Antonio Gramsci and Anti-Family Politics in the U.S.

[antoninus]

The Federal Government continues to participate in the Left's prosecution of the Gramscian culture war against Judeo-Christian "bourgeouis" society by paying the states incentives encouraging them to practice these draconian Soviet style, anti-family, child destroying policies. What a frightening use of our “tax dollars at work” to undermine and destroy the social order of America. Even going so far as to pay incentives on a slightly reformed version of Article 81 of The Russian Family Code. This was promoted in the United States by Irwin Garfinkel as “The Wisconsin Model” for child support and welfare reform. “The Wisconsin Model then became a center-piece for the national child support and welfare reform movement.” [ix] The Child Support Guideline Problem, Roger F. Gay, MSc and Gregory J. Palumbo, Ph.D. May 6, 1998."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iO5_1ps5CAc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pICypNXHKbg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lstA7j5fmio

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QO2dOCqr8

By the time I'm finished with all of you, you'll each have your Ph.D in Socio-Political Dialectics and the Family Law System in Western Society.

Who was Antonio Gramsci? How does his particular brand of Communist ideology threaten the West and its Judeo-Christian values of God, Country and Family? What was Benito Mussolini defending when he jailed Gramsci?

"Antonio Gramsci, 1891-1937

"In 1919 an Italian socialist named Antonio Gramsci began to publish a newspaper in Milan called, L'Ordine Nuovo, or "The New Order." Loosely rendered, he concluded that the average person would never voluntarily reject the faith and culture of the West. He concluded that the best way to implement a collectivist government was to use an intellectual elite to destroy traditional values by attacking fundamental Jewish and Christian beliefs...

"The communist inspiration and design inherent in the Clintonion "pro-child" and "pro-woman" initiatives (e.g., the Careers/Workforce proposition, VAWA and the federalization of child support and custody matters) is also drawn from the Italian communist theoretician Antonio Gramsci, who has been publicly acknowledged as a primary influence on Hillary Clinton's political guru, Michael Lerner, and Bill Clinton's friend and adviser, Derek Shearer.

"The Federal Government continues to participate in the Left's prosecution of the Gramscian culture war against Judeo-Christian "bourgeouis" society by paying the states incentives encouraging them to practice these draconian Soviet style, anti-family, child destroying policies. What a frightening use of our “tax dollars at work” to undermine and destroy the social order of America. Even going so far as to pay incentives on a slightly reformed version of Article 81 of The Russian Family Code. This was promoted in the United States by Irwin Garfinkel as “The Wisconsin Model” for child support and welfare reform. “The Wisconsin Model then became a center-piece for the national child support and welfare reform movement.” [ix] The Child Support Guideline Problem, Roger F. Gay, MSc and Gregory J. Palumbo, Ph.D. May 6, 1998.



ADOPTING THE FAILED SOVIET ATTEMPT TO DESTROY THE FAMILY

Instead of our constitutionally guaranteed “Republican form of government,” we now have a thoroughly entrenched Marxist Communist judiciary in the civil court system [at least Judge Globerman's friend and comrade, the late Judge Elliot Wilk was honest and open about his Communist beliefs and I respected him for that-- AC] masquerading as “family law.” America’s family law courts are no longer about the law, they represent complete perversions of numerous legal maxims and common law traditions that American law was founded upon. [x] These abandoned maxims represent the “hegemony” of American culture and historical tradition in civil family matters. The reprehensible evil of being rewarded for one’s wrongs, and of punishing the innocent have been firmly entrenched in the state’s family courts.

No-fault divorce, “the child’s best interests,” and other components of family law in America were imported from the worst of the Soviet family law system. For example from a 1975 Louisville Law School review:


“Few members of the American legal community are aware of the fact that the Soviet Union has had, for some period of time, what can be described as a no-fault divorce legal system… [A]t a meeting with a group of Soviet lawyers in 1972, one of them asked, “Is it for a long time that you (California) have that system?” When informed of the January 1, 1970 effective date of the California law she remarked, “I think it is the influence of our law… [T]here are a number of similarities between Soviet and California divorce laws that suggest a “borrowing” or a remarkable coincidence.” (pg 32)

“For the Bolsheviks, with their Marxist disdain for reli*gion, the influence of the ecclesiastical authorities over the family was an outrage. Since the family represented the major institution through which the traditions of the past were transmitted from generation to generation, the new re*gime had to destroy the old bourgeois notions of the family and the home. There was also a very urgent practical reason for disassociating family relations from the influence of the religious authorities… [T]he first task of the new regime in relation to the family was to break the power of the church and the husband.” (pg 33)

“Birth alone was declared the basis of family ties, and all legal discrimi*nation against illegitimate children was abolished... Early Soviet policy was intended to at*tack these evils [of “patriarchy”] and to transfer the care, education and main*tenance of children from home to society. This would mean the end of the family’s socialization functions, and would remove the child from the conservative atmosphere of the patriarchal family to a setting that could be entirely con*trolled by the regime.” (pg 34)

The Soviet press reported in the mid-thirties that promiscu*ity flourished... juvenile delinquency mounted, and statistical studies showed that the major source of delin*quents was the broken or inattentive home… Additional public homes for children were established, and propaganda cam*paigns sought to persuade the public that a strong family was the most communistically inspired one. (pg 38, 39)

There was also the matter of seven to nine million fatherless and homeless children, according to Russian estimates of the early twenties. In derogation of Marxist ideology, the state had been unable to assist single mothers, and there existed almost no children’s homes, nurseries or kindergartens. Because of more pressing tasks and limited personnel and material resources the state had not been able to fulfill the conditions Engels had specified for extrafamilial facilities. (pg 40)

More seriously, anti-family policies were leading to a situation where many children in the first Soviet urban generation simply lacked the kind of socializing experience to fit them intellectually or emotionally to the new society the regime was attempting to build, with its emphasis upon self-discipline and control, perseverance, steadiness, punctuality and accuracy. While the family influence had been under*mined, extrafamilial agencies had failed to provide a workable substitute, leaving the child prey to the noxious and deviant influences of “the street.” (pg 41) [xi]


The US Library of Congress Country Studies on Romania also shows direct parallels noting;


“Family law in socialist Romania was modeled after Soviet family legislation… [I]t sought to undermine the influence of religion on family life. [Previously] the church was the center of community life, and marriage, divorce, and recording of births were matters for religious authorities. Under communism these events became affairs of the state, and legislation designed to wipe out the accumulated traditions and ancient codes was enacted. The communist regime required marriage to be legalized in a civil ceremony at the local registry prior to, or preferably instead of, the customary church wedding.

Because of the more liberal procedures, the divorce rate grew dramatically, tripling by 1960, and the number of abortions also increased rapidly. Concern for population reproduction and future labor supplies prompted the state to revise the Romanian Family Code to foster more stable personal relationships and strengthen the family. At the end of 1966, abortion was virtually outlawed, and a new divorce decree made the dissolution of marriage exceedingly difficult.


INDOCTRINATING LAWYERS AND JUDGES TO DESTROY AMERICA

Gramsci wrote, "The conception of law will have to be freed from every remnant of transcendence and absoluteness, practically from all moralist fanaticism.” Law schools across America teach Gramscian “critical theory” as well as other communist ideals. A Westlaw or Lexis search reveals not just dozens, but hundreds and hundreds of legal articles, law reviews, and other materials on feminism, homosexuality, and various forms of Gramscian class “victimology.”


"The revolutionary forces have to take civil society before they take the state, and therefore have to build a coalition of oppositional groups united under a hegemonic banner which usurps the dominant or prevailing hegemony." [xii]


"Today’s Gramscian Marxists have numerous 'oppositional groups' headed by lawyers and promoted by judges and bureacrats. They advance such “counter-hegemonic” (culturally corrosive and culturally destructive) positions as homosexuality, abortion, the complete FRAUD of the non-existent “separation of church and state,” the (it only applies to destroying marriage and relationships) Violence Against Women Act, and 'outcome based education.' and the fictitious “global warming.” Today’s Marxist Communists operate in law, government, religion, media, entertainment and education. They use Orwellian NewSpeak with words such as “tolerance” which actually means intolerance of things that prevent the destruction of all social structures and societal “norms”. Gramscians preach the religion of division, class warfare and social warfare while spouting their hatred of anything traditional, conservative, moral, or values centered – their battle cry is “the personal is the political.” They want all of Western culture completely destroyed and centralized government control erected in the place of the structure they seek to tear apart and discard. The fruits of the culture war they have engaged on America can be seen in the corrosive remnants of broken families, broken children, filled prisons, and a host of other ills underwritten by America’s taxpayers.

