The Serpent in the Garden: A.J.A. Woods’s history of the ‘cultural Marxism conspiracy’ (Matt McManus, May 4, 2026, Commonweal)
Woods, an intellectual historian, is interested in the role that conspiracy theories about cultural Marxism play on the right. He isn’t concerned about “refut[ing] all the claims that every critic of Cultural Marxism has made.” This is partly because so many of those claims are obviously not made in good faith. The people making them are not interested in accurately describing Marxism, cultural or otherwise. Even when critics of cultural Marxism are earnest, their theories are rarely intellectually substantive. What’s interesting is not the theories themselves but their strangely pervasive influence.
Woods shows how conservatives and far-right influencers like Paul Weyrich criticized the older American right for being “more interested in being right than winning power.” At a 2020 conference, William S. Lind, who effectively coined and popularized the term “cultural Marxism” in an American context, described its value to the right in affective rather than analytical terms. He argued that “cultural Marxism” works as a “delegitimizing tool in the United States, because many Americans regard anything even remotely Marxist as illegitimate.” As Woods writes, there was therefore no need to “quibble over definitions of Marxism or prove that political correctness is genuinely Marxist, because, as Lind claims, the American public does not generally care about these academic debates. Do not waste your time on research, Lind counsels.” The term “cultural Marxism” is best understood as a floating signifier under which the right lumps a vast array of disparate phenomena to undermine their credibility. Woods puts it well early in the book: “The elements of cultural Marxism/s have been deconstructed and reconfigured time and time again as reactionary political forces across the world search for new ways to justify their opposition to equality, democracy, and justice.”