I recommend that you read this interesting post by Andrew Lynn at The Hedgehog Review. Here’s a snippet:
According to conservative journalist and blogger Andrew Sullivan, today’s cultural Marxists are deeply invested in toppling power structures of patriarchy and white privilege. They do so, according to this version of history, by following the Frankfurt School thinkers in transposing the oppressed-oppressor conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie into the cultural realm, assigning oppressed status to various nonprivileged identity groups. Emergence of a victimhood culture follows, as groups laying claim to various identities articulate grievances against dominant groups and the structures that serve their interests. Rational adjudication of truth then becomes subsumed under demands for the subversion of power, patriarchy, and privilege across unjust social institutions, perpetuating continual identification of conflict within the established social order.
There are many problems with this narrative, of course, and here’s one: Such a vision of an ever-in-conflict social order is only loosely “cultural†and could be constructed entirely independent of anything “Marxist.†You can find it in Machiavelli, Hobbes, Nietzsche, and Ayn Rand, to name just a few. Indeed, today the most popular accounts of society as groups in perpetual conflict over resources—whether material, symbolic, or political—are found in best-selling books by evolutionary psychologists and biologists eager to apply their disciplinary insights to questions far outside their field. It is more the diffusion of Darwin—not Derrida—that underlies popular conflict-grounded accounts of morality and culture today.
I think there’s broad dissatisfaction among the people in “the West” and the dissatisfied probably don’t know much more about Marx or Derrida than they do about Marlon Brando in the clip above.