Those who deeply care about this country and our constitution must fearlessly engage in this culture war--; the war for America’s heart and soul. It’s not too late yet. There is still a critical mass and majority of Americans who are not ready for the horrors of the type of communism or national socialism that Gramscians promote. No form of Marxism or communism (even its most radical form of National Socialism) has ever survived without totalitarian control. If the support were there for these Marxist Communists and National Socialists, history has shown that they would not hesitate to attempt a forceful or violent overthrow of American government.

"If the family trends of recent decades are extended into the future, the result will be not only growing uncertainty within marriage, but the gradual elimination of marriage in favor of casual liaisons oriented to adult selfishness. The problem… is that children will be harmed, adults will probably be no happier, and the social order could collapse." [xiii] “In his book, The American Sex Revolution, Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin reviewed the history of societies through the ages, and found that none survived after they ceased honoring and upholding the institution of marriage between a man and a woman.”

Culture War
By Lee Congdon, Ph.D.

To few Americans is Antonio Gramsci a familiar name. That is to be regretted because the work of the late Italian Marxist sheds much light on our time. It was he who first alerted fellow revolutionaries to the possibility that they would be able to complete the seizure of political power only after having achieved "cultural hegemony," or control of society's intellectual life by cultural means alone. His was an incremental, rather than an apocalyptic, revolution-the kind, that is, that we have been witnessing in the United States, and the Western world generally, since the 1960s. With this in mind, we ought not to treat the contemporary "culture war" lightly; the fate of what remains of civilized life may well be decided by its outcome.

Few Leftists now adhere strictly to the original tenets of Marxism, or even to those of Marxist Revisionism, but, what is every bit as dangerous, they, like Gramsci, often succumb to a temptation that appears to be irresistible to those who dream utopian dreams: the passion for negation that often shades into nihilism. Utopianism and nihilism may seem to be antithetical, but they are not; both derive from the same source-undying hatred of the world as it is.

Much of contemporary American culture has as its aim the trampling of moral and aesthetic standards that were once all but universally acknowledged, even when they were being violated. With few exceptions, contemporary movies, television shows, and popular music portray Judeo-Christian morality as laughable at best and tyrannical at worst. To hear them tell it, America is in danger of becoming a theocracy governed by the "Religious Right." This despite the fact that the reigning culture is pagan through and through. It therefore assumes casual or impersonal sex to be the norm; feeds the public's increasing appetite for sexual perversion; depicts all fictional tyrannies as "right wing"; and pollutes the public square with scatological language. Only in rare cases are the purveyors of this "culture" challenged; and then, like the egregious Howard Stern, they pose as persecuted defenders of free speech and command even more money. Almost no one-Judge Robert Bork is an honorable exception-has had the courage to make the case for censorship, in part because of the widespread, but utterly mistaken, belief that there exists a "right of free expression" that is absolute.

Another oft-repeated, but spurious, argument against censorship is that "you don't have to watch (or read or listen to) it." Others, however, do and even those who are not motivated thereby to commit crimes-think only of the Littleton, Colorado murderers-are coarsened by it and thus contribute to a further lowering of public taste, with what consequences for individual, often young, lives we have reason to know. Those who can endure a veritable torrent of linguistic vulgarity will find Tom Wolfe's recent novel, I am Charlotte Simmons, instructive in this regard.

Following Gramsci, Leftists know that Christianity remains the greatest obstacle to their total victory in the culture war. "The civilized world had been thoroughly saturated with Christianity for 2000 years," the Italian had written; something, he insisted, had to be done about that, and something has. The de-Christianizing of America and the West that he advocated is by now well underway. Inspired by the anti-Christian French Revolutionary calendar, publishers now insist upon the secular "B.C.E." (Before the "Common Era"-whatever that means) rather than "B.C." and "C.E." (the Common Era) rather than "A.D." Booksellers, popular magazines, and television treat with respect anti-Christian screeds such as The DaVinci Code. Courts, including the Supreme Court, declare most displays of the Decalogue to be "unconstitutional." The media repeat the mantra according to which Islam is "the religion of peace" (daily evidence to the contrary notwithstanding), find nothing to criticize in Buddhism, and remain "non-judgmental" concerning scientology and other cults, while at the same time they portray Christianity as the religion of "crusaders," bigots, and yahoos. Members of the Christian clergy have themselves joined in the relentless attack on orthodox Christianity.

Few thoughtful people deny that we are living in a time of decline. Judge Bork entitled one of his books Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline. Pat Buchanan recently published The Death of the West. The only question that remains is: Is the decline reversible? There are a few signs of hope, including the much commented upon challenge to the "mainstream" media presented by talk radio, bloggers, and Fox News. That is something, but not enough. Gramsci counseled his side to begin a "long march through the institutions," by which he meant the capture of the cinema, theater, schools, universities, seminaries, newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and courts. It is past time to begin a long march in a new and better direction.

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(Lee Congdon is professor emeritus of history at James Madison University, and a member of the Board of Scholars of the Virginia Institute for Public Policy, an education and research organization headquartered in Gainesville, Virginia. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided the author and his affiliations are cited.)



FEATURES:
Why There is a Culture War


By John Fonte

Gramsci and Tocqueville in America



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As intellectual historians have often had occasion to observe, there are times in a nation’s history when certain ideas are just "in the air." Admittedly, this point seems to fizzle when applied to our particular historical moment. On the surface of American politics, as many have had cause to mention, it appears that the main trends predicted over a decade ago in Francis Fukuyama’s "The End of History?" have come to pass — that ideological (if not partisan) strife has been muted; that there is a general consensus about the most important questions of the day (capitalism, not socialism; democracy, not authoritarianism); and that the contemporary controversies that do exist, while occasionally momentous, are essentially mundane, concerned with practical problem-solving (whether it is better to count ballots by hand or by machine) rather than with great principles.

And yet, I would argue, all that is true only on the surface. For simultaneously in the United States of the past few decades, recurring philosophical concepts have not only remained "in the air," but have proved influential, at times decisive, in cultural and legal and moral arguments about the most important questions facing the nation. Indeed: Prosaic appearances to the contrary, beneath the surface of American politics an intense ideological struggle is being waged between two competing worldviews. I will call these "Gramscian" and "Tocquevillian" after the intellectuals who authored the warring ideas — the twentieth-century Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci, and, of course, the nineteenth-century French intellectual Alexis de Tocqueville. The stakes in the battle between the intellectual heirs of these two men are no less than what kind of country the United States will be in decades to come.

Refining class warfare

We’ll begin with an overview of the thought of Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), a Marxist intellectual and politician. Despite his enormous influence on today’s politics, he remains far less well-known to most Americans than does Tocqueville.

Gramsci’s main legacy arises through his departures from orthodox Marxism. Like Marx, he argued that all societies in human history have been divided into two basic groups: the privileged and the marginalized, the oppressor and the oppressed, the dominant and the subordinate. Gramsci expanded Marx’s ranks of the "oppressed" into categories that still endure. As he wrote in his famous Prison Notebooks, "The marginalized groups of history include not only the economically oppressed, but also women, racial minorities and many ‘criminals.’" What Marx and his orthodox followers described as "the people," Gramsci describes as an "ensemble" of subordinate groups and classes in every society that has ever existed until now. This collection of oppressed and marginalized groups — "the people" — lack unity and, often, even consciousness of their own oppression. To reverse the correlation of power from the privileged to the "marginalized," then, was Gramsci’s declared goal.

