The next generation of Marxists is marching through the institutions

Zakiya Carr Johnson thinks America is a “failed historic model” — a society so awful, so laden with racism, misogyny, and patriarchy, that we can no longer try to tweak it or improve it. “Time has run out” on America, as she put it in a blog post she has since deleted.

More and more, we hear similar troubling messages from Americans in everyday life. Just this month, a pro-Hamas demonstrator told a YouTuber that the protest he was leading was really about “getting rid of America, getting rid of the West.”

Today, the revolutionary is no longer the worker but the member of racial and gender-marginalized groups.

“Everyone here understands that at some level, we need to get rid of America. Completely,” he said, motioning toward the crowd of demonstrators. He was by no means the only pro-Hamas protestor to make this type of statement, but he got some attention because Elon Musk reposted the exchange on X (formerly Twitter), receiving over 40 million views.

In the case of Carr Johnson, her views — that America is so suffused with racism, with misogyny, and with colonialism that “to make any change, we have to dismantle that traditional structure at every juncture” — should warrant the attention of all 330 million Americans.

After all, Secretary of State Antony Blinken just this month appointed Carr Johnson as the State Department’s head of diversity, equity, and inclusion. From this position, she can influence the actions of all our diplomats, assistant secretaries, and undersecretaries. She can affect our foreign policy.

Carr Johnson is the exemplar of a new political and cultural warrior that we call “NextGen Marxist.” Even though we had not heard her name before we wrote the book, she is the reason we both sat down to write “NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It.”

The idea that the country is systemically rotten (racist, patriarchal, heteronormative — fill in the blank) and that we live under an oppressive structure had been introduced into our universities since at least the 1980s. And in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter and antifa riots, it has entered every nook and cranny of our lives. It has affected not only the upper reaches of the culture but of the Biden administration as well.

The only solution, logic would dictate, is to jettison all the systems and structures. Improvement is obviously out of the question, and ferreting out individual racists and sexists when they violate civil rights law would not resolve the systemic problem.

This is an important point. We both recognize — it would be crazy not to — that individual racists and misogynists do indeed exist. But the ideologues who have been proselytizing the word for decades — and to be precise, we mean promoters of critical race theory and all other types of critical theories — have drawn a very bright, bold line on their view that individual sinners do not matter, systems do.

This is one of the characteristics that makes NextGen Marxists Marxist to the core. To Karl Marx, societal change had to be systemic, totalizing. His favorite line came from Goethe’s "Dr. Faust": “Everything that exists deserves to perish.”

Another key element that NextGen Marxists share with their ideological master is the Manichean division of the world into an epic struggle between the oppressed and their oppressors (“Unterdrücker und Unterdrückte” as we read on the first page of the 1848 “Communist Manifesto”), from which the oppressed will emerge victorious once they realize they’re in chains.

Some things have changed, and though to some orthodox Marxists, these changes are so fundamental as to render the present ideology no longer Marxist, to the two of us, these changes are more cosmetic.

There is, for example, the evolution of Marx’s dictum that the changes in the material forces of production would dictate the pace of revolution. Cultural Marxists who came along in the 1920s, after revolutions failed in Western Europe, placed less emphasis on economics and more on culture. “Popular beliefs and ideas are themselves material forces,” quipped Italy’s Antonio Gramsci, the most famous of the cultural Marxist ideologues, in the 1920s.

To this, American Marxists added race, sex, climate, and so on. “The racialization of all aspects of political life operates as a material force in itself,” Eric Mann, the former Marxist terrorist who recruited BLM architect Patrisse Cullors, wrote in 1996, neatly echoing his two predecessors’ themes from the 1840s and the 1920s.

This baton-passing is what constitutes NextGen Marxism. Marxism evolved from the original economic themes of the “Manifesto” and “Capital,” to the cultural Marxism of Gramsci and others, to today’s race- and gender-obsessed variant of NextGen Marxists. Today, the revolutionary is no longer the worker, but the member of racial and gender-marginalized groups, or those who sign up to fight the revolution over climate, over Gaza, against colonialism, etc.

So, we see climate activists blaming capitalism for “killing the planet” or the deputy prime minister of Canada saying that democracy may not be up the task of fighting climate change. Capitalism and democracy, you see, can now be fought under all these other ruses.

But if, like us, you think that democracy and capitalism may not be perfect but are far superior to their alternatives, then we wrote a book for you. You’ll need it to make sense of the likes of Zakiya Carr Johnson.

Mike Gonzalez is the Angeles T. Arredondo Senior Fellow on E Pluribus Unum at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., and coauthor (with Katharine Gorka) of “NextGen Marxism” (Encounter Books). He spent close to 20 years as a journalist, 15 of them writing from Europe, Asia, and Latin America.

Katharine Cornell Gorka is the coauthor (with Mike Gonzalez) of “NextGen Marxism” (Encounter Books).