Increasingly, one of the Trump administration’s favored insults for its enemies on the left is “communist.” After a slate of progressives and Democratic Socialists of America-aligned candidates won Democratic primaries, Trump posted on Truth Social that the U.S. will “Never be a Communist Country.” The White House’s official X account posted in early June 2026 that “You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.” In 2025, President Trump used his executive authority to designate the week of November 2-8 “Anti-Communism Week.” These official proclamations follow years of Trump himself designating his enemies as communists, from Bernie Sanders to his 2024 opponents Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to newly elected mayor of New York City Zohran Mamdani and many others besides, including judges, district attorneys, and educators that he deems as “threats to American identity, culture and values,” as the Associated Press put it last year.
Such a word is extremely powerful in the United States for a host of reasons. It conjures images of tremendous human suffering under Soviet dictators such as Joseph Stalin as well as contemporary human rights violations by the Chinese Communist Party. It suggests authoritarianism and censorship as well as confiscation of private wealth and property. Perhaps more than anything, it suggests dysfunction. For many conservative Americans above a certain age, the Soviet Union lost the Cold War because it could not compete with successful and prosperous liberal capitalist America. It appears that the Trump administration’s use of the term is deliberately incendiary, and the word “communist” seems to cover a wide variety of movements ranging from democratic socialism to left-wing anarchism to actual Communism—or as close as one can get to communism in 2020s America.
The Trump administration’s use of the term is deliberately incendiary, and the word “communist” seems to cover a wide variety of movements.
The Cultural Marxism Boogeyman
Within the right, President Trump’s comments have spurred a debate on the diversity of left-wing thought. Some conservatives have argued that President Trump is basically correct, and left-wing politics can simply be denounced as “Communism” or at least “Marxism.” Other more sophisticated thinkers, such as the paleoconservative Paul Gottfried, have argued that the vanguard ideology of the contemporary left is not communism at all but what has been called “wokeism,” which, according to the right wing, seeks to champion the claims of marginalized peoples at the expense of whites, males, and Christians. Other conservative thinkers have distinguished between 19th- and 20th-century economic Marxism and later post-World War II Cultural Marxism, or what has been called Critical Theory or Frankfurt School Marxism. As Andrew Lynn has written, some conservatives like Andrew Sullivan suggest that the contemporary left has transposed the “oppressed-oppressor conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie into the cultural realm, assigning oppressed status to various nonprivileged identity groups”—thereby leaving class politics behind.
What the right calls twenty-first- century “wokeism” is often conflated with twentieth-century Frankfurt School Marxism…In reality, wokeism is distinct from Frankfurt School critical theory.
Indeed, what the right calls twenty-first-century “wokeism” is often conflated with twentieth-century Frankfurt School Marxism (likewise, wokeism is often tied to French Theory, or postmodernism, which is in turn tied back to Marxism). In reality, wokeism is distinct from Frankfurt School critical theory. Nonetheless, for many on the right, the argument is that after the Second World War, the left abandoned the hope for recruiting the working class for an economic revolution and rather turned toward cultural changes allegedly to subvert and destroy the West and to bring about a Marxist utopia that was re-envisioned not as economic equality but as racial and gender equity.
As Dorian Lynskey has written about Jordan B. Peterson, one of the rightists who, although having made an early career as a Jungian psychologist, has veered into an apologist for a more simplified version of the New Right, “His bete noire is what he calls ‘postmodern neo-Marxism’ or ‘cultural Marxism’. In a nutshell: having failed to win the economic argument, Marxists decided to infiltrate the education system and undermine Western values with ‘vicious, untenable and anti-human ideas’, such as identity politics, that will pave the road to totalitarianism.”
This line of thought has become standard operating procedure, with Peterson being only the most successful in branding and monetizing this position. As early as 1994, influential and well-connected figures like William S. Lind had come to the same conclusion. Addressing American troops in the Marine Corps Gazette, Lind wrote that “the next real war we fight is likely to be on American soil,” given the country’s collapse due to “a new ideology, usually known as ‘multiculturalism’ or ‘political correctness,’ that is in essence Marxism translated from economic into social and cultural terms.”