Power, in Gramsci’s observation, is exercised by privileged groups or classes in two ways: through domination, force, or coercion; and through something called "hegemony," which means the ideological supremacy of a system of values that supports the class or group interests of the predominant classes or groups. Subordinate groups, he argued, are influenced to internalize the value systems and world views of the privileged groups and, thus, to consent to their own marginalization.

Far from being content with a mere uprising, therefore, Gramsci believed that it was necessary first to delegitimize the dominant belief systems of the predominant groups and to create a "counter-hegemony" (i.e., a new system of values for the subordinate groups) before the marginalized could be empowered. Moreover, because hegemonic values permeate all spheres of civil society -- schools, churches, the media, voluntary associations -- civil society itself, he argued, is the great battleground in the struggle for hegemony, the "war of position." From this point, too, followed a corollary for which Gramsci should be known (and which is echoed in the feminist slogan) — that all life is "political." Thus, private life, the work place, religion, philosophy, art, and literature, and civil society, in general, are contested battlegrounds in the struggle to achieve societal transformation.

It is perhaps here that one sees Gramsci’s most important reexamination of Marx’s thought. Classical Marxists implied that a revolutionary consciousness would simply develop from the objective (and oppressive) material conditions of working class life. Gramsci disagreed, noting that "there have always been exploiters and exploited" — but very few revolutions per se. In his analysis, this was because subordinate groups usually lack the "clear theoretical consciousness" necessary to convert the "structure of repression into one of rebellion and social reconstruction." Revolutionary "consciousness" is crucial. Unfortunately, the subordinate groups possess "false consciousness," that is to say, they accept the conventional assumptions and values of the dominant groups, as "legitimate." But real change, he continued to believe, can only come about through the transformation of consciousness.

Just as Gramsci’s analysis of consciousness is more nuanced than Marx’s, so too is his understanding of the role of intellectuals in that process. Marx had argued that for revolutionary social transformation to be successful, the world views of the predominant groups must first be unmasked as instruments of domination. In classical Marxism, this crucial task of demystifying and delegitimizing the ideological hegemony of the dominant groups is performed by intellectuals. Gramsci, more subtly, distinguishes between two types of intellectuals: "traditional" and "organic." What subordinate groups need, Gramsci maintains, are their own "organic intellectuals." However, the defection of "traditional" intellectuals from the dominant groups to the subordinate groups, he held, is also important, because traditional intellectuals who have "changed sides" are well positioned within established institutions.

The metaphysics, or lack thereof, behind this Gramscian worldview are familiar enough. Gramsci describes his position as "absolute historicism," meaning that morals, values, truths, standards and human nature itself are products of different historical epochs. There are no absolute moral standards that are universally true for all human beings outside of a particular historical context; rather, morality is "socially constructed."

Historically, Antonio Gramsci’s thought shares features with other writers who are classified as "Hegelian Marxists" — the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs, the German thinker Karl Korsch, and members of the "Frankfurt School" (e.g., Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse), a group of theorists associated with the Institute for Social Research founded in Frankfurt, Germany in the 1920s, some of whom attempted to synthesize the thinking of Marx and Freud. All emphasized that the decisive struggle to overthrow the bourgeois regime (that is, middle-class liberal democracy) would be fought out at the level of consciousness. That is, the old order had to be rejected by its citizens intellectually and morally before any real transfer of power to the subordinate groups could be achieved.

Gramsci’s long reach

The relation of all these abstractions to the nuts and bolts of American politics is, as the record shows, surprisingly direct. All of Gramsci’s most innovative ideas -- for example, that dominant and subordinate groups based on race, ethnicity, and gender are engaged in struggles over power; that the "personal is political"; and that all knowledge and morality are social constructions -- are assumptions and presuppositions at the very center of today’s politics. So too is the very core of the Gramscian-Hegelian world view — group-based morality, or the idea that what is moral is what serves the interests of "oppressed" or "marginalized" ethnic, racial, and gender groups.

What, for example, lies behind the concept of "jury nullification," a notion which now enjoys the support of law professors at leading universities? Building on the Hegelian-Marxist concepts of group power and group-based morality, jury nullification advocates argue that minorities serving on juries should use their "power" as jurors to refuse to convict minority defendants regardless of the evidence presented in court, because the minority defendants have been "powerless," lifelong victims of an oppressive system that is skewed in favor of dominant groups, such as white males.

Indeed, what is called "critical theory" — a direct descendant of Gramscian and Hegelian-Marxist thinking — is widely influential in both law and education. Critical legal studies posits that the law grows out of unequal relations of power and therefore serves the interests of and legitimizes the rule of dominant groups. Its subcategories include critical race theory and feminist legal theory. The critical legal studies movement could hardly be more Gramscian; it seeks to "deconstruct" bourgeois legal ideas that serve as instruments of power for the dominant groups and "reconstruct" them to serve the interests of the subordinate groups.

Or consider the echoes of Gramsci in the works of yet another law professor, Michigan’s Catharine MacKinnon. She writes in Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989), "The rule of law and the rule of men are one thing, indivisible," because "State power, embodied in law, exists throughout society as male power." Furthermore, "Male power is systemic. Coercive, legitimated, and epistemic, it is the regime." Therefore, MacKinnon notes, "a rape is not an isolated event or moral transgression or individual interchange gone wrong but an act of terrorism and torture within a systemic context of group subjection, like lynching." Similarly, MacKinnon has argued that sexual harassment is essentially an issue of power exercised by the dominant over the subordinate group.

Such thinking may begin in ivory towers, but it does not end there. The United States Supreme Court adopted MacKinnon’s theories as the basis for its interpretation of sexual harassment law in the landmark Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson (1986). This is only one example of how major American social policy has come to be based not on Judeo-Christian precepts nor on Kantian-Enlightenment ethics, but on Gramscian and Hegelian-Marxist concepts of group power.

Hegel among the CEOs

Quite apart from their popularity among academics and in certain realms of politics, Gramscian and Hegelian-Marxist ideas are also prominent in three other major sectors of American civil society: foundations, universities, and corporations.

As laymen and analysts alike have observed over the years, the major foundations — particularly Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and MacArthur — have for decades spent millions of dollars promoting "cutting edge" projects on racial, ethnic, and gender issues. According to author and foundation expert Heather Mac Donald, for example, feminist projects received $36 million from Ford, Rockefeller, Mellon, and other large foundations between 1972 and 1992. Similarly, according to a Capital Research Center report by Peter Warren, a policy analyst at the National Association of Scholars, foundations have crowned diversity the "king" of American campuses. For example, the Ford Foundation launched a Campus Diversity Initiative in 1990 that funded programs in about 250 colleges and universities at a cost of approximately $15 million. The Ford initiative promotes what sounds like a Gramscian’s group-rights dream: as Peter Warren puts it, "the establishment of racial, ethnic, and sex-specific programs and academic departments, group preferences in student admissions, group preferences in staff and faculty hiring, sensitivity training for students and staff, and campus-wide convocations to raise consciousness about the need for such programs."

Alan Kors, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has described in detail how Ford and other foundation "diversity" grants are put to use. As he noted in "Thought Reform 101" in the March 2000 issue of Reason, "at almost all our campuses, some form of moral and political re-education has been built into freshmen orientation." A "central goal of these programs," Kors states, "is to uproot ‘internalized oppression,’ a crucial concept in the diversity education planning documents of most universities." The concept of "internalized oppression" is the same as the Hegelian-Marxist notion of "false consciousness," in which people in the subordinate groups "internalize" (and thus accept) the values and ways of thinking of their oppressors in the dominant groups.

At Columbia University, for instance, new students are encouraged to get rid of "their own social and personal beliefs that foster inequality." To accomplish this, the assistant dean for freshmen, Katherine Balmer, insists that "training" is needed. At the end of freshmen orientation at Bryn Mawr in the early 1990s, according to the school program, students were "breaking free" of "the cycle of oppression" and becoming "change agents." Syracuse University’s multicultural program is designed to teach students that they live "in a world impacted by various oppression issues, including racism."

