The long slow march of leftism
On this blog we’ve talked many times about the Gramscian march, the slow and steady and dedicated work of the left on the hearts and minds of Americans. This work has borne tremendous fruit, and may have reached a critical mass among the younger generation.
Much of this work was originally generated by the Soviets, who understood that the mind is a powerful weapon, and that influencing American thought over the years would be crucial.
So I recommend this piece, which although old (written over 13 years ago) was linked today by Instapundit. A few excerpts:
By contrast, ideological and memetic warfare has been a favored tactic for all of America’s three great adversaries of the last hundred years — Nazis, Communists, and Islamists. All three put substantial effort into cultivating American proxies to influence U.S. domestic policy and foreign policy in favorable directions.
I would observe that although the Nazis were rather poor at it—their philosophy didn’t travel all that well, being based on (among other things) the tremendous supposed superiority of the Germans— the Communists and the Islamists (who are sometimes allied despite their differences, because after all they have some of the same enemies) have been remarkably successful.
Especially the Communists:
The Soviets had an entire “active measures” department devoted to churning out anti-American dezinformatsiya…
…[Here are] some of the most important of the Soviet Union’s memetic weapons…:
—There is no truth, only competing agendas.
—All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism.
—There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.
—The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.
—Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal. Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.
—The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying with poor people and criminals.)
—For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself. But ‘oppressed’ people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.
—When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of view, and make concessions.
We have become all too familiar with these principles as the years go on and we see them demonstrated by the left time and again.
Most were staples of Soviet propaganda at the same time they were being promoted by “progressives” (read: Marxists and the dupes of Marxists) within the Western intelligentsia…
This worked exactly as expected; their memes seeped into Western popular culture and are repeated endlessly in (for example) the products of Hollywood.
Indeed, the index of Soviet success is that most of us no longer think of these memes as Communist propaganda. It takes a significant amount of digging and rethinking and remembering, even for a lifelong anti-Communist like myself, to realize that there was a time (within the lifetime of my parents) when all of these ideas would have seemed alien, absurd, and repulsive to most people — at best, the beliefs of a nutty left-wing fringe, and at worst instruments of deliberate subversion intended to destroy the American way of life.
To that last part, I would add that many of the people now pushing these ideas are unaware of their origins, as well. Those of us who oppose them may not know the exact origin of each thought, but we certainly know their far-leftist and often Soviet provenance, as well as the intensity of the Soviet desire to “bury” us.
The essay continues:
The most paranoid and xenophobic conservatives of the Cold War were, painful though this is to admit, the closest to the truth in estimating the magnitude and subtlety of Soviet subversion.
And note this, and recall that it was written early in 2006 [emphasis mine]:
In this context, Jeff Goldstein has written eloquently about perhaps the most long-term dangerous of these memes — the idea that rights inhere not in sovereign individuals but identity groups, and that every identity group (except the “ruling class”) has the right to suppress criticism of itself through political means up to and including violence.
The Soviets didn’t invent it, but they promoted it heavily in a deliberate — and appallingly successful — attempt to weaken the Lockean, individualist tradition that underlies classical liberalism and the U.S. Constitution. The reduction of Western politics to a bitter war for government favor between ascriptive identity groups is exactly the outcome the Soviets wanted and worked hard to arrange.
Mission accomplished, at least on the Democratic side. And the left would like to label everything that has occurred lately on the right as an example of that same struggle, with Republicans representing the evils of “white supremacy” (which would be that “except the ‘ruling class'” exception referred to in the excerpt).
I know a great many liberals. And I would guess that, although most of them ascribe to the principles on that list of “the Soviet Union’s memetic weapons,” they are unaware that what they are espousing is far leftist propaganda, and remain ignorant even now of its origins and purpose.
And if I were to send them a link to this particular post, they would think I’d gone bonkers.
Looks like Obama could have written that.
Neo,
Back away slowly from the red pill of rationality and take this beautiful blue pill, and all will be fine. You will be just as happy as those democrats you know.
You know what’s more powerful than the Gramscian march? Realty. It’s why the Soviet Union doesn’t exist any more and Donald Trump is in the White House.
Which isn’t to say this stuff isn’t important. It is. But the biggest Gramscian impact isn’t on the Left or in general society but on representatives of the Right.
Look at the NeverTrump phenomenon. It’s true that some NeverTrumpers have been revealed as nothing but grifters but a bunch of them are/were actual conservatives who in some cases have spent years or decades supposedly battling the Left. I specifically mean those folks who urged people to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016, Democrats in 2018, and are now whining about the Dems nominating someone even they couldn’t support in 2020.
