The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West, AJA Woods, 2026, Verso
As Brazil gears up for critically important elections in October, it finds itself in the front line of a civilisational struggle that will determine not only its future but that of Latin America.
The country is on the battlefront in the ideo-cultural war being waged worldwide by Donald Trump’s Maga cohorts through their proxies in a region that has already seen incumbent leftwingers suffer significant defeats.
Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the Workers’ Party (PT) is seeking to hold back the tide through a fourth term—but facing a stiff challenge from rightwing opposition senator Flávio Bolsonaro, son of the jailed former executive Jair Bolsonaro.
Jair Bolsonaro was sentenced to 27 years in prison for his attempt to cling to power through a coup after losing the 2022 elections to Lula, but his malign influence continues to infect the country like a virus. The length of his sentence is being challenged in the courts.
Latest polls suggest that, with just four months to go, Lula is clinging on to a thin lead in Latin America’s largest economy, having recovered ground after reports had linked Flávio Bolsonaro to a disgraced banker.
Yet putting Flávio Bolsonaro’s dodgy dealings aside, he remains the embodiment of an imported US ideology that has already badly damaged Brazilian society and that lingers in the background of this election campaign like a bad smell.
That is because his father had bought into the “cultural Marxism conspiracy theory” hook, line and sinker to become, when he occupied the Brazilian presidency, the foremost champion of contemporary far-right ideology á la Washington that has not gone away.
Indeed, we must not be deluded by the approach taken by Flávio Bolsonaro both to play down comparisons with his father and to present himself as a more moderate conservative option—political analysts say both are a deliberate strategy to widen his electoral appeal.
A simple but good example of this has been the mantra of his campaign—his forename, “Flávio! Flávio!”, is chanted endlessly at rallies, and rightwing newspapers use it solely in headlines, in a crude effort to dupe Brazilians into forgetting the toxic Bolsonaro legacy.
Jair Bolsonaro is hated by millions not only for his racist extremism and for plotting a coup, but for his heartlessly incompetent response to coronavirus, which killed 800,000 citizens.
At the heart of the Bolsonaro ideological universe, however, remains the US: not only did the most prominent Maga figures actively intervene in Jair Bolsonaro’s failed re-election campaign in 2022, then used their platforms to champion lies of electoral fraud, but Flávio Bolsonaro continues to court the apologists of the empire.
The most recent example of this was the Brazilian candidate’s appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Texas in March, where he portrayed the forthcoming election as a referendum on US–Brazilian relations.
Bolsonaro was unrepentant about his family’s personal relationship with Trump and portrayed his father as being unjustly persecuted just as Trump claimed to have been after his own attempt at a coup in the 2021 Capitol insurrection.
Intellectual historian Andrew Woods has written extensively about the cultural Marxism conspiracy theory, and his excellent recent book on this includes a valuable section on Bolsonaro’s Brazil.
Let’s be under no illusions about this conspiracy: Woods traces its etymology to Nazi Germany and the subsequent antisemitic hostility of rightwing US commentators to the political interventions of Frankfurt School philosophers.
He shows how the US right was the progenitor of what would become a global conservative fixation, and roots this in Gramscian terms whereby new forms of knowledge production and the intellectuals created by them attained influence in the postwar era by concocting false coherence from motley theories in order to fashion a discernible enemy.
In unpicking the story of the marxismo cultural conspiracy theory in Brazil and its intimate relationship with Bolsonarismo, Woods finds fertile ground for its attraction to conservatives in their fixation upon “order”.
He writes: “Bolsonarismo brought together a medley of social and ideological tendencies that were deeply rooted in Brazilian society: social conservatism, anti-leftism (or antipetismo, which refers to a dislike of Brazil’s leftwing Workers Party or PT), militarism, anti-intellectualism, neoliberal entrepreneurialism, and evangelicalism.
“What united the varied and sometimes contradictory elements under the banner of Bolsonarismo was an underlying desire for order.”
