Ted Cruz, Paranoia, and the Cultural Marxism Conspiracy

This chapter exposes the unconscious aspects of Republican rhetoric by analyzing Senator Ted Cruz’s Unwoke: How to Defeat Cultural Marxism in America. Cruz’s book elaborates a now-common conspiracy theory circulating on the Right, which is focused on the way our culture has been taken over by a secret Marxist movement. According to this fantasy-narrative, the followers of Karl Marx have realized that they can no longer take over countries through direct political revolutions, and so instead, they are seeking to impose a totalitarian form of Communism by first infiltrating higher education and then spreading out into all sectors of society. According to this story, while the original Marx focused on class conflict and economic exploitation, the new form of Marxism subverts society by engaging in a culture war dedicated to the hatred of white Christian heterosexual males. For Cruz, whose parents came from pre-revolutionary Cuba, Marxism is defined by an emphasis on power relations between the oppressors and the oppressed. Of course, this is a distorted, simplified interpretation of Marx and many of his followers, but the key move that Cruz wants to make is to replace a class war with a culture war through the rebranding of a new mode of anti-Communist McCarthyism.