A book on the six-decades long Gramscian march
Christopher Rufo’s new book sounds interesting, and even important. It’s called America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. Here’s a review:
The most extreme anti-American rhetoric from the 1960s is now the norm among progressives and the institutions they control, from schools and colleges to prominent newspapers and television networks. The terrorists of the 1960s, decades in hibernation, have awakened to take control of America. …
Several writers, including Roger Kimball, Victor Davis Hanson, and (currently) Christopher Rufo, have tried to explain how this happened. Rufo’s excellent new book, America’s Cultural Revolution, gives an account of the New Left’s “long march through the institutions” over the decades and shows how the radicals adopted that strategy in the 1970s when their efforts to bring off a violent revolution collapsed around them.
I haven’t read Rufo’s book, but I think it’s obviously the case that the 60s radicals began by getting their noses into the tent of education at the end of that era (I’m talking about you, Bill Ayers) and they never looked back. They are patient people, as are their successors. In the 1990s the group began to reach critical mass in education – and the rest, as they say, is history. I see education as the key to the entire process, because it influences each young generation which then fans out into the world, ultimately taking its place at the helm of various institutions in many fields.
Watergate also spawned a movement of journalists – not “reporters” – who considered leftist activism their mission. They have amply fulfilled it.
NOTE: You might want to take a look at this older post of mine about the end of the Constitution and the patience of the left, and how long they’ve been planning and coordinating a takedown of that document.
And don’t ever forget that Pete Buttigeig’s dad was a follower of Gramasci.
I can recommend Fred Siegel’s The Revolt Against the Masses. His starting point isn’t Gramsci or the Frankfurt School but the early 20th century American liberal intellectuals who looked down on ordinary people and hoped for rule by the Enlightened Elite. Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Annointed might also shed more light on that.
What happened over time is that the leftists worked within the system and merged with the upper middle class liberals to become a powerful political force. An affluent society can support all manner of activists, and the social science and humanities faculties of universities that are increasingly adrift can’t stop producing them. Today’s well-heeled activists are now more acceptable to affluent, educated Americans than people in the hinterland are.
I do weary of the ceaseless conservative lament, “Alas, America, the Republic is lost! Woe! Woe! Woe unto us!”
Well, maybe the Republic is lost. But no one can know for sure.
It didn’t look good for the New Left in 1962 (Port Huron Statement), but now they seem to run the world.
_______________
Eyes on the Prize!
Deep in my heart I do believe.
We shall overcome one day.
Antonio Gramsci never gets enough credit for this caper.
They may have been patient in the past, but they aren’t any longer.
Junior…they don’t feel like they have to be… that may be their undoing.
junior:
They don’t think they need to be as patient anymore. But they have more up their sleeves and are not finished yet.
Neo’s subsidiary point about reporters, in the wake of Watergate, becoming crusaders is an important one.
Little-known fact:
Jeffrey Lebowski was a co-author of the Port Huron Statement. The original draft, not the watered-down revised draft.
The Dude abides.
Father of Cultural Marxism, reading at least one book on the early start is a good mind opening.
I also think that the Vietnam War had a role. Leftist students stayed in grad school and eventually became the leftist professors who drove out the faculty I remember from the 1950s. Lyndon Johnson contributed in several ways. He might have called up the reserves but did not so as to minimize the pain for the average citizen. He also allowed unlimited draft deferments for students who stayed in school. The FBI was no more clumsy than it is today but the courts were less tolerant and Bill Ayres got away with his treason.
well Marcuse was the father of the new left, a member of the Frankfurt School, and a member of the OSS’s analytical division,
As the great Western Philosopher Yogi Berra said” The good old days ain’t what they used to be”.
Jeffrey Lebowski was a co-author of the Port Huron Statement. The original draft, not the watered-down revised draft.
IrishOtter49:
Damn straight! I’m glad you brought that up.
________________________________
I was, uh, one of the authors of the Port Huron Statement. The original Port Huron Statement. Not the compromised second draft. And then I, uh… Ever hear of the Seattle Seven?