For all these folks like to think of themselves as ideologues, they’ve been revealed as nothing but creatures of the status quo. There have been innumerable opportunities for them to defend Trump or attack the Left while still remaining true to their supposed values, yet they’ve consistently declined to do either. They just want things to go back the way they were because that’s the only way they can ever imagine them being.
Mike
Every one of those Communist assertions are easily disproved and the fact that they used deceit rather than open, factual debate confirms their inability to triumph through reason.
“if I were to send them a link to this particular post, they would think I’d gone bonkers.”
No doubt that would be the reaction for perhaps all but certainly nearly all. But… in their “heart of hearts” they’d know that to be untrue. As there’s nothing in that post that is hyperbolic and every assertion is historically verifiable.
So it’s really a case of willful blindness and willful blindness always springs from moral cowardice. And, acts motivated by moral cowardice render the coward morally culpable and complicit in the untruth they refuse to face.
I state this with great sadness, for I along with millions of others have ‘well meaning’ relatives and friends who are enabling evil through their moral cowardice. Yet when the “well meaning” attack those who express disagreement with the left, then they embrace evil to protect themselves from exposure.
And in that act, they remove all difference between themselves and the evil they refuse to face.
Quite often you see the caution that it would be an error to fall for the idea that there was some one, overarching cause—usually somewhat obscure or hidden—that could account for all sorts of current phenomena, because such would be the gullible, lazy thinking of believing in “conspiracy theories”–take your pick, its the “Illuminati,” the “Masons,” the “Templars,” the “Bilderberger Society,” the “Catholic Church,” or a “Zionist conspiracy,” etc., etc.–that’s behind it all.
And “conspiracy theory” is one of the latest dismissive epithets that is hurled against anyone who dares to point to deliberate calculation and method behind any one or more examples of the all-spectrum attacks by the Left against the foundations, and all of the basic building blocks of Western society.
But, nonetheless, nothing explains where were are today in the West anywhere near as well as our situation being the result of the near total success of the generation’s long unfolding of pre-WII Italian Communist Party member and Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci’s recommendation to Communists/Leftists to–in what has been termed a “conspiracy of shared values” pursue, each in his own place and position, and in his or her sphere of life–a mostly “peaceful,” long-term, incremental “long march through the institutions/culture.”
The slow, gradual “fundamental transformation” of all aspects of our culture and society through the infiltration, capture, subversion, and parasitization by the Left of our institutions, thought, speech, History, expectations, behavior and, thus—among other things–our mind-set, and our cultural, philosophical, social, familial, sexual, legal, and political orders; in sum, a transformation of pretty much everything, switching the Left’s world-view and viewpoint, their priorities, their political and cultural order for the traditional one.
No one –if they are informed and honest—and comparing the mindset and culture of the United States of, say, the period immediately after WWII, or the Korean War, or even the time of our 1969 landing on the Moon, could fail to note how radically different the mindsets, ideas, language, priorities, and preoccupations of those eras are from ours today.
I do not at all view most of our “progress” from those bygone eras as an improvement.
Geoffrey Britain:
I don’t agree that it’s moral cowardice. At least, that’s not what I’d call it and not how I think of it.
I see a political belief system, and a belief about historical events (such as the anti Communist “witch hunt” of the 1950s), as an aggregate of thousands of small facts gleaned over time, plus a respect for and trust of their sources. Beliefs are strong edifices, not easily challenged or broken.
Sometimes beliefs crumble piece by piece, over a long period of time, from the accumulation of facts that challenge the old facts. Sometimes (more rarely) it happens quickly. Most of the time it doesn’t happen at all, because people think they know what they know and don’t need to learn much more, especially if from sources they distrust or have never heard of.
So they reject the information without spending a lot of time and effort finding out if it’s true. That’s not moral cowardice. That’s partly being busy, and partly thinking you already know plenty of facts that refute it. People have a finite of time and energy for the careful study that it warrants, and they choose to do other things that are more pleasant.
Plus, of course, it’s threatening to have one’s beliefs challenged. That may be the “moral cowardice” of which you speak. But I think it’s just a part of it.
And I don’t know exactly what you mean by “complicit.” We are certainly complicit in what we cooperate with out of ignorance. But that’s a weak type of guilt, common to the human condition, something of which we are all guilty.
Marx was all about victims and victimizers. The evil bourgeoisie were oppressing and impoverishing the proletariat. Nothing has changed.
