the last time you called wealthy people "trash" or "redneck" and associated racism with them?

An important inflection point was the passing of NAFTA, which everyone knows Clinton was responsible for. Except that is a half-truth at best.
The reality is that NAFTA was negotiated by the Reagan Administration. It was labor unions that kept it from passing Congress, until the "moderates" took over the Democratic Party. Even then a majority of Democrats voted against it ("pro-union" Biden voted for NAFTA), while Republicans were universally in favor.
I focus on NAFTA because if Free Trade Agreements aren't globalism, then what is?
One thing that conservatives absolutely hate is globalism, and the left loves it. Except that in reality it was labor unions that fought against shipping our jobs overseas for decades, and leftist groups protested against the WTO in Seattle and the IMF everywhere else, while conservatives never said "boo" until these last few years.

Right-wing antiglobalism tends to argue that globalization is an ideology advanced by Zionism, Marxism, and liberalism. Globalization is presented as a worldwide conspiracy against national identity, Western culture, or the white man...
Supporters of left-wing antiglobalism argue that the capitalist logic underlying globalization results in asymmetrical power relations (both domestically and worldwide) and in the treatment of every aspect of life—including health, education, and culture—as a commodity.

Globalism is the best example I can think of the differences between the modern right and modern left. Globalism is above all a political issue driven by capitalist economic forces. Right-wingers oppose globalism for strictly cultural reasons. That means the right has no real answers to the problems of globalism, because they don't even address the forces behind it. Modern conservatism sees virtually everything through a cultural lens. Equally important, modern conservatives think that the left is just as obsessed with culture.
To arrive at that conclusion required two things: a) taking the out-of-touch virtue signaling of wealthy liberals and recasting it as the "far-left", and b) re-inventing an obscure and mostly ignored branch of leftist thought and calling it "Marxism".

It's not a coincidence that Identity Politics has become prominent on universities at the same time that college tuition has become unaffordable to working class students. Working class people are often more concerned with economic issues. Upper-class people have more time to virtue signal.
What right-wing media did brilliantly was to take the excesses of this upper-class pastime and portray it as some sort of organized ideological project.
An example of this effort is this headline from the Heritage Foundation: Cancel Culture Is Helping Marxists Achieve Their Revolution in the West Without the Bloodshed
That may sound bizarre, because it is. It all comes down to something called Cultural Marxism.

Another name for the neo-Marxism of increasing popularity in the United States is "cultural Marxism.” This theory says the driving force behind the socialist revolution is not the proletariat—but the intellectuals. While Marxism has largely disappeared from the workers' movement, Marxist theory flourishes today in cultural institutions, in the academic world, and in the mass media.

This “cultural Marxism” goes back to Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) and the Frankfurt School. The theorists of Marxism recognized that the proletariat would not play the expected historical role as a “revolutionary subject.” Therefore, for the revolution to happen, the movement had to depend on the cultural leaders to destroy the existing, mainly Christian, culture and morality and then drive the disoriented masses to Communism as their new creed. The goal of this movement is to establish a world government in which the Marxist intellectuals have the final say. In this sense, the cultural Marxists are the continuation of what started with the Russian revolution.

There are just a few things wrong with this theory. Number One: It's batsh*t stupid. Number Two: It's the opposite, not the continuation, of the Russian Revolution.
This moron goes on to say,"The Russian Revolution was neither Russian nor proletarian." Which even a bad reading of history would disprove.
It's what you see when you are a right-wing culture warriors looking into a carnival funhouse mirror. Lyndon LaRouche first began pushing this conspiracy theory in the 1970's, but it never got picked up by the mainstream right until after the fall of the Soviet Union, coincidentally when the right was searching for another enemy.

