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Notes -
As I laid out in the last paragraphs of this reply, my main concern in this discussion is that the right not recapitulate the type of sloppy thinking that I find so obnoxious about the left. I raised two issues regarding what I see as fallacious thinking:
The tendency to refer to every idea on the left as "Marxist" seems to me to be analogous to the left's tendency to call everything they don't like "fascism". Describing every non-leftist position as fascist is simply incorrect; and it is similarly incorrect to describe all leftism as Marxism. Let me put it this way: can someone subscribe to a typical woke agenda (trans surgeries for minors, mandatory racial diversity quotas, the need to overthrow the patriarchy and empower women, etc) and not be a Marxist? Or has (what is alleged to be) the historical provenance of those ideas made them intrinsically and permanently Marxist?
I believe that the right's preoccupation with "cultural Marxism" carries with it an implicit assumption that without Karl Marx, none of this would be happening. If we just didn't have those darn radical Marxist professors who were giving our kids bad ideas, then men would still be men and women would still be women, racial minorities would be at peace, Jesus would reign and everyone would be happy. And I think that assumption is simply based on mistaken models of history, psychology, and politics. It's the right's version of "if only Trump supporters weren't brainwashed by Russian bots, then they would see that Trump is a threat to democracy just like we do". It fails to take seriously the notion that different people really do just think fundamentally different than you, and that their ideas aren't just random bullshit, but are instead a response to actual real conditions. Woke ideas wouldn't be as popular as they are if people didn't find them genuinely appealing, independent of whatever authority figures endorse them.
Oh, certainly! The trans surgeries for minors things seems more driven by the medical establishment’s desire to make huge amounts of money off of trans people - and to a lesser extent by transhumanists using trans surgeries as a foot in the door to different types of alterations of the human form - than it does by Marxism. Racial diversity quotas are isomorphic to the kinds of ethnic spoils systems that have existed in tons of multiethnic/multiracial empires throughout history. And the shattering of patriarchy and empowerment of women has been a recurring strain of thought in several religious traditions - for example, Baha’i - and liberal philosophical movements. However, I would say that the specific framing that sees sex relations as an explicit dialectical class conflict between two competing groups is distinctly Marxist.
I think it’s plainly true that the vast majority of the people who actually achieved the real-world implementation of these ideas, whether in the U.S., Europe, Latin America, or Asia, were Marxists and were doing so because they were Marxist. It’s true that they also could have arrived at these ideas by other paths - they just didn’t. Martin Luther King was a closeted communist, and his speeches were likely ghostwritten by Stanley Levison, his handler and fundraiser, a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. These activists were overwhelmingly motivated by an explicit commitment to Marxism. That doesn’t even mean all of their ideas were wrong! I don’t think Marxists are wrong about everything! It’s just an accurate description of the provenance of their ideas.
Right, so to a large extent I agree with this whole paragraph. If it hadn’t been Karl Marx developing these ideas, it would have been someone else. Hell, Marx was only one of a number of commentators writing about similar ideas at the time, reacting to the same influences and in discussion with each other. MLK and the other major figures behind the Civil Rights movement were communists, but they clearly won by appealing to pre-existing moral sentiments and vulnerabilities present among liberal Christians. Magnus Hirschfeld, one of the seminal figures in early gay right activism and the man who founded the medical institute that performed the first sex-reassignment surgeries in history, was a socialist, and Harry Hay, a very influential American gay rights activist, was a long-time member of the Communist Party. However, these men were building on, and in ongoing dialogue with, thinkers who were coming from totally different and non-Marxist philosophical backgrounds. Many of these movements are natural extensions of ideas contained within the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution.
I think it’s important to tease out the provenance of these ideas very carefully and to find a way to rescue what’s good about them while discarding all of the Marxist class-struggle garbage that accumulated around them. That requires being very honest about not only the fact that it was Marxists leading the way on most of them, but also why that was the case and how to wrest control of them away from Marxists moving forward.
In an American context referring to 'liberal Christianity' pre-Roe v Wade ranges on a narrow spectrum from potentially misleading to flat out false. The clearest throughline is from churches opposed to eugenics and churches teaching socially conservative doctrines today, and these weren't particularly present on the segregationist side- indeed, the largest, the Roman Catholic Church, excommunicated members who engaged in segregationist advocacy.
It's better to say that Christianity's discomfort with racial inferiority aligned with liberal activists. There were Christians on both sides, but the civil rights movement was much more religious than the segregationists- and it's notable that many of the segregationists had a change of heart when they found Jesus later on in life(yes, racism was now deeply unfashionable, but Christianity coincided with repudiation of racism in most of these cases).
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