I read somewhere that the old Soviet KGB spent less than 50% of its budget on traditional spy-craft operations. The rest went towards promoting the topics in this piece.
But what made the Gramscian memes so effective? Were the Soviets diabolically clever?
Or is it just that the G-memes appeal to human weaknesses like blaming others, envy, guilt, tribalism, laziness, etc.?
It’s not like the US hasn’t waged its own propaganda war for old-fashioned American values. Though it doesn’t seem we do much of that anymore. In any event it seems we lost that war even with our own citizens.
City Journal: The Red Decade, Redux: Journalist Eugene Lyons’s chronicle of the 1930s Left remains startlingly relevant today.
As a kid I was nutty enough to have a subscription to “Soviet Life.” It was free to Americans. It was pretty mild as propaganda went. More like the Soviet counterpart to our “Life” magazine — big glossy color cover, human interest stories, scenic photographs, that sort of thing. Certainly no pictures of the gulags but no Marxist-Leninist diatribes either.
I loved chess, like the sound of Russian (even made a few abortive attempts to learn from records and later took a term of it in college) and wanted to understand the other side. I hoped the Cold War was just a terrible misunderstanding.
It seems I was mistaken.
Michael Anton (National Conservatism Conference): https://youtu.be/Ry5aFZZuft0
About marching back the other way, more or less. Still about seeking justice — that human thing we do — but a justice fit to individual human souls, as distinct from “group” souls or “social” souls. Against imperialism is another way of putting his talk.
Look also at the other videos under the channel heading “National Conservatism”. There are many good talks presented.
Was it that we saw our core American values and ideas as so self-evidently right, so strong, true, and effective in their application and results, that they needed no further care and nurturing, they needed no defense; and that they could withstand any assault?
One could take a cool, objective look at our state of affairs today, and conclude that in Darwinian “survival of the fittest” terms we conservatives, and traditionalists are losing, or have even–for all intents and purposes– already lost the battle for control over our culture, our country, and its future direction; that by the time we caught on to the Left’s sly, slow subversion, they controlled virtually all of the positions of power in our society, the “high ground,” and that it was just far, far too late.
This, because we were not informed, alert, or wary enough, forceful enough, or ruthless enough enough to detect and to effectively combat and win against the Left’s all-spectrum mimetic and ideological attacks against the old, traditional order.
It is pretty humbling to realize that we “modern” Americans–as educated, informed, sophisticated, and civilized as we are supposed to be—have been far less alert, far less “savvy,” and effective than the isolated, rough, not or barely educated farmers who read a broadsheet or two, and the farmers, burghers, and the few businessmen and lawyers who gathered in taverns in the 1770’s, were they discussed and argued over the lessons of History, political philosophies and ideas, the basis of law and structures of government, and, then, created and started this unique and remarkable country on its way.
We today were all far too complacent, “civilized,” mannerly, and “nice.”
We should all be deeply ashamed that our fatal complacency, our inability to defend our Heritage has brought us to this pass; our poor performance in defending and fighting for that Heritage and our traditional ways and culture against the attacks, ideas, and subversion of the Left.
Yoram Hazony, who called for and organized the National Conservatism Conference held last weekend: https://youtu.be/4cpyd1OqHJU
I’ve only listened to eight minutes of a 33 min talk but already would commend it to everyone.
Snow on Pine: If you were responding to my comment, thanks.
In my readings from aesthetic and intellectual viewpoints, I recall the outright hostility Western artists and writers had for the middle-class for the first half of the 20th century. They still do. I don’t think they needed much help from Marx, Lenin or the KGB.
Between the promises of modern technology and the disillusionment following the horrors of WW I, they saw the middle-class as a big block to progress. Making common cause with socialists and communists against the middle class and for progress to some glorious future was natural. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
That’s a piece of it, I think.
huxley –Yes, I was trying to respond to your question, “what made the Gramscian memes so effective?”
Rashida Tlaib 20 second video clip
https://youtu.be/NVBqXvMouJg
11 seconds of Rashida Tlaib at a rally going crazy
https://twitter.com/DailyCaller/status/1152711615877398528?