Kors states that at an academic conference sponsored by the University of Nebraska, the attendees articulated the view that "White students desperately need formal ‘training’ in racial and cultural awareness. The moral goal of such training should override white notions of privacy and individualism." One of the leading "diversity experts" providing scores of "training programs" in universities, corporations, and government bureaucracies is Hugh Vasquez of the Todos Institute of Oakland, California. Vasquez’s study guide for a Ford Foundation-funded diversity film, Skin Deep, explains the meaning of "white privilege" and "internalized oppression" for the trainees. It also explains the concept of an "ally," as an individual from the "dominant group" who rejects his "unmerited privilege" and becomes an advocate for the position of the subordinate groups. This concept of the "ally," of course, is Gramscian to the core; it is exactly representative of the notion that subordinate groups struggling for power must try to "conquer ideologically" the traditional intellectuals or activist cadres normally associated with the dominant group.

The employees of America’s major corporations take many of the same sensitivity training programs as America’s college students, often from the same "diversity facilitators." Frederick Lynch, the author of the Diversity Machine, reported "diversity training" is rampant among the Fortune 500. Even more significantly, on issues of group preferences vs. individual opportunity, major corporate leaders tend to put their money and influence behind group rights instead of individual rights.

After California voters passed Proposition 209, for example — a referendum outlawing racial and gender preferences in employment — Ward Connerly, the African-American businessman who led the effort, launched a similar antipreferences initiative in the state of Washington. The Washington initiative I-200 read as follows: "The State shall not discriminate against or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, or public contracting." This language was almost identical to California’s Proposition 209. Atlantic Monthly editor Michael Kelly reported in the Washington Post on August 23 that when asked his opinion on Proposition 209 during the referendum debate, Sen. Joseph Lieberman replied, "I can’t see how I could be opposed to it. . . . It is basically a statement of American values . . . and says we shouldn’t discriminate in favor of somebody based on the group they represent."

However, Washington’s business leaders disagreed. In his autobiography Creating Equal, Ward Connerly wrote that the "most important significant obstacle we faced in Washington was not the media, or even political personalities, but the corporate world. . . . Boeing, Weyerhauser, Starbucks, Costco, and Eddie Bauer all made huge donations to the No on I-200 campaign. . . . The fundraising was spearheaded by Bill Gates, Sr., a regent of the University of Washington, whose famous name seemed to suggest that the whole of the high-tech world was solemnly shaking its head at us."

Interestingly, private corporations are also more supportive of another form of group rights — gay rights — than are government agencies at any level. As of June 2000, for example, approximately 100 Fortune 500 companies had adopted health benefits for same-sex partners. According to the gay rights organization, Human Rights Campaign, the companies offering same-sex benefits include the leading corporations in the Fortune 500 ranking: among the top 10, General Motors (ranked first), Ford (fourth), IBM (sixth), AT&T (eighth), and Boeing (tenth), as well as Hewlett-Packard, Merrill Lynch, Chase Manhattan Bank, Bell Atlantic, Chevron, Motorola, Prudential, Walt Disney, Microsoft, Xerox, and United Airlines. Corporate reaction to gay activist attacks on Dr. Laura Schlessinger is another indication of how Hegelian-Gramscian the country’s business leaders have become. Sears and EchoStar have lately joined a long list of advertisers — Procter and Gamble, Xerox, AT&T, Toys R Us, Kraft, General Foods, and Geico — in pulling their advertising from the popular talk show host. Whether these decisions favoring gay (read: group) rights were motivated by ideology, economic calculation, or an opportunistic attempt to appear "progressive," they typify American businesses’ response to the culture war.

The Tocquevillian counterattack

The primary resistance to the advance of Gramscian ideas comes from an opposing quarter that I will call contemporary Tocquevillianism. Its representatives take Alexis de Tocqueville’s essentially empirical description of American exceptionalism and celebrate the traits of this exceptionalism as normative values to be embraced. As Tocqueville noted in the 1830s (and as the World Values Survey, a scholarly comparative assessment, reaffirmed in the 1990s), Americans are different from Europeans in several crucial respects. Two recent books — Seymour Martin Lipset’s American Exceptionalism (1997) and Michael Ledeen’s Tocqueville on American Character (2000) — have made much the same point: that Americans today, just as in Tocqueville’s time, are much more individualistic, religious, and patriotic than the people of any other comparably advanced nation.

What was particularly exceptional for Tocqueville (and contemporary Tocquevillians) is the singular American path to modernity. Unlike other modernists, Americans combined strong religious and patriotic beliefs with dynamic, restless entrepreneurial energy that emphasized equality of individual opportunity and eschewed hierarchical and ascriptive group affiliations. The trinity of American exceptionalism could be described as (1) dynamism (support for equality of individual opportunity, entrepreneurship, and economic progress); (2) religiosity (emphasis on character development, mores, and voluntary cultural associations) that works to contain the excessive individual egoism that dynamism sometimes fosters; and (3) patriotism (love of country, self-government, and support for constitutional limits).

Among today’s Tocquevillians we could include public intellectuals William Bennett, Michael Novak, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Marvin Olasky, Norman Podhoretz, and former Clinton White House advisor and political philosopher William Galston, and scholars Wilfred McClay, Harvey Mansfield, and Walter MacDougall. Neoconservatives, traditional conservatives of the National Review-Heritage Foundation stripe, some students of political philosopher Leo Strauss, and some centrist Democrats are Tocquevillian in their emphasis on America’s special path to modernity that combines aspects of the pre-modern (emphasis on religion, objective truth, and transcendence) with the modern (self-government, constitutional liberalism, entrepreneurial enterprise). The writings of neoconservative Irving Kristol and National Review-style conservative Charles Kesler clarify this special American path to modernity. Like thoughtful scholars before them, both make a sharp distinction between the moderate (and positive) Enlightenment (of Locke, Montesquieu, and Adam Smith) that gave birth to the American Revolution and the radical (and negative) Enlightenment (Condorcet and the philosophes) that gave birth to the Revolution in France.

Like their ideological opposites, Tocquevillians are also represented in business and government. In the foundation world, prevailing Gramscian ideas have been challenged by scholars funded by the Bradley, Olin, and Scaife foundations. For example, Michael Joyce of Bradley has called his foundation’s approach "Tocquevillian" and supported associations and individuals that foster moral and religious underpinnings to self-help and civic action. At the same time, Joyce called in "On Self-Government" (Policy Review, July-August 1998) for challenging the "political hegemony" of the service providers and "scientific managers" who run the "therapeutic state" that Tocqueville feared would result in "an immense and tutelary" power that threatened liberty. As for the political world, a brief list of those influenced by the Tocquevillian side of the argument would include, for example, Sen. Daniel Coats of Indiana, Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, and Gov. George W. Bush of Texas. All have supported Tocquevillian initiatives and employed Tocquevillian language in endorsing education and welfare measures that emphasize the positive contributions of faith and responsibility.

There is also a third category to be considered here — those institutions and and individuals that also oppose the Gramscian challenge, but who are not Tocquevillians because they reject one or more features of the trinity of American exceptionalism. For example, Reason magazine editor Virginia Postrel sees the world divided into pro-change "dynamists" and anti-change "stasists." Postrel’s libertarianism emphasizes only one aspect of American exceptionalism, its dynamism, and slights the religious and patriotic pillars that in the Tocquevillian synthesis provide the nation’s moral and civic core.

Similarly, paleoconservatives such as Samuel Francis, a leading Buchananite intellectual, oppose modernism and the Enlightenment in all its aspects, not simply its radical wing. Likewise secular patriots such as historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. embrace a positive form of enlightened American nationalism, but are uncomfortable with the religious and entrepreneurial (including the antistatist) traditions that complete the Tocquevillian trinity. Catholic social democrats like E.J. Dionne accept the religious part of the Tocquevillian trinity, but would like to curb its risky dynamism and deemphasize its patriotism.

