Much Ado About Marxism: The Heritage Foundation and the Cultural Marxism Conspiracy Theory
In a period of American history where conspiracist thinking is associated with the political right (Konda, 2019, p. 9), it is natural to search for links to the world of conspiracy theories in the institutions important to conservative politics. The Heritage Foundation (or “Heritage” for short), a conservative think tank and prolific publisher of conservative think piece articles and reports, is one such organization with significant power in conservative politics (“Impact,” n.d.). By drawing parallels between the “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory (hereby referred to as “the CMCT”) that Marxist intellectuals are seeking to overturn American society and Heritage’s concerns over anti-whiteness and Marxist revolution via racial justice advocacy, we can better trace where conspiracist logic finds rhetorical footholds in modern American conservative discourse on race. This paper does not charge Heritage itself as a conspiracist organization, since the policies and work of the organization are too vast to be labeled on the basis of one facet of their policy platform; rather, it asserts that Heritage’s racial rhetoric is unmistakably marked by conspiracist thinking about “cultural Marxism” and is thus an example of how the conspiracy world permeates modern conservative politics.
Conspiracist Thinking: Hallmarks of a Conspiracist Perspective
In his book Conspiracies of Conspiracies, political science professor Thomas Konda sets out to provide descriptions of certain keywords in the study of the conspiracy world. In particular, the term “conspiracism” features prominently in this paper and in Konda’s book and refers to a “mental framework” that extends beyond simple belief in a conspiracy theory and “leads people to look for conspiracies, to anticipate them, to link them together into a grander overarching conspiracy” (Konda, 2019, p. 2). Organizations, beliefs, and people described as “conspiracists” adopt conspiracism as their perspective, and how conspiracists think about the world can be termed “conspiracist thinking” (Konda, 2019, p. 3). A conspiracy theory is a smaller part of the larger conspiracy world, and one with a much more contentious definition (Konda, 2019, p. 4–5). Konda once again provides the basics: a conspiracy theory is a specific idea or story in which the forces of an imagined secret, powerful evil act to harm those identified by the theory as good or innocent. The next section explores how this definition applies to the CMCT. First, though, it is important to investigate the undercurrent of conspiracist thought at Heritage more generally.
A comparison between Heritage’s racial rhetoric and elements of the CMCT is possible because the way Heritage discusses its positions mirrors certain general hallmarks of the conspiracy world. The basic narrative at the heart of Heritage’s commentary on race in America is that individuals associated with racial justice movements seek to attack white America and destroy the Christian, capitalist foundations of the country (most concisely expressed in the 2021 Heritage article by Jonathan Butcher and Mike Gonzalez, “Purging Whiteness To Purge Capitalism”). Immediately, certain conspiracist aspects of this idea stand out. Broadly speaking, conspiracism tends to be negative, meaning, according to Konda, that “Conspiracists fear and oppose the conspiracies they envision, because those conspiracies are invariably aimed at destroying their way of life” (Konda, 2019, p. 4). Heritage’s fear that racial justice advocates are allegedly trying to overthrow the American social order certainly mirrors Konda’s formulation of negative conspiracism. Heritage’s position on racial justice also exhibits a populist sentiment that Konda points out is common to conspiracism, painting a picture of racial justice advocates as Marxists who “seek to dismantle, or at least unrecognizably alter, the experiment that Abraham Lincoln called ‘the last best hope of earth,’” (Gonzalez, 2024) according to one Heritage article. Appealing to the ideal of America and calling upon Americans to “defeat today’s enemy [cultural Marxists],” (Gonzalez, 2024) Heritage sets up debates about racial justice as a fight the American people must wage against the possible destruction of their country as they know it, a definitive battle against good and evil that is common in conspiracist thinking.
Particularly interesting about Heritage is that their status as an esteemed institution in conservative America lends an air of authority to their publications–the organization brands itself as “the world’s leading think tank for policy impact” (“Homepage,” n.d.). The articles and reports the organization publishes exhibit important characteristics of “conspiratorial articles,” defined in a 2022 study as articles promoting conspiracy theories. The study’s authors, a group of German psychologists, conducted two studies in which they asked first four and then 1158 volunteers to numerically rate a collection of conspiracist and non-conspiracist articles on various factors related to argumentation, types of content, and tone, including how much information each article contained related to fact, emotion, and perceived threats. (There were 36 pairs of articles, each containing a conspiracist and non-conspiracist article on the same event, used in the study. Each pair of articles addressed a different conspiracy theory.) By comparing the aggregate rating for each set of articles on the amount of factual, emotional, and threat-related information that the articles relayed, researchers found that “conspiratorial articles are characterized by less factual information and more emotional and threat-related information,” than non-conspiratorial articles, meaning that articles advancing conspiracy theories tended to present the issues in emotional terms and describe a perceived threat to a certain group (Meuer et. al., 2022).