Sgt. Mom at ChicagoBoyz has a recent post which she pitches straight into the strike zone of elite hostility towards the middle-class I mentioned:
Me – I have now had the experience in several different theaters of realizing that certain people, politicians, media, intellectual and entertainment figures of note, or even the establishments they work for – are no longer our countrymen. In fact, those certain people and their establishments deeply despise us ordinary, moderately-conservative, content and hard-working middle class citizens. They hate us, indeed – with a passion that convulses their souls, and drips in their every word like corrosive acid. They hate that we are individual, un-biddable, independent and proud. They hate it even more ferociously that we are not humble in the manner of the 19th century lower class Europeans in the face of nobles and bureaucrats, and they despise everything that we honor and relish, from church membership, to where we choose to shop, to adorn our homes and what we do for hobbies. They hate it that we have the franchise and exercise it, too – and even assume that it is our right and duty to be politically-involved; most recently with movements like the Tea Party. (Which, inter alia, shook and is still shaking the current ruling class down to its bones – hence the viciousness of the reaction to it, from the media, to popular entertainment and to the long-established political parties.) Most of all, I think – they despise us for not giving a damn what they think particularly, and rejecting practically everything that they tell us to do – ride public transportation, move into urban stack-a-prole housing, give up eating meat (or much of anything else), and continuing to believe that we can raise our own children and sort out our own lives without self-elected nannies breathing down our necks 24-7. Very likely the well-manicured and delicate hands of the new ruling class itch for a whip to give us all a good thrashing for our temerity.
–Sgt. Mom
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/44007.html
Very important post. I learned this while in the Navy. We had lectures about Communism and their methods. Yet, I found it hard to believe that there were people who embraced such ideas living among us. The disorders and violence of the 1960/70s showed me that those people existed. But my assumption was always that they were a minority and could not espouse their ideas openly. The last year has changed my mind. We now have candidates for president openly espousing radical socialist/communist ideas. What’s worse is that the MSM is solidly in their corner. Even worse, the radical Soviet memes are now acceptable to a large number of citizens, especially the young. Either these ideas will be recognized as anti-American by a majority of people who will vote them down and work for the changes necessary to defend the Republic, or it will eventually be settled with open warfare.
Snow on Pine,
The only conspiracy ‘theory’ I accept as most probably true is Lucifer’s. As, “the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to convince the world that he didn’t exist”
neo,
I fully acknowledge that the factors you mention are relevant. Yet, I perceive something deeper at play.
Remember the “liberal reset button”? Surely you’ve had more than one experience of it.
And, for those perhaps unfamiliar with it, it describes how you may persuade a liberal to reconsider their positions through a long conversation and then in just a day or week, they’re right back to advocating the same memes as if you never got them to admit that their position was untenable.
That IMO is evidence of willful blindness and I continue to maintain that willful blindness is motivated by moral cowardice. “There are none so blind as they who will not see…”
We cannot be held responsible for that which we do not know, so I am not holding as complicit the ignorant, i.e. the low info voter.
I am holding as complicit those who defend the indefensible.
It’s the act of willful blindness that renders complicity upon the willfully blind.
huxley,
“But what made the Gramscian memes so effective? Were the Soviets diabolically clever?
Or is it just that the G-memes appeal to human weaknesses like blaming others, envy, guilt, tribalism, laziness, etc.?”
Reportedly, only 1/3 of the american colonists were willing to fight for liberty. 1/3 were opposed and 1/3 were ‘neutral’. That’s very close to where we are in the right-middle-left of today.
America’s traditional values place emphasis on standing upon ones own feet and being accountable for one’s actions. Many people simply want to be taken care of by a beneficent nanny state.
And, elite hostility towards the ‘lower’ classes is eternal; “Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties:
1. Those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes.
2. Those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe, although not the most wise depositary of the public interests.
In every country [and time] these two parties exist, and in every one where they are free to think, speak, and write, they will declare themselves.” Thomas Jefferson
On another thread here, we were talking about our 1969 landing on the Moon, and I linked to a current day “woke” take on that event, which saw it through the lens of the Left’s current crusade against all things masculine, and “toxic masculinity,” seeing that achievement solely as one reeking of testosterone ( and, thus, not being “inclusive,” apparently not really worth all that much).
During a recent photo op in the WH with some NASA types President Trump asked a good question, “why not go directly to Mars,” rather than to the Moon, then Mars?
(I realize that the journey to Mars is a much longer and, thus, a more difficult one, and that the astronauts undertaking such an adventure would be subject to much different conditions during the journey and on Mars vs. those going to and on the Moon, nonetheless, the question has some merit, and is worth asking.)
And President Trump was told, “well, we have to get “experience” on the Moon that is necessary before we can attempt Mars.”
A good question that might be asked of these NASA types is, “what have you been doing these last 50 years?
The landing on the Moon—from proposal to accomplishment—took just eight years.