–The Dude, “The Big Lebowski”
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/26831/dude-port-huron-statement-and-seattle-seven
Gramsci and the Frankfurt School played a central role in the collapse of basically all of our institutions. No question. But their influence can be overstated at times; or, shall we say, overemphasized as the most obvious explanation for the maelstrom we now face. But that’s not the whole story.
Let us not forget John Rawls and post-war Liberalism, which so graciously opened the door…
‘A Theory of Justice’ came out in 1971 and is the Bible of modern liberalism (much like the actual Bible, most faithful adherents know little about it). Rawls’s ‘original position’ and ‘two principles’ informed much of liberal thought in the last 50 years.
The Gramscian twist is…’how can you justify the disparities in the modern world? How can you even explain it (based on Rawlsian liberal premises)?’ ‘You can’t!!’
And they’re right. You can’t. Not based on the ethical framework of modern liberalism (of which Rawls is a major contributor). To explain it and defend it, requires a conservative framework. Yoram Hazony’s excellent ‘Conservatism: A Rediscovery’ lucidly explores this essential discord in great detail
My point is not to diminish the role of Gramsci and the Frankfurt School in our present predicament. Not at all. But their views needed a willing interlocutor, which Rawlsian liberalism well provided.
@ Ackler > “Let us not forget John Rawls and post-war Liberalism, which so graciously opened the door”
When ‘A Theory of Justice’ came out in 1971 I was still an undergraduate, but in 1974-1976 took an MA in Political Science, and it was Big Stuff in our curriculum.
His principles didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me then, and I haven’t looked back at it since, but I’m glad to know that there is a reason I didn’t grok it’s major premises — “To explain it [the disparities in the modern world] and defend it, requires a conservative framework.”
And a fair knowledge of the Bible.
}}} the six-decades long Gramscian march
This process has been going on for far far longer than that, I’d assert. It just took that long to get enough idiots on board to swallow their pablum.
As I have noted before, I believe this really began with/after WWI (yes: ONE)
The old style “Classical Liberal”, so proud of the accomplishments of Western Civilization, so arrogant in their presumption of having “improved humanity”, saw WWI and rightfully recoiled with horror at how humans abused the gifts of Western Civ in war. The end result was the development of PostModernism, and the slow shift from Classical Liberalism to PostModern liberalism, aka “Progressivism” (progressivism existed prior to WWI, of course, and, in fact, it was originally a major plank for the Republicans, taking off with Teddy, who created many of the foundational “3 letter agencies” behind much of our woes today, thus opening the doors to Big Government and the Deep State.)
Those liberals turned on Western Civ like a woman scorned, with the determination to destroy Western Civ. Perhaps not with evil intent, but nonetheless, they saw the downside to WCiv and none of the incredible upsides to it. And they teach all the downsides, while ignoring all the upsides.
If you look closely at PostModern concepts, they are all aimed at foundational aspects of WCiv, particularly the twin pillars of
1 — The inheritance of Greek Thought and Ideal
2 — Judeo-Christian morality and ethos
I recommend reading a 30yo article from American Heritage:
What We Lost In The Great War
John Steele Gordon
https://www.americanheritage.com/what-we-lost-great-war
I think you can see how things began their slow slide to Hell in that article. It was certainly the point where I personally saw the history of it. And it’s only gotten worse and worse in the last 30y — I fear it’s too late to fix as-is, it’s going to require a wholesale war between the two factions of it to settle whether we will have true Western Civ or all the worst of the other civs at our throats.
And, assuming I am correct, that puts the effort at 105y and counting.
Aesop,
Absolutely. A fair knowledge of the Bible and of classics in general.
chayevsky’s network illustrates the zeitgeist, circa 1976, holden’s schumacher, is the old guard, he was with murrow in london during the war, hes a reprise of george c scott’s surgeon in the hospital, being mau maued, by the usual crew,
he has an affair with dunaways character, who reprises diane rigg from the earlier film, but a much more cynical sort, who doesn’t believe in anything
ned beatty’s jeremiad at the tail end of the film, is really the gospel of schwab, which has gained some acceptance in corporate boardrooms as well as government agencies,
A while back I was at a writing conference where Calvin Trillin was one of the speakers. He mentioned as an aside that in his day, serious reporters were called reporters. He said the term journalist was considered “candy-ass.”
