I’ve spent a fair deal of time–way too much, actually–trying to get a handle on the Jordan Peterson phenomenon. And it is best to distinguish JP the phenomenon from JP the person, because from I can tell, they are indeed quite different and distinct.

I’m going to state at the outset what I had originally put in my conclusion. That:

1.) The Jordan Peterson phenomenon is mainly caused by our failure to take the pain of men, especially young men, seriously.

Men, especially white men, today are dealing with an impossible series of challenges. There are few satisfying roles for them in society anymore. They are ridiculed. They feel persecuted. They feel unloved. The rise of the Sheconomy has made the only jobs on offer for men ones that they don’t particularly enjoy doing or are not particularly suited for. Even in the few fields that are still (temporarily) male-dominated, such as computer programming, we are told that that this means we have a “diversity problem” that needs to be corrected, while no one frets about the paltry number of male home health care aides or registered nurses. Men are blamed for creating and sustaining a system that is shortening their own lifespans, and one that men feel is increasingly stacked against them (for example, child support and visitation rights).

Men quickly find that their natural interests do not overlap with what society wants or needs anymore, and their inclinations are seen as inherently boorish and cruel. They find that the traits that make them desirable as workers make them undesirable as romantic partners. They find video games and pot more satisfying than working in a dead-end job where you are treated like a virtual serf.

Peterson understands this phenomenon. He understands that men, in general, are less agreeable than women, and that they have different cognitive styles. He knows this from his psychological studies. He also knows that men, especially young men, have been abandoned by society that has no use for many of them and are feeling hopeless and adrift. This quote from James Howard Kunstler describes the situation pretty well:

“The general run of humanity really does need some sort of a coherent armature for daily life. And that incudes role models who offer examples of behavior that will allow them to thrive rather than to be defeated by life. They need a certain amount of discipline in order to fulfill the behavior that those role models show them, and they need some aspiration, some ability to aspire to the products or the results of leading what we might call a good life. And a lot of those things are missing, especially in these unfortunately sort-of disenfranchised, throw-away, forgotten, lower middle classes that we have in America. ” “You can see it very clearly in my region, which was, as I said, a former thriving region of small manufacturing, small factories…around the confluence of the Hudson river and the Battenkill River where I am. Granted, a lot of these companies were paternalistic, but as part of that paternalism they sponsored a lot of institutional activities for people. You know, they had baseball teams, they had outings, [and] they paid these people enough to live decently, and these people produced children who aspired to do better. And they were able to do better. They got a better education by eighth grade in the 1920’s than people are getting now in grad schools. And all of this stuff has dissolved.” “You actually need quite a bit of built-in structure in everyday life for a society to thrive and individuals to thrive within it. And that’s not there, and we don’t care about it. We just don’t care. We have eliminated most of the public gathering places in small town America. I live in a town that doesn’t have a coffee shop [or] a bar, anyplace that somebody might go outside their home. And there’s the expectation that all of the ‘community’ that you’re going to be a part of is found on your TV set. Well that’s just a lie. It’s based on a very basic and almost universal misunderstanding in America that the virtual is an adequate substitute for the authentic. That having relationships with made-up people on TV is the same as having relationships with people who are really in your life.” “And so that structure for leading a good life is absent. We’re seeing the results of it in this ‘anything goes and nothing matters’ society that we’ve created for ourselves.”

James Howard Kunstler: Racketeering Is Ruining Us (Peak Prosperity interview, YouTube)

Into this vacuum steps Jordan Peterson with his theories about how “anything goes and nothing matters” is the postmodernist creed, with its ultimate roots in Marxism, and that the universities are spreading this pessimistic message of “cultural Marxism.” To counteract this, he turns to philosophers like Nietzsche and looks to archetypes and mythology to restore a lost order (logos) to life.

“I think at a deep level the West has lost faith in masculinity. That’s no different than the death of God. It’s the same thing. And Nietzsche knew what the consequences of that would be, that’s most of what he wrote about. So you’d say the divine symbol of masculinity has been obliterated. Well, so then what do you expect? What’s going to happen? That means masculinity is going to become weak. Especially if the symbol is also denigrated, which it definitly is.” “So what that means is that the ideal that men could aspirte to is denigrated? Well, then with your ideal in tatters, you’re weak. That’s definitional. So I think the reason that men have been responding positively to my thinking is that I don’t buy any of that. I like the masculine spirit. It’s necessary. And its not fundamentally carnage and pillaging. Its not fundamentally rape culture. It’s not fundamentally world destroying And all of those aspersions have been cast upon it. That’s partly the guilt of Western society for technological progress…”

Jordan Peterson – The West Has Lost Faith In Masculinity (YouTube)

2.) To me, the most tragic thing about the JP phenomenon is the fact that, in my not-so-humble-opinion, the destruction of white males is caused primarily by our economic system of globalized financial casino capitalism which seeks no other goal than to maximize profit for a small international investors class, consequences to the health of society be damned. It leads to a “devil take the hindmost” attitude, where society is a zero-sum game divided into winners and losers.

