"Critical Theory" is to the contemporary Right what "Communism" was to the right from McCarthyism to Reagan. It is a catch all term that can be used to lump together and dismiss a wide swath of people who disagree amongst themselves.

It is a term intended to cancel, to signal to people "do not listen to or read anything these people have to say, for what they dispense is poison that grows out of an inherently evil root. Just one drop of 'wokeness' will turn you into a brain eating leftist zombie."

The IDW "thinkers" who have made their names inventing this monolithic monster called "critical theory" and who have gotten people like Andrew Sullivan and David Brooks to believe it exists, are just the latest in a long line of anti-intellectual intellectuals.

Here's an article from 1921, written by VP Calvin Coolidge that pretty much says the same thing about the college campuses of those days as the "anti-critical theory" people say about college campuses today. It was dumb and wrong then. Same goes for today. https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/1229919954037686272?s=20

What inspired this thread was listening to this conversation this morning. I think it was supposed to be about people like me and the things we supposedly think and teach, but it seemed like they were talking about a cartoon version of me. https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/voxs-the-weeds/e/76575400

The part that really took me up short was the moment where they incredulously talk about these obscure ideas associated with critical race theory that were floating around in the 1990s but which now have become part of our general lexicon. The implication was, "this is bad."

Maybe it's just because I'm a historian of ideas, but it made me wonder "how the f do these two people think change happens?" As in, some people generate some new tools for understanding society. Many people find them useful and also adopt them. What's the problem here exactly?

I mean, the self-justifying narrative of American conservatism goes something like this. Americans were deceived by welfare state thinking, and then Hayek and Friedman came along and offered some useful new tools for understanding the world, and then came Goldwater & Reagan.

The problem is not that new terminology or that new ideas emerge and get taken up by people. That's. Um. Just. How. History. Works.

The question is, why do certain ideas get traction at certain historical moments?

There's a rich historiography around the question of how free market economics came to become a matter of dogmatic commitment on the right. Free Enterprise by @LarryGlickman and Invisible Hands by Kim Phillips-Fein are just two of many excellent books on the topic.

That "free market" ideology was furthered in a host of ways. Readers Digest published an abridged version of Hayek in the late 1940s. Disney-trained animators made a host of capitalist propaganda films that were promoted & paid for by a Christian college. https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/995470879357259776?s=20

Anyone who criticizes free market economics by writing a take down of one of those cartoons (or the Readers Digest version of Hayek) is not actually engaging with those ideas.

I think Andrew Sullivan would agree with that. But whenever he writes about "critical theory" by singling out something a college student once said or a Readers Digest/NYTimes best seller version of an enormous body of scholarship, he's doing exactly the same thing.

The "cultural studies is destroying western civilization" meme is a close cousin to "cultural Marxism." Neither one exists in the form that their critics think they do, but they are useful monsters for whipping up conservative hysteria. https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/1095519731132465152?s=20

So look, if you come into my mentions and you start railing on about "cultural Marxism" or "then cultural studies agenda" you're just outing yourself as an anti-intellectual reactionary. It's only a few clicks shy of someone who posts about the "Soros's globalist agenda."

There is indeed a world of scholarship out there that is carried out under the banner of "critical theory" or "critical race theory." Most of the people who do that work disagree with each other about many things. Many academics find some of these ideas convincing, others less so

There's no nefarious conspiracy afoot here. There's just people reading stuff and thinking "ooh, that's a really insightful idea" and then incorporating it into their writing and teaching. Those same people, 20 years later, usually have shifted their thinking, sometimes a lot.

Because the world changes. Peoples' minds change. New insights emerge that supplant or supplement older ways of thinking & talking. All of this is just normal human stuff. Anyone who thinks it's a conspiracy is lying to get clicks, because anti-intellectualism always sells.

Whipping up hysteria around "poisonous ideas" is also how reactionaries maintain their self-perception as brave free thought warriors. "Sure, I've just written a piece that red baits an entire category of people, but it's just because their ideas are evil."

Thanks to @richterscale and @nataliapetrzela who brought up "secular humanism." That is indeed another one of these anti-intellectual scare terms that conservative "intellectuals" like to use. It's origins are instructive. https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/1262808607042617344?s=20

My experience is that "secular humanism" is no longer in such wide circulation. I suspect that's because as the number of Americans who participate in organized Christianity has decreased, "secular" has lost its rhetorical power as a scare term.

Anyway, back when the "Moral Majority" was driving the conservative movement, "secular humanism" was the catch all scare term. Now that anti-immigrant and anti-BLM racism is in the driver's seat, "critical race theory" or "wokeness" is the catch all scare term.

This is all understandable and predictable. Backlash politics has always been a major force in the US. But anyone who thinks of themselves as a "public intellectual" should know better than to just devote their careers to putting rhetorical lipstick on a reactionary backlash pig.

Because that's what you sound like when you use the term "critical theory" or "cultural marxism" as a knock down argument. You sound like an ignorant person's idea of what a smart person should sound like.