In the following series, I will outline the origins of cultural Marxism, the neuroses of American conservatism, and a solution to unify conservatism beneath the banner of ideology.
This article begins the discussion by outlining the origins of cultural Marxism and its relation to current events.

Although hardly discussed outside small academic circles, the formation of The University of Frankfurt Institute for Social Research (ISR) is among the most significant sociopolitical events in the history of Europe and the Western world. When Communism fell alongside the Soviet Union, the West had only won half the battle. After the defeat of the overtly martial caste of Stalinist Marxists, another caste continued, struggling in a war of attrition against the culture and institutions that had defeated the Soviets. Marx's mantle passed from the Communist Bloc to a calculating group of socialites and academics who better understood the implications of Das Kapital. They worked tirelessly in the shadows to undermine the West. We are at war today with a different sort of social Marxism than we knew in decades past. The old strategies do not work because this is a different enemy altogether.
The Context of The ISR
Dramatic changes took hold of the Western world at the end of the eighteenth century, precipitated by two significant shifts in European power. First, the monarchies had grown weary after fighting colonial wars abroad, while at home, they were failing to maintain a grasp on the minds of their subjects. It had been common since the Middle Ages that the lower classes did not resent their lieges unnecessarily. Still, as the Enlightenment increased, the common man grew bolder in his attitude. Moreover, the great powers enjoyed a relative philosophical monopoly due to the careful organization of education by the Church and the upper class. As their projection of domestic power waned, the political consciousness of the population increased, and enlightenment philosophies seeped into the public discourse.
Compared to his ancestors in the Middle Ages, enlightened man could travel further, own more property, and learn to think in new ways. With the world's increasing interconnectedness came more Enlightenment and liberation for all. The lower classes began to enjoy a level of personal agency once reserved for nobles.
The second reason for change was the invention of Capitalism. For generations, nobles leveraged mercantile economics to their advantage, settling the far corners of the earth and transitioning the European economy from agrarianism to industrialization. With machines and automation, the lower classes had an opportunity to amass more wealth within one lifetime than their ancestors would have dreamed possible. The Industrial Revolution brought social mobility to ordinary people. It afforded them the dream of an egalitarian future, where economies and industries, rather than sovereign mandates, direct the courses of nations. Thus, Capitalism, born during the height of European imperialism, would soon eliminate the nobles and their mercantile economics for good. As empires democratized, liberty replaced fealty, and by the turn of the nineteenth century, every man became his own king.
Along with the resources and education of the nobility, enlightened man secured new verbiage to describe the phenomenon of wealth-based class struggle. Some authors, such as Adam Smith, celebrated the empowerment of all men through free exchange and economic independence—the successful enterprising of ordinary men seemed to warrant the upending of mercantilism. However, while disentangling the state and the economy resulted in more liberty for man, it paradoxically worsened class divides.
This inequality pushed others toward skepticism, and recognizing that the unbridled power of Capitalism could achieve the same degree of social control as mercantilism, but the benefits that a ruling class brings. Joseph Wydemeyer and Carl Marx were among the first to describe the new economic situation by degrees of material wealth rather than land or vocation, using language like proletariat and bourgeois and distinguishing class by relation to private property and economic productivity. As quickly as the industries of Europe grew, so did the array of philosophies concerned with wealth and class.
By now, martial power alone had ceased to ensure that subjects abroad would remain loyal to the crown at home. The colonial powers needed to decrease social consciousness by divesting economic interests into the hands of the lower classes. Underscoring this urgency, the lower classes began to organize liberation movements and call for reformation. Where words failed, they revolted against the nobility. Some governments acted quickly to preserve the rule of law, reforming themselves to allow more representation of the lower classes. The more inflexible regimes met revolts with military suppression (as in the case of the French.)
Nearly as often as the proletariats could facilitate Marxist revolutions, they fragmented into disarray; so nuanced and diverse was the range of Marxist philosophy that even a minor policy disagreement could result in schismatic setbacks to the people's agendas. This pitfall is most evident in the aftermath of the 1917 October Revolution, when Lenin's death left significant policy decisions in the hands of his lieutenants, Trotsky and Stalin. We now remember them as two of the most prominent schismatics in Marxist history.