(Another amusing thing he said was that when he was at the New Yorker, he spent about three months on each of his essays. He said people who write books asked him, How do you keep up the pace? Newspaper reporters asked him, What else do you do?)
It’s been going on longer than from the sixties…
Check out Bella Dodd…
here’s some basic stuff:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bella_Dodd
A big part of the March is membership on nonprofit board of trustees. One liberal grows more liberals. Gain control of the nominating committee and the cancer grows. The money then flows to radical liberal causes and the benefactors don’t nave to work just be full time agitators . Would Henry ford recognize his foundation today?
I agree with OBH above. World War I came after 100 years of European peace. There were wars elsewhere, like the American Civil War and Crimean and the Boer War but, except for the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, Europe was at peace after Napoleon. Then the war began after such minor seeming issues. The machine gun stalemate was horrendous. An entire generation of young men was wiped out on both sides. The Armistice was almost as bad. The poison that we are experiencing now is the result of disillusionment from that war. Western civilization lost a lot of its optimism.
“Red Diaper Babies” many of whom are/were the children of WWI immigrants from Russia. Hard as that is to understand. Let’s not forget that Cary Nelson at the University of Illinois was a very public example of the determination of these children of children.
This particular university also hired Bill Ayers–wanted for a bomb attack. He has written the book titled “Doing Democracy. Look here for him:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Ayers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cary_Nelson
some skimming through, derrick bell, is the eminence gris, I remember somewhere in the new criterion maybe it was kramer, or kimball, describing his uber screed, his book of parables, which of course, one of the segments, the space traders became a showtime segment, (bell’s animus toward America is so great that he suggests we would ship the slaves back to aliens) about 15 years later, I noted he was on the syllabus at barack obama’s u chicago seminars on civil rights law, it was a tiny note by the times reporter, who did a profile on the day of his keynote speech in chicago, the reporter jodi cantor, obviously didn’t catch the import, a reporter at the daily caller, ben shapiro, I think, did track back
and patrick frey, who has since lost his mind to orange man derangement, gave it wider circulation,
the other significant figure for our purposes is Angela Davis, I had the misfortune of reading her turgid bio, in a sociology class how german marxism shaped her point of view, which lead to her part in the George Jackson jailbreak, he is the architect of dismantle prisons and defund the police, they come at oblique angles
toward the same target being western civilization,
Two things need to be done to change this parlous place in which we find ourselves.
First, conservatives need to capture a few more state legislatures. It’s the only way to assure free and fair elections. And when that happens we are well on our way to a more conservative federal government.
Second, we shrink the effect of leftist colleges (nearly all of them) on our young people. Let’s no longer fund degrees that don’t lead to productive work. I’m thinking of all those “study” degrees, for instance. Base loans upon what is needed in the workforce. Something like this would defund all those extra administrators. The government has been pumping money into colleges for years and it’s resulted in bloated bureaucracies and leftist indoctrination.
Without the first the second cannot happen. In fact, little of the reactionary conservative agenda is possible without the states compelling free and fair elections.
Neo – “… the patience of the left, and how long they’ve been planning and coordinating a takedown of that document.”
I am having a little trouble understanding just how literally, vs. figuratively, you mean this, specifically the planning and coordination aspect. This “left” sounds like a true conspiratorial group, analogous to the Trilateral Commission or the Illuminati, etc., who might meet periodically and plan the next phase of their “take over” of society. E.g.: “We have now captured 7 of the 12 university sociology departments we targeted three years ago, and can project completing their full take-over in the next three years.” “We need Soros to provide another $87M for the capture of the DA and AG offices in states X, Y, and Z.” Etc. Plus, occasionally they would have to select and elect the next generation of conspirators into their ranks, for this program to have been a planned effort over generations.