So, what has been accomplished by NASA–which, each year since that Moon landing, has been given respectable budgets–an estimated total of $1.32 Trillion dollars over its lifetime–and which, right now, has a little more than 17,000 FTEs, but which has had a lot more, and in some earlier years more than 375,000 annual contract workers—in the 50 years after, what was all that money spent on, what was all that manpower devoted to accomplishing?
In short, what did we get that was functional–what “experience” and hardware–that got us out into space, and on again to the Moon or to Mars?
The sad fact is that, as of today, we have no actual, functional U.S. “Space Program”–we have a flag, some footprints, and some discarded equipment left behind on the Moon, we have some robots scurrying around on the Moon and Mars, some satellite images of bodies in our solar system, we have a few probes flying around the Solar system and beyond, we have all sorts of concept models, animations, plans, and “things in development.”
But, of actual U.S. rockets capable of boosting our astronauts into orbit and beyond, or U.S. space vehicles capable of flying to the Moon or Mars, we have none, zip, nada.
All this makes me wonder what ever happened to “the right stuff,” and whether NASA has actually just been one gigantic jobs program for administrators, aerospace engineers, and defense contractors.
Perhaps we needed that “right stuff” after all.
There is a good video on YouTube of an interview with Yuri Bezmenov, a Soviet defector, who describes the active measures taken by the KGB in order to produce demoralization in the West. I think they succeeded, and the effects are still being felt long after the Soviet Union itself has collapsed. The whole video is online but this shorter section gives the gist:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bX3EZCVj2XA
And President Trump was told, “well, we have to get “experience” on the Moon that is necessary before we can attempt Mars.”
A good question that might be asked of these NASA types is, “what have you been doing these last 50 years?
The landing on the Moon—from proposal to accomplishment—took just eight years.
Snow on Pine: I’m’ sure if we went at the Moon again with the same “Get ‘er done” attitude we could do it in eight years, maybe less, and do it better. But we would have to recreate a huge amount of human expertise and manufacturing supply chains based on current tech.
Manned flight to Mars first is unrealistic. Mars is about 600x farther than the Moon. It’s hugely more difficult and dangerous to go there and back. I can’t imagine not trying to get to the moon and back first.
It’s easy to spin your wheels technically (and non-technically) without a specific goal and white-hot motivation. After we got to the moon we let the space program go and our focus was absorbed by the craziness of the late sixties and early seventies — civil rights, the Vietnam War, Watergate, the environment and a sagging economy.
There is a good video on YouTube of an interview with Yuri Bezmenov, a Soviet defector, who describes the active measures taken by the KGB in order to produce demoralization in the West.
TrueNorth: I’ve watched that video a couple times. It is a fascinating glimpse into Soviet deviousness. However, I think conservatives give the Soviets too much credit for cultural changes. We were already heading in those directions. The Soviets were happy to give us a push, but I don’t believe the Soviets made the difference.
You can find the seeds of those changes in the 1900s, 1910s and certainly after WW I, and even in the 1800s.
I remember the big story that the Nuclear Freeze movement was a Soviet operation. My first work as an activist was with the Freeze. Sure, I accept that the Soviets tossed us money here and there and pushed Freeze propaganda, but the notion that we wouldn’t have existed without Moscow I find ridiculous. Rather like the current Democrat obsession that Trump wouldn’t have been elected without the Russian connivance.
huxley–I think that what has happened is that, rather than mostly making things up out of whole cloth–creating very effective invasive “memes,” ideas and stories, versions of facts, events, and supposed “history” created around some kernel of truth, memes designed to infect and to linger in the public consciousness as the KGB did, and their successor organization likely still does– what the Left has been particularly good at, in addition to using these created memes, is in spotting, and seizing upon trends that are pushing our society and culture in the direction they want it to go in, and then in pumping energy and support into them, using these maleficent trends as vehicles to manifest their agenda.
A recent example of this is the whole panoply of ideas and attitudes that comprise the “woke” phenomenon.
Similarly, an approach that was touted by former Obama Administration minions was to arrange economic and other incentives so as to “nudge” things in a certain direction.
You might not even been aware of the fact that–since your choices were very carefully chosen, limited, and arranged–you were being “steered,” but you were.
You might not even been aware of the fact that–since your choices were very carefully chosen, limited, and arranged–you were being “steered,” but you were.
Snow on Pine: Oh, really? I remember far more serious “steering” from the Catholic Church, K-12 education and the constant red-white-and-blue patriotism crap coming at me from every angle when I was young.
