One hundred years of cultural war to overthrow the West, wokeism as the culmination

A crisis, cleverly provoked by the saturation of public services and the collapse of institutions (...) could trigger a Marxist revolution.

By Etienne Fauchaire, interview with Évelyne Joslain

Source : The Epoch Times

INTERVIEW – In recent years, the general public has been startled by the emergence of visible manifestations of wokeness. However, far from being a noisy fad confined to the margins of the ultra-left, this phenomenon is an extension of the "political correctness" born of the May 1968 revolution, itself the child of a patient and methodical Marxist enterprise of subversion of Western civilization, explains Évelyne Joslain, in Guerre Culturelle (Éditions Presses de la Livrée). From the emergence of the technocratic state to the lexical strategy of Marxist theorists, from the insidious influence of the Frankfurt School to the civilizational upheavals caused by the 1965 US Immigration Act, from borderlessness to the Great Reset, this essayist specializing in America traces with scholarly rigor and uncompromising style the history of a "Hundred Years' War that concerns us all," where words are weapons and institutions are battlefields.

Epoch Times: "It was with Wilson that the culture war truly began," you write. Can you explain why Woodrow Wilson is, in your view, the "first globalist president" and how 1913 was a pivotal year in the rise of socialism in America?

Évelyne Joslain: Woodrow Wilson was the first "progressive" president of the United States, that is, the first left-wing chief executive openly committed to the socialist, even socialist, ideas of his time. But he was also, and above all, the first cosmopolitan president, what we would call a globalist today.

Where his predecessors saw America as a nation apart, exceptional for its commitment to liberty, Wilson broke with this tradition: he despised the American Constitution and considered European models superior. His fascination with the British parliamentary system and the Bismarckian welfare state bears witness to this.

He was also a globalist through his foreign policy, by engaging the United States in the First World War, yet playing a decisive role in the Allied victory, and by inaugurating a geopolitical doctrine in the name of which America was duty-bound to ensure the freedom of global maritime commerce and free trade between nation-states. He founded the League of Nations (League of Nations), the forerunner of supranational international institutions.

As I recall in my book, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge was one of the first to understand and denounce the idea of ​​a developing supranational sovereignty, fatal to America and other nations. For Wilson, it was "the world first, America last." His fundamental irenicism prevented him from imagining the inevitable corruption of large, uncontrollable international organizations. Certainly, his League of Nations failed. But the idea remained.

Wilson also definitively marked America from within, with reforms adopted in 1913 and imitated throughout the West: the creation of the income tax (a direct tax on citizens, replacing the customs duties imposed on foreign countries), the election of senators by universal suffrage, and, above all, the creation of the Federal Reserve, a central bank independent of the executive branch.

Diana West, in her masterful work American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our National Character, is not exaggerating in the least when she speaks of a betrayal of the national character. It is indeed the spirit of the Founding Fathers that Wilson disowned.

It is therefore quite amusing that Donald Trump is considering dismantling the most deleterious legacies of 1913, which was in reality the unofficial opening of the Culture War that has undermined America for more than a century.

In 1944, at the National Conference of Communist Parties, Alexander Trachtenberg, publisher of Marxist newspapers and activist in the Communist Party USA, famously said: "When the time comes to take control of America, we will do so neither under the banner of Communism nor under that of Socialism: these terms are too tainted and repellent for the American people." No, we will take over America under labels we have made attractive: liberalism, progressivism, democracy. But we will indeed take it over!" Today, it is not uncommon to hear political or media figures defending ideas traditionally classified as left-wing or far-left, while claiming to be liberal and democratic. How has the term "liberalism" been progressively emptied of its original meaning and diverted for ideological purposes?

Alexander Trachtenberg, an American Marxist born in 1886, was an activist publisher and a pure revolutionary, convinced, like Antonio Gramsci, that the transformation of societies requires a long-term process.

A century later, this strategy bore fruit: two days before his election to the presidency of the United States in 2008, Barack Obama declared in a jubilant announcement to his voters: "We are two days away from the profound transformation of America," thus echoing Trachtenberg's predictions.

One cannot, of course, be both Marxist and democratic—the "people's democracies" of Eastern Europe have demonstrated this. When the contemporary left, whether in the Democratic Party or the European Union, claims to want to "protect our democracy," it should be understood as "preserve our bureaucracies."