I can understand, given human nature, instinctual psychology, and various sources of indoctrination, how some people would end up having a similar outlook on life, essentially Sowell’s unconstrained vision. They would see flaws in the “dead white man’s” constitution, the appeal of equal results over equal opportunity as a “true” or “better” result for society, some sort of merit in Marxist ideas or post modernism, etc.
So, in sync with Drcool#1 on August 19, 2023 at 9:44 am; and anonymous on August 19, 2023 at 12:11 pm, I can see how a particular small group of like minded people could grow that smaller group into a larger, but not necessarily coordinating, group of people with similar outlooks/ viewpoints. E.g., Woodrow Wilson and his benighted ideas; the Frankfurt School and their transition to Columbia; eventually taking over even localized and national political parties (coupled with selective deceits and LIV’s). Capturing and biasing the media was of course a major coup. Law schools, BOD’s, trusteeships, etc., also all qualify. Except I don’t see how they interact or coordinate with each other in a synchronized way, vs. just happening to have similar aims and goals or perspectives on life.
However, we have noted quite often how a common language and dedicated meme will be promulgated through the media within hours of some initial viewpoint being expressed. This does imply a “command center” with active agents running things. But even this seems to be at the fringes of having a major impact on any given issue, except via continued repetition of this mode of propagandizing.
I perceive that you don’t really mean a centralized planning function is in place, controlled by a small and dedicated group like a politburo (although meetings in Pelosi’s or Harry Reid’s office might qualify for political pronouncements and legislative strategies), but a more general and amorphous adoption of common ideas and pushing of Overton Window advances. So a bunch of self styled “intellectuals” and “experts” provide commentary to show their peers how smart and dedicated to their commonly held cause they are, expecting laudatory praise and deeper group acceptance when this is done publicly (and perhaps when done via more private actions as well). But they are operating in many cases as separate and stand alone activists or actors, but with a result that does or seems to advance their cause as though it was being controlled from a central group or organization.
Am I misreading this situation and your view, or perhaps I am simply naïve and lacking a liberal arts or law background, so I fail to see what is readily apparent to you or others here?
@ackler and @aesop
Good points on not only Marcuse and the Frankfurt school, but Rawls…I was doing graduate work in intellectual history, philosophy of history, political philosophy and mathematical economics in the early 1970s; Marcuse’s work was widely regarded as central in rehabilitating a sort of Freudian Marxism, Gramsci was the rage in the leftist journals, and Rawls’ A Theory of Justice was being poured over assiduously by the political philosophers…heady times…and those of us interested in the part of mathematical economics closely related were coping with Arrow and with Sen’s then new Collective Choice and Social Welfare… while off at Harvard Robert Nozick was working on his quasi-libertarian reply to Rawls – Anarchy, State, and Utopia – which was interesting but didn’t really work and seems long since past its brief mid-70s vogue.
There were a fair number of us concerned about what was coming down even then, and, yes, we saw the march of the left in American academic and intellectual circles as traceable to many of the later (especially Wilsonian) Progressives and the both Marx and Freud inspired intellectuals who surrounded and influenced Franklin Roosevelt and his regime… It’s hard for students in the present to realize just how pervasive and all encompassing the assault on the original American Constitutional order and the classical liberal world it represented has been, almost from every quarter. I suppose a good place to start – though it was written too early to anticipate the New Left – is Burnham’s The Decline of the West…I used to think it a bit dramatic and unsophisticated, but 60 years later it seems spot on…just as some of Ayn Rand’s characters, who seemed too much cardboard caricatures to take seriously, have come to life in recent decades….
to reply a bit to @R2L…. perhaps my comments above will give you a better sense…it’s not so much that it was a coordinated and centrally planned campaign, but rather the various bits and pieces of the attack were coming – it seemed – from everywhere and constantly, some at bits others at the whole classical liberal ediface.