A big reason conservatives lost the cultural war IMO was it was obvious how programmed and robotic they were. It’s been a good thing in that conservatives had to lay low and actually think their positions through.
So now the shoe is on the other side. It’s the left which is dogmatic.
huxley–Come right down to it, it’s which side’s “steering”–that of the Right or that of the Left–you believe is heading you in the correct direction.
I happen to think that the steering that was previously done by the Right–corny as it was and, in the face of attacks from the Left, increasingly less effective, then, in places, essentially abandoned, and now stripped from everywhere, reviled, and replaced by the relentless “steering” of the Left–was the far more preferable steering, steering individuals and our country to a far better place.
As someone has pointed out recently, post the Cold War, we here in the U.S. are just not used to thinking in terms of ideological threats.
A guy setting up shop in our town, and trying to take business away from our used car or pizza shop, with the aim of, ultimately, closing us down, and running us out of town, we can understand, compete with, and keep a wary eye on.
A group of apparently harmless refugee European intellectuals like the “Frankfort School,” setting up shop in one of our universities and, using their “Critical Theory,” proceeding to produce theories and ideas that will be used to attack and subvert our entire system, that was/is not on our radar.
I just ran across an interview with Yuri Bezmenov, a Soviet KGB defector from the early 1980s, who spoke about how the communists were attacking the USA without using their military. He said the prospects for America were grim if the Soviets were successful in brainwashing the young generation. The interview seems even more relevant today…
https://youtu.be/y3qkf3bajd4
A group of apparently harmless refugee European intellectuals like the “Frankfort School,” setting up shop in one of our universities and, using their “Critical Theory,” proceeding to produce theories and ideas that will be used to attack and subvert our entire system, that was/is not on our radar.
Snow on Pine: That’s the Frankfurt School.
The left ate conservatives’ lunch because conservatives were slow, stupid and robotic. If you want to lay that off on the diabolical genius of the Frankfurt School and the KGB, be my guest. You’ve got company with today’s Democrats who believe Putin put Trump into power, because how else could that happen?
[Bezmenov] said the prospects for America were grim if the Soviets were successful in brainwashing the young generation.
Magnus: The classic cynical definition of a leader is someone who jumps in front of the parade, then takes credit for leading it.
If you want to give the Soviets credit for leading the American parade, that’s fine with me. But I consider it a foolish proposition. The constant blaming of the Soviets for *everything* was no small part of how conservatives discredited themselves with the “young generation.”
With or without outside influence, I think that the tendency of any government is to get bigger and more powerful. As someone wrote a long time ago, “The bureaucracy is expanding, to meet the ever expanding needs of the bureaucracy.”
The Constitution was cleverly crafted to avoid and prevent this, but human nature is just to strong. All governments eventually topple from their own weight when they can no longer steal enough money from the public to keep feeding the monster that the bureaucracy has become.
The fact is that Marxism and its detritus are the dominant philosophy in academia. To fully understand this Gramscian damage, it can only succeed because Marxism is not clearly understood as a philosophy, as nonsensical as it is, and a coherent philosophy is not widespread to oppose it. I suggest that to understand the problem one should listen to John Ridpath’s four lectures on Marxism on the Ayn Rand Institute YouTube channel. Here is the first one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6Am9TXI8tU&t=3s The second lecture is particularly interesting. I also think that the works of Aristotle and Ayn Rand offer insight and tools to oppose this Protean mass called Marxism. It requires real philosophizing. Not everyone can do this, but for those who can do this, this is the only way to fully defeat Marxism.
The definitive work on this is Dr. Ryszard Legutko’s 2018 work “The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies”. Having fought Communism for decades under Poland’s Soviet satellite regime, Legutko is a former Deputy Speaker of the Warsaw Senate, Minister of Education and Secretary of State under President Lech Kaczynski.
Now a Professor of Philosophy at Krakow’s flagship Jagellonian University, a current Member of the European Parliament serving on the Foreign Affairs Committee, Dr. Legutko finds that “liberal democracy” shares roots with history’s worst despotisms, presupposing similar axioms-of-faith regarding culture, politics, religion and society, conflated with oligarchs’ dismissive, self-serving views of Human Nature dating to Hobbes, Rousseau, and subsequent collectivist/Statist ideologues of every stripe.
The Constitution was written and ratified by people who had firsthand experience with political and/or religious oppression. No living person born in America has known real oppression, except for perhaps the poor inner city black community at the hands of the left. We’re spoiled, and are foolish enough to think that our liberty can be taken for granted. The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
Neo,
Are you sure you know a great many “liberals?”
