Current Events > NYT columnist writing about "cultural Marxism"

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/26/opinion/millennial-activists-generation-gap.html

When I meet someone who runs an organization in a blue state, I often ask: Do you have a generation gap where you work? The answer whether the person leads a college, a nonprofit, a tech company, an entertainment company or a publication is generally the same: Yes, and its massive.

The managers at these places, who are generally 35 and above, are liberals. They vote Democratic and cheer on all the proper causes of the left. But some of the people under 35 are not liberals, but rather are militant progressives. The older people in the organization often have nicknames for the younger set: the Resistance, Al Jazeera, the revolutionaries. The young militants are the ones who stage the protests if someone does something deemed wrong.

If a company fires an employee for writing an inappropriate memo or uttering an inappropriate phrase, its usually because theres been a youth revolt. If a speaker is disinvited from a festival or from campus, its often because of a youth revolt. If a writer is fired for a tweet, or an editor has to resign from a literary review because of an unacceptable article, its often because of a youth revolt.

This generation gap is completely unsurprising. At pivotal moments of cultural change, such gaps open up, as the older generation breathes in one atmosphere and the younger generation breathes in another. After the turmoil of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Midge Decter wrote an outstanding book called Liberal Parents, Radical Children. Were seeing a similar chasm today.
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Two great belief systems are clashing here. The older liberals tend to be individualistic and meritocratic. A citizens job is to be activist, compassionate and egalitarian. Boomers generally think they earned their success through effort and talent.

The younger militants tend to have been influenced by the cultural Marxism that is now the lingua franca in the elite academy. Group identity is what matters. Society is a clash of oppressed and oppressor groups. People who are successful usually got that way through some form of group privilege and a legacy of oppression.

The big generational clashes generally occur over definitions of professional excellence. The older liberals generally believe that the open exchange of ideas is an intrinsic good. Older liberal journalists generally believe that objectivity is an important ideal. But for many of the militants, these restraints are merely masks for the preservation of the existing power structures. They offer legitimacy to people and structures that are illegitimate.

Two weeks ago, in the New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/13/opinion/cultural-marxism-anti-semitism.html

And while increasingly popular worries about cosmopolitan elites and economic globalization can sometimes transcend the most noxious anti-Semitism, talk of cultural Marxism is inseparable from it. The legend of cultural Marxism recycles old anti-Semitic tropes to give those who feel threatened a scapegoat.

A number of the conspiracy theorists tracing the origins of cultural Marxism assign outsize significance to the Frankfurt School, an interwar German and mostly Jewish intellectual collective of left-wing social theorists and philosophers. Many members of the Frankfurt School fled Nazism and came to the United States, which is where they supposedly uploaded the virus of cultural Marxism to America. These zany stories of the Frankfurt Schools role in fomenting political correctness would be entertaining, except that they echo the baseless allegations of tiny cabals ruling the world that fed the rights paranoid imagination in prior eras.

The wider discourse around cultural Marxism today resembles nothing so much as a version of the Judeobolshevik myth updated for a new age.

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What is the message you're trying to convey with these bolded sections? That the NYT has an inconsistent message, or that cultural Marxism is akin to antisemitism?

EDIT: Or hidden option C, which is that opinion sections are meaningless garbage?
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lol didn't read
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That the New York Times, an ostensibly liberal paper, should know better than to publish a writer tossing about the notion of cultural Marxism, a trope that is rooted in anti-Semitism. I don't expect the NYT to be a hivemind; different columnists have different views. But I think the money they spend on David Brooks' nonsense would better serve the paper if it were used to hire like five reporters.
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Antifar posted...

That the New York Times, an ostensibly liberal paper, should know better than to publish a writer lazily tossing about accusations of cultural Marxism, a trope that is rooted in anti-Semitism. I don't expect the NYT to be a hivemind; different columnists have different views. But I think the money they spend on David Brooks' nonsense would better serve the paper if it were used to hire like five reporters.

What is your definition of cultural marxism?
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Godnorgosh posted...

>mentions "the academy" and "cultural Marxism" as reasons for radicalization
>no mention of recession, stagnant and falling wages, increasing costs of college and housing, etc.

This

People are pissed and lashing out regardless of culture tropes
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Both links are for the two week old piece.
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Musourenka posted...

Both links are for the two week old piece.

Fixed that.
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Ive never seen anyone talk about cultural Marxism outside of paranoid right wingers ranting about conspiracies.
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Antifar posted...

Musourenka posted...

Both links are for the two week old piece.

Fixed that.

Thank you.

Articles like Brooks' is why NYT is deservedly getting so much flak. They have been doing this quite often lately.
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