Heritage’s articles certainly follow this pattern: for example, one piece by Heritage staffer Mike Gonzalez accuses Black Lives Matter (BLM) of trying to “[rip] out the foundations of American society” by indoctrinating students and workers (Gonzalez 2021). Heritage’s presentation of Black Lives Matter and associated racial justice movements as a threat that aims to topple America certainly evokes an emotionally-charged sense of persecution in line with the aforementioned study’s analysis of how conspiracism is presented in an article format.
Having established that the way Heritage discusses racial issues shares much with the important elements of the conspiracy world–charged language, a perceived threat, and populist American sentiment–it is now fitting to move on to a description of the particular content of Heritage’s views on race.
The “Villains”: Cultural Marxism and Critical Race Theory
Recall from the previous section that conspiracy theories suppose an often shadowy group working towards an evil purpose–in essence, a villain. The Heritage Foundation’s “villains” in their discussion of race in America are cultural Marxism and CRT, but what exactly do those terms mean?
Critical race theory (CRT) is itself a dynamic and vast concept–in fact, scholars working with CRT are not a monolith and frequently disagree (Fortin, 2021). New York Times journalist Jacey Fortin quotes legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term “critical race theory,” when explaining that CRT is a framework that analyzes how race as a social concept is produced and “the ways that racial inequality is facilitated and the ways that our history has created these inequalities that now can be almost effortlessly reproduced unless we attend to the existence of these inequalities” (Fortin, 2021). In a word, CRT looks at American society, history, and power structures through the lens of racial inequality to understand how racial oppression operates. Although CRT has existed in its current form since 1989, it caught the attention of conservatives following the explosion of racial justice debates after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. CRT is a fundamentally academic framework that has been heavily misconstrued by conservative opponents like Heritage, who view CRT as a Marxist philosophy. Critical race theorists want to, according to a guest article for Heritage by leading anti-CRT conservative Christopher Rufo, “overturn” the American social order “through a countervailing application of force” (Rufo, 2021).
The increase in conservative attention to CRT has caused a distortion in the term, which “is often used to describe a range of activities that don’t really fit the academic definition, like acknowledging historical racism in school lessons or attending diversity trainings at work” (Fortin, 2021). Heritage’s characterization of CRT is, indeed, overinclusive; one Heritage article by Gonzalez, “Marxism Underpins Black Lives Matter Agenda,” laments perceived infiltrations of CRT into classrooms and the workplace (Gonzalez, 2021), the exact place that, as Fortin points out, are often the areas in which conservatives falsely categorize efforts at racial justice and inclusion as CRT.
At the heart of this criticism is the (inaccurate) characterization of CRT as inherently Marxist, an idea that pervades almost every article Heritage produces on racial justice; this strong anti-Marxist bent highlights Heritage’s use of the cultural Marxism conspiracy theory (CMCT) in their racial stances. A preliminary overview of the cultural Marxism conspiracy theory is in order. Sarah Cammarata, a journalist with a background in extremism and war studies, synthesizes previous journalistic reporting on cultural Marxism and the Great Replacement theory to deliver a definition. As she writes in an article for the Global Network on Extremism and Technology (a project run by the International Center for the Study of Radicalization at King’s College in London), the theory maintains that left-wing Jewish intellectuals have been planning to destroy Western civilization since the 1930s. The American right-wing shaped the intellectual ideas behind cultural Marxism “to construct a conspiracy that became a moniker for all liberal values and ideas that the right rallies against” (Cammarata, 2023).
In 2003, reporter Bill Berkowitz in The Intelligence Report, the magazine published by the civil rights-focused Southern Poverty Law Center, elaborated that, for adherents of the conspiracy theory, “cultural Marxism” means “a kind of ‘political correctness’ on steroids” that was started by Jewish intellectuals who wanted to destroy Christian America by creating “an unorthodox form of ‘Marxism’ that took aim at American society’s culture, rather that its economic system” (Berkowitz, 2003). Given that adherents of this conspiracy theory tend to use it as a form of resistance to any number of progressive ideas, the amount of positions and policies that could be labeled “cultural Marxism” are numerous (Cammarata, 2023).