The theory of cultural Marxism is also blatantly antisemitic, drawing on the idea of Jews as a fifth column bringing down western civilisation from within, a racist trope that has a longer history than Marxism. Like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the theory was fabricated to order, for a special purpose: the institution and perpetuation of culture war. We can even nominate an author for this lunacy: William S Lind, a polymath of the American hard right, who sought to put rightwing activism on a new footing as the cold war drew to a close...
When the Berlin Wall fell, it was time for Lind’s strategy of “cultural conservatism” to become a central strategy for US Republicans: it identified a new kind of social enemy for the right to mobilise against. The changing parameters of economic debate and the beginning of American decline demanded that conservatives embrace a politics “centred more, not less, on cultural issues” – the family, education, crime and morality. The fairytale of cultural Marxism provided a post-communist adversary located specifically in the cultural realm – academics, Hollywood, journalists, civil rights activists and feminists. It has been a mainstay of conservative activism and rhetoric ever since.

While Lind has recently become a more marginal figure, his story of cultural Marxism has proved durable and useful across the spectrum of right-wing thought because it offers so much.

If cultural Marxism really was a powerful force at universities, we would expect to see academic publications on Marx, Gramsci and critical theorists crowding out libertarian, liberal and conservative voices.
We don't.
Conservatives pushing the idea of Cultural Marxism, a term that the right-wing invented, frequently point to the scholars of the Frankfurt School like Erich Fromm, Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin.
To which leftists will respond, "Who?"
How is it that the founders of this Leftist Colossus which is on the verge of overturning the very fabric of America, are largely unknown on the left? Quite simply what we have with Cultural Marxism is a strawman, but a very useful one.
It's the missing link that binds together all of the various actors and interests on the right.
That's how you can accuse the Left of opposing free speech, while the right are the ones banning books and suppressing history taught in schools.
That's how capitalist billionaires can be accused of being leftists, even while they crush labor union and fund the Republican Party, simply because their marketing division tells them that virtue signaling for the environment is good for business.

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QMS's picture

a new suit of clothes. Left is now a misnomer. Think right then look to your left.
What do you see? Righty tighties, dirty underware and trumpet wannabees.
WTF, over? This is politics? Seems more like the theater of the absurd.

Reminds me of Firesign Theater episodes. Like the Onion, only more so.

we are all bozos on this bus

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question everything

Your summary of cultural Marxism and the supposed leftist and rightist viewpoints was excellent, very informative and very timely
Thank you

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are political constructs in which we pigeon-hole ourselves, as defined by those that wish to divide us.

It should be, in a world that moves beyond the paradigm of political bicameral division, we, the 99% against them, the 1%.

The struggle is not horizontal, it is vertical.

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In 2016 I thought that the quisling Democrats were suicidal going for wealthy liberals because they would turn coat on a dime as soon as their cultural liberalism cost them anything. I thought they were just virtue signaling. In fact they were playing a subtle reverse psychology game, promoting absurd and offensive cultural opinions and calling them liberal to divide the working class on racial/gender/etc. lines. The working class is getting too racially tolerant? Create "white privilege". Men starting to support equality for women? Make it so that families need two income then give women all the good jobs and blame everything on "toxic masculinity". It's the same divisiveness, just switched.

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On to Biden since 1973

janis b's picture

@doh1304

It addresses the state of modern males.

"A lot of men hear this message from mainstream society that there's something wrong with them, there's something 'toxic' about them. When there aren't positive messages about masculinity it's very easy to understand why they'd then be attracted to extreme figures on the right. I saw it in my own sons.”

Although there's growing awareness of the cultural issues facing boys and men, reactionary people from both fringes of the political spectrum have tended to dominate the conversation, Reeve says.

When people told him it too was risky for a self-described "pretty liberal slash egalitarian" scholar to wade in on gender politics, he knew it was the right thing to do.

"So many unreasonable people have dominated this debate. We need more reasonable people who are interested in the data, who are interested in solutions, who are… occasionally, dare I say it, a little bit dull.

"We don't need more polemics, we don't need a culture war around this. What we need is stuff that actually helps real people in the real world."

With the loss of traditionally male jobs, we need public policy to encourage men into industries that have traditionally been female-dominated, Reeve says.