While today's American ultra-left—from Bernie Sanders to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—no longer hides its open adherence to Marxist ideology, let us remember that it had to hide the truth from the American public for over a century. The very term "American Marxist" is no longer an oxymoron, as Mark Levin demonstrates in his book American Marxism.

Since the beginnings of "progressivism," a term chosen to mask a latent socialism, left-wing theorists have systematically and successfully sought to manipulate language to conceal their true ideological identity and real objectives. This process unfolded in several stages—which I detail in my book—and led, since the 1970s and the advent of political correctness, to the establishment of a veritable coded nomenclature.

It should be noted that universities have often been at the forefront of this lexical subversion, coining new expressions and distorting the meanings of words to produce "acceptable" versions of reality, that is, those consistent with left-wing ideology.

The term liberal is undoubtedly the one that has undergone the greatest semantic distortion. In the United States, a classical liberal traditionally referred to an American belonging to the conservative right, committed to the founding principles of the Republic, individual liberty, the free market, and limited government. But since the 1960s, the word has been entirely appropriated by the left.

Now, a liberal refers to a leftist, often interventionist, in favor of massive redistribution and technocratic governance. But the term has become so repulsive to a large part of the American electorate that the left has preferred to return to its original label: progressive.

As for classical liberals, ousted from their own label, they have partly evolved towards libertarianism, a movement that sometimes brings its members closer to the left on certain political issues.

In Europe, "liberals," for their part, still claim a connection with classical liberalism, even though they have distanced themselves from the fundamental principles enunciated by John Stuart Mill, the American Founding Fathers, or even French liberal thinkers. European liberals assert their difference from American libertarians, who oppose interventionist government, which allows them to fully embrace the idea of ​​a European superstate.

Like libertarians, they remain locked in a rigid doctrinal straitjacket, refusing any questioning. Thus, they defend a dogmatic free trade policy, even when certain commercial or regulatory practices—whether originating in certain countries or even their beloved European Union—create profound market distortions.

They are just as silent on the subject of uncontrolled immigration, which is in reality likely desired and therefore controlled by globalist ideologues. Nor do they ever criticize international institutions or globalist structures, constantly scorning anything that even remotely touches on "populism," that is, in reality, the aspirations of rooted peoples.

This liberal ambiguity also extends to geopolitical and societal issues. Unlike American libertarians, who are often avowed pacifists, European liberals carefully avoid taking a position on these subjects, except, of course, when it comes to the war in Ukraine.

Following in the footsteps of Antonio Gramsci and Leon Trotsky, a Hungarian communist intellectual exiled in Berlin, Georg Lukács, participated in the founding of what would become the Frankfurt School in 1923. Alongside several German thinkers, most of them Jewish, who would later flee Nazism to seek refuge in the United States, Lukács contributed to the establishment on American soil of this institute, which was conceived from the outset as a tool of cultural subversion as part of the "long march through institutions." Can you discuss the ideological nature of the Frankfurt School, its intellectual strategy, and the legacy it left behind, particularly in the genesis of the phenomenon now referred to as "wokeism"?

The Frankfurt School was originally a Marxist think tank based at the University of Frankfurt. I don't know what remains of it there today, but its intellectual legacy has been widely exported, particularly to the United States, where it naturally took root at Columbia University. This institution became, in the 1930s, the epicenter of the leftist revolution that, starting in 1968, spread to almost all American campuses.

The pro-Hamas and anti-Israel demonstrations that followed the attack of October 7, 2023, illustrate the permanence and vigor of the ideas emerging from this school. Columbia continues to set the tone, not only for other American universities, but also for French institutions like Sciences Po.

It is important to remember that violence is not an accidental deviation of the ultra-left, but a deliberate tool in its ideological arsenal. The thinkers of the Frankfurt School have always advocated civil disobedience, subversion, and even direct confrontation, in the name of the moral superiority of their cause. Violence is justified because the ends are supposedly noble, and the adversaries, by definition, guilty.

Finally, all the concepts forged in left-wing academic circles since the 1980s—in the wake of Howard Zinn, Edward Said, and Noam Chomsky—are a direct continuation of Critical Theory, the Frankfurt School's hallmark. It is this extremist ideological matrix that led to wokeism, promoted first under Barack Obama and then under Joe Biden, and which continues to permeate the Western radical left today.

Considered the father of the New Left, Herbert Marcuse, a German Jewish Marxist theorist, also fled Nazi Germany to the United States. Also a member of the Frankfurt School, he later became a major inspiration for the leftist revolutionaries of May '68, including Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who also came from a German Jewish family who had fled Nazism. What role did Herbert Marcuse play in the emergence of neo-Marxism?

