When I entered Cornell University in 1964, I could not have imagined that given the thousands of future doctors, lawyers, scholars, engineers, architects, and executives in my class, the person destined to have possibly the greatest influence on America’s future would not be one of them. Instead, that role may have been achieved by a fellow member of Cornell’s debate association, a tall, loudmouthed Brooklynite who proudly bore the cognomen Rick "The Pr*ck" Mann.
Mann soon achieved a local notoriety when he and his partner/sidekick, chosen to represent Cornell at the prestigious Georgetown University debate tournament, stood up to issue a loud "Boo!" when the dinner speaker, a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee, was announced. For their misbehavior, Mann and partner were dismissed from the association, and I never encountered (nor expected to hear of) them again. Imagine my surprise, then, in 2020, when Patrisse Cullors, cofounder of the Black Lives Matter movement, which organized violent riots in many American cities following the George Floyd killing, described herself as a "trained Marxist" thanks to the tutelage of Mr. Mann.
Mann, I discovered, had carved quite a career following graduation. He gravitated from the murderous Black Panthers (Mann is white) to the still more violent Weather Underground of the late ’60s and served jail time for shooting up a police station. Subsequently, in view of the failure of the Weathermen to generate the nationwide, armed revolution they had hoped for, Mann became one of the major figures in the enterprise that Mike Gonzalez and Katharine Cornell Gorka depict in their powerful and important book, NextGen Marxism. (Gonzalez is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, while Gorka is a former official of the Department of Homeland Security whose work focuses on threats posed by extremist ideologies.)
The authors’ title alludes to a movement that arose in Germany and Italy a century ago when leftist intellectuals, disheartened by their failure to achieve a Communist revolution like the one that had just occurred in Russia, turned to a different strategy. Instead of relying on factory workers (Karl Marx’s "proletariat") to generate the Communist paradise, they would gradually shape the surrounding "culture" to achieve that end.
The movement originated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, best-known for its invention of "critical theory," based on the theory and strategy of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci (who spent his later years composing his 30-volume Prison Notebooks in one of Mussolini’s jails) maintained that the revolution would require a painstaking, decades-long "education" (indoctrination) of the workers, so as to disabuse them of their attachment to the system of private property and imbue them with "revolutionary consciousness." That education would be the work of a handful of "enlightened" Marxist intellectuals.
In one of the ironies of history, Hitler’s rise compelled the leaders of the Frankfurt school, including Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse, to flee to the great bastion of "capitalist" democracy, the United States. Among them, the most influential was Marcuse, who remained in postwar America and from his perch as a tenured professor at Brandeis University (and later at the University of California, San Diego) concocted a youth-tempting witches’ brew combining Marxist utopianism (the abolition of government and property) with sexual "liberation." He thereby became the guru of the American "New Left" of the 1960s. (His prize pupil was Angela Davis, the future prominent Communist and terror supporter.)
What was "new" about this Left was that following Gramsci’s plan, it concealed its authoritarian aspirations behind a mask of "cultural" renewal. (Recall the intentionally misnamed "Free Speech" movement at Berkeley in 1964, which actually aimed at suppressing rival views in accordance with Marcuse’s doctrine of "repressive tolerance" and culminated in the student riots of 1968-69, not accidentally prefiguring the pro-Hamas campus chaos we have witnessed since last fall.) Another of Marcuse’s protégés, the West German radical Rudi Dutschke, termed the Gramscian project a "Long March through the Institutions" of society.
Far from drawing their inspiration from Marx’s promise that socialism would elevate the material conditions of working people, by the ’60s, as the authors recount, the New Leftists, like the latter-day Frankfurt scholars, came to realize "that capitalism was, in fact, much better at supplying material goods." Given this fact, and what Horkheimer described as the "dialectical" relationship between freedom and justice, it followed that ordinary people’s freedom, and even their economic welfare, would have to be sacrificed for the sake of "true" justice. And it was the students and their mentors, not factory workers (who were too attached to their freedom and prosperity to want to overthrow them), who would become the truly "revolutionary" class.
While the violence of the Weathermen was suppressed, the Gramscian-Marcusian project of gradual, outwardly peaceful revolution advanced as some of the radicalized students of the ’60s became academics themselves and passed on their ideology to others who achieved positions of influence in the media, Hollywood, the foundation world, and college and K-12 teaching. (Remarkably, Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn, unrepentant members of the Weather Underground, wound up being teachers of education—with Ayers, additionally, mentoring Barack Obama in the art of "community organizing," though Obama tried to downplay that connection during his 2008 presidential campaign.)
Drawing on a multitude of books, law-review articles, manifestoes, and scholarly studies, Gonzalez and Gorka demonstrate the underlying unity among a variety of contemporary endeavors aimed at transforming or undermining fundamental aspects of American political society so as to bring us closer to the Marxist paradise. Among the most important elements of this enterprise are the devaluing of American constitutional democracy as an oppressive oligarchy; the assault on the traditional family on behalf of a "gender theory" that directs schools to teach elementary-school students to rethink (and possibly seek medical treatment to "correct") the gender they were "assigned" at birth; the legal establishment of "gay marriage"; the rejection of Martin Luther King’s vision of a colorblind society whose members would be judged by "the content of their character" in favor of encouraging race hatred; and a general disparagement of the rule of law in favor of rioting and looting when they serve the revolutionary cause.
One of the most important revelations of NextGen Marxism is that the riots that swept American cities following the police killings of criminal suspects Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, and then of George Floyd, were not spontaneous incidents. Instead, the authors document how those events were used by "a large web of Marxist groups" aimed, as Cullors attested, at "transform[ing] black people’s relationship" to the country. In pursuit of that goal, shortly after Brown’s death, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, "formed at the behest of socialist leaders overseas," sent a "special projects" director, Alicia Garza, to Ferguson to "network"—and, presumably, provoke an uprising. (The NDWA was funded by the billionaire leftist George Soros, who has more recently supported pro-Hamas rioters as well as financing the election campaigns of prosecutors who aim at "decarceration" and depolicing.) As Garza, the Marxist-trained cofounder of BLM, put it, their ultimate goal was "to keep dismantling the organizing principle" of American society.
Garza shared that goal with Eric Mann, with whom she served on the planning committee of a U.S. branch of an international Marxist organization, the World Social Forum, in 2007. Also on the international scene, Gonzalez and Gorka document the growing links between BLM and the anti-American dictators of such Latin American countries as Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. And Mann, who does get around, claims that he got the idea of centering his intended American revolution on black people at the 2001 World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa, (which the United States boycotted on account of its equating Zionism with racism).
The concluding chapter, "What to Do," sets out an ambitious agenda for Americans and their elected leaders to combat the NextGen assault on our institutions and way of life. These include banning indoctrinating schoolkids in gender "theory"; eliminating ideological training in "diversity, equity, and inclusion" from our public and private workplaces; cutting off the hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies that the federal government provides annually for projects concocted by the "progressive" left; and combating the inclusion of propagandistic "ethnic studies" courses (now scheduled to be graduation requirements in Boston and California) from the public schools. NextGen Marxism should serve as a much-needed wakeup call.
NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It
by Mike Gonzalez and Katherine Cornell Gorka
Encounter Books, 328 pp., $32.99
David Lewis Schaefer is professor emeritus of political science at the College of the Holy Cross.