The Prophet of the Post-Marxist Left
The paleoconservative icon Paul Gottfried on the state of the Left—and the Right.
Dr. Paul Gottfried has been following the development of American politics for longer than many readers have been alive. A political philosopher and godfather of the paleoconservative movement, Gottfried was a student of the Marxist theorist Herbert Marcuse and has closely monitored the radical Left’s transformation from classically Marxist to woke to the internal tensions it is experiencing now. In this interview, Gottfried discusses the intersection between wokeism and Marxism, where the Left is heading, and what the Right should do about it.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Rufo: We’re excited to talk to the man himself, Paul Gottfried, who has observed so many political cycles, from the New Left as a student of Herbert Marcuse to the second Trump administration now. Paul, I just wanted to get a sense of things from you. Having seen so much radical political development, and having been one of the key thinkers in paleoconservative thought—which was out of fashion for a number of years but has really come roaring back during the Trump years—what do you make of it as you look back at all these changes?
Gottfried: I think that it’s very hard to process them, although I’ve lived through them for sixty years. The country has become much more socially and culturally radical than it was even when I was a graduate student—something that I hear Christopher Rufo has discussed quite well in his books. And what I’ve seen is a changing of the leftist guard. In my youth, we were dealing with a New Left that was to a much larger extent influenced by classical Marxism than the Left is now.
What I think has happened, and what I’ve argued in books, is that we’re living through a post-Marxist Left, one which is only very vestigially influenced by traditional Marxism and much more heavily influenced by what you have written on extensively, which is wokeness—which I think has become the major characteristic of the Left in our times.
