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Ok, but what if I told you I don't want the transference? Like I mentioned, I like MadMozer's analogy to Mormonism, because I can understand the Christians' impulse to say "hey, don't put me in the same bag as those weirdos", but that's not what the Marxists here are saying. What they're doing is more akin to "the Church of Mormon is a conspiracy theory", it's maddening.
See my reply to naraburns elsewhere in the thread. I think the appropriate analogy is more like, if the Mormons denied that God existed altogether, would you still call them Christian?
I do agree that calling cultural Marxism a "conspiracy theory" is dumb. At most, I would describe the term as mistaken or misguided. And regardless of terminology, many of the concrete allegations - the idea that there is a concerted effort among leftists to attain positions of institutional power in order to influence the direction of culture - are just plainly true.
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I don’t know of any atheists out there saying a Mormon state is the end-goal of American Christianity, which is what would garner the equivalent response, “The Church of Mormon is a conspiracy theory.”
It would be easy, actually, to point out how the LDS church is a major driver of conservative culture, trying to match the Roman Catholic Church in cultural power through new media (Angel Studios, Glenn Beck, The Blaze, etc.). Now, build up a conspiracy theory of a group of influential and wealthy Mormons trying to bring about the White Horse Prophecy. Then check the funding of conservative candidates and PACs by Mormons, and you’ll see “evidence” for the theory everywhere you look. Easily disproved, of course, but now you’ve got the mind-worm whispering to you every time you see a Mormon involved in the culture war. (It works because of the successful othering of Mormons since their beginning, the American equivalent of the perpetually-othered Ashkenazi Jews of Europe complete with pogroms.)
But all that aside, the reason “Cultural Marxism” is denied is because most people have no clue what actual Cultural Marxism was/is. The progressive movement’s economic policy wing is rolling along on the momentum of bog-standard envy-driven collectivism, same as it ever was, grabbing and using new terminology by opportunity, not by design.
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So then why do you want to use the term so badly? You should have seen a lot of arguments against using it that are not "it's a conspiracy theory" by now. Can you be baited into doing something if the outgroup condemns you for doing it in sufficiently maddening terms? If the "right-wingers take Ivermectin against COVID because they are anti-science conspiracy theorists" needling had become obnoxious enough, would you have taken it just on those grounds? (If you do actually believe in Ivermectin, replace with drinking/injecting bleach)
You'll note that I don't actually go around calling the woke stuff "Cultural Marxism" in day-to-day conversations. It's only when someone denies that such a movement ever existed, and applied that label to itself, and that they were inspired by Marxist ideas, and that they resulted in what we now call "woke", that I pipe up, and point out that they are wrong.
Well, this is (almost) a motte I'm happy to concede - the only part that I find doubtful is how by "resulted" suggests that the lineage of "woke" is entirely, or mostly, within the movement that referred to itself as "Cultural Marxism". I have seen evidence of existence of communities that used that term for themselves, but the volume of evidence is really too small for there to ever have been more than a fairly small number (on the order of a few academic groups and attached activist groupies? Perhaps 100-1000 people?). If you want to claim that those groups, however small they are, begot the "woke" that we see today to a sufficient degree that "resulted" is justified as a term, when the "woke" themselves see their lineage as a procession of mass movements (civil rights, LGBT etc.), this is pretty close to the textbook definition of a conspiracy (events are secretly steered by a small group). Then the moniker "conspiracy theory" would be appropriate on the surface. Whether one should abstain from using it because of the pejorative connotations, or push back against the pejorative connotations on account of those being obvious enemy action by conspiracies, is a separate question.
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