Race and gender theory, especially, are seen as the children of Frankfurt School Marxism, as is the push toward radical egalitarianism and equity—movements such as Black Lives Matter and organizations such as ANTIFA are also supposedly rooted in Frankfurt School Marxism. The truth of the matter is much more complex, and there have been several recent works that chronicle the history of the Frankfurt School, including Stuart Jeffries’ magisterial Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School.
Some of the attacks on the Frankfurt School attempt to blame multiculturalism and mass migration on the Frankfurt School. The irony is that free market capitalism is much more likely the rationale behind open borders and pluralization than is Marxism.
Some of the attacks on the Frankfurt School attempt to blame multiculturalism and mass migration on the Frankfurt School. The irony is that free market capitalism is much more likely the rationale behind open borders and pluralization than is Marxism. Most of the thinkers of the Frankfurt School were Jewish, and were exiled, imprisoned, or killed during Nazism’s rise and spread. The fact of their Jewishness has caused some right-wing thinkers to portray them as ipso facto enemies of the West and responsible for the perceived downfall of Europe. As Bill Berkowitz reported as early as 2003, figures like the aforementioned William S. Lind—who was integral in mainstreaming the idea of “Cultural Marxism” in the early 1990s, as A.J.A Woods has shown in their recent The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy—made no secret about this. As Berkowitz reports, Lind, speaking at a conference hosted by an antisemitic journal in 2002, identified the Cultural Marxist conspirators this way: “‘These guys,’ he explained, ‘were all Jewish.’”
Berkowitz notes that many others were even more forthright, arguing in books like The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Social Movements that the Frankfurt School “foist multiculturalism on other people [i.e., gentiles] even as they cynically pursue a group strategy that rejects that ideology for themselves.” On right-wing social media, the Frankfurt School has been identified as the genesis of the attempt by “the Jews” to destroy the West with diversity—even though many of the Frankfurt School thinkers, for better or worse, thought of themselves as saving, not destroying Western Civilization. Again, as Slavoj Zizek has argued, much of anti-semiticism (which lumps Jews from a host of worldviews into one simplified category) is an attempt to unjustly blame the negative effects of capitalism on an entire people—the classical Onion article, “Local Jew Feels Left Out Of World Wide Jewish Conspiracy,” makes a similar but more humorous critique of the attempt by antisemites to blame Jewish people as a whole for multiculturalism.
Outside these harder-edged corners, it must be noted, right-wing thinkers are not the only ones who have suggested that there is a conspiracy behind the Frankfurt School. Some on the left argue that Frankfurt School intellectuals were, at the very least, sellouts who turned their backs on socialism in favor of American-style liberal hegemony or else arch anti-Communists who actively tried to overthrow actually existing socialist states; some are even accused of serving as paid agents of Western intelligence services.
Some on the left argue that Frankfurt School intellectuals were, at the very least, sell outs.
These arguments have caused an uproar on the left in recent years, especially since the publication of Gabriel Rockhill’s controversial Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism, which makes exactly the accusations just described vis-à-vis the Frankfurt School. Rockhill shows that figures like Franz Neumann, Otto Kirchheimer, and Herbert Marcuse worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), during the Second World War. Much ado has been made about this, but the critique is a little suspect if only because, during the Popular Front years of the war, Stalin himself advised Western leftists to do precisely this.
Rockhill is most forceful in his critique of Marcuse, whom he shows continued to work with U.S. government agencies even after the war was long over. Rockhill also demonstrates that the U.S. government funded certain Frankfurt School initiatives through cutouts like the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF)—implicating, in Rockhill’s eyes, anyone who either took this funding directly or published in outlets that did. As he says in his introduction to another controversial book from this anti-Frankfurt School canon, Domenico Losurdo’s Western Marxism, “Prominent Western Marxists such as Horkheimer participated in its [the CCF’s] junkets. Others, like Adorno, had their work published and translated in its journals, while directly collaborating with CIA agent Melvin Lasky, who took the lead in the German anti-communist Kulturkampf.”
In Western Marxism, Losurdo himself takes on Adorno and Horkheimer for their anti-communism and especially their inattention to, or disapproval of, the colonial struggles that were ongoing throughout their lives. To take just one case, Losurdo argues that it was Adorno and Horkheimer “who considered the movements of national liberation backward and reactionary and who watched from the distance or (in the case of the latter) did not fail to support the war the United States unleashed in Vietnam.”