But instead of taking a critical look at that system, Peterson places the blame, and the responsibility for solving it, squarely on the shoulders of the individual. I think this is not only self-defeating, but it is actually harmful. Numerous studies have shown that in countries where individuals blame wider economic forces for their unemployment, rather than their own personal fortitude, there is less self-hatred and self-harm.

When the job search becomes a blame game (MIT News)

American Dream breeds shame and blame for job seekers (BBC)

Peterson not only does not wish to look at these forces, but is a staunch defender of libertarian market values. Not only is there no class war, declares Peterson, but even thinking in class terms makes you a Marxist!

3.) One could hardly think of a better way to kneecap a genuine Leftist movement than unleashing the divisive identity politics seen on college campuses. But where are these ideas really coming from? Are they truly ‘Marxist’ as Peterson asserts?

We know that, by definition, the men suffering the most in America today are those without college degrees. This was the conclusion of the Case/Deaton study. Life spans are actually declining for men and women without degrees. This means that, by definition, the people suffering the most in our society have no idea what is really going on on college campuses! Yet they are continually warned of a “Red Peril” emanating from college campuses by the alt-right and vote accordingly. It’s the Red scare updated for the twenty-first century.

In my opinion, this is entirely a media-manufactured phenomenon. Why? As Adam Curtis opined, ‘Angry people click more.’ Keeping people angry and outraged seems to be the main purpose of media these days because it is profitable. Keeping people informed is less important than profits.

Are the semi-mythical “Social Justice Warriors” actually closet Maoists dedicated to spreading communism beyond the campus? Consider that it is at the core of the Marxist project for workers to set aside superficial differences such as race, gender and nationality, and recognize their class role as the main reason they are exploited. The social justice warriors clearly do not want that.

Liberals would be satisfied with a world in which exploitation and wealth were evenly distributed across demographic groups. The left doesn’t want that. We want no exploitation of anyone. That necessarily means that white men shouldn’t be exploited either…So, lonely and/or broke white men sometimes feel the left offers them no explanation for their suffering. You know who does? Jordan Peterson. He says to them, I know you feel bad, and let me tell you why. And then he feeds them a bunch of hateful bullshit. More and more people are going for it. He has the number one bestselling book on Amazon…

Slavoj Zizek makes this point as well:

If I were to engage in paranoiac speculations, I would be much more inclined to say that the Politically Correct obsessive regulations (like the obligatory naming of different sexual identities, with legal measures taken if one violates them) are rather a Left-liberal plot to destroy any actual radical Left movement. Suffice it to recall the animosity against Bernie Sanders among some LGBT+ and feminist circles, whose members have no problems with big corporate bosses supporting them. The “cultural” focus of PC and #MeToo is, to put it in a simplified way, a desperate attempt to avoid the confrontation with actual economic and political problems, i.e., to locate women’s oppression and racism in their socio-economic context…Liberals will have to take note that there is a growing radical Left critique of PC, identity politics and #MeToo…

A Reply To My Critics Concerning An Engagement With Jordan Peterson (Philosophical Salon)

This surprisingly intelligent YouTube comment makes a similar point:

For a long time it has been a tactic of US intelligence to support a moderate group, be it progressive or reactionary, as a way of blocking a more extremist group from gaining support. This happened domestically in the 60’s with progressive movements as well. Most famously Gloria Steinem was covertly supported by the CIA as a way of keeping attention away from more dangerous radicals. Culturally, things like universities in effect reproduce this dynamic. By having an Overton window big enough to include a lot of progressive politics, they can exclude actually dangerous stuff. This is the [role] political correctness basically plays. By maintaining vigorous debate within a specific window, and outrage for anything outside of that, it vanguards against real leftist politics of the sort actual Marxists argue for.

As this comment from an article in the Guardian about Peterson’s book states: “I thought Marxism was about “workers of the world unite” not ‘let’s fragment into a million separate indentities and fight each other.'”

So, who the hell is Jordan Peterson, anyway?

Jordan Peterson is a formerly obscure Canadian psychology professor who became an overnight sensation by posting a series of YouTube videos describing his opposition to Canadian Bill C-16. Opposition to this bill has become something of a a cause celebre among a certain group of self-described anti-Leftist activists who like to militate against against “identity politics.” He argued that the bill forced him to call people by their “preferred pronoun,” or else face sanction. He argued that this amounted to a form of “compelled speech,” and that language was a battleground that he would not cede to the “radical Left.”

In other words, if I were a transgender person and demanded Peterson call me, I don’t know, ‘apple,’ he would have to do so.

Now, I think we can all agree this is a little silly. But to Peterson, this was no less than a threat to freedom and very foundations of Western civlization.