Are you sure you don’t, in fact, know a great many leftists who self-identify as “liberals?”
Alan Dershowitz is a liberal. Dave Rubin is a liberal. Tim Pool is a liberal. Bret Weinstein is a left-liberal, but still a liberal because he’s careful not to espouse oppressive use of centralized power against those who dissent from his views. Bill Maher likes to identify as a libertarian when convenient; but more realistically he straddles the line between leftism and liberalism, because he despises Christians sufficiently strongly that he doesn’t much care if they get stomped on a little bit. Still, he usually leaves one toe inside the leftmost boundary of liberalism and is willing to hate on leftists when they get violent.
Now, if the folks you know have swallowed all that Gramscian damage with no pushback, it’s hard to see how they could be liberal any longer.
Ideas matter, after all, and even a person who is constitutionally unsuited to helping Robespierre build guillotines is still likely to cheer for Robespierre’s ascendancy as long as the latter mouths the platitudes of the revolution. Having cheered Robespierre on, they’ll stay comfortably out of the way while Robespierre’s armed faction does the dirty work of killing any “traitors to the revolution.” My guess is that most “liberals” these days fall into that “supportive, but not directly involved” category: Ideologically Leftist, but leaving the day-to-day oppressing up to others.
Of course, in America, it won’t look as bad as it did in revolutionary France. People who aren’t approved-of by the Left won’t get simply shot, any time soon. Only rarely will they be clubbed to death, under cover of street-level Antifa action. But they’ll be denied equal protection under law as a punishment for opposing the Left’s causes. They’ll be ineligible to work in certain professions (e.g., counselling and psychiatry, which is currently closed to Christians who publicly profess traditional Christian sexual morality). Rules in the armed forces will gradually exclude them from promotion if they don’t keep quiet. (Also a current reality.)
Anyway, Neo, it’s important to call things by your proper names. Liberalism means something having to do with liberty, which implies at minimum a right to fly your own freak-flag without being compelled to pledge allegiance to the ideological programme of the ruling elites.
If your friends are still liberals, good for them: Liberalism has its problems, but it’s a cleaner and humbler creed than leftism.
But I kind of doubt they are. They’ll know they’re still liberals if the leftist “liberals” around them start excluding and shunning them, the way they exclude and shun Rubin, Pool, etc.
When they start to fear to express their non-leftist inclination to “live-and-let-live” vis-a-vis conservatives, then they’ll know they’re on the “liberal” side of the dividing line. And when they overcome that fear and actually say “live-and-let-live,” and suffer whatever social consequences the Left imposes, then they’ll have earned the right to call themselves “liberals.”
Rrr.
When I wrote, “Anyway, Neo, it’s important to call things by your proper names,” I meant to say “…their proper names.” Not sure why I wrote “your,” which makes no sense.
Homer nods.
R.C.:
I am 100% sure.
I know some leftists, and I know a great many liberals—and what’s more, I know the difference.
Most of the liberals I know are not all that politically oriented. They read and watch some of the news, but they don’t explore things in depth, and they know what the Times, NPR, and their friends tell them.
I’m not even knocking them for that. I never used to be especially interested in politics, and that description in the last paragraph could have described me through the end of the 20th century. I was busy with other things, and my politics had been formed years earlier and I thought they were pretty set. I wasn’t poorly informed but I wasn’t well informed either, and a great deal of what I thought I knew wasn’t true.
I was never never a leftist or even close to it.
That is the description of most of my friends.
I’ve written several posts on this subject, although I don’t have time to look for them at the moment.
I was initially impressed with Eric Raymond’s post on “Gramscian Damage.” I no longer am.
The West was already headed in those directions without the KGB’s help. That the KGB chose to exacerbate those tendencies is interesting and no doubt contributed to the West’s movement towards self-destruction, but that doesn’t make the KGB diabolical masterminds who pinpointed our weaknesses and with their super meme-ster powers set us upon the path of our ultimate destruction.
IMO the real Gramscian damage was when the left discovered they could push around academia any which way they wanted — including hiring and firing.
Academia turned out to have almost no defense against Stalinist attacks and now professors are overwhelmingly liberal, leftist or radical. The few remaining conservative professors know to keep their heads down.
I am convinced the reason the academy is so fond of Marxism is that they believe that if it is implemented they will, as philosopher-kings, come out on top.