What is important to note about the CMCT is that cultural Marxism does not really exist. Yale professor of law and history Samuel Moyn captures the point succinctly: “neither the defense of the workers nor of other disempowered groups was a conspiracy on its own” (Moyn, 2018). As Moyn notes, people have made Marxist critiques of society and culture, but the CMCT goes too far when it concludes from these critiques that there is a group of elite Marxist academics hoping to oppress traditionally privileged groups. Recalling the earlier definition of a conspiracy theory as an idea that an elite, evil group is working to harm innocents, we can easily see that the CMCT is, indeed, a conspiracy theory about an “unholy alliance” of Marxists seeking to “take away people’s privileges” (Moyn, 2018). In an effort to gain a more effective understanding of the implications of the CMCT in modern conservative politics, the following section takes as an example a specific exploration of the hold the CMCT has on how the Heritage Foundation thinks about issues of race.
Cultural Marxism and the Heritage Foundation
In line with the definition given above, Cammarata (2023) notes that adherents to the CMCT may see “anti-racist courses in schools or the Black Lives Matter Movement” as threats to the American way of life, which is exactly the position Heritage endorses. Based on their published articles, Heritage seems to be convinced that racial justice advocates associated with Black Lives Matter (BLM) and CRT are Marxists set on overturning the foundations of America while attacking white people. For example, in a Heritage piece titled “Purging Whiteness to Purge Capitalism,” the authors assert that CRT is just a mask for Marxism aimed at using race conflict to overturn the capitalist order (Butcher & Gonzalez, 2021). Another Heritage article, “Marxism Underpins Black Lives Matter Agenda,” reinforces this idea with concerns that racial justice advocates support “discriminating legally against whites and men” (Gonzalez, 2021). Thinkers at Heritage are highly concerned with racial justice movements resulting in discrimination and hatred towards white Americans and what those movements could mean for the capitalist order.
Given this, it’s hard to miss how Heritage’s racial rhetoric seizes upon fear of cultural Marxism; when it comes to race, the organization seems obsessed with a Marxist threat. In fact, Gonzalez, the Heritage employee and author of books on race mentioned in an earlier section, explicitly used the words “cultural Marxism” in describing the basis of a “NextGen Marxism” created by combining cultural Marxism with “contemporary American pathogens…above all, racial grievances,” as he explains in his piece “Meet the New Marxism, the Same As the Old Marxism.” According to him, this Marxism “seeks the abolition of the family, the nation-state, private property, and God” (Gonzalez, 2024), an assertion that aligns readily with conspiracist beliefs, identified by Berkowitz (2003) in his piece for the Southern Poverty Law Center, that cultural Marxism seeks to destroy “traditional American values–Christianity, ‘family values,’ and so on.” Gonzalez (2021), in his critique of BLM as a Marxist organization, alleges that such a destruction of values would result in a crumbling of “the foundations of American society.” Heritage’s criticisms of racial justice movements and the CMCT both share a fear of societal overhaul at the hand of Marxist forces that would allegedly result in oppression of previously privileged groups, an idea that, as established in the previous section, is markedly conspiracist.
In addition to their explicit use of the term “cultural Marxism,” Heritage shares more eerie similarities with the CMCT, often connected to their discussion of CRT. Heritage traces the origins of critical theory–what they allege is the precursor to CRT in the article “Purging Whiteness To Purge Capitalism” (Butcher & Gonzalez, 2021)–to the Frankfurt School, which, according to the CMCT, is where Jewish intellectuals began their plan for control of American culture via Marxist theory (Berkowitz, 2003). In the Heritage article “Critical Race Theory, the New Intolerance, and Its Grip on America,” authors Mike Gonzalez and Johnathan Butcher (2020)allege that from their beginnings at the Frankfurt School, critical theorists launched “an unremitting attack on Western institutions and norms in order to tear them down” and allege that those individuals involved with CRT, though they obscure the Marxist origins of their school of thought, are a part of this attack.
Most interestingly, Heritage’s criticism of CRT and racial justice programs captures the important role that guilt plays in the cultural Marxism conspiracy theory: just as adherents to the cultural Marxist conspiracy theory believe that making Americans feel guilty is the key to collapsing U.S. society (as noted by Berkowitz, 2003), so too does Heritage assert that “The purpose of the CRT training programs, and the curricula, is now to create enough bad associations with the white race, by teaching whites from childhood that they’re collectively guilty of past crimes and generally inferior” (Gonzalez, 2021). Thus, Heritage’s belief that racial justice advocates are launching an attack on whiteness by making white people feel guilty aligns with the idea, associated with CMCT and analyzed by Berkowitz, that cultural Marxists supposedly want to make Americans feel guilty as part of a plot to subvert Christianity (Berkowitz, 2003).