After the partition of Leninism and subsequent failures of Bolshevik revolutions across the rest of Europe, a coalition of the most prominent Marxist academics sought to establish a corpus of pure Marxist policy and rhetoric that would elevate the movement from reactionaryism into a coordinated agenda. By doing this, they essentially invented ideology. In 1923, these academics ( who included Felix Weil, Carl Grunberg, Eric Fromm, Theodore Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse) established the Institute for Social Research (ISR) at Goethe University, Frankfurt. Better known as the Frankfurt School, it served as a breeding ground for those variants of Marxist philosophy that have outlasted the Soviet Bloc and survived into the modern era. Marxism-Leninism collapsed inwards, and Maoist China reformed itself to incorporate Keynesian Capitalism. However, one strain of Marxist thought still permeates the Western world thanks to the efforts of the ISR.
Understanding Critical Theory
Appreciating the effectiveness of the ISR's undertakings requires a broad understanding of critical theory (CT). Philosophies follow structures like family trees in such a way that the works of one philosopher usually depend upon the works of his predecessor. Critical theory is no exception. While most people are only vaguely familiar with CT as a buzzword, a dishearteningly vast body of work is responsible for its existence. Critical theory begins with Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, who adopted and modified Hegel's dialectical method. For Hegel, history unfolds through a dialectic process: thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Hegel believed this dialectical process was driven by ideas (thus Hegelian idealism). Marx flipped this on its head with materialism, wherein he surmises that material conditions drive history rather than ideas. In this case, material conditions are almost always synonymous with economics.
For Marx, material conflicts between classes shape each stage of history. Most of his writings concerned economic theories and Capitalism, and these observations form the basis of Critical Theory. Per Marx, history flows from material conditions like the material base (the means of production and labor relations) and a philosophical superstructure (culture, politics, and ideology) that society creates to justify and sustain the economic system. The dominant ideas in society serve the ruling class's interests to keep the working class quiet and obedient. Marx predicted that the 'self-contradictions' inherent in Capitalism would eventually lead to its downfall. He believed the working class would eventually become aware of their exploitation, increase their class consciousness, and revolt.
Despite Marx's predictions, Capitalism avoided these pitfalls by relying on state intervention (primarily satisfying the need for collective ownership) and reforming itself with policy innovations such as workplace regulation, minimum wages, and labor unions. When it became clear that Capitalism would not collapse as Marx had predicted, his descendants reformed Marxism to compensate. They retained the terms material base and superstructure but realized that cultural institutions (e.g., media and education), rather than economic institutions, perpetuate the superstructures of domination.
With such a breakthrough, the ISR worked to perfect an application of this theory. Horkheimer and Adorno were instrumental in this. The only way to free mankind was to expose the culture, ideology, and institutions that perpetuate systems of oppression, enabling individuals to challenge and dismantle them. This was the ideological imperative of Critical Theory.
To free mankind, they set their sights on the obvious targets like religion and Neoplatonic philosophy. However, they also began to target the Enlightenment itself, arguing that the tools of human liberation (reason, science, and progress) were co-opted into new systems of domination. Since reason itself could not be trusted, there was nowhere else to turn but non-reason. The most significant concept formalized by the ISR for their mission was the culture industry, which describes how mass media and entertainment are used to control and pacify populations, distracting them from critical thought and revolutionary action by offering escapist entertainment and reinforcing the status quo.
From here, the last component they needed was a post-modern anti-Truth philosophy. They turned critical theory into a tool for destabilizing all systems of social control and picking apart any social institutions which, in theory, would prevent the increase of class consciousness. Max Horkheimer was primarily involved with adapting critical theory from Marx's works, but Herbert Marcuse created the ISR's final product, critical social theory. In its simplest form, it suggests that human history is a struggle between oppressors and the oppressed. From these lines of reasoning, the most powerful civilization in history has been picked apart and brought to its knees. While total implementation would take nearly seventy years, it began to erode the foundations of the Western world almost immediately, launching our culture into utter madness.