On September 27, University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson posted a video titled Professor Against Political Correctness on his YouTube channel. The lecture, the first in a three-part series recorded in Peterson’s home office, was inspired by two recent events that he said made him nervous. The first was the introduction of Bill C-16, a federal amendment to the Canadian Human Rights Act and Criminal Code that would add gender identity and gender expression to the list of prohibited grounds for discrimination. Peterson’s second concern was that U of T’s human resources department would soon make anti-bias and anti-discrimination training mandatory for its staff—training he believed to be ineffective, coercive and politically motivated. “I know something about the way that totalitarian, authoritarian political states develop,” Peterson said in the first video, “and I can’t help but think I’m seeing a fair bit of that right now.” Other profs in his position might have written op-eds, circulated petitions or negotiated with university officials. But Peterson is a big believer in the power of YouTube—“a Gutenberg revolution for speech,” he calls it—and, as it turns out, he had a lot to get off his chest. He carpet-bombed Marxists (“no better than Nazis”), the Ontario Human Rights Commission (“perhaps the biggest enemy of freedom currently extant in Canada”), the Black Liberation Collective (“they have no legitimacy among the people they purport to represent”) and HR departments in general (“the most pathological elements in large organizations”). Peterson also said he would absolutely not comply with the implied diktat of Bill C-16, which could make the refusal to refer to people by the pronouns of their choice an actionable form of harassment. He believes the idea of a non-binary gender spectrum is specious and he dismisses as nonsensical the raft of gender-neutral pronouns that transgender people have adopted—ze, vis, hir, and the singular use of they, them and their. “I don’t recognize another person’s right to determine what pronouns I use to address them,” he said grimly. “I think they’re connected to an underground apparatus of radical left political motivations. I think uttering those words makes me a tool of those motivations. And I’m going to try and be a tool of my own motivations as clearly as I can articulate them and not the mouthpiece of some murderous ideology.”...In his fervent opinion, the issue wasn’t pronouns, per se. It was much bigger than that. It was truth itself. Being told what to say—and by the government no less—was just one more step along the slippery slope to tyranny. The way Peterson tells it, the only thing standing between us and a full-blown fascist insurrection was him.

The Pronoun Warrior (Toronto Life)

Underground apparatus? Murderous Ideology? What the f*ck is he talking about???

According to Peterson, the mandated use of such pronouns is a “slippery slope” down the road to totalitarianism, re-education camps and gulags, and identity politics is the “camel’s nose” for FULL COMMUNISM.

Peterson contends that “political correctness” is actually a mutated form of Communist ideology, the same ideology, he claims, that directly led to the murder of millions of innocent individuals in the twentieth century. Furthermore, he claims that entire fields of academia have been corrupted by “radical postmodernism” including nearly all the humanities such as anthropology and literature. He further alleges that these “Neo-Marxists” have seized control of universities, government departments and corporate HR departments.

Despite his fear of leftist goon squads patrolling college campuses, no one, not one single person, has been arrested or jailed, or even fined over this law. It is a totally artificial crisis, manufactured in order to smear the radical left on college campuses and foment outrage. It’s pure grandstanding. Here is what legal scholars think in a letter from the Canadian Bar Association:

For human rights legislation, the CHRA prohibits denying or differentiating adversely in the provision of goods, services, facilities or accommodation customarily available to the general public, commercial or residential accommodation, or, employment on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination. The Act applies to federal and federally regulated entities. The amendment to the CHRA will not compel the speech of private citizens. Nor will it hamper the evolution of academic debates about sex and gender, race and ethnicity, nature and culture, and other genuine and continuing inquiries that mark our common quest for understanding of the human condition.

RE: Bill C-16, An Act to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code (gender identity or expression) (Canadian Bar Association – PDF)

However, millions of people watched the videos and tens of thousands contributed to Peterson’s Patreon account, to the tune of over $50,000 a month. Being a martyr has its advantages. Chapo Trap House described him as “the Rosa Parks of Pronouns.”

If Peterson were really so concerned about the threats to free speech coming from employers such as his university, then why isn’t he arguing for more union representation, which has the added benefit if reducing inequality (which he claims to want to do):

I’m seeing a lot of comments from the political right and centre-right worrying about the possibility that workers may be fired for expressing conservative views…It strikes me that this would be a really good time for people…to campaign for an end to employment at will, and the introduction of the kind of unfair dismissal laws that protect workers in most democratic countries, but not, for the most part, in the US. Among other things, these laws prohibit firing employees on the basis of their political opinions. Better still, though, would be a resurgence of unionism. Union contracts generally require dismissal for cause, and unionised workers have some actual backup when it comes to a dispute with employers.

Free speech, unfair dismissal and unions (Crooked Timber)

So is Peterson’s far right?

Short answer: no. This video, Jordan Peterson: Am I Far Right?, gives a good simple description of what Peterson’s major influences are:

In an emailed rebuttal to a journalist who termed him a figure of the “far right”, he described his own politics as those of a “classic British liberal … temperamentally I am high on openness which tilts me to the left, although I am also conscientious which tilts me to the right. Philosophically I am an individualist, not a collectivist of the right or the left. Metaphysically I am an American pragmatist who has been strongly influenced by the psychoanalytic and clinical thinking of Freud and Jung.”

12 Rules for Life by Jordan B Peterson review – a self-help book from a culture warrior (Guardian)

There seem to be three, mutually interlocking Jordan Petersons:

A. The tenured psychology professor, who has written books and papers, and whose lectures have been described as ‘life changing’ by students who took his courses.

B. The self-help guru, who talks about things like metaphysical truth, Jungian archetypes and seeking meaning whose ideas resemble Joseph Campbell’s work in a lot of ways.