The New Left emerged in 1962. To my knowledge, its origins lie with Tom Hayden, surrounded by some fifty activists, with the founding of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) movement. But the groundwork had been carefully prepared much earlier by Herbert Marcuse, a central figure of the Frankfurt School, in the 1940s.

Marcuse was both a revolutionary and a pornocrat with a Freudian streak. He understood that any revolution is always facilitated, if not initiated, by a moral subversion of morals. He relied in particular on the example of the "libertines" of the French Revolution, the ideological ancestors of our contemporary pornocrats. For these doctrinaires, the corruption of youth, and in particular of children, constitutes the first lever of revolutionary change: once the benchmarks are abolished, the rest follows naturally.

How do you analyze the openly anti-Zionist discourse of these leftist figures who are, however, Jewish?

I'm not an expert on Cohn-Bendit or even Marcuse, whose works I haven't read. But if both have, as you suggest, adopted anti-Zionist stances, it's most likely the same anti-Zionism professed by Jewish figures like George Soros or Bernie Sanders, who manifest a profound hostility not only toward Zionism, but toward everything that embodies a declared Jewish identity.

In the vision of this extreme left, the typical Jew and the Israeli citizen fall into the same guilty category: the former are guilty of usury and capitalist connections, the latter of colonialism. Here we find the Hegelian dialectic, which constitutes the foundation of Marxist thought, characterized by its simplistic approach: on one side, the oppressors—bankers, capitalists, colonizers; on the other, the oppressed—workers, colonized peoples, people of color.

It should be noted that the ultra-left never questions itself. And when its traditional victim figures disappear, such as the industrial proletariat, it invents new ones at will.

Another marker in this long cultural war you describe: immigrationism, which encouraged the massive importation of millions of foreigners into the West in order to serve, according to you, the globalist agenda promoted by the left. In this regard, you assert that the American immigration law of October 3, 1965, constitutes in itself "a global revolution," insofar as it quickly spread to Europe, then morally weakened by decolonization. What was the genesis of this law, and what were its repercussions for the entire Western world?

The 1965 U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act owes its adoption largely to the activism of Senator Ted Kennedy. It represents the culmination of several ideological currents that emerged around the world before taking root and emerging in America.

It is important to recall the symbolic weight of the Bandung Conference in 1955, which preceded a wave of decolonization. This movement was supported by Americans, who viewed with suspicion Europeans, recipients of American military and financial aid, clinging to their vast and costly colonial empires.

Added to this was the rise of anti-Americanism championed by progressive intellectuals of the 1950s, led by Lionel Trilling: civil disobedience, nonconformity, and the emergence of a "radical chic." Twenty years before, the Palestinian-American decolonialist academic Edward Said was already developing this preference for the Other: the foreigner, the exotic, perceived as necessarily oppressed. It became chic and morally virtuous to be concerned with the misery of the newly coined "Third World."

Another underlying ideology accompanied this upheaval: that of open borders, or rather, a world without borders, where unconditional acceptance became a moral imperative, and where native populations were required to welcome and grant civil rights to all who came their way.

All of this also took place within the context of the directives issued by the famous Second Vatican Council. Senator Kennedy, a Catholic by family heritage if not by personal morality, was sensitive to all this intellectual nonsense, in addition to being eager to leave his name in history. He therefore did not hesitate to lie outrageously by claiming that this law "would not bring about any undesirable changes" or "was in no way revolutionary," and succeeded in forcing it through Congress. The rest is history.

In sixty years, under the influence of this revolutionary-inspired law, America has experienced several successive waves of migration that have profoundly transformed its founding DNA.

The European Union continues to promote this same policy, and the United Kingdom, despite having left the Union, continues to apply its principles with identical effects. The Western transnational left tolerates no questioning of its migration policies. The England of Keir Starmer, the Trotskyist who became Prime Minister, offers a final striking illustration: Renaud Camus, author of the theory of the Great Replacement, has just been refused entry to British territory. His crime? Having described this process of organized replacement of native populations as the "cultural and civilizational genocide" of Europe.

It is also worth noting that, although this 1965 Immigration Act predates by a year the formulation of the Cloward-Piven doctrine—named after the two Marxist sociologists teaching at Columbia—it is clear that it was already inspired by their ongoing work. At the heart of this thinking: the idea that a crisis, skillfully provoked by the saturation of public services and the collapse of institutions—under the effect of waves of riots, orchestrated disasters, and massive arrivals of carefully unassimilated foreigners—could trigger a Marxist revolution.