Lukács believed that the Frankfurt School theorists were cozily scribbling away next to an abyss of nihilism, safe from the demands of real political action.
Other left-wing critics took a different tack and argued that the Frankfurt School was too wrapped up in academic theory—indeed, one of its most formidable critics, the Hungarian Marxist György Lukács, dubbed the Frankfurt School the Grand Hotel Abyss (the impetus to the title of Jeffries’ book). Lukács believed that the Frankfurt School theorists were cozily scribbling away next to an abyss of nihilism, safe from the demands of real political action.
The validity of this claim was perhaps exemplified in the fact that some Frankfurt School thinkers, such as Adorno and Horkheimer, viewed the 1960s student movement and its demands as sometimes silly and stupid, if not a kind of soft or “left fascism” and a variation of the authoritarian personality (as their correspondence makes abundantly clear). Their student, Habermas, had a more complicated relationship to the student movement—he began with high hopes, before himself characterizing the student protestors as Linksfaschisten (left-wing fascists) before moving, after many years, to a more sympathetic view of protest activity as a specific kind of democratic aesthetic expression, as Robert Wyllie has written about.
Rather than trafficking in simplification or fabrications, it is important in our own time to try and understand the Frankfurt School on its own terms.
What was the Frankfurt School, Really?
The Frankfurt School, since its inception in 1923, was both Marxist and not Marxist. Like earlier Marxists, it sought to critique capitalism, but it was more specifically concerned with the rise of fascism and the alleged similarities between twentieth-century consumer capitalism and twentieth-century militant fascism. Moreover, it tended more toward intellectual critique than radical social change. Such a fact tends to make both conservative critics as well as left-wing advocates for the Frankfurt School bristle and is also the basis of a critique of the Frankfurt School emanating from within the radical left itself, as will be shown below.
The Frankfurt School, since its inception in 1923, was both Marxist and not Marxist.
But it is first and foremost important to understand the thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School as being steeped in not only a very European but a very German high culture. While both MAGA republicans and contemporary radical millennials celebrate the virtues of American pop culture as being a noble expression of equality, many of the Frankfurt School thinkers viewed twentieth-century American pop culture as being dehumanizing and totalitarian.
Thinkers associated with the “first generation” of the Frankfurt School include Max Horkheimer (1895-1979), Theodore Adorno (1903-1969), Leo Löwenthal (1900-1993), Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), Erich Fromm (1900-1980), and Friedrich Pollock (1894-1970), among others. The influential and recently deceased Jürgen Habermas (1929-2026) was part of the “second generation” of Frankfurt School intellectuals, as was the late Claus Offe (1940-2025). Their students, Axel Honneth and Nancy Fraser most famously, constitute the School’s “third generation.”
When trying to understand the Frankfurt School, it perhaps makes sense to begin with Walter Benjamin, though he was not integral to the founding of the School itself as an institution. Benjamin’s autobiography is a microcosm of the wider intellectual movement of the School. Born into privilege in Berlin, Benjamin, as a child, reveled in what appeared to be one of the high points of European civilization. However, as National Socialism arose in Germany, Benjamin began to reevaluate his own memories as well as wider European history, presenting what he viewed as a demystifying critical lens to the history of the West. In his later work, Benjamin went so far as to write, in his “On the Concept of History,” that “There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” While fleeing Nazism, Benjamin attempted to transit through Francoist Spain en route to the United States but was turned away by Spanish police and informed he would be sent back to Nazi-occupied France, where he expected to be arrested and sent to die. He committed suicide instead, overdosing on morphine in the border town of Portbou (there are, however, conspiracies on the left about Benjamin’s execution by Soviet agents).
Benjamin was a proponent of “revolutionary” or “organized” pessimism, and this pessimism (perhaps stripped of its revolutionary character) can be found in some of the works of the Frankfurt School that came after Benjamin’s tragic death. Adorno’s 1951 Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, for example, is rife with such motifs. And as the editors of Dialectic of Enlightenment note, by the 1940s “The hope for a radical transformation of conditions, indeed, any confidence in the possibility of historical progress at all, seemed to be without substance.” At the end of the day, while the experience of the Second World War and the Holocaust had a profound effect on the Frankfurt School theorists, the right is not entirely right to depict the Frankfurt School as being on a mission to destroy Western Civilization because of the Nazis.
