(Karl Marx by John Jabez Edwin Mayall 1875. Städelsches Kunstinstitut.)

One of the more curious features of contemporary American intellectual life is not the persistence of Marxist ideas, but the elaborate ritual of pretending they aren’t there.

Mention Marxism’s influence on the modern academy—or on the cultural assumptions that now spill from it into media, corporate life, and public institutions—and a familiar response appears. A smirk. A Monty Python–style eye roll. There are communists everywhere! Under the bed! In the kitchen eating the wife’s jam! The implication is clear: noticing ideological inheritance is evidence of paranoia.

I’ve come to think of this reflex as a form of secondary gaslighting. Primary gaslighting is deliberate deception—knowing something is true while insisting it’s madness to believe it. Secondary gaslighting is more banal, and more common: people with little or no education in intellectual history assuring you, with total confidence, that what you’re describing simply doesn’t exist—because they’ve been trained to mock anyone who notices it.

They aren’t deceiving. But they are repeating a script written by people who most assuredly do know better.

The irony, of course, is that the lineage is not obscure. It’s documented. It’s taught—often approvingly—by the very institutions now insisting it has no downstream effects.

Begin with Karl Marx, whose influence did not end with failed economic predictions or the collapse of the Soviet project. What survived Marx was not his nineteenth-century economics, but his moral grammar: history as structured conflict, cultural legacy as false consciousness, and liberation as a project of unmasking hidden power.

That grammar was consciously preserved and reworked by Antonio Gramsci, who recognized that Western capitalism would not collapse under its own contradictions. Culture mattered. Institutions mattered. Consent mattered. If the working class would not rise spontaneously, intellectuals would have to do the preparatory work—reshaping norms, language, and assumptions until political change became inevitable rather than controversial.

This insight was taken up, refined, and exported by the Frankfurt School, particularly figures such as Herbert Marcuse. Here Marxism underwent its decisive cultural turn. The focus shifted from factories to consciousness, from ownership to domination, from economic prediction to moral critique. Capitalism no longer merely exploited; it integrated. Liberation would require critique—endless, suspicious, demystifying critique—aimed at everything from consumer culture to language itself.

By the time these ideas reached American universities in force, Marxism no longer needed to announce itself as such. In the 1990s, when I was at university, that transition was still incomplete. Marxism was often worn openly, even proudly. I knew professors—brilliant, generous, and unapologetically Marxist—who regarded their commitments as marks of intellectual seriousness. One of them awarded me a prize at the end of a semester: a book of Sandinista poetry. The point isn’t grievance; it’s candor. Marxism was out in the open, confident enough to name itself.

Today, that confidence has been replaced by stealth—not because the ideas vanished, but because they succeeded.

The phrase “long march through the institutions,” associated with Rudi Dutschke, was never a conspiracy; it was a strategy stated plainly. Shape the academy. Normalize the assumptions. Translate theory into moral intuition. Let the frogs warm slowly.

Postmodernism played a crucial role here. Often presented as a rejection of Marxism, it functioned instead as a salvage operation. When Marxist grand narratives lost credibility, postmodern skepticism toward truth, objectivity, and meta-narratives ensured that Marxism’s failures could never quite count against it. If knowledge itself is power, then critique is always justified—and refutation is always suspect. What it preserved was Marx’s critique of “false consciousness” and his call to overthrow the existing order.

This synthesis now undergirds what is loosely called “woke.” The term itself, once a colloquial expression of alertness to manipulation, was repurposed by explicitly Marxist activists—most notably in movements such as Black Lives Matter—to relocate Marx’s “critical conflict” from class to race. The structure remains unchanged: oppressor and oppressed, false consciousness, moral asymmetry, and the conviction that one knows the decisive truth before inquiry begins.

None of this requires believing in secret plots or hidden cabals. It requires only a willingness to trace ideas across time. The refusal to do so—combined with ritualized mockery of those who try—is not skepticism. It is incuriosity elevated to virtue. And that, more than Marxism itself, is what should worry us.

A liberal education once meant initiation into an inheritance: Jerusalem, Athens, Rome; the slow accumulation of insight, error, and hard-won wisdom of, frankly, astonishing richness and unprecedented strength. To treat that inheritance primarily as a crime scene—as a catalog of domination to be dismantled rather than a tradition to be understood—is not progress. It is amnesia—or worse: a stealthy repudiation of inheritance, sometimes fueled by resentment, always armed with theory. It is the peculiar habit of dismantling an inheritance one has never quite bothered to understand.

Noticing this does not make one paranoid. It makes one attentive. And attentiveness, inconvenient as it may be, remains the beginning of intellectual honesty.

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