“The richest people on the planet do not want a just society, one in which they pay their fair share of taxes and are subject to its norms, rules, and laws. They’d rather do as they’ve always done: enrich themselves on the labor and goodwill of society, then live above it. They’re going to collude with authoritarian dictators in order to cement their place in an accompanying oligarchy.”
Conservative popular opinion is like a merry-go-round featuring a recurring lineup of demonized people, ideas and shifting cultural values. Villains du jour include feminism, secular humanism, atheism, LGBT people, people with foreign accents, people who weren't born here, college professors, journalists - the list goes on and on.
The more inquisitive reactionaries look for historical precedents and intellectual genealogies. Satan is behind it all, according to the Bible-slapped. Some exalt the Middle Ages and trace what they hold to be the current decadence and malaise to modernity. Communism, elevated into a preternatural force that seeps into everything mostly unseen and with unnerving cunning, becomes the bête noire for others.
And then there's the Frankfurt School. The more I read of this school's original writers like Horkheimer, Adorno and their successors, the stronger becomes the conclusion that what drives such conspiratorial and unhinged opposition to these writers is at root an inability to handle philosophical skepticism and rational critique applied to everything - economics, culture, the family, gender roles, religion, art, music, literature, and so forth. The criticism of everything in sight is necessary if you're to live with both minimal illusion and the possibility of changing human realities. There exist, however, certain psychologies for whom open ended reason is a primal threat. (N.b.,
Despite how much conservative opinion I read, I still don't have a good handle on how widespread Frankfurt School conspiracism is on the right. In his last chapter of Splinters in Your Eye: Frankfurt School Provocations (2020), "Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment: The Frankfurt School as Scapegoat of the Lunatic Fringe," Martin Jay has the following eyebrow raising anecdote:
For more background on this rightist bogeyman check out the recent Acid Horizon podcast episode below:
The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West with A.J.A. Woods by Acid Horizon on
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