C. The rabid anti-Communist crusader who engages in conspiracy theories and red-baiting, who sees secret Communism behind every campus action he doesn’t like.

Peterson’s fans commonly depict him as “misunderstood.” This is because, for almost everything he has said, he has said the opposite at some point, or used weasel words to meliorate his stance. He’s also been accused of doing a Gish gallop through the topics he describes, making describing what he really believes like nailing jello to a tree.

Why, then, is he considered to be far right?

Well, one major reason is that Peterson’s primary fan base is the alt-right, whether he likes it or not. It was not Peterson in his A or B incarnations that made him famous and put money in his coffers; it was version C. And he knows it.

A large part of this is because Peterson’s preferred enemies list is exactly the same as that of the alt-right: “social justice warriors,” feminists, political correctness, activists (such as Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ), the undifferentiated “radical left,” HR departments, entire academic disciplines (especially anything with “studies” in the title), postmodernism, but above all, Marxists and Neo-Marxists.

Peterson throws around the terms “Marxism” and “Neo-Marxism” sloppily and interchangeably, and without precise definitions. For a man whose cardinal rules include “Be precise in your speech,” he is extremely sloppy using these phrases, making it difficult to know exactly what he is talking about. This video from the Epoch Times is the most comprehensive statement of Peterson’s ideology:

The accompanying article in the Epoch Times, an anti-comummunist newspaper founded by dissidents from the Falun Gong movement, transcribes the main points of the interview:

Peterson said it’s not possible to understand our current society without considering the role postmodernism plays within it, “because postmodernism, in many ways—especially as it’s played out politically—is the new skin that the old Marxism now inhabits.” […] By the end of the 1960s, he said, even French intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre had to admit that the communist experiment—whether under Marxism, Stalinism, Maoism, or any other variant—was “an absolute, catastrophic failure.” Rather than do away with the ideology, however, they merely gave it a new face and a new name. “They were all Marxists. But they couldn’t be Marxists anymore, because you couldn’t be a Marxist and claim you were a human being by the end of the 1960s,” said Peterson. The postmodernists built on the Marxist ideology, Peterson said. “They started to play a sleight of hand, and instead of pitting the proletariat, the working class, against the bourgeois, they started to pit the oppressed against the oppressor. That opened up the avenue to identifying any number of groups as oppressed and oppressor and to continue the same narrative under a different name. And so since the 1970s, under the guise of postmodernism, we’ve seen the rapid expansion of identity politics throughout the universities,” he said. “It’s come to dominate all of the humanities—which are dead as far as I can tell—and a huge proportion of the social sciences.” “We’ve been publicly funding extremely radical, postmodern leftist thinkers who are hellbent on demolishing the fundamental substructure of Western civilization. And that’s no paranoid delusion. That’s their self-admitted goal,” he said, noting that their philosophy is heavily based in the ideas of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, “who, I think, most trenchantly formulated the anti-Western philosophy that is being pursued so assiduously by the radical left.” “The people who hold this doctrine—this radical, postmodern, communitarian doctrine that makes racial identity or sexual identity or gender identity or some kind of group identity paramount—they’ve got control over most low-to-mid level bureaucratic structures, and many governments as well,” he said. “But even in the United States, where you know a lot of the governmental institutions have swung back to the Republican side, the postmodernist types have infiltrated bureaucratic organizations at the mid-to-upper level.” “I don’t think its dangers can be overstated,” Peterson said. “And I also don’t think the degree to which it’s already infiltrated our culture can be overstated.”

Jordan Peterson Exposes the Postmodernist Agenda. Communist principles in postmodernism were spread under the guise of identity politics (Epoch Times)

Now, technically, Peterson doesn’t use the term “Cultural Marxism” directly in the video, preferring to use the term “Neo-Marxism.” As far as I can tell, however, the terms are interchangeable; I could not find any information distinguishing between the two, so I will consider them the same unless I find out some new information. He certainly describes them in the same terms.

Given that he took grave exception to the use of term “far right” in reference to him, to the point of demanding a retraction, one can only assume he is okay with the phrase “cultural Marxism” in reference to this video, otherwise he would have demanded that the term be removed and replaced with a more accurate one.

That Peterson is also vehemently anti-Marxist would be relatively unremarkable were it not for the fact that, in many of his online disquisitions about what he sees as a left-wing takeover of campus culture, he uses the terms “Marxism” and “postmodernism” almost interchangeably. Not only are these two schools of thought very different from one another, they are also in certain respects mutually antagonistic. You don’t need an MA in critical theory to figure it out: the travails of the Democratic Party during the primaries for 2016’s presidential election highlighted, in a very public and destructive way, the ideological fault lines in US progressive politics. The bitter schism between the Hillary Clinton camp — which mobilized aggressively around identity politics — and the old-school leftists who rallied around Bernie Sanders ultimately helped clear Donald Trump’s path to the presidency. (Historically, the burgeoning of identity politics in US campus culture in the 1980s and ’90s went hand in hand with the ascendancy of postmodernist ideas that explicitly repudiated Marxism.) It’s not just that this sloppy use of language exposes Peterson as an intellectual lightweight; the tendency to causally conflate various disparate phenomena that one happens not to like — in this instance, postmodernism, Marxism, and political correctness — is the calling card of the paranoiac.