Rightly or wrongly, the Frankfurt School nonetheless saw itself as playing an emancipatory role for the West. One of the most important clues to understanding the Frankfurt School is the Marxist concept of alienation. For traditional Marxists, alienation is the dehumanization of workers as a result of industrial capitalism. The mechanisms of production dehumanize and destroy a worker. Frankfurt School theorists—especially Herbert Marcuse in his 1964 One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society—argue that twentieth-century consumer capitalism has a profoundly alienating effect on humans. Rather than arguing for a totalitarian socialist government to destroy the West, normalize homosexuality, or replace white people, the Frankfurt School criticized pop culture because it was a manifestation of the authoritarian nature of capitalism. Pop culture degraded and humiliated men and women, cheapened their lives, and made them compliant workers and consumers. Rather than destroying or replacing Europeans, the Frankfurt School thinkers thought—rightly or wrongly (or something in between) that they were freeing Europeans from the oppressive effects of consumer capitalism.
Far from being anti-Western wreckers, figures like Adorno and Horkheimer reveled in and admired Western civilization, its legacy, and its cultural achievements.
Even in such works as Horkheimer and Adorno’s 1944 Dialectic of Enlightenment, which makes a link between fascism and the Enlightenment, there is an argument that mass culture and consumer capitalism have degraded the human (European) personality under the alleged tyranny of reason. Far from being anti-Western wreckers, figures like Adorno and Horkheimer reveled in and admired Western civilization, its legacy, and its cultural achievements. Adorno, for instance, was an aficionado of classical music and a harsh critic of what he saw as contemporary, bastardized forms of music like jazz. He was likewise a harsh critic of shallow, “new age” contemporary replacements for traditional religion, such as the interest in astrology. Horkheimer’s conservative turn in his later life, far from being a betrayal, was marked by certain continuities and affinities for Western civilization.
The Frankfurt School indeed tied various elements of Western Civilization to Nazism. However, they also, to varying degrees, viewed these as being inauthentic elements or at least perversions of Western thought—Marcuse made this point explicitly in conversation with Martin Heidegger. At the same time, the Holocaust was a very strong impetus to the work of the Frankfurt School. As the right frequently notes, in the 1940s Adorno developed the now-infamous California F scale, which documents alleged pathological personality traits that can lead to fascist thinking, and the results were published in his The Authoritarian Personality. The Authoritarian Personality has drawn a great deal of ire from right-wing thinkers who view it as an attack, not on cruel and sadistic personality types, but on healthy and strong masculinity.
However, there can be common agreement on the left and the right that there are certain personality traits, many of which are encouraged by fascism, which are clearly dysfunctional and tyrannical. Curiously, Adorno’s arguments are rooted in a (liberal variation of) European humanism and ultimately Christianity but have been taken in variant directions by various left-wing thinkers and activists and thus provoked a response from the right. There is little doubt that there are those on the left who argue that any forms of masculine aggression or authority or any form of patriotism and ethnic identity are evil, but the thought of the Frankfurt school is more complicated. In a similar manner, Marcuse’s 1955 Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud argues for sexual license, but he does argue for some limited sexual norms. It is only later thinkers on the left who take a more radical pansexual approach.
An Enduring Legacy
Some left-wing scholars have noted that the Frankfurt School has been eclipsed by two key phenomena: a further radicalization of critical theory and the dominance of American capitalism as well as its attendant pop culture industry. In the twenty-first century, consumerist capitalism appears to exercise complete hegemony, and twenty-first-century politics is largely an argument over two types of consumer capitalism. One can vote for Donald Trump or Joseph Biden or Kamala Harris. One can be racist or anti-racist. One can argue for Christian sexual morality or libertine sexual morality or something in between. However, one must support capitalism. One must continue to buy things. One must be a consumer. The Frankfurt School thinkers would argue that such a situation is totalitarian in nature and has an oppressive and alienating effect. Thus, despite all the noise and as controversial and maligned as it is, the Frankfurt School has left a legacy to draw on, one that may yet teach us something about ourselves and our own time.
Jesse Russell is the author of The Political Christopher Nolan: Liberalism and the Anglo-American Tradition. He has also published in scholarly journals such as Politics and Religion and Political Theology.
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