Hah! Just ask Mandelstam, Sakarov, Solzhenitsyn, and all the Chinese professors and teachers who were destroyed in the Cultural Revolution how that worked out.
The claim that these leftwing, ‘Social Justice’ ideas were injected into American culture by the KGB is liable to be rejected as just conspiracy-mongering, and an attempt to denigrate ‘liberalism’, which is always held to be high-minded and well-intentioned. There may be some justice to such rejection: I expect that the American ‘Progressive’ movement has always been able and willing to latch onto such ideas, mainly because of its high-minded and well-intentioned self-regard. They will never admit they were infiltrated, even if they were, as the gullible are the most adamant. The KGB or Soviet ‘front groups’ could have done nothing without Lenin’s ‘useful idiots’.
The intelligentsia in the ’20s and ’30s were enamored of the Soviet ‘experiment’ with Marxism, beginning with John Reed, and that ideology has, under the guise of Social Justice a hundred years later, permeated much of American society, from academia to most of the Ruling Class and virtually all Democrats. “Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal. . . The poor are victims. . .violence and war are never justified. . .” Who could gainsay such self-evident truths? They are now conventional ‘wisdom’.
It has come to the point that the principles of Freedom and the Dignity of the Individual that underlay the foundation of our Republic are no longer being taught in the schools, and are denigrated in polite company as quaint and outmoded ideas that have no place in the ‘modern’ world. Social Justice for Victim Groups has no room for individuals, not to mention private property or free enterprise.
It is as if the Bolshevik Revolution has eclipsed the American one, even to the point where conservatives who espouse the values of the Founding are hounded from college campuses and the public square by masked, black-shirted thugs. This development is eerily reminiscent of the 1930s in Europe, when totalitarian statists of different persuasions (Communists, Fascists) battled in the streets. Is this what we are heading for?
By chance I watched a film that harked back to that sad time, called “Watch on the Rhine.” I hoped it was not a sign of things to come, but I took it as a warning. See here if you’re interested:
https://walkingcreekworld.wordpress.com/2019/07/15/shaking-the-magnolias-an-independence-day-warning/
Neo,
I’m happy to hear that. And you strike me as sufficiently honest — with us, and more importantly with yourself — that I will choose to trust your word on that matter (that the folks in question are in fact liberals).
Sorry if I was overly suspicious before. In this day-and-age, it takes a bit of effort for me to overcome the suspicion that, for every open leftist ready to drive dissenters off campuses or out of tech companies, there are a half-dozen “liberals” who’re too well-salaried and middle-aged to bother mobbing and milkshaking the opposition, but who’re perfectly comfortable cheering on the ones who do.
I’m happy to hear that the folks you describe as liberal really are. I guess that means that if they could only learn about how their side of the aisle is really behaving, and how many of the news stories about right-wing misbehavior are blatant hoaxes, they’d start speaking up in opposition to it. I gather that, in your view, the problem is epistemological: They just don’t know.
How, then, can one “raise their awareness?”
(I hate even asking that question. Most people who’re “raising awareness” — about breast cancer, about kidney disease, about childhood poverty — are either profit-seeking Concern Pimps or busy Mau-Mauing various Flak-Catchers. But in this case I’m not talking about manipulating emotions, but about actually penetrating a propaganda wall with thus-far suppressed information.)
What do you think it would take for a standard liberal to conclude that their world-picture is incomplete in important ways, and start looking seriously at what they could learn from the other side of the aisle?
I know that 9/11 got the change rolling for you, Neo. (But, reading your old “A mind is a difficult thing to change” series, it seems to me you’d had a tickle or two of cognitive dissonance, as far back as the late 80’s, which 9/11 triggered into fuller activity.)
I hope that the liberals you know are similarly aware that there are gaps in their worldview, and merely underestimate their importance. Perhaps some future events, or even current ones, might stimulate a cascade of mind-changing?
(I just hope it won’t always take an act of war and thousands of tragic deaths.)
Discussion continues here:
https://www.thenewneo.com/2019/07/23/political-change-the-liberals/
Thanks especially for the link to Jeff Goldstein’s piece at proteinwisdom.com, despite the fact that it’s all but unreadable: Why in the name of everything do weblogs and other internet sites use light grey text on a white ground? And why o why o WHY do they guarantee unreadability by using fonts where the lines and curves in the letters are I swear LESS THAN 1 pixel wide!!!
Nevertheless, I persevered until I got to this reference:
to which it links. It’s longer than usual, and very very interesting. From 2005.
https://www.city-journal.org/html/black-family-40-years-lies-12872.html