there are venn diagrams sometimes concentric circles, bell and angela davis overlap in some aspects, the first is more broadly the father of critical race studies, the latter put in practice,
marcuse who precedes them by a generation, created the notion of ‘repressive tolerance’ this is the notion that underlies ‘hate speech’, one must crush any alinsky is a rough contemporary, employing direct action against key nodes in the superstructure, what was Reagan’s jibe, leftists have read Marx, conservatives (at least they used to) understand what it means
one does learn from lefty professors, one of them, was an expert on the American indian, and the Wests treatment of same, but he knew a fair amount of constitutional law,
he did introduce me to marcuse and rawls among other figures,
R2L:
I think some of it was informal and organic and some was actual groups planning. The latter wouldn’t necessarily be one central group, nor would it necessarily be a secret group, although the planning might indeed be secret or somewhat secret. Just to take one example – there were quite a few Communists on my father’s side of the family. Nor my father, but his brother and a whole bunch of their cousins, most of whom I didn’t know but one branch I did know. These people led ordinary lives but I’m going to assume they were part of groups that met and planned according to Communist philosophy. And then there’s someone like Bill Ayers, who specifically (and probably along with other like-minded people to whom he talked) decided to become an educator for ideological purposes. It’s called the Gramscian march for a reason – and I think it’s logical to think that people who believed that was a good idea got together and planned.
anonymous:
See my comment right above this one.
As I wrote, I wasn’t a red diaper baby but one branch of my family produced quite a few of them. So I know the genre very very well. You are incorrect about the timing. Their parents came prior to WWI, usually in the first ten years of the 20th century. Russia was in tremendous turmoil and they were fleeing all sorts of oppression, and Communism represented hope to them. The children were raised with that belief. Many left the fold in the 1950s after the extent of Stalin’s crimes were revealed. But some rationalized things by believing that the problem was just Stalin and now he was gone, and they believed that leftism could still work.
David Horowitz’s autobiography is a good source to read.
Mike K,
You left out German Confederation vs Denmark 1848, Sardinia vs Austria 1849, Sardinia and France vs Austria 1859, Prussia and Austria vs Denmark 1864, Prussia vs Austria 1866, Italy vs Austria 1866.
not on the same scale, the british faced a little of that effect, in the boer wars, when both sides had the gatling gun
Neo: You’re correct on the first generation of red diaper babies, but their children -born in the US in the teens through thirties- produced a second generation of red diaper babies who were also influential in the New Left – I knew quite a few of them who were undergraduates in the late ’60s and early ’70s who stayed to go into academia…many related going to (often the same) communist summer camps as their parents had in the ’30s and ’40s…some were the children of blacklisted communist Hollywood writers…I even knew one who went to Germany in 1968 to become involved with a guy who turned out to be a major figure in Bader Meinhof…she at least was able to skedaddle back to the USA when the heat got too high….
Kathy Boudin was the quintessential 2nd gen red diaper baby.
From Wikipedia
“ Magenta took its name from an aniline dye made and patented in 1859 by the French chemist François-Emmanuel Verguin, who originally called it fuchsine. It was renamed to celebrate the Italian-French victory at the Battle of Magenta fought between the French and Austrians on 4 June 1859 near the Italian town of Magenta in Lombardy.”
CatoRenasci:
Believe me, I’m well aware of that. As I said, I have relatives that fit that description. My contemporaries among them are the second-generation red diaper babies. Some are quite active leftists and Marxists. Some are not.
When the Bushies took their whack at establishing a common core curriculum for America’s schools, I remember thinking, “Haven’t you been paying attention? The lefties and the education establishment, taken over by the remnant of ’60s radicalism, are going to co-opt this completely.” And so it was, with Lynne Cheney and her merry crew getting eaten by the America’s education departments and teachers’ unions. Incomprehensible math lessons and woke history standards galore.
The Cheneys, well-meaning and well connected, have taken us to some very bad places with very good intentions. I don’t think any of them have learned a thing.
Yawrate–“First, conservatives need to capture a few more state legislatures.”