A Messiah-cum-Surrogate-Dad for Gormless Dimwits: On Jordan B. Peterson’s “12 Rules for Life” (Los Angeles Review of Books)

What is “Cultural Marxism?”

Cultural Marxism is a “snarl word” and dog-whistle phrase that refers to the Frankfurt School, a loosely organized group of academic and writers based in Germany during the Weimar Republic who were influenced by Marx. They were part of what we would today call a “private think tank” based in Frankfurt. For a good overview, I suggest listening to this slightly less-biased overview from the BBC Radio four’s excellent In Our Time show: BBC Radio 4 – In Our Time, The Frankfurt School

Weimar Germany was a time much like our own: economic dislocation, rampant unemployment, declining faith in liberal democracy; communists, anti-communists, fascists and anti-fascists battling it out in the streets, marches and protests, etc. Despite all the chaos, there was a feeling of ‘hope and change;’ one scholar in the show compares it to an ‘Obama moment.’

Yet, instead of revolution, the nation turned to the right-wing Nazi Party.

Marx himself believed that successful revolution could only take place where the forces of capitalist production were sufficiently advanced. In such a scenario, the inherent contradictions of capitalism would cause it to falter, leading to socialist structures taking over in a more-or-less organic manner.

Instead, all the major communist revolutions were agrarian revolts by peasants against the aristocracy, rather than the proletariat rising up and seizing the means of production from capitalists in industrialized countries. Because the mass production of capitalism was not yet fully developed in these countries, Marx himself could have predicted their failure, and would not be surprised at the chaos under their implementation. Most Communists consider the Soviet Union as a form of state capitalism.

The Frankfurt School think tank pondered this question: Why didn’t the revolution occur in Germany after the War, where it “should” have occurred? Why didn’t the proletariat rise up and overthrow the capitalist class in the advanced capitalist countries of Western Europe, as many thought was inevitable? To answer this question, the Frankfurt School looked at more than just the economic structure, they decided to look at the culture itself. Capitalism wasn’t just an economic system, they argued. It colonized the minds of the individual people living under it, such that they could see no alternatives. It was embedded in the very DNA of society. To this end, they developed a “critical theory,” which was, as you can imagine, critical of capitalist society, but addressed itself mainly to sociocultural issues rather than the economic workings of society as Marx had done.

They never called themselves “cultural Marxists,” however. Rather, that label first came from the National Socialist (Nazi) Party. The National Socialists didn’t use the phrase “cultural Marxism,” instead preferring the term “cultural Bolshevism.”

A History of Nazi Germany describes how the Weimar Republic brought about increased freedom of expression (modernism), then described by critics as decadent and irrational. Traditionalist Germans thought that this was causing German culture to decay and that society was heading towards a moral collapse. The Nazis labelled this modernism as “Cultural Bolshevism” and, through “Jewish Bolshevism”, claimed that Jews were primarily behind Communism. In particular, they argued that Jews had orchestrated the Russian Revolution and were the main power behind Bolshevists. This Jewish-led Bolshevist assault was described by Adolf Hitler as a disease that would weaken the Germans and leave them prey to the Jews, with Marxism being perceived as just another part of an “international Jewish conspiracy”. An ideological objective was thus the “purification” to eliminate alien influences and protect Germany’s culture.

Cultural Marxism (RationalWiki)

This concept of Marxists undermining Western civilization, and equating being “critical” and “pessimistic” with an attempt to subvert Western values is a staple of far right which began in Nazi Germany as a reaction to dislocation and rapid change. It’s a thread that runs through the alt-right today.

As this article points out:

[Peterson’s] obsessive anti-communism sits uncomfortably with [his] supposed anti-fascism. The main opposition to Adolf Hitler’s rise, after all, came, not from high-minded conservatives like Peterson, but from German socialist and communist worker’s parties. And Hitler secured support domestically and internationally in part by promising to crush that leftist opposition.

How anti-Leftism has made Jordan Peterson a mark for Fascist Propaganda (Pacific Standard)

In fact, a lot of “high minded conservatives” and prominent intellectuals threw their support behind Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. Many wealthy, conservative Americans did too, especially those strenuously opposed to the “socialist” policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt, policies that are quite similar to those advocated by, for example, Bernie Sanders today.

The “cultural Marxist” conspiracy theory didn’t die with the end of the Third Reich, however. Instead, it was revived and greatly expanded by the rising conservative movement of the 1990’s as the Republican Party merged with movement conservatism and the John Birch Society. They blamed everything they claimed was destroying American society on Marxists who were behind “politically correct” speech and quotas.

This post is a good explanation of why, ‘”[C]ultural Marxism” is a poorly framed interpretation of Marxist theory and is flawed in its conception”: Cultural Marxism, Cultural Conservatism and the Frankfurt School: Making Sense of Nonsense (How to Paint Your Panda). But then again, maybe it’s part of the conspiracy!