A few years ago, several conservative and religious intellectuals writing in a First Things magazine symposium suggested that American liberal democracy was facing a crisis of legitimacy. One of the symposium writers, Judge Robert Bork, suggests in his book Slouching Towards Gomorrah that "revolutionary" upheavals of the 1960s were "not a complete break with the spirit of the American past," but inherent in the Enlightenment framework of America’s founding principles. Bork and others — including Paul Weyrich and Cal Thomas — appear to have speculated that perhaps America’s path to modernity was itself flawed (too much dynamism and too little morality). What could be called a partial Tocquevillian position of some conservative intellectuals and activists could be contrasted with the work of American Catholic Whigs — for example, the American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Novak and the Faith and Reason Institute’s Robert Royal — who have argued, in essence, that America’s founding principles are sound and that the three elements of the Tocquevillian synthesis (entrepreneurial dynamism, religion, and patriotism) are at the heart of the American experience and of America’s exceptional contribution to the idea of ordered liberty.

At the end of the day it is unlikely that the libertarians, paleoconservatives, secular patriots, Catholic social democrats, or disaffected religious right intellectuals will mount an effective resistance to the continuing Gramscian assault. Only the Tocquevillians appear to have the strength — in terms of intellectual firepower, infrastructure, funding, media attention, and a comprehensive philosophy that taps into core American principles — to challenge the Gramscians with any chance of success.

Tocquevillianism as praxis

Writing in Policy Review in 1996, Adam Meyerson described the task of cultural renewal as "applied Tocquevillianism." In explaining one of his key points, Tocqueville writes in Democracy in America that "mores" are central to the "Maintenance of a Democratic Republic in the United States." He defines "mores" as not only "the habits of the heart," but also the "different notions possessed by men, the various opinions current among them, and the sum of ideas that shape mental habits" — in short, he declares, "the whole moral and intellectual state of a people."

One of the leading manifestos of the Tocquevillians is "A Call to Civil Society: Why Democracy Needs Moral Truths," published by the Council on Civil Society. It outlines the traditional civic and moral values (Tocqueville’s "mores") that buttress the republic. The document (endorsed by, among others, Sens. Coats and Lieberman, in addition to Don Eberly, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Francis Fukuyama, William Galston, Glenn Loury, Cornel West, James Q. Wilson, and Daniel Yankelovitch) states that the "civic truths" of the American regime are "those of Western constitutionalism, rooted in both classical understandings of natural law and natural right and in the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. . . . The moral truths that make possible our experiment in self-government," according to this statement, "are in large part biblical and religious," informed by the "classical natural law tradition" and the "ideas of the Enlightenment." The "most eloeloquent expressions" of these truths are "found in the Declaration of Independence, Washington’s Farewell Address, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural Address, and King’s Letter from the Birmingham Jail."

The Tocquevillians, then, emphasize "renewing" and "rediscovering" American mores, suggesting that there is a healthy civic and moral core to the American regime that needs to be brought back to life. Moreover, if the first task is cultural renewal, the second task is cultural transmission. Thus, the "Call to Civil Society" declares that the "central task of every generation is moral transmission." Religion, in particular, "has probably been the primary force" that "transmits from one generation to another the moral understandings that are essential to liberal democratic institutions." Moreover, "[at] their best . . . our houses of worship foster values that are essential to human flourishing and democratic civil society: personal responsibility, respect for moral law, and neighbor-love or concern for others." In addition, the statement declares that a "basic responsibility of the school is cultural transmission," particularly "a knowledge of [the] country’s constitutional heritage, an understanding of what constitutes good citizenship, and an appreciation of [this] society’s common civic faith and shared moral philosophy."

In the matter of practice, the past few years have also witnessed what could be called "Tocquevillian" initiatives that attempt to bring faith-based institutions (particularly churches) into federal and state legislative efforts to combat welfare and poverty. In the mid-1990s, Sen. Coats, working with William Bennett and other intellectuals, introduced a group of 19 bills known as the Project for American Renewal. Among other things these bills advocated dollar for dollar tax credits for contributions to charitable organizations, including churches. Coats’s goal in introducing this legislation was to push the debate in a Tocquevillian direction, by getting policy makers thinking about new ways of involving religious and other civic associations in social welfare issues. Coats and others were asking why the faith community was being excluded from participating in federal social programs. At the same time there are other Tocquevillians, including Michael Horowitz of the Hudson Institute, who favor tax credits, but worry that by accepting federal grant money the faith institutions could become dependent on government money and adjust their charitable projects to government initiatives.

In 1996 Congress included a "charitable choice" provision in the landmark welfare reform legislation. The charitable choice section means that if a state receives federal funds to provide services, it could not discriminate against religious organizations if they wanted to compete for federal grants to provide those services. The section includes guidelines designed simultaneously to protect both the religious character of the faith-based institutions receiving the federal funds and the civil rights of the individuals using the services. However, in 1998 the Clinton administration attempted to dilute the "charitable choice" concept in another piece of legislation by stating that administration lawyers opposed giving funds to what they described as "pervasively sectarian" institutions that could be inferred to mean churches doing charitable work.

Besides activity at the federal level, some states have started similar projects. Faithworks Indiana, a center sponsored by the state government, assists faith-based institutions with networking. In Illinois state agencies are reaching out to faith-based institutions through the "Partners for Hope" program. In Mississippi Governor Kirk Fordice launched the "Faith and Families" program with the ambitious goal of linking each of the state’s 5,000 churches with a welfare recipient.

Both Gov. George W. Bush in Texas and Sen. Joseph Lieberman in Congress have been friendly to some Tocquevillian approaches to legislation. Bush has promoted legislation to remove licensing barriers to church participation in social programs. He has also supported faith initiatives in welfare-to-work and prison reform projects. Lieberman supported the charitable choice provision of the welfare reform act and co-sponsored the National Youth Crime Prevention Demonstration Act that would promote "violence free zones" by working with grass-roots organizations, including faith-based organizations.

Legislative battlegrounds

Gramscian concepts have been on the march through Congress in recent years, meeting in at least some cases Tocquevillian resistance and counterattack. For example, the intellectual underpinning for the Gender Equity in Education Act of 1993 (and most gender equity legislation going back to the seminal Women’s Educational Equity Act, or WEEA, of the 1970s) is the essentially Gramscian and Hegelian-Marxist concept of "systemic" or "institutionalized oppression." In this view, the mainstream institutions of society, including the schools, enforce an "oppressive" system (in this case, a "patriarchy") at the expense of a subordinate group (i.e., women and girls).

The work of Harvard education professor Carol Gilligan, promoted by the American Association of University Women (AAUW), was influential in persuading Congress to support the Gender Equity in Education Act. Professor Gilligan identifies the main obstacles to educational opportunity for American girls as the "patriarchial social order," "androcentric and patriarchical norms," and "Western thinking" — that is to say, the American "system" itself is at fault.

In speaking on behalf of the bill, Republican Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine made a Gramscian case, decrying "systemic discrimination against girls." Democratic Rep. Patsy Mink of Hawaii likewise attacked the "pervasive nature" of antifemale bias in the educational system. Maryland Republican Rep. Connie Morella declared that throughout the schools "inequitable practices are widespread and persistent." Not surprisingly, she insisted that "gender equity training" for "teachers, counselors, and administrators" be made available with federal funds. As noted earlier, one of the remedies to "systemic oppression" is "training" (of the "reeducation" type described by Professor Kors) that seeks to alter the "consciousness" of individuals in both the dominant groups and subordinate groups. Thus, Sen. Snowe also advocated "training" programs to eliminate "sexual harassment in its very early stages in our Nation’s schools."

In a related exercise in Gramscian reasoning, Congress in 1994 passed the Violence Against Women Act. According to Democratic Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware, the "whole purpose" of the bill was "to raise the consciousness of the American public." The bill’s supporters charged that there was an "epidemic" of violent crime against women. Echoing Catharine MacKinnon (e.g., rape is "not an individual act" but "terrorism" within a "systemic context of group subjection like lynching"), the bill’s proponents filled the Congressional Record with the group-based (and Hegelian-Marxist) concept that women were being attacked because they were women and belonged to a subordinate group. It was argued by bill’s proponents that these "violent attacks" are a form of "sex discrimination," "motivated by gender," and that they "reinforce and maintain the disadvantaged status of women as a group." Moreover, the individual attacks create a "climate of fear that makes all women afraid to step out of line." Although there was no serious social science evidence of an "epidemic" of violence against women, the almost Marxist-style agitprop campaign worked, and the bill passed.

