On Saturday, the Australian published a column by the ABC’s political editor, Chris Uhlmann. In it, Uhlmann repeated a disturbing theory about the origins of 20th century social change. It’s one that appears to have firmly lodged itself in the minds of many conservative Australian journalists.

It begins in its familiar way with the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, who, after realising that open calls to revolution were falling on deaf ears in the west, argued that Marxists, in Uhlmann’s words, should seek the “commanding heights of the bureaucracy, universities and the media”, and “scrub the landscape clean of Western values”.

Then, we are told, “neo-Marxists … built critical theory as a vehicle for change and began the deconstruction of the West.”

At this point, Uhlmann’s retelling of the tale embraces darker, more vivid and disturbing imagery:

Frankfurt School academics fleeing Adolf Hitler’s Germany transmitted the intellectual virus to the US and set about systematically destroying the culture of the society that gave them sanctuary.

Not just a vector of intellectual infection, and not just ungrateful parasites who sought to destroy their hosts, these academics were, on this account, determined to use the freedoms America afforded them in order to destroy it.

America’s freedom of speech was its achilles heel. Critical theorists were given university pulpits and a constitutionally ordained right to preach, grinding its foundation stones to dust. Since 1933 they have been hellbent on destroying the village to save it.

In the work of a late Frankfurt School theorist, Herbert Marcuse, “developed a plan for reversing the polarity of freedom”. In Uhlmann’s view, Marcuse singlehandedly redefined the nature of tolerance in a way that advantages the left.

“It is now considered tolerant to demand silence from nonconformists,” Uhlmann wrote.

This tale of decades of Marxist subversion was rolled out by Uhlmann to explain why some people had taken issue with him on Twitter.

He attracted criticism because he stuck up for Tony Abbott’s decision to address the Christian far-right group, the Alliance Defending Freedom. He claims that some unnamed Twitter users – including journalists – disagreed with this, and claimed that Abbott had no right to speak to a reactionary group. Had he named anyone, the truth of his assertions could be checked.

Personally, I only saw people – including me – arguing that while Abbott has the right to speak to whomever he chooses, he should expect his engagements to attract scrutiny.

A little criticism and disagreement – the only thing that Uhlmann has really had to endure – was all it took for him to reach for the theory of “cultural Marxism”, whose details he repeats without giving it its title.

As the US hate-watch group, the Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC) puts it, this “theory posits that a tiny group of Jewish philosophers who fled Germany in the 1930s and set up shop at Columbia University in New York City devised an unorthodox form of ‘Marxism’ that took aim at American society’s culture, rather than its economic system”.

The “cultural Marxism” theory was developed towards the end of the cold war to open up a new front against the left: the culture war against a supposed “political correctness”.

The SPLC describes the theory as “bizarre”, because it is. The Frankfurt School once in the US were primarily focused on the origins of far right authoritarianism, not the subversion of the US.

Any critique of American values they made – for example in the work of Theodore Adorno – was on the basis of a lament for the decline of traditional European high culture in the face of post-war commercial culture. Anyone who thinks otherwise has likely not read their work.

And anyone who looks at the global contemporary capitalist order would find it hard to believe that we are living under a Marxist hegemony.

The decline of traditional values is a result of the relentlessly transformative nature of capitalism itself, not the work of a small group of emigre Marxists who are little read now even among academics.

In 2002, when they first reported on it, the SPLC called it “the newest intellectual bugaboo on the radical right”, but worried about “signs that this bizarre theory is catching on in the mainstream”.

It’s still popular on the far right – increasingly so. Everyone from white nationalists to militant antifeminists on “the redpill right” still relies on it as an explanatory theory of history. The notion was central to the thought of Anders Breivik, who massacred young social democrats in Norway.

But the SPLC were right to predict its penetration of mainstream conservatism. The sclerotic inhabitants of the Australian’s op-ed page appear to have a particular affinity with this line of thought.

Before Uhlmann, Kevin Donnelly and Nick Cater also gave potted versions of the story. (I noted the latter instance in an earlier column.)

The SPLC worried about this happening, because it may lend respectability to a narrative that “in its most virulent form, (it is) an antisemitic theory that identifies Jews in general and several Jewish intellectuals in particular as nefarious, communistic destroyers.”

The far right thinkers who popularised the story of cultural Marxism from the late 1980s were not above peddling it to political antisemites. Paul Weyrich who, along with William S Lind, promoted this theory at the Free Congress Foundation from the late 1980s onward, was known to propound in speeches to Holocaust-deniers.

Not everyone who critiques cultural Marxism is an antisemite and there’s no suggestion being made here that Uhlmann himself is antisemitic. But in the context of this history, his metaphors of infection and internal subversion are exceptionally poorly chosen. He should have been more careful with his metaphors and should have not got himself entangled in a theory that the right – mainstream and extreme – are increasingly happy to use to paint themselves as history’s victims.

We might remember what made Uhlmann so incensed: criticism of him, and some further, vaguely drawn, and uncited criticisms of Abbott.



When the response to such disagreement is a hysterical repetition of a shibboleth of far right thinking, who is betraying our journalistic and civic values?