The Excesses of Equity
How, and why, the revanchist nature of Identity Politics and sociopolitical Grievance Movements are harming, rather than healing, us today
Any good polemic needs a mandate and a relatively narrow focus. For now, let’s imagine my mandate is concern for my fellow man. The focus? The creeping influence of Cultural Marxism, especially as it relates to Equity pushes in art, business, politics, and so on.
“But wait,” you might say. “I heard ‘Cultural Marxism’ is just some gross, bigoted conspiracy theory.” Well, then, we should probably start with a bit of history, and also define our terms.
Marxism: Named after Karl Marx. Restrictively applies most to a philosophy of economics, politics, and society which is skeptical of free markets, class roles, businesses & businessmen, and Western historical orthodoxy. See also Cultural Marxism further down.
Conflict theory: A broad field of political and social science that includes, but is not limited to, Marxism. This field was most heavily fathered and influenced by the distinct works of Ludwig Gumplowicz and Lester F. Ward in the 1800s. Marx would also prove to be hugely relevant in this area of thought both contemporaneously and centuries later. Conflict theory can best be summed up as a frame for viwing society, wherein all relations and dynamics are judged based on assumed conflicts between parties. Men in conflict with women, white in conflict with black, rich in conflict with poor, and so on.
Critical Theory: An outgrowth of conflict theory, with an expansive interest in sociology and society at large, rather than staying focused on economics or even philosophy. It is a grand theory, or collection thereof, with tendrils into ethnic/racial thought (Critical Race Theory or CRT), feminist theories, filmmaking, historical studies, literature, and much more. Largely originated at, and propagated by, the Frankfurt School and its various leading theoreticians. Epitomized by skepticism of established norms, essentialist views on groups, and a push for reshaping the media and/or relationships it critiques.
Cultural Marxism: Also known as Marxist cultural analysis. Basically a term for a specific ideological frame which, like Conflict Theory, was largely born out of the Frankfurt School. The men most associated with this specific frame were Antonio Gramsci, Georg Lukács, and Leon Trotsky. Cultural Marxism can fairly be described as an expansive synthesis of Critical Theory, Marxism, and various conflict theories of the 20th century. It seeks a redress of grievances around cultural issues, and a vast reshaping of society. Like its philosophical forebearers, it can be applied to culture, the arts, and interpersonal relations in a manner that goes far beyond the specific realm of economics and government.
Equality: A term that, in political contexts especially, relates to free treatment, observance of human rights, justice under law, and the condemnation & penalization of discriminatory practices. Noted goals of political equality include colorblindness, which treating people without regard to race, and equality of opportunity, wherein of all races, creeds, genders, and orientations have a level chance at their preferred professional or sociocultural pursuits.
Equity: A political term most commonly associated with ideas of redistribution of resources and forcible equality of outcome. Equity goes beyond equality by pushing for a (re)balancing of the scales in sociopolitical and economic contexts, such that forms of positive discrimination (including affirmative action) are often employed and valorized. Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion (DEI) practices and policies are also strongly influenced by political Equity philosophy.
Frankfurt School: The word “School” here may be misleading, as this group was more a school of thought and an semi-informal club than a strictly pedagogic institution. The men involved were all public intellectuals, already well past their twenties in many cases. However, it did notably influence many traditional academies, universities, and the like therafter. Due to high number of scholars and political dissidents involved, the Frankfurt School’s members also had an outsized role in shaping activist movements of the 20th century and onward.
Identity Politics: Political movements and philosophies that are heavily tied to identity groups. Includes everything from white supremacy and black nationalism to feminism to Lesbian, Gay & Bisexual (LGB) rights groups. The politics of identity can, in some contexts, be used for good, as was the case with the civil rights and voting rights movements of the 20th century. They can also be used for ill, as we’ve often seen with white identity groups like the KKK and various racialized gangs (black, Latino, and so on).
Progressivism: The modern political movement and nomenclature most associated with the United States’ Democratic Party, at least internally. It has many contours and tenets, not all of which are germane to this piece. For simplicity, just understand it as an orthogonal outgrowth of 20th Democratic Party Liberalism, but with an emphasis on Identity Politics and a sympathetic ear to Cultural Marxist thought.
So, is “Cultural Marxism” a conspiracy theory? Well, it is a term that was used neutrally and descriptively, at least until the 1990s (per academic sources). It applies to a very real school of thought. That school of thought has absolutely, indisputably influenced later teachings throughout global academia and, in turn, spawned political movements. And while it is a tad esoteric and has been invoked or misused by some terrible people in bigoted ways, so have many other terms. I would allow you be the judge on whether the “conspiracy theory” charge is being used in good faith or not. To my mind, and many others, it just seems like cynical scaremongering and semantics to deflect from legitimate criticism of an ideology, and broader political project, that is absolutely a real thing.
On to the meat of our topic though. Now that we roughly understand what the terms mean, allow to dig deeper into what’s wrong with some of them. In particular, I want to drill down into the perils of Cultural Marxism as expressed and exemplified in parts of modern progressive politics. In fairness, we could just as easily call this phenomenon progressivism writ large, but progressivism is a big beast that has other tenets I’m not interested in scrutinizing here. No, the economic policies aren’t the main issue. It’s the social ones.