In 1991, the Congress passed a civil rights bill that altered a Supreme Court decision restricting racial and gender group remedies. The new bill strengthened the concept of "disparate impact"; which is a group-based notion that employment practices are discriminatory if they result in fewer members of "protected classes" (minorities and women) being hired than their percentage of the local workforce would presumably warrant.

Nine years later, in June 2000, the U.S. Senate passed the Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which would expand the category of hate crimes to include crimes motivated by hatred of women, gays, and the disabled (such crimes would receive stiffer sentences than crimes that were not motivated by hatred based on gender, sexual orientation, or disability status). In supporting the bill, Republican Sen. Gordon Smith of Oregon declared, "I have come to realize that hate crimes are different" because although they are "visited upon one person" they "are really directed at an entire community" (for example, the disabled community or the gay community). Democratic Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts supported the legislation because, he insisted, "standing law has proven inadequate in the protection of many victimized groups."

In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Dorothy Rabinowitz penned a Tocquevillian objection to this Gramscian legislation. Rabinowitz argued that hate crimes legislation undermined the traditional notion of equality under the law by "promulgating the fantastic argument that one act of violence is more significant than another because of the feelings that motivated the criminal." Using egalitarian and antihierarchical (that is, Tocquevillian) rhetoric, Rabinowitz declared that Americans "don’t require two sets of laws — one for crimes against government-designated victims, the other for the rest of America."

The Supreme Court and the White House

Like the congress, the Supreme Court has witnessed intense arguments over core political principles recognizable as Gramscian and Tocquevillian. Indeed, the court itself often serves as a near-perfect microcosm of the clash between these opposing ideas.

A provision of the Violence Against Women Act, for example, that permitted women to sue their attackers in federal rather than state courts was overturned by a deeply divided Supreme Court 5-4. The majority argued on federalist grounds that states had primacy in this criminal justice area. In another 5-4 decision the Supreme Court in 1999 ruled that local schools are subject to sexual discrimination suits under Title IX if their administrators fail to stop sexual harassment among schoolchildren. The case, Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education, involved two 10-year olds in the fifth grade. Justice Anthony Kennedy broke tradition by reading a stinging dissent from the bench. He was joined by Justices Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas. Justice Kennedy attacked the majority view that the actions by the 10 year-old boy constituted "gender discrimination."

American Enterprise Institute scholar Christina Hoff Sommers in The War Against Boys noted that the court majority appears to accept the position of gender feminist groups that sexual harassment is "a kind of hate crime used by men to maintain and enforce the inferior status of women." Thus, Sommers explains, in terms of feminist theory (implicitly accepted by the court), the 10-year-old boy "did not merely upset and frighten" the ten-year old girl, "he demeaned her as a member of a socially subordinate group." In effect, the court majority in Davis endorsed Gramscian and Hegelian-Marxist assumptions of power relations between dominant and subordinate groups and applied those assumptions to American fifth graders.

Recently, a similarly divided Supreme Court has offered divergent rulings on homosexual rights. In June 2000 the court overturned the New Jersey State Supreme Court and ruled 5-4 in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale that the Boy Scouts did not have to employ an openly gay scoutmaster. The majority’s reasoning was quintessentially Tocquevillian -- the First Amendment right of "freedom of association." Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Rehnquist declared that "judicial disapproval" of a private organization’s values "does not justify the State’s effort to compel the organization to accept members where such acceptance" would change the organization’s message. The law, Rehnquist continued, "is not free to interfere with speech for no better reason than promoting an approved message or discouraging a disfavored one, however enlightened either purpose may strike the government."

The dissent written by Justice Stevens, by contrast, declared that the states have the "right" to social experimentation. Stevens noted that "atavistic opinions" about women, minorities, gays, and aliens were the result of "traditional ways of thinking about members of unfamiliar classes." Moreover, he insisted, "such prejudices are still prevalent" and "have caused serious and tangible harm to members of the class (gays) New Jersey seeks to protect." Thus, the dissenters in this case agreed with the New Jersey Supreme Court that the state had "a compelling interest in eliminating the destructive consequences of discrimination from society" by requiring the Boy Scouts to employ gay scoutmasters.

In 1992 Colorado voters in a referendum adopted Amendment 2 to the state constitution barring local governments and the state from adding "homosexual orientation" as a specific category in city and state antidiscrimination ordinances. In 1996 in Romer v. Evans, the U.S. Supreme Court in a 6-3 ruling struck down Colorado’s Amendment 2. The court majority rejected the state of Colorado’s position that the amendment "does no more than deny homosexuals special rights." The amendment, the court declared, "imposes a broad disability" on gays, "nullifies specific legal protections for this class (gays)," and infers "animosity towards the class that it affects." Further, the majority insists that Amendment 2, "in making a general announcement that gays and lesbians shall not have any particular protections from the law, inflicts on them immediate, continuing, and real injuries."

Justice Anton Scalia wrote a blistering dissent that went straight to the Gramscian roots of the decision. He attacked the majority "for inventing a novel and extravagant constitutional doctrine to take victory away from the traditional forces," and for "verbally disparaging as bigotry adherence to traditional attitudes." The court, Scalia wrote, "takes sides in the culture war"; it "sides with the knights," that is, the elites, "reflecting the views and values of the lawyer class." He concluded that: "Amendment 2 is designed to prevent the piecemeal deterioration of the sexual morality favored by the majority of Coloradans, and is not only an appropriate means to that legitimate end, but a means that Americans have employed before. Striking it down is an act, not of judicial judgment, but of political will."

Finally, Gramscian and Hegelian-Marxist concepts have advanced in the executive branch as well. In the 1990s, the federal government attempted both to limit speech that adversely effected subordinate groups; and to promote group-based equality of result instead of equality of individual opportunity.

In 1994, for example, three residents of Berkeley, Calif., protested a federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) plan to build subsidized housing for the homeless and mentally ill in their neighborhood. The residents wrote protest letters and organized their neighbors. HUD officials investigated the Berkeley residents for "discrimination" against the disabled and threatened them with $100,000 in fines. The government offered to drop their investigation (and the fines) if the neighborhood residents promised to stop speaking against the federal housing project.

Heather Mac Donald reported in the Wall Street Journal that one lawyer supporting HUD’s position argued that if the Berkeley residents’ protest letters resulted in the "denial of housing to a protected class of people, it ceases to be protected speech and becomes proscribed conduct." This is classic Hegelian-Marxist thinking -- actions (including free speech) that "objectively" harm people in a subordinate class are unjust (and should be outlawed). Eventually, hud withdrew its investigation. Nevertheless, the Berkeley residents brought suit against the HUD officials and won.

In 1999, to take another example, the Wall Street Journal reported that for the first time in American history the federal government was planning to require all companies doing business with the government to give federal officials the name, age, sex, race, and salary of every employee in the company during routine affirmative action audits. The purpose of the new plan, according to Secretary of Labor Alexis Herman, was to look for "racial and gender pay disparities." The implicit assumption behind the Labor Department’s action is that "pay disparities" as such constitute a problem that requires a solution, even if salary differences are not the result of intentional discrimination. The Labor Department has long suggested that the continued existence of these disparities is evidence of "institutionalized discrimination."

Transmission — or transformation

The slow but steady advance of Gramscian and Hegelian-Marxist ideas through the major institutions of American democracy, including the Congress, courts, and executive branch, suggests that there are two different levels of political activity in twenty-first century America. On the surface, politicians seem increasingly inclined to converge on the center. Beneath, however, lies a deeper conflict that is ideological in the most profound sense of the term and that will surely continue in decades to come, regardless of who becomes president tomorrow, or four or eight or even 20 years from now.