'We do have to take very seriously the barriers men face going into those professions just we did the barriers for women going into male-dominated professions.'

https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/afternoons/audio/2018863334/wh...

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Big Al's picture

but maybe that was just a false narrative from the beginning. I certainly agree relative to the 1 percent, or even more miniscule than that, like the .01%, i.e., the frigging billionaires, et al, but the 99% thing I've duly soured on as I've gotten older and seen what happened over the last two plus years. To me, it's like, you're either with us or against us, and if you're not with us, you're with them. There are a lot of people with them and will never be with us. A lot of true colors have been shown. Smile

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@Big Al
my brother.

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mimi's picture

@Big Al
I remember something about you, but forgot what it was./;-)

It sucks getting old. Stay younger. Welcome back.
With all due respect to gjohnsits analysis, I can only understand simple stuff. So to me it seems that everything one says different to the narrative of TPTB is by default to the left. And who still dares to say anything against them?

Be well and stay for a while.

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Big Al's picture

meant to reply to the comment by JtC. Hi dude.

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janis b's picture

@Big Al

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Big Al's picture

@janis b A pleasure to see Ms. Janis, wasn't if from New Zealand? I suppose I'm always rusty when it comes to plucking the keyboard.

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janis b's picture

@Big Al

Good to see you too and hope you're doing well.

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Lookout's picture

it is no longer left and right, but globalist and anti-globalist... because there's plenty of both the right and the left in each camp.

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

"Marxism mixed with globalist banksterism/oligarchism/corporatism will get you to mercantilism."

First of all, they could shorten their subject to "Marxism mixed with Jews," because that is what they are dog-whistling. But how this works to bring about mercantilism--the 17th century idea that all economies should promote exports and eliminate imports (see the contradiction here?) is a mystery.

Not that they know what Marxism is either. They can apply their Q-theories about child cannibalism in pizza basements or schools forcing kids to use litter boxes (the formerly sane Tulsi Gabbard fell for that one in her recent decent into MAGA hell).

The Orange Trump attempted to return to mercantilism, but it didn't take Marxists or Jews to get him there--unless you could children-in-cages Stephen Miller. And everything the former guy tried, it collapsed. Except for his tax cuts for billionaires, which is collapsing us in an inflationary spiral.

Take two hits of horse dewormer and call me in the morning . . .

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@SancheLlewellyn
I got a bunch of replies from conservatives. Several called me a Commie. No surprise there.
A couple called me ignorant, claimed to know what Marxism is, and promptly proved that they didn't.
But most of them proved exactly my point here - that they are obsessed with the culture wars.

I remain convinced that the culture wars are there primarily to distract the working class from the fact that they are being robbed blind by the ruling class. And that the ruling class is guilty of criminal mismanagement that is leading the country to a disastrous economic collapse.

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Sima's picture

@gjohnsit

I remain convinced that the culture wars are there primarily to distract the working class from the fact that they are being robbed blind by the ruling class. And that the ruling class is guilty of criminal mismanagement that is leading the country to a disastrous economic collapse.

Is exactly it, exactly!

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If you're poor now, my friend, then you'll stay poor.
These days, only the rich get given more. -- Martial book 5:81, c. AD 100 or so
Nothing ever changes -- Sima, c. AD 2020 or so

Cassiodorus's picture

@Sima "economic collapse" is something they're "threatening" you with when, for many people, it's already happened... another example that comes to mind right away is abortion rights -- when Dobbs came out, there were a fair number of red states where women couldn't get abortions anyway, because the pseudo-Christian Right had already scared the clinics away...

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The ruling classes need an extra party to make the rest of us feel as if we participate in democracy. That's what the Democrats are for. They make the US more durable than the Soviet Union was.

Cassiodorus's picture

is Mark Levin's book American Marxism. (The review in the link speaks for itself, so I'll just leave it at that.)

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The ruling classes need an extra party to make the rest of us feel as if we participate in democracy. That's what the Democrats are for. They make the US more durable than the Soviet Union was.