Political activism has long been soaked in political theory like that of the Frankfurt School. Radical thinkers often become professors at prestigious universities. Students become activists. And then those activists become leaders in politics, even mainstream ones. This is how Cultural Marxism goes from simple political theory to concrete social policy.
“What’s so bad about that,” you might ask. Perhaps all this activism, and the pipeline that fuels it, is necessary. After all, “nonwhite people have suffered historic injustices. Women have been treated as glorified property and subjected to sexist, and sexualized, mistreatment en masse.” Before commenting on the proposed solutions, I would again agree to these historical facts. “Non-heterosexual people have been medically stigmatized, tortured, and denied the very right to exist in public,” or so the various arguments go. And these arguments do have some merit.
But we live in an era of unprecedented tolerance, pluralism, and equality of opportunity. A honest accounting could not lead one to say, with a straight face, that we are a prejudiced and inegalitarian society in the global Western world of the 21st century. We’ve enshrined our commitments to equal rights, anti-discrimination, and other best practices into law. In the increasingly rare instances where we do still find bigoted behavior, we root it out, stigmatize it, and penalize it harshly in both political and economic terms.
We’ve never been less prejudicial, and never will be.
Okay, I’ll admit that last line was me intentionally gilding the lily. The sad truth is we actually are more prejudicial in 2024 than we were in the past, but when I say that I mean the very recent past. Alas, I can recall a time in the late 2000s and early 2010s when we legitimately had, at least ostensibly, Crossed the Rubicon of racism, sexism, and even homophobia. Women, nonwhites, and LGB people were fully acknowledged as equal humans and citizens, not secondary classes. But what happens when all the identity movements and groups built around fighting those equality battles have run out of just causes? The logically & rhetorically obvious, but politically unspeakable, next step: Move on to unjust causes.
The groundwork was already laid. Positive crimination, in the form of affirmative action and the like, was a decades-old standard practice in school & work by the 2010s. Pushing for more elaborate, and less straightforward, identity preferences like DEI was only a natural progression. Similarly, we can look at the lingering air of pro-female chivalry and deference, the kind which allowed for objectively ridiculous double standards like enfranchisement sans national service, or the socioeconomic enforcement of male gender norms even as their female equivalents largely evaporated. Not to mention a newfound sociopolitical guilt over homophobia, which was weaponized by activist groups in service of programs and agendas that original LGB rights coalition never wanted nor needed.
In short, we transitioned from an unequal 20th century to a relatively brief window of nominal equality in the early 21st, then speedran right into a different, but similarly pernicious, paradigm of inequality today. I’ll affirmatively say it: We created a climate that’s actually too favorable to certain identity groups, and in many cases we’ve established a cottage industry that promotes outright discrimination, all the way up to hateful bigotry, whilst wrapping itself in the language of “justice” and social science.
This is where Cultural Marxism leads us. It influenced a politics of grievance that’s committed to revanchism rather than harmony. How else do we explain the rise of antisemitism masked—often literally masked, and keffiyah adorned—as “Anti-Zionism” in schools, businesses, and the arts? How do we explain what can be only described as anti-white racism, tacitly tolerated throughout the last fifty, sixty years or more? On and on we could go down this line, if we have the courage and honesty to do so.
Days ago I was promoting, or perhaps forewarning, the imminence of this article you’ve now been reading. I had insisted that I was not interested in grand theory or societal collapse. Perhaps I gilded the lily there too, or perhaps this issue I seek to address is just too big, too far reaching, and too insidious to avoid speaking of it in bombastic terms.
Were I to tell you that feminism was influenced by conflict theory, you’d likely not be surprised. Same thing if I told you that modern progressive politics had both Marxist roots and essentialist aims (tied to identity movements and past prejudices). Yet when we combine all the seemingly discreet, observable features of Cultural Marxism, Identity Politics, Equity, and so on together…it does sound to the uninitiated like a conspiracy theory. I don’t discount this. What I ask, nay beg, of you is that you evaluate what I’ve said in earnest and in good faith. Interrogate your priors, just as you might interrogate me or question my own ideological commitments. (I profess now, as ever, to be beholden only to the truth, no matter how inconvenient it may be.)
In closing, I will offer some points of nuance and hope. Though I’ve outlined how certain political orthodoxies and projects seek to bring down some groups and raise others, I will almost freely admit that these groups are more vocal minority than normie majority. Whenever they, and their questionable beliefs and actions, are forced into the clarity of light and true comprehension, people recoil. Most regular people don’t think hatred of Jews is acceptable as some idiotic form of geopolitical revenge or class consciousness. Most people don’t actually think bigotry or sexism are really okay, they simply are a bit too myopic to realize that this is an absolute & universal truth, and it applies to white people and men just as much as nonwhites and women. The majority of us are decent, and we can be decent again, just as we were for that brief window over a decade ago. We only have to be honest and principled enough to call out the bad actors, and bad acts, whenever and wherever we see them.