‘Cultural Marxism’ becomes a rallying cry for the modern-day alt-right

The conflagration of Marxism with political correctness and activism began long before anyone had ever heard of the good professor. It actually started in the Nineties, with roots going back to the Seventies.

This conspiracy theory hinges on the idea that the Frankfurt School wasn’t just an arcane strain of academic criticism. Instead, the Frankfurt School was behind an ongoing Marxist plot to destroy the capitalist West from within, spreading its tentacles throughout academia and indoctrinating students to hate patriotism & freedom. Thus, rock’n’roll, Sixties counterculture, the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, homosexuality, modern feminism, and in general all the “decay” in the West since the 1950s are allegedly products of the Frankfurt school…[rationalWiki] Its origins were surprisingly deliberate, emerging from a paleoconservative Washington think tank called the Free Congress Foundation. The FCF was founded by Paul Weyrich, a founder of the Heritage Foundation and namer of the so-called Moral Majority movement. Weyrich also created a TV network called National Empowerment Television, a short-lived predecessor to Fox News, which aired a documentary in 1999 called “Political Correctness: The Frankfurt School.” Hosted by…William Lind, it presents an account of the origin of what we now call “identity politics.” Weyrich first presented his notion of Cultural Marxism in a 1998 speech to the Civitas Institute’s Conservative Leadership Conference, later repeating this usage in his widely syndicated “culture war letter”. At Weyrich’s request, William S. Lind wrote a short history of his conception of Cultural Marxism for the Free Congress Foundation; in it Lind identifies the presence of homosexuals on television as proof of Cultural Marxist control over the mass media and claims that Herbert Marcuse considered a coalition of “blacks, students, feminist women, and homosexuals” as a vanguard of cultural revolution…[wikipedia] These came, Lind tells us, from the Institute for Social Research, or the Frankfurt School. There, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and their cronies created a school of thought called “critical theory,” which the FCF gave the name “cultural Marxism.” This frightening idea fused the impertinence of Marx with the indecency of Freud, producing a new threat to Western values far beyond those posed by Copernicus or Darwin… [https://www.viewpointmag.com/2018/01/23/postmodernism-not-take-place-jordan-petersons-12-rules-life/]

Sounds an awful lot like Peterson’s rhetoric, doesn’t it? In his essay, Lind declared, in rhetoric virtually identical to that of the stump speeches of Jordan Peterson:

“Political Correctness is cultural Marxism. It is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. It is an effort that goes back not to the 1960s and the hippies and the peace movement, but back to World War I. If we compare the basic tenets of Political Correctness with classical Marxism the parallels are very obvious.”

Lind wasn’t satisfied with just an online essay. He also produced a series of videos which can easily be accessed on YouTube, whose ideas are virtually identical to the political views of Dr. Peterson:

In 1999, Lind led the creation of an hour-long program entitled “Political Correctness: The Frankfurt School”. Some of Lind’s content went on to be reproduced by James Jaeger in his YouTube film “CULTURAL MARXISM: The Corruption of America.” The historian Martin Jay commented on this phenomenon saying that Lind’s original documentary: ‘… spawned a number of condensed textual versions, which were reproduced on a number of radical right-wing sites. These in turn led to a welter of new videos now available on YouTube, which feature an odd cast of pseudo-experts regurgitating exactly the same line. The message is numbingly simplistic: all the ills of modern American culture, from feminism, affirmative action, sexual liberation and gay rights to the decay of traditional education and even environmentalism are ultimately attributable to the insidious influence of the members of the Institute for Social Research who came to America in the 1930’s.‘ Heidi Beirich likewise holds that the conspiracy theory is used to demonize various conservative “bêtes noires” including “feminists, homosexuals, secular humanists, multiculturalists, sex educators, environmentalists, immigrants, and black nationalists”.

Wait a minute, that’s the exact same enemies list as Jordan Peterson!

Indeed, I’ve spent some time watching these documentaries. Now, when I say the rhetoric is the same, you don’t have to take my word for it. Watch the Jordan Peterson video above. Watch the William Lind documentaries. Make up your own mind.

Although the theory became more widespread in the late 1990s and through the 2000s, the modern iteration of the theory originated in Michael Minnicino’s 1992 essay “New Dark Age: Frankfurt School and ‘Political Correctness'”, published in Fidelio Magazine by the Schiller Institute. The Schiller Institute, a branch of the LaRouche movement, further promoted the idea in 1994. The Minnicino article charges that the Frankfurt School promoted Modernism in the arts as a form of cultural pessimism and shaped the counterculture of the 1960s (such as the British pop band The Beatles) after the Wandervogel of the Ascona commune.

The idea that the counterculture was a fifth column for communism is an old chestnut going back to the 1960’s, as is the idea that colleges were radicalizing middle American children. The Powell memorandum back in the 1970’s sounded a paranoid alarm about how students on college campuses were being indoctrinated by insidious left-wing professors to hate the “free enterprise” system.