As we have seen, Tocquevillians and Gramscians clash on almost everything that matters. Tocquevillians believe that there are objective moral truths applicable to all people at all times. Gramscians believe that moral "truths" are subjective and depend upon historical circumstances. Tocquevillans believe that these civic and moral truths must be revitalized in order to remoralize society. Gramscians believe that civic and moral "truths" must be socially constructed by subordinate groups in order to achieve political and cultural liberation. Tocquevillians believe that functionaries like teachers and police officers represent legitimate authority. Gramscians believe that teachers and police officers "objectively" represent power, not legitimacy. Tocquevillians believe in personal responsibility. Gramscians believe that "the personal is political." In the final analysis, Tocquevillians favor the transmission of the American regime; Gramscians, its transformation.

While economic Marxism appears to be dead, the Hegelian variety articulated by Gramsci and others has not only survived the fall of the Berlin Wall, but also gone on to challenge the American republic at the level of its most cherished ideas. For more than two centuries America has been an "exceptional" nation, one whose restless entrepreneurial dynamism has been tempered by patriotism and a strong religious-cultural core. The ultimate triumph of Gramscianism would mean the end of this very "exceptionalism." America would at last become Europeanized: statist, thoroughly secular, post-patriotic, and concerned with group hierarchies and group rights in which the idea of equality before the law as traditionally understood by Americans would finally be abandoned. Beneath the surface of our seemingly placid times, the ideological, political, and historical stakes are enormous.




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Copyright © 2007 by the Board of Trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University
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Toward the Total State
by William Norman Grigg


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July 5, 1999

Has the left won America’s culture war? Some observers, including political organizer Paul Weyrich (who coined the term "moral majority"), appear to think so. For many Americans who cherish our nation’s traditions of individual freedom, limited government, and personal moral responsibility, the Clinton impeachment melodrama abounded in evidence that America has undergone a dramatic transformation.
If one were to credit the ubiquitous opinion polls and the outpourings of the "mainstream" media, the American people were nearly unanimous in their support for President Clinton, despite his ongoing personal depravity and his willingness to abuse both the powers of his office and the institutions of our judicial system in order to retain his position as the nation’s chief executive. The only holdouts were to be found among the "religious right," which — according to the custodians of "respectable" opinion — is a marginalized group unworthy of political influence.

While the outcome of impeachment was largely a product of the gangland tactics (including blackmail and character assassination) employed by the Clinton Administration against its opponents, as well as the institutional cowardice of the Senate, there is no doubt that America’s culture has undergone a dramatic transformation — a transformation engineered by the radical left. Writing in the Winter 1996 issue of the Marxist journal Dissent, Michael Walzer enumerated some of the cultural victories won by the left since the 1960s:

• "The visible impact of feminism."

• "The effects of affirmative action."

• "The emergence of gay rights politics, and … the attention paid to it in the media."

• "The acceptance of cultural pluralism."

• "The transformation of family life," including "rising divorce rates, changing sexual mores, new household arrangements — and, again, the portrayal of all this in the media."

• "The progress of secularization; the fading of religion in general and Christianity in particular from the public sphere — classrooms, textbooks, legal codes, holidays, and so on."

• "The virtual abolition of capital punishment."

• "The legalization of abortion."

• "The first successes in the effort to regulate and limit the private ownership of guns."

Significantly, Walzer admitted that these victories were imposed upon our society by "liberal elites," rather than being driven "by the pressure of a mass movement or a majoritarian party." These changes "reflect the leftism or liberalism of lawyers, judges, federal bureaucrats, professors, school teachers, social workers, journalists, television and screen writers — not the population at large," noted Walzer. Rather than building "stable or lasting movements or creat[ing] coherent constituencies," the left focused on "winning the Gramscian war of position."

While most Americans would be mystified by Walzer’s reference to Italian Communist theoretician Antonio Gramsci, those who wish to understand the ongoing culture war must first have some understanding of the Gramscian concept of the "long march through the institutions." The process described by Walzer, in which the cultural and bureaucratic organs of our society have fallen under the influence of "progressive" forces devoted to transforming our nation, is derived directly from Gramsci’s blueprint for Marxist subversion. Gramsci’s distinctive insight, as we will shortly see, was that the construction of the total state requires the seizure of the "mediating institutions" that insulate the individual from the power of the government — the family, organized religion, and so forth — and a systematic redefinition of the culture in order to sustain the new political order.

That process is well underway in our nation — and if it is consummated, Americans will learn that the culture war is a deadly serious effort to destroy the institutions and traditions that have protected Americans from the horrors of the total state.

"The scientific concept of dictatorship," wrote Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin, "means nothing else but this: power without limit, resting directly upon force, restrained by no laws, absolutely unrestricted by rules." Benito Mussolini’s totalitarian formula was even more concise: "Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state." Whatever its specific configuration or ideological pretext, the total state always requires that all human activities be made subject to its power. But to exercise that power, the total state relies, to a remarkable extent, on the cooperation of its victims.

No matter how vast the instrumentality of coercion or how vicious the intentions of the ruling elite, the masters of the total state are always dramatically outnumbered by their victims. No army of occupation is large enough to exercise total control over a tyrannized population; no secret police is capable of exercising incessant and all-encompassing surveillance. The triumph of the total state is made possible by the conquest of the human mind. "We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission," explained O’Brien, an agent of Big Brother’s "Ministry of Love" in George Orwell’s 1984. "When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us.... We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him."

"Death by Government"

Of course, wholesale murder is very much a part of the totalitarian experience, as a way to dispose of those who prove unsuitable for "conversion." Lenin’s "scientific concept of dictatorship," when put into practice by criminals in positions of political power, has led to unimaginable horror. In the Soviet Union, Communist China, Cambodia, Vietnam, and elsewhere, the unchecked power of the state "has been truly a cold-blooded mass murderer, a global plague of man’s own making," writes Professor R.J. Rummel in his study Death by Government.

During the first nine decades of the 20th century, writes Rummel, "almost 170 million men, women, and children" have been destroyed through the "myriad ways governments have inflicted death on unarmed, helpless citizens and foreigners. The dead could conceivably be nearly 360 million people." In a particularly sobering observation, Rummel points out that while "library stacks have been written on the possible nature and consequences of nuclear war and how it might be avoided, in the life of some still living we have already experienced in the toll from democide (and related destruction and misery among the survivors) the equivalent of a nuclear war, especially at the high near-360 million end of the estimates."

America has been spared such horrors because it is uniquely blessed among all nations with a tradition of ordered liberty and limited government. Our nation’s founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, embrace a concept of government diametrically opposed to the Leninist "scientific concept of dictatorship": the rule of law, administered by a government that is itself subject to the law, deriving "its just powers from the consent of the governed," and created for the exclusive purpose of protecting the lives, rights, and property of the law-abiding.

But these institutional safeguards of liberty and the rule of law are dependent on a culture conducive to freedom. In a self-governing society, public morality and private morality cannot be compartmentalized; people who have abandoned what George Washington referred to as the "eternal rules of order and right" will be incapable of exercising the self-discipline necessary to maintain a free government. In his Farewell Address, Washington advised that there is "no truth more thoroughly established than that there exists in the economy and course of nature an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness; between duty and advantage; between the genuine maxims of an honest and magnanimous policy and the solid rewards of public prosperity and felicity." When such habits of virtue are cultivated and preserved, society can enjoy the blessings of limited government — one that will, in Jefferson’s words, "restrain men from injuring one another, [and which] shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned."

Quiet Revolution

In principle, and to a limited extent in practice, Bill Clinton and his Administration have embraced Lenin’s "scientific concept of dictatorship." Consider, for example, the fact that Mr. Clinton has brazenly and repeatedly ignored Congress’ constitutional authority to declare war — most notably in the undeclared Kosovo War, which Mr. Clinton has conducted in defiance of a pointed refusal on the part of the House of Representatives to declare war against Yugoslavia. In domestic affairs, Mr. Clinton has made good on his stated intention to bypass Congress entirely, ruling instead by executive decree. Former Clinton Administration lackey Paul Begala memorably summarized Mr. Clinton’s ruling doctrine in these terms: "Stroke of the pen, law of the land — kinda cool."

Just as disturbing is the fact that much of the Senate, and a significant portion of the House of Representatives, have embraced a complementary concept taught by Adolf Hitler: fuhrerprinzip, or the "leader principle." Under that doctrine, an autocratic executive claims access to the "collective will of the people," exercises power that is "independent, all-inclusive, and unlimited," and considers himself responsible "only to his conscience." Thus, the legislature exists merely to rubber-stamp the decisions of the imperial leader.