The greatest victory for Marxism was the unification of its most potent philosophies under one all-encompassing ideology; the transition from a reactionary movement against the new capitalist economic system into a powerful and measurable formula was made possible by the academic determination of Fromm, Horkheimer, and Marcuse. Were it not for these, Marxism may have been left in the rubble of the USSR. Instead, Marxism merely changed tactics. Drawing inspiration from the Maoist 'People's War,' it became a pathology and flowed freely through the cultural roots of Western society. The ISR's goal was to end Capitalism, not to reform it. Counter-intuitively, this meant ushering in the final, dying stage of Capitalism; by carving out its very soul, they created the immoral, hyper-consumerist corporate dystopia that we are familiar with today. Worse, because of the pathology involved in this process, enough of the Western population has been made drunk off the rotten fruits of cultural decay and social Marxism that to purge these from our institutions would be a messy and violent endeavor. Riding ourselves of the Marxist toxins would be an undertaking that would not have bothered the French revolutionaries of the late 1700s, but in the modern era, we seem to have lost the stomach for such a thing.
To accelerate Capitalism, the Marxists eroded the foundations of the West: Christianity, Neoplatonic philosophy, individual sovereignty, and especially the presupposition that mankind is inherently evil. They misconstrued the divide between church and state. They interpreted the Bill of Rights as a list of things the government expressly cannot do (thus inferring that everything else is permissible.) They increasingly exposed the public to the things that erode man's conscience and ability to self-govern. The Marxists knew that politics lie downstream from culture and that the character of man's heart directly influences the rule of law. They became teachers and professors, radicalizing the youth with an aversion to individual responsibility and inclining them towards class consciousness, victim mentality, and revolution.
Today, because of the efforts of a unified Marxist front, there are more young Marxists than ever before, although they are hardly aware of it. Unlike the revolutions of the twentieth century, which Marxists paid for in blood, all that is required to be a revolutionary today is to reject one's American heritage and the Christian moral foundations of our society. The new school of Marxism ( a double meaning since after being expelled from Germany, the ISR relocated to Columbia University and called itself 'The New School') has created the conditions for a peaceful revolution by simply possessing a critical majority of the idea economy.
While I could fill volumes with the refutation of Marxism and critical theory, the lesson from the story of social Marxism is clear. Conservatism has been failing for decades because it is not an ideology but something that has always existed in reaction to something else. While the ISR Marxists had an agenda and a specified goal, conservatism is loosely defined by a set of values and attitudes, but even conservatives cannot agree on all of these. Some describe conservatism as a devotion to small government, while others consider it the defense of traditional values. Conservatism still exists in America as a tangible force; the most recent election of Donald Trump proves this, but it is rife with self-contradiction. President Trump is a unifying figure to conservatives because he stands opposed to the vast body of cultural Marxism; the Republican party has been unable to produce another candidate like him. When Trump is gone, there will be no candidate to replace him, nobody to unify conservatism, and even if a similar candidate arises, they and Trump would still be reactionaries rather than ideologues.
Conservatism needs a reset, and this will happen in the same way that the Marxists pathologized their philosophies into an ideology. There must be an imperative, a foundation, and a consensus.
To that end, the following article will discuss the history of conservatism and examine the divisions within.
Well put. Your best article to date. This is quite literally the pinnacle of critical analysis of what has happened to the west, and done in such a short and succinct manner. I was hanging on every word, captivated, captivated, captivated. Well done sir.
Excellent analysis of how we have come to the brink of the 'Death of the West'. And very succinctly put, also.
I find it difficult to understand how easy it is to get young people to '"reject their heritage and the foundations of our society." I was encouraged during this election cycle that many Americans rejected what we loosely call the ' woke' ideology. I am looking forward to your solution for building a strong conservative 'reset'.