I think any fair appraisal of GOP political malpractice after the Dobbs decision makes that very unlikely. Women are marching to the polls in some very red states to assure their rights to abortion The GOP has provided no counter proposals except extreme limitation or elimination of abortion rights. Remember that 20-25 vote HR majority the GOP was supposed to get in the 2022 election? It turned into a five seat majority. and both houses of the Michigan legislature flipped to Dem for the first time in 40 years. An extremely strong pro-abortion rights amendment to the Michigan Constitution was adopted. KS, OH, MI, MN and others all saw pro-abortion rights votes last year.
From talking to my friends, I believe that even women who have grave reservations about abortion still want to have the ultimate choice in their hands, and they will vote to reserve that right if given a chance. The GOP is completely missing the boat on this.
Quote, 8/18/23:
“A blanket program of equality—aka equity—in all the realms of life, work, and remuneration is inevitably destined to fail. In provoking an attitude of discontent and endemic jealousy of those who have, in one way or another, been legitimately favored through individual initiative, a society works against its own best interests. Even if an enlightened state has provided for skill, virtuosity, drive, and competence to be rewarded, and even though First World grudge-bearers may enjoy the necessities and comforts that the truly dispossessed in the Third World sadly lack, the socialist project for omnibus equality at the expense of individual freedom will find us, as Friedrich Hayek memorably put it, on “the road to serfdom.” A central authority that controls our position in the social hierarchy irrespective of individual qualities, inclinations, or desires leads to a pervasive state of languor and indolence, and renders it “impossible to be just.” Hayek notes that “Independence of mind or strength of character is rarely found among those who cannot be confident that they will make their way by their own effort.”
https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2023/08/18/no-quality-in-socialist-equality-n1720457
Amadeus 48:
You have briefly touched on the largest population of “enforcers” any communist party could want–the indoctrinated feminists. Not just the professional women who have worked their way up the “success” ladder, but those women who love their husbands, and for whom home and family are first. Those women will ALSO do whatever they are askedto do in order to get their family ahead somehow. The feminist leadership has been training/rewarding dirty tricksters for at least 50 years now. They train young women in universities to twist truth, accuse the innocent, etc. “in order to prove I am strong enough to become a leader” is what one young woman (age 20 +/-) told me at a Jesuit university.
There is a new group that has come on the scene in the last 30 years–the Catholic Leadership introducing/indoctrinating young students to Liberation Theology. This ideology is as communist as you can imagine. It’s too bad the old Jesuits have died off. Those who run those universities are nothing at all what the old intellectuals were–those men understood why America was the best hope for humanity. The new leadership at Jesuit Universities believe that finding a balance somewhere between Russia, China, and Sweden ideologies is the best place! AND, the new students and scholars are not made to do the heavy reading–the heavy lifting of serious study in order to understand why this new ideology is not the best! They just have to “do what they are told” and mimic the lecture. All they want is the next best job. So many people in America waiting in the wings to do “just a little dirty deed” in order to get a better life for their loved ones and themselves. Someone has to start talking to the women. We are a long way from fully comprehending how extensive the system of “flunkies–flunkettes” has become.
“The GOP is completely missing the boat on this.” – Amadeus 48 at 5:43pm
I agree. The Democrats in Washington State rode that issue very hard even though it’s a strawman argument in this state. Tiffany Smiley should have beat Patty Murray. She was superior in every way, but she had an ill-defined position on abortion rights. As you point out, so did too many other GOP candidates nationwide in 2022.
IMO, the national GOP has to make it clear that they do not want to ban abortion because banning it does not end it. It only drives it underground and into back alleys. Legal, safe, and as rare as possible should be the mantra.
The GOP should also try to ban federal funds to Planned Parenthood and make sure Pregnancy Crisis Centers have equal standing with PP in the community. If they can’t ban federal funds to PP, then federal funds should go to Pregnancy Crisis Centers as well.
The GOP should also stand up for the role of birth control and responsible sex as being the path to reducing unwanted pregnancies.
The national GOP needs to get this issue right if they want to increase their vote in 2024.
What individual states do may vary, as we have seen. But that is for those states to thrash that out as their citizens’ desire. As you point out, abortion rights are an important issue for many women voters.