>I believe he argues convincingly that it can be
It's pretty convincing when you read third party accounts of Marxism by right wing spokesman who have a lot to gain to equating what they don't like to Marxism. When you read either Marxists (plenty of others besides BLM) or the ones who you call Neo-Marxists, you find Marxists sighing when not Marxism is called Marxism, and the so called "Neo-Marxists" criticizing Marx.
>arbitrary notion of two economic classes to slightly less arbitrary notion of two races.
Every classification is arbitrary, although you can argue about it's usefulness or consistency.
>A few other bits of jargon have been renamed, but otherwise the belief framework is intact.
Except the most essential part which makes the framework consistent. But hey, if you squint hard enough even a dog can be a cat.
>Marx is by far the most famous proponent of this kind of dual class oppression/revolution based framework. Someone really deep into the history of that stuff might prefer the term Hegelianism, but it's hardly more useful for communication.
Marx is known for a lot of things, to be honest I don't be surprised if some isolated community believes that Marx had babies for breakfast, this is an effect of being an ideological boogeyman. Regardless of what you think of communism, it should be hard to deny the depth of his philosophical and historical points, if not that it's a regular POV. With that in mind, adding more legends to the Marxist black legend should be considered the opposite of useful communication.
>The essay does acknowledge that the underlying worldview pre-dates Marx, and the term Marxism is thus merely a useful handle to describe that bundle of worldviews.
Yes, as mentioned this is exactly my main problem with the essay, the author even spells out my main point, but still framing this as a external factor "corrupting" liberalism.
>BTW: Quillette is not a liberal magazine and Hazony is a highly conservative Jewish nationalist.
I was not familiar with the writer, and mixed the liberal term with the more American Libertarian. My mistake.