How the Frankfurt School Captured the Culture – and How to Fight Back

Conservatives have too often failed to realise that “politics is downstream from culture”. So argued Douglas Murray in a recent obituary of the late Peter Whittle, founder of the New Culture Forum (NCF), following the adage popularised by the late American journalist Andrew Breitbart, himself the founder of Breitbart News. “Too many conservatives for far too long felt the crucial battles were about economics”, Murray writes. “The NCF founder helped to correct that error.”

Equally vital, given culture is upstream of politics, is what the philosopher Roger Scruton describes as “cultural conservatism”.

While some dismiss the culture war as a side show, Scruton argues that for conservatives, these battles are “central to their sense of what they are fighting for and why”. In particular, Scruton argues Western societies must regain confidence “not in our political institutions only, but in the spiritual inheritance on which they ultimately rest”.

Certainly, the enemies of conservatism have long understood the centrality of culture to modern political struggles. Classical Marxism once expected the economic contradictions of capitalism to be the vehicle for revolutionary change, inexorably bringing about a “dictatorship of the proletariat”. There was only one problem with this theory: the mass industrial working classes of Europe simply didn’t play ball, with many millions of them willingly going to fight for their capitalist homelands in the First World War rather than rebelling against their supposed oppression.

Rather than admitting their theory had been wrong, the Marxists decided the industrial proletariat must have been suffering from “false consciousness”. From the early 1930s, Marxist academics associated with the Frankfurt School began to reorient Marxism as a cultural struggle, seeking to subvert the norms and ideologies of conventional bourgeois society by which they believed the masses had been brainwashed. Leading adherents included Theodor Adorno, whose dubious study The Authoritarian Personality painted all Western publics as inherently fascistic, Herbert Marcuse, with his ideas of “repressive tolerance”, and Jürgen Habermas, who is still wittering on about critical theory (and the EU) to this day.

Drawing on Antonio Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony and Rudi Dutschke’s idea of a “long march through the institutions”, cultural Marxism sought to take control of Western societies not through violent revolution, but by infiltrating and dominating schools, universities, the media, political parties, intermediary organisations and the family to change the way people think.

The spread of anti-Western, anti-capitalist and anti-family ideologies throughout our culture today is testament to their success. Whether it’s gender ideology, where children are told gender and sexuality are fluid and limitless; climate alarmism, where activists wail that the world is about to go up in flames because of the industrial revolution; or the ever-present accusation that Western societies are sexist, transphobic, misogynistic, racist, classist and guilty of white supremacism, it certainly seems the Left’s long march has claimed tremendous ground.  

To fight back, we need to understand what makes conservatism so uniquely beneficial.

Where Leftists scoff at ‘outdated’ traditions, conservatism entails a proper understanding of one’s history and cultural inheritance. As Edmund Burke, the founding father of English conservatism, wrote: “People will not look forward to prosperity who never look back to their ancestors.” Yet while critics may say this makes it stuffy, they forget it involves change as well as continuity. As Burke also wrote: “A state without the means of some change, is without the means of its own conservation.”

Rather than an inflexible and unyielding ideology, like communism, fascism and cultural Marxism, the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott describes conservatism as a particular disposition.

The conservative prefers “the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant… present laughter to utopian bliss”, he writes. Like Burke, Oakeshott simultaneously accepts the need for change, arguing it is wrong to idolise “what is past and gone”.

The Italian philosopher and cultural critic Augusto Del Noce, while not widely known in the Anglosphere, usefully defines conservatism as having the limited goal of the “conservation of freedom”.

He argues that the inherent danger with revolutionary and utopian ideologies, by contrast, is that they promise to bring about the kingdom of God here on Earth, in pursuit of which almost anything can be justified. Religion, and with it concepts like good and evil, right and wrong and God-given rights to liberty and freedom are all thrown aside, replaced instead by totalising political ideologies “as the source of man’s liberation”.

Beginning with the French Revolution, and followed by Communist Russia and China, the likes of Pol Pot’s Cambodia, as well as Nazi Germany, the barbarism, carnage and inhumanity inflicted on millions in the name of modern ideologies shows the horrors we are prone to once religion is lost. As Del Noce concludes, “every cruelty and every violation of the moral order” becomes possible.

Dreadful as they are, why have Left-wing ideologies been able to gain so much ground in our societies? President Abraham Lincoln once observed that “The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next”.  One of the reasons why the cultural Left has been so effective is because education was, and still is, their prime target.

As a result, generations of students have been fed a steady diet of Leftist ideology, whether on race, gender, economics or history. Much of this is based on the unflushable woke dogma that knowledge is a social construct enforcing the power of the elites and that a commitment to truth is simply a ‘binary’, oppressive, ‘white supremacist’ concept.

Conservatives, on the other hand, refuse to believe that truth is simply determined by power. From Ancient Greece to the Enlightenment, our philosophical patrimony of reason, rationality and common sense is what has allowed Western societies to flourish: our planes to stay in the air and our bridges not to collapse. Today, it is this cultural inheritance we must fight to conserve.

Dr Kevin Donnelly is a Melbourne-based cultural critic and author.  Email him at kevind@netspace.net.au