Yet again an American city is being torn apart by black rioters. The images we see of the violence in Charlotte do not resemble the country we know. At the same time, high school footballers, cheerleaders and even American servicemen are following Colin Kaepernick’s lead by kneeling during the national anthem. Many Americans are baffled.

How is it that eight years after Obama promised a post-racial America and fifty-two years after the Civil Rights Act was passed, Americans are more divided by race than ever before?

It is certainly not for lack of resources being thrown at the problem. American universities have Black Studies Departments, corporations have diversity trainers and racial staffing quotas and the mainstream media covers race issues constantly. Despite all of this, the divisions keep worsening.

This trend is not being driven by white prejudice. It is being driven by ideology. The reason race relations in America continue to deteriorate is the cultural Marxist philosophies being taught relentlessly in schools and colleges across the nation.

Many Americans are familiar with political correctness, yet may not be familiar with its origins in cultural Marxist theory. While classical Marxism argued that capitalism and the class structure it created must be overthrown because it is oppressive to workers, cultural Marxism argues that it is not economics that creates oppression but rather the nuclear family, traditional morality and concepts of race, gender and sexual identity. These are the chains of tyranny which must be broken by revolution.

Modern woman, are you unhappy in your marriage? Are the responsibilities of motherhood and the burdens of work getting you down? Patriarchy! Black man, do you feel hard done by? Does it seem like the deck is always stacked against you and you can’t get a break? Racism! Gay man, are you tired of the sneers and microaggressions of straight men? They’re afraid that they’re gay too. That’s why they hate you!

These are the narratives which are paraded endlessly in our education system. They are not natural or accidental. They have been constructed by intellectuals and academics who have had a radical agenda to transform the nation, and benefit themselves in the process.

Believers in these doctrines of straight, white male oppression today call themselves liberals. This is a post-war fabrication designed to deceive everyday Americans about their revolutionary agenda. They are not liberals. They are Marxists.

Cultural Marxism is the Marxist dialectic fused with Freudian theory and applied to identity and culture. Like all forms of Marxism, it is based upon categorizing people into abstract groups and then creating a narrative of historical oppression between them. The strategy of Marxists is always to cultivate a victimized group and then convince its members that solidarity is required against the oppressors. This creates resentment and hatred and is how Marxist ideologies fulfill their revolutionary objectives.

The cultural Marxism that our societies are infected with is a particularly Western phenomenon. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Marxists in Europe believed that the dictatorship of the proletariat was at hand. They were wrong. The revolution failed to spread. In despair, and in one of Mussolini’s prisons, a young Italian socialist Antonio Gramsci wrote that the problem was the Christian bedrock of Western European cultures. He encouraged Marxists to develop a fifth column inside these countries to destroy the foundations of Western cultures. Only then would international socialism be achievable.

This call to subversion was picked up by Marxist scholars based around the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany. In the tumultuous milieu of Weimar Germany, theorists such as Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Theodor Adorno and Georg Lukacs integrated the theories of Sigmund Freud with classical Marxism to develop the foundations of critical theory, deconstructionism, post-structuralism and postmodernism. Known as the Frankfurt School, many of these intellectuals fled Hitler’s Germany for the United States where they were welcomed by Progressives and socialist intellectuals. The theories of the Frankfurt School unified the vanguard of the 60’s countercultural movement and have since spread to every discipline in our universities, colleges and schools. These theories, which obsess about colonization, subjugation and oppression, have indeed colonized higher education in the West.

Marxism is always cloaked in high-sounding utopian rhetoric. This is a ruse. What cultural Marxists seek has nothing to do with true diversity, social harmony or universal tolerance. They don’t want the races getting along. They seek power. The solution for the perceived injustices that Cultural Marxists have manufactured is radical social engineering. The power to carry out this social engineering must be given, of course, to a politically-correct elite determined to remake society along ideological lines.

This is why cultural Marxists always seek to enter government, academe or influential positions in the media. In the process of remaking society, unsurprisingly, these Cultural Marxists gain enormous wealth, status and power. This is how careers and fortunes are made in the industry of grievance. It is also why Marxism is so appealing to the ambitious and unscrupulous.

Thus it is no surprise that the groups which cultural Marxists have labelled victims are themselves now worse off than ever. The decline of black America over the last fifty years has been a modern tragedy. Across all metrics, black communities have been deteriorating. The solution loudly demanded by cultural-Marxist opportunists is always more of the same, thus accelerating the decline of these communities

Marxism proved over the twentieth century that it is the deadliest and most destructive belief system on the planet. It has a body count beyond measure and has left a trail of brokenness, suffering and desolation wherever it has taken hold. Marxist ideology destroyed the traditional civilizations of Europe and Asia until they renounced it in the 1990’s. It is in the West that it has lived on in hybrid form, gnawing away at the fabric of our societies. That fabric will not hold forever. Every knee taken, every glass bottle thrown and every incitement to victimhood is another crack in the unity of the nation; and without unity there can be no United States.

Moses Apostaticus is a PhD student with a background in classics, history and literature. His years in education have made him a lifelong enemy of leftism. He blogs at http://follyofreason.org.