Obviously, America was not conquered by the Soviet Union or by National Socialist (Nazi) Germany. The institutions of our federal system of government still exist, albeit in a somewhat distorted form. Elections still occur at regular intervals, and citizens can still exercise their right to petition their elected representatives and express their political opinions in the public square. Nonetheless, the chief tenets of the most murderous dictatorships in history are now the operative principles of our national government. How did this dire situation come about? How can it be reversed?

America has undergone what historian Garet Garrett described as a "revolution within the form." Although the "forms of republican government survive," wrote Garrett, "the character of the state has changed." To illustrate how this was accomplished, Garrett quoted this observation from Aristotle’s Politics: "People do not easily change, but love their own ancient customs; and it is by small degrees only that one thing takes the place of another; so that the ancient laws will remain, while the power will be in the hands of those who have brought about a revolution in the state." (Emphasis added.)

Communist theoretician Antonio Gramsci urged those who sought to bring about a "revolution in the state" to pursue the course described (although not endorsed) by Aristotle: The steady, incremental subversion of free societies by conducting a "long march through the institutions" that define such societies. In some ways the Gramscian approach is kindred to that pursued by Britain’s Fabian socialists, who chose "patient gradualism," rather than violent insurrection, as the most effective means to collectivize society. Gramsci’s distinctive insight was to urge Marxists to escape from the shackles of economic theory and focus instead on society’s cultural organs — the press and other media, education, entertainment, religion, and the family. In order for revolutionaries to establish "political leadership or hegemony," advised Gramsci, they "must not count solely on the power and material force of government"; they must change the culture upon which that government was built.

Cultural commentator Richard Grenier recalls that during Gramsci’s incarceration in one of Mussolini’s prisons, he "formulated in his Prison Notebooks the doctrine that those who want to change society must change man’s consciousness, and that in order to accomplish this they must first control the institutions by which that consciousness is formed: schools, universities, churches, and, perhaps above all, art and the communications industry. It is these institutions that shape and articulate ‘public opinion,’ the limits of which few politicians can violate with impunity. Culture, Gramsci felt, is not simply the superstructure of an economic base — the role assigned to it in orthodox Marxism — but is central to a society. His famous battle cry is: capture the culture."

Gramsci recognized that the chief "fortresses and earthworks" impeding the triumph of Marxism were precisely those institutions, customs, and habits identified by Washington and the other Founding Fathers as indispensable to ordered liberty — such as the family, private initiative, self-restraint, and principled individualism. But Gramsci focused particularly on what Washington described as the "indispensable supports" of free society — religion and morality. In order to bring about a revolution, Gramsci wrote, "The conception of law will have to be freed from every remnant of transcendence and absoluteness, practically from all moralist fanaticism."

Layers of Strength

At this juncture, a question naturally arises: If the conspiracy to undermine our culture and constitutional system has enjoyed such success, why aren’t Americans living in abject, undisguised tyranny? If Lenin’s "scientific concept of dictatorship" and Hitler’s fuhrerprinzip have been accepted as ruling tenets by our apostate political elite, where are the gulags and gas chambers?

The answer to this question is quite simple: The institutions referred to by Gramsci as "fortresses and earthworks" have not yet been completely overcome by the forces of revolution. Yes, the American family is under siege, but its resilience has proven to be formidable. Parents still seek to instill habits of self-discipline, honesty, and genuine public service in their children. Millions of Americans from all religious denominations and traditions remain committed to living honorable lives defined by God’s law, and insist that their elected representatives, for the most part, pay at least nominal homage to that standard as well. The American tradition of individualism remains a vivid part of our national heritage. And despite decades of mass indoctrination regarding the supposed glories of collectivism, most Americans still cherish their individual rights — and are provoked to militancy when those rights are threatened.

These admirable traits — the "fortresses and earthworks" Gramsci sought to overcome — were celebrated by Robert Welch — a devoted champion of freedom — as "layers of strength" that should be fortified by conscientious Americans. The reason the enemies of freedom must pursue Gramsci’s long-term subversive strategy rather than more overt measures is because most Americans will not meekly submit to the will of their would-be masters.

Yes, our situation is grave. No, America does not enjoy any privileged immunity to the horrors that have descended upon many other countries during this century of rampant democide. In order to preserve our existing freedoms, and to restore those that have been stolen from us, it is necessary for Americans to understand the tactics, strategies, and objectives of the Gramscian conspirators who are waging a culture war against us.

~~~::~~~

from The New American
Vol. 15, No. 14, July 5, 1999
copyrighted

[antoninus]

"I think it started a lot longer ago than Antonio Gramsci. Somewhere in Eden with a snake. Gramsci was simply one of the Fallen's henchmen.
...E. Both Capitalism and Judeo-Christian culture must be destroyed before a Communist revolution can succeed ..... Religious sentiment cannot be destroyed through legislation, as Lenin believed, but must be redirected from the divine to the state .........a. Terror will only drive Religion underground .........b. Religion will then reemerge when Leninism fails .........c. So Religion must be destroyed in the minds of menWhatever else happens, Christ will not let his Church be destroyed. He will return again in glory to judge the living and the dead. And His kingdom shall have no end."

Antonio Gramsci, 1891-1937

In 1919 an Italian socialist named Antonio Gramsci began to publish a newspaper in Milan called, L'Ordine Nuovo, or "The New Order." Loosely rendered, he concluded that the average person would never voluntarily reject the faith and culture of the West. He concluded that the best way to implement a collectivist government was to use an intellectual elite to destroy traditional values by attacking fundamental Jewish and Christian beliefs.

Antonio Gramsci, 1891-1937

...A. The New Order (L'Ordine Nuovo)
..... Italian Communist newspaper, founded 1919
......2. Co-founder of Italian Communist Party, 1921
......3. Pre-Prison Writings, ed. Richard Bellamy (Cambridge, 1994)
......4. Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Intl. Publishers, 1971)

...B. Lenin was wrong, and the Leninist revolution will fail
..... The workers will see the revolutionary government as a new boss
......2. When the revolution fails, the west will re-import Capitalism

...C. Gradual revolution through infiltration & subversion by revolutionaries
..... Infiltrate the State: elective & appointed office; judgeships
......2. Infiltrate the military: enlist & subvert from within
......3. Infiltrate justice: undermine and discredit state constitutions
......4. Infiltrate education: professors & administrators
......5. Infiltrate & discredit religion: scoundrels as clergymen
......6. Register, then license, then confiscate all privately held weapons

...D. Form or infiltrate international organizations to promote goals such as "global understanding," "economic development," "transfer of resources"

...E. Both Capitalism and Judaeo-Christian culture must be destroyed before a Communist revolution can succeed
..... Religious sentiment cannot be destroyed through legislation, as Lenin believed, but must be redirected from the divine to the state
.........a. Terror will only drive Religion underground
.........b. Religion will then reemerge when Leninism fails
.........c. So Religion must be destroyed in the minds of men
......2. Infiltrate religious academies and become priests and clergymen
.........a. Subtly promote heresy within religious organizations
.........b. Infiltrators must act so as to discredit the church
............(1) Cause financial and sexual scandals
............(2) See that this is given a high profile in the news
............(3) Like-minded infiltrators in the media will cooperate
......3. Once religion is discredited from within, continuously promote the idea that only the state can solve the problems that have been traditionally brought before the church
...F. When propagating revolutionary ideas, cloak them in polite terms
..... National Consensus
......2. Popular Mandate
......3. National Pacification
......4. Pluralism
......5. Global Community
......6. Economic Justice
......7. Economic Democracy
......8. Liberation Theology
......9. Direct Action
...G. Marxists "must enter into every civil, cultural, and political activity in every nation, leavening them as yeast leavens bread."Gramski's Archives

http://www.oakland.edu/~crouch/102/marx.txt

Gramsci-(original Italian) = Gramschi = Gramski-(sp prefered by communists)
This article comes from Focus on Freedom