Crisis, real or fabricated, is an excellent means of imposing unpopular and totalitarian measures on populations. It was in this wake that Cloward-Piven introduced the concept of universal basic income in 1966, which would slowly germinate until it blossomed into the grandiose Great Reset project spearheaded in 2020 by Klaus Schwab, eager to profit from the Covid crisis. Schwab called in 2020 for a "reset" of capitalism, which is nothing other than capitalist communism, a crony capitalism (among elites) that combines public and private sectors, similar to the state capitalism practiced by the Chinese Communist Party. As part of this ideological pendulum swing between the United States and Europe, you assert that "Lyndon B. Johnson is the first president responsible for the culture war," and that his policies directly inspired the Pleven Law of 1972 in France, the first anti-racist legislation adopted in France. This law, often criticized for allowing activist and judicial use of the courts by certain woke associations, also prefigured, recall, the Gayssot Law of 1990, introduced by a communist MP, which criminalizes racism, anti-Semitism, and the protest against crimes against humanity.

With Lyndon B. Johnson, the culture war became a tangible and visible reality. He followed in the footsteps of his Democratic predecessors—Woodrow Wilson, who had already introduced socialist ideas, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, architect of a sprawling deep state—but this president was the one who drove a definitive wedge between the American right and left. A gap that has become irreconcilable sixty years later.

Johnson didn't limit himself to social policies: he implemented an arsenal of laws that established preferential treatment for certain citizens to the detriment of others deemed less "deserving." Through a redistributive system of benefits, privileges, and "rights" specially created by the government—in contradiction with the universal rights guaranteed by the Constitution—he laid the foundations for systemic clientelism.

At the same time, he initiated the ideological militarization of justice, now two-tiered, notably beginning with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which allowed certain groups to benefit from free lawyers.

His influence was decisive internationally. In Great Britain, it inspired the Labour Party's Harold Wilson, and a few years later, in France, the Pleven and Gayssot laws, two repressive laws, were adopted under the guise of anti-racism, criminalizing any preference or expression deemed contrary to the new dogmas.

We must never lose sight of the fact that the Left is fundamentally transnational, organized and united around a globalist project, in the tradition of the First Socialist International. Its ideas circulate between the Old and New Worlds at breakneck speed, driven by a keen awareness of a common goal. While there is emulation and collaboration within it, conversely, conservatives in Western nations struggle to cooperate, often ignoring one another.

You also discuss environmentalism at length, the ideological beginnings of which you place in 1972 with the Meadows Report of the Club of Rome. You express outrage that the Climategate scandal, which occurred in 2009, did not "definitively expose the global fraud" that constitutes the "fight against climate change." How has it become, in your view, "the Trojan horse of the Marxist Left and a central pillar of wokeism"?

The fight against so-called climate change is a telling example of the lengths to which the neo-Marxist left is prepared to resort to achieve its fundamental objective: the destruction of capitalism and traditional societies. This issue has become the Trojan Horse par excellence of this left, and what I consider the central pillar of wokeness, even before immigration.

Why? Because the other two pillars of wokeness—obsessions with sexual identity and obsessive racial questions—do not enjoy unanimous support within the left itself. On the other hand, the climate cause unites. It presents itself as a universal crusade, a planetary emergency, a green idealism that particularly appeals to younger generations, across all cultures. It is the virtuous issue par excellence, the one that instantly places you on the side of Good.

It's also a subject perfectly compatible with Marxist dialectics: the Earth, idealized and then deified, is portrayed as a victim exploited and plundered by humanity, a figure of the capitalist oppressor, destructive in its activities and guilty in its demographics.

Moreover, the most radical neo-Marxists go so far as to establish a direct link between climate and immigration: populations in the Global South are no longer fleeing only poverty or conflict, but also the environmental consequences of the abuses of the former colonizers of the North. Immigrants thus become "climate refugees." It was something to be considered. Pope Francis and Greta Thunberg have done much to legitimize this vision.

This subject also unites all the globalist elites: crowned heads, international institutions, politicians, financiers, media, artists, academics, funded scientists, red billionaires, and globalist lobbies... all of whom have a very real interest in maintaining climate alarmism. And, in this great ideological mechanism, it is the European Union, much more than the United States, which today appears to be the surface of the globe most dramatically affected by climate catastrophism.