There may be some precedent for the Heritage’s overlap with the CMCT. In context, this overlap is a narrower example of the broad infusion of anti-Communist/Marxist conspiracism into right-wing politics. Historian Richard Hofstadter draws upon US history for his assessment of the country’s “paranoid,” or conspiracist, political culture and in the course of this investigation, he remarks that right-wing political thought rests on the idea that communists have infiltrated the government and are destroying America and “that the whole apparatus of education, religion, the press, and the mass media are engaged in a common effort to paralyze the resistance of loyal Americans” (Hofstadter, 1964, pp. 25–26).
Heritage believes that CRT is a “fully-loaded howitzer aimed at the pillars of the system” –for example, “capitalist, Christian, and patriotic structures” (Butcher & Gonzalez, 2021)– and that the media consistently ignores CRT’s Marxist origins. As the 2021 Heritage article “Purging Whiteness To Purge Capitalism demonstrates, Heritage believes that “All strains of CRT are of Marxist origin, a fact that would be better known to the wider public if the press did its job” [emphasis added]). This distrust of media and a sense of a Marxist threat certainly indicates that Heritage’s racial views could rest upon Hofstadter’s proposed anti-communist foundation for right-wing conspiracist thought, employing a specifically conservative anti-Communist sentiment to support CMCT’s narrative of an American system under attack by Marxist forces.
Conclusion: Why Does It Matter?
This paper focused primarily on the rhetorical links between Heritage’s positions on racial issues and the conspiracy world, using the organization’s adoption of key ideas in the cultural Marxism conspiracy theory as an example of how conspiracism has entered the conservative mainstream. Heritage’s adoption of many of the theory’s core tenets in their racial rhetoric provides a fascinating look at how conspiracist logics can facilitate right-wing political thought. However, this overlap is not mere intellectual fodder; Heritage is highly involved in American politics–so too, then, are the conspiracist logics they use. Among the recent victories they promote on their website are the fact that the Trump administration adopted 64% of their policy recommendations and that they helped recommend the Supreme Court Justices whose appointment to the court resulted in the Dobbs decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion (“Impact,” n.d.).
Crucially, Heritage is also at the helm of Project 2025, the project it organized in preparation for a right-wing presidency to “seize the gears of power effectively” (Chretien, 2023). Heritage’s Project 2025 policy guidebook, Mandate for Leadership, mentions critical race theory 20 times and connects it to “Marxist indoctrination” (“Mandate for Leadership,” 2023, p. 103). There is a real possibility that tenets of the cultural Marxist conspiracy theory could define policy priorities in future conservative administrations, and in fact Heritage’s work is setting the agenda for American culture wars over race even now; for example, Heritage’s crusade against CRT in the classroom has connected them with organizations leading book banning efforts (Alter & Harris, 2022). And, although not the focus of this paper, there is another dark theme of the conspiracy world lurking in Heritage’s evocation of the CMCT: the specter of anti-semitism and ties to conspiracies that tend to drive adherents to violence, like Great Replacement and white genocide conspiracy theories.
According to the American Jewish Committee, these types of conspiracy theories allege that non-white populations, allegedly allowed to flourish or enter the country under the control of Jews, will replace and oppress or kill white Americans (“Great Replacement,” n.d.). As Cammarata (2023) notes, “features of conspiracy theories known as the great replacement and cultural Marxism have become entangled to create an all-encompassing narrative of existential threats to Western civilisation.” Heritage may present a “dressed up” version, so to speak, of this shared rhetoric through their adoption of the CMCT, but the reality remains that the ideas that underpin white genocide and Great Replacement conspiracy theories–ideas shared and tied to CMCT–drive significant amounts of violence against Jews and people of color, including shootings in Pittsburgh, El Paso, Chirstchurch, and Buffalo and the violence at Charlottesburg in 2017 (“Great Replacement,” n.d.).
The fact that Heritage, with the size of platform and influence it has, seems to echo some of the rhetoric related to these ideas, ought to be incredibly concerning. This dark web of connections between Heritage’s rhetoric and deeply violent conspiracism demonstrates that though Heritage asserts that it wishes to protect America, it may just be that the organization’s particular strategy of demonizing racial justice movements and discussions of race could harm the country, especially minorities that see themselves represented and cared for by such movements. As Professor Michael Schwable, a CRT educator, states, CRT can “extinguish unproductive guilt and bring together people who want to create an America that lives up to its ideals of fairness and meritocracy” (Schwalbe, 2021). Perhaps Heritage is wrong about how American values are undermined.
References
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