The culture war has been front and center for over a decade. Donald Trump’s election in 2016 was as much a reaction to it as it was about any of his policies. And the Biden administration’s war on MAGA is much more a war on its culture than against any credible threat posed by “white supremacists.”

Please.

There is no sense in fighting a war if one doesn’t know what one is fighting for and against. The right and left have different motivations and goals. At least the thought leaders on either side do. For much of the rank and file, it is purely a tribal conflict, with each side defending its banners and shibboleths.

It is important to understand that the left’s war on traditional culture is economically motivated. Breaking down cultural norms is a means, not an end. The entire school of critical theory was founded based on the realization there was not going to be a proletariat revolution due to economic conditions.

There was a very simple reason for this: the industrial revolution had made the proletariat much better off. Their real wages had risen and standard of living skyrocketed. It’s hard to generate the kind of anger necessary for a revolution among people who are doing better than they or any of their ancestors had ever done.

The founders of the Frankfurt School did not admit this to themselves. They were convinced socialism was a superior socio-economic philosophy and since empirical economic data contradicted this view, there needed to be a “more accurate” lens through which to view societal conditions.

Thus, critical theory was born as history’s most elaborate rationalization for denying reality. Objective reality was necessarily one of the prime targets of critical theory because it could tell only one story: capitalism was a vastly superior economic system not only to socialism but to any other economic system yet discovered. So, objective reality had to be challenged.

This eventually led the critical theorists to focus on minority victim groups and how capitalism was oppressing them, even if it was yielding vastly better economic results in the aggregate.

Of course, this was no truer than Marx’s economic theories about capitalism. What has vastly improved the lives of “people of color,” women, and other “marginalized groups” in poor countries over the past several decades has been less socialism and more capitalism.

China and India did not go from destitution to explosive economic growth because of diversity or democracy. Their transformation is due entirely to becoming more capitalist. Are they laissez faire? No, but they’re far more capitalist and far less socialist than they used to be. The same can be said for dozens of other countries.

A billion people were lifted out of extreme poverty over the past three decades and all the gains came in countries that became more capitalist and less socialist. There are zero outliers.

One can see why objective reality is such a problem for Marxists. This is why they fight on the cultural front, using all means possible to distort objective reality and persuade their target victim groups that capitalism is oppressing them. To achieve their ends, history must be erased, established customs declared racist, misogynist, or homophobic, and even the meaning of words changed to, in many cases, their antithesis.

But the end goal is economic. Every assault on societal norms must be viewed as a strategy to achieve socialism – because it is. No, the shrieking, purple-haired, nose-ringed, “trans man” may not realize this him/herself, but the people who created that unfortunate soul do.

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?