According to Chip Berlet, who specializes in the study of far-right movements, the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory found fertile ground within the Tea Party movement of 2009, with contributions published in the American Thinker and WorldNetDaily highlighted by some Tea Party websites. More recently, the Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik included the term in his document “2083: A European Declaration of Independence”, which—along with The Free Congress Foundation’s Political Correctness: A Short History of an Ideology—was e-mailed to 1,003 addresses approximately 90 minutes before the 2011 bomb blast in Oslo for which Breivik was responsible. Segments of William S. Lind’s writings on Cultural Marxism have been found within Breivik’s manifesto. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School#Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_theory]

Right-wing agitprop outlets such as Breitbart, whose head Steve Bannon served in the Trump administration, also commonly use cultural Marxism as a snarl word and all-purpose bogeyman for everything they believe is destroying America from within, in terms alarmingly similar to those of the Nazis:

Breitbart views so called ”Cultural Marxism”as the root of all evil. Cultural marxism destroys the language. Cultural Marxists wants to have equality between the sexes. they threaten the western civilization, and hate God and they love Muslims and Homosexuals too. Yes, Cultural Marxists are behind Muslim” immigration to, they claim. It all started with talk about the rights of minorites in the 60s, as they write: Under this “cultural Marxism,” progressives believed they would aid racial and sexual minorities — and now Islamic minorities — by transferring cultural power and status from ordinary Americans, especially from white working-class Americans and away from individualistic-minded Christian churches… The present day cultural Marxists, including former President Obama are also encouraging the migration of devout Muslims and their theocratic political leaders into the United States. And that leads to terrorism. The resulting spike in jihad attacks…”

The Nazi Roots of the Word ”Cultural Marxism” (Breitbart Watch)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLUvlRUzS5w

And this idea has even infiltrated the highest levels of the U.S. military:

In July 2017, Rich Higgins was removed by US National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster from the United States National Security Council following the discovery of a seven-page memorandum he had authored, describing a conspiracy theory concerning a plot to destroy the presidency of Donald Trump by Cultural Marxists, as well as Islamists, globalists, bankers, the media, and members of the Republican and Democratic parties.

As RationalWiki states, “Nobody denies that the Frankfurt School existed (and championed its fair share of nutty ideas). Critics of the pseudohistorical ‘Cultural Marxism’ conspiracy theory merely argue that the school was tediously unsuccessful (and, as such, somewhat unimportant) in the broad scheme of Western progressivism — and, more obvious still, that all liberals aren’t commies as well.”

Now, it’s obviously clear that Peterson’s understanding of “Cultural Marxism” is very different than Anders Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer. But Peterson’s constant use of this term is worrying. After all, this is what our young men are listening to! Peterson’s claims are that things like bill C-16 lead to the gulag and reeducation camps. Yet ideas virtually identical to the ones he is peddling have already directly led to the deaths of 77 people in Norway. It’s even gained cachet among people with their fingers on the nuclear button. What’s the real threat here???

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the right-wing theory of cultural Marxism holds that the Jewish, Marxist philosophers of the 1930s Frankfurt School hatched a conspiracy to corrupt American values by promoting sexual liberation and anti-racism…Peterson has tweaked this argument a bit. In his lectures, he mostly traces cultural rot to postmodernists like Derrida (whose work Peterson comically garbles) rather than to the Frankfurt School. In Peterson’s new book, though, he does explicitly link postmodernism to the Frankfurt school, and in other venues he regularly uses and approves the term “cultural Marxism.” One of his videos is titled “Postmodernism and Cultural Marxism.” On Facebook, he shared a Daily Caller article titled “Cultural Marxism Is Destroying America” that begins, with outright racism, “Yet again an American city is being torn apart by black rioters.” The article goes on to blame racial tension in the U.S. on … you guessed it: the Frankfurt School. Of course, it is possible to criticize the left without falling into fascism. Joseph Stalin was a murderous monster; Communist regimes have done horrible things that led to the deaths of millions of people. But the left in the U.S. and Canada is not promoting armed revolution or mass murder. In his cultural Marxism video, Peterson argues that, whether you’re talking about Leninist insurrection or folks criticizing sexism or racism in cultural products, “the end result is much the same.” That’s dangerous nonsense, which can easily be used to justify any extreme of violence. If your gender studies professor is the equivalent of Lenin … well, we’d better destroy her, right?

How anti-Leftism has made Jordan Peterson a mark for Fascist Propaganda (Pacific Standard)

His constant promotion of these paranoid conspiracy theories to his audience of impressionable, frustrated, and economically precarious young men makes him what I would characterize, somewhat ironically, a “useful idiot” for the far-right. This is why Peterson’s “I’m so misunderstood” schtick is disingenuous, as are the claims that he is “misinterpreted.” I think it’s pretty clear from the evidence above, in his own words, what he believes.

