A conference run by a rightwing US thinktank might be expected to feature robust discourse on culture wars and identity. But the National Conservatism gathering has gone notably further: with speeches using terms linked to antisemitism and the far right.
The debate over “cultural Marxists” and “globalists”, as used by onstage speakers, including a Conservative MP, at the gathering in Westminster, is a microcosm of the wider jostling about the populist right and language.
On the one side, self-styled free speech defenders insist any worries are confected, an attempt to stifle debate and to unfairly link conservatives with an entirely separate extreme fringe.
But others – including many Jewish groups – worry deeply about what they see as the importation of tropes linked with far-right conspiracy theories and thus, very often, antisemitism, whether done out of malice or carelessness.
Cultural Marxism, used as a term of abuse in a speech on Monday by the Conservative MP Miriam Cates, is the more straightforward of the two ideas to pin down.
It has its origins in a conspiracy theory that Marxist scholars of the Frankfurt school in interwar Germany, many of whom were Jewish, devised a programme of progressive politics intended to undermine western democracies.
At the centre of the idea, says Dr Huw Davies, a sociologist at Edinburgh University, is the belief that socialists aim to spread their credo by first taking over cultural and educational institutions, an idea often tied to an apparently invented quote from the Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci.
Some on the right, Davies said, “think they’ve got political power, but they don’t think they have cultural power. So they are looking for an explanation for why that happened.”
While there is little debate that the idea of cultural Marxism has antisemitic overtones and is closely linked to the far right, it is not uncommon for British politicians to use it.
Suella Braverman, the home secretary, who also spoke at the National Conservatism event on Monday, was criticised by Jewish groups for doing so in 2019. The following year, 26 Tory MPs wrote a joint letter to the Daily Telegraph accusing the National Trust of being beset by “cultural Marxist dogma”.
Davies said: “They think it sort of gives them a sort of intellectual veneer of credibility, as if it’s established theory in academia or something. But it’s only because they’ve been listening to rightwing academics who believe it’s a valid theory.
“It should horrify them that it is in the manifestos of racist mass murderers like Anders Breivik. It’s often accompanied by the language of disgust and disease, metaphors like it has ‘infected’ our schools and universities. It implies that these institutions need to be restored to purity, need to be cleansed.”
Not all agree, however. Yoram Hazony, the Israeli-US writer whose thinktank runs the conference, condemned what he called “this attempt to smear a friend of the Jews, such as Miriam Cates, with the utterly preposterous accusation of antisemitism”.
He argued: “The term cultural Marxism is as an apt phrase to describe the cultural agenda promoted by many on the left today. The Edmund Burke Foundation offers no platform to antisemites. We are proud to number Miriam Cates among our speakers and friends.”
“Globalist” is an arguably more ambiguous term, although experts and Jewish groups say its use as part of the notion that left-leaning institutions and banks are seeking to take over the world is often connected to antisemitic conspiracy theories, especially when tied to people such as the Jewish financier George Soros.
The former Ukip leader Nigel Farage, who arguably pioneered the use of much of the populist-nationalist language now being employed by some Conservatives, has been criticised by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, among others, for using Soros as a central trope in theories about globalists.
At the National Conservatism conference on Tuesday, Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, a US thinktank, mentioned the globalist idea more than a dozen times, tying it into the notion that leftwing groups want to end democracy and impose their views.
“The new left, greedy, elitist, woke and globalist, has foresworn every principle their ideological predecessors once espoused: democracy, equality, diversity, justice,” he said.
The trope is a populist repurposing of leftwing criticism about economic globalisation and the increased power of corporations, says Davies, with the addition of conspiracy theories linking it to everything from Soros to the World Economic Forum and the United Nations.
The defence that it is a term that UK politicians or people such as Roberts could use innocently is not convincing, says Davies. “This is not hidden knowledge. I don’t understand why you wouldn’t be aware of it.
“And whether he is deliberately weaponising it, not following the full connotations, or using it naively, I’m not sure that matters to be honest, because the message is received by the right people.”