The author identifies a dense organisational infrastructure through which the marxismo cultural discourse was disseminated by Bolsonaro and his acolytes, from large institutional entities such as Pentecostal churches to small WhatsApp, YouTube and Telegram groups.
Nonetheless, one ideologue more than any other was the intellectual handmaiden of these ideas, which can be traced back to his output in the 1990s: Olavo de Carvalho, a conspiracy theorist, astrologer and journalist who introduced cultural Marxism(s) to Brazilian audiences.
Carvalho’s caustic articles—drawing upon existing anti-communist conspiracy theorising within Brazil’s military, replete with fake news, and at times little more than hate speech—would anticipate and shape the development of the country’s New Right.
This figure reserved much of his antipathy towards leftwing thought for Gramsci, and his 1994 book A nova era e a revolução cultural (“The New Age and Cultural Revolution”) insisted that Gramscianism had already turned Brazil into a communist state.
It is convenient that Carvalho rarely cited his sources, because as Woods points out much of his work appears to reproduce the ideas of former Nixon and Reagan adviser Pat Buchanan, whose The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil our Country and Civilization (2002) denounces the Frankfurt School philosophers on whom the US right blames cultural Marxism.
Carvalho would go on to found important elements of the infrastructure that nurtured Bolsonarismo, such as the Mídia Sem Máscara (“Maskless Media”) blog that continues to publish, and would inspire the creation of the Brasil Paralelo (BP) revisionist media company.
Jair Bolsonaro’s interest in Carvalho resulted in the latter becoming one of the most influential individuals during the far-right politician’s career, and their video chats were promoted through conservative YouTube channels.
Inevitably, with Bolsonaro’s election in 2018, Carvalho would wield unprecedented influence within the administration, hand-picking ideological fellow travellers such as foreign minister Ernesto Araújo, whose own bizarre theoretical corpus includes the arguments that climate change and coronavirus are communist plots, Nazism was leftwing, and “globalism” is driven by cultural Marxism.
Fortunately for Brazil, Araújo’s tenure did not last long: his strange behaviour towards other countries led to his resignation early in 2021 after pressure from Brazilian senators.
Woods traces how Bolsonaro and people he surrounded himself with such as Carvalho and Araújo waged war while in office against Brazilian institutions that they argued had been corrupted by leftwing ideas, in particular the public education system.
As the author has pointed out, education is a core theme of the cultural Marxism conspiracy theory and Brazil’s far-right has its very own public enemy: the radical educator Paolo Freire.
Another one of Carvalho’s handpicked appointments, for example, was Bolsonaro’s first education minister, Ricardo Vélez Rodríguez, whose brief tenure (he lasted three months) witnessed such proposals as a revision of history textbooks to portray the 1964 coup as a democratic and constitutional transfer of power.
There are many lessons to take away from Woods’ archaeology of the cultural Marxism conspiracy theory—not least how it has over time served the intellectual needs of conservatives in the US and countries such as Brazil in their efforts to curb social rights on behalf of capitalism.
The author is ambivalent about Flávio Bolsonaro himself, and argues that it is difficult to anticipate whether Brazil’s New Right will ever recover from his father’s coup attempt.
However, Woods indicates, revisionist media such as Brasil Paralelo continue to be hard at work spreading their poison, and the support from Maga extremists in the US remains steadfast: in May Flávio Bolsonaro was received by Trump at the White House along with Eduardo Bolsonaro, his brother, who has been lobbying US officials to help get his father out of jail.
In short, concludes Woods, Jair Bolsonaro’s defeat and downfall “did not bring an end to conspiratorial talk about the threat of cultural Marxism.” Brazil is faced by the threat of going back to the future.
Please help the Latin American Review of Books: you can subscribe on Substack, make a donation through Stripe . . . or just buy us a coffee
BUY THIS BOOK: UK/Europe
Categories: Brazil, United States