The tragic thing is, there was a guy who wrote in very similar terms about the rootlessness, despair and alienation that young men would inevitably experience under capitalism. He also gained a following as well. His name? Karl Marx:

Matthew Syed in the Times gives us a wonderful example of Marxist thinking. He asks why marathon running is so popular, and says it’s because it satisfies a desire for self-improvement which we cannot get from paid labour: We live in a world where the connection between effort and reward is fragmenting. In our past, we hunted, gathered and built…We could observe, track and consume the fruits of our labour. We could see the connection between our sweat and toil, and the value we derived from them. In today’s globally dispersed capitalist machine, this sense is disappearing. This is pure Marxism. Marx thought that people had a desire for self-actualization through work, but that capitalism thwarted this urge. In capitalism, he wrote: Labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. Jon Elster claims that Marx “condemned capitalism mainly because it frustrated human development and self-actualization.” Marx was right. The fact that we spend our leisure time doing things that others might call work – gardening, DIY, baking, blogging, playing musical instruments – demonstrates our urge for self-actualization. And yet capitalist work doesn’t fulfill this need. As the Smith Institute said (pdf): Not only do we have widespread problems with productivity and pay, as well as growing insecurity at work, but also a significant minority of employees suffer from poor management, lack of meaningful voice and injustice at work. For too many workers, their talent, skills and potential go unrealised, leaving them less fulfilled and the economy failing to fire on all cylinders. This poses the question: why isn’t there more demand at the political level for fulfilling work?

Alienation: The Non-Issue (Stumbling and Mumbling)

Perhaps because people like Jordan Peterson and his ilk would rather we focus on the threat from radical postmodernist feminist college professors, and the identitarian Neoliberals just want to make sure that there are enough minorities represented among the exploiters. Divide and rule has been a standard tactic to maintain power in America since Bacon’s Rebellion invented the very concept of “race” to keep working classes from teaming up against the aristocracy who were–dare we say it–oppressing them. It was only when Martin Luther King attempted to bring poor whites into his movement that he was assassinated.

The meaning and self-actualization Peterson is peddling in his book simply isn’t possible under the capitalist system. And that’s the problem. No amount of self-help or story-building is going to change that fact.

Combining white paranoia about being a minority with a deteriorating economy and constant fears of cultural Marxism, and peddling those ideas to angry young men has not shown itself to lead to a good result, historically. Is Peterson too ignorant of history to see this?

Admittedly it’s not always easy to distinguish between a harmless retro eccentric and a peddler of poisonous and potentially murderous ideas. So let’s take stock: Masculinist persecution myth? Check. Repeated appeals to Darwinism to justify social hierarchies? Check. A left-wing conspiracy to take over the culture? Check. Romanticization of suffering? Check. Neurotic angst about “chaos”? Check. Like many of his sort, Peterson sees himself as a defender of the best traditions of Western civilization and the Enlightenment. But there is an old adage: if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, chances are it’s a duck.

A Messiah-cum-Surrogate-Dad for Gormless Dimwits: On Jordan B. Peterson’s “12 Rules for Life” (Los Angeles Review of Books)

Finally, here are some more good comments from that YouTube video. I’ve combined several of them together which make the point that Marxism and Postmodernism have nothing to do with the identitarian politics on college campuses.

I’m so fucking tired of people using the term postmodernist as a catchall for leftists – postmodernism has literally nothing to do with Marxism, in fact by its very nature is at odds with the material nature of Marxism… Derrida wasn’t a Marxist, he wasn’t even a political radical unlike many of his colleges. Derrida didn’t even write about Marx at all until the 90s, after the time in which all of his intellectual cohort had given up on Marx. Derrida’s philosophical heritage is by way of the structuralism of Saussure and Levi-Strauss, and hermeneutic philosophy of Heidegger and Gadamer… Something that most people who aren’t in the academic left don’t realize is that Foucault is seen as a clear break with Marxism, and distinctly not as an extension of it. Foucault was the first one to pose a distinctly different understanding of oppression, a sort of anarchist flavoured one, against the Marxists. There have been attempts at reconciliation, the most significant of which is Empire by Negri and Hardt, where they incorporated Foucault’s biopolitical framework to create framework for analyzing the world after the cold war. Postmodernism, insofar as that term refers to anything at all, is the wave of thinkers who broke with Marx after reading Nietzsche, which is both the case for Foucault and Deleuze. Lyotard and Baurillard also broke with Marx altogether, though for different reasons. Negri, Deleuze, and Althusser all also became anti-Hegelian, all adopting Spinoza as a model for bizarre anti-dialectical forms of “Marxism”. Basically, this is a lot more complicated than Peterson, or you, understand. The people who are collected up into ‘postmodernism’ were serious intellectual with real insight, and while most of it I don’t think is correct, it’s important and interesting stuff. Because Postmodernism doesn’t actually refer to anything, it is an empty label and basically exists only as a term of abuse by people who don’t want to actually engage with various philosophers and social thinkers. The really is no common factor philosophically that link Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Rorty, etc etc… What connects all these people is really just their attempt to explain society in the era they lived in. …Peterson just straight up doesn’t understand the topology of the left. Peterson has never lived in a place where ‘the left’ and ‘liberals’ where universally understood to be categorically different orientations in politics. For Peterson communists are just ‘very liberal’ people, while in European politics, for most of the most of the postwar period being ‘very liberal’ was the same as saying ‘very anti-communist’. In places like France and Italy the Communist party was often the second or third biggest party, and was distinctly separate from anything called a ‘liberal’ party. This fact means that Peterson totally conflates the Marxist left with the ‘left-liberalism’ or progressive liberalism…

Next time we’ll take a look at how Peterson defends and shores up those systems.