Many of my fellow card-carrying members of the Columnist Party write about "the culture wars," the social issues. These issues may indeed prove crucial to the outcome of the 2024 elections.
It’s not culture war (as conservatives prefer to frame it) or even civil war (as progressives rather fancy). We confront a cultural revolution.
And are engaging in a counterrevolution. The rules of these conflicts differ.
To win this epic struggle, we conservatives must understand the terms of engagement.
I choose the term "cultural revolution" judiciously and perhaps a bit maliciously. It alludes to the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" of Communist China's Red Guard.
From The Guardian:
"a decade-long period of political and social chaos caused by Mao Zedong's bid to use the Chinese masses to reassert his control over the Communist party. Its bewildering complexity and almost unfathomable brutality was such that to this day historians struggle to make sense of everything that occurred during the period. However, Mao's decision to launch the 'revolution' in May 1966 is now widely interpreted as an attempt to destroy his enemies by unleashing the people on the party and urging them to purify its ranks."
"Unleashing the people on the party?"
Shades of Saul Alinsky, whose "power to the people" ethos was rooted in a conservative commitment to social, especially racial, justice, codified in "Rules for Radicals."
The Tea Party before the Tea Party.
MAGA before MAGA.
Just, with China's millions of casualties, more extreme.
Much more extreme.
Many in America's privileged classes fear that something comparable might happen if Donald Trump gets reelected in 2024. That narrative clashes with the historical facts.
"[C]ontrary to popular belief, the government was responsible for most of the bloodshed, not the Red Guards."
If we right-wingers are to win, we must get clear on the playbook being used by the privileged left against us proletarian conservatives. Let's sneak a peek.
The left's playbook was written by a political prisoner named Antonio Gramsci.
Gramsci, head of the Italian communist party, was imprisoned by the fascists who ruled Italy and died in prison. From his cell he formulated and disseminated two key principles that guide the left to this very day.
To beat them at their own game, we must grasp those principles and flip the script. Otherwise, as many conservatives fear, America indeed may be lost.
The first key principle is "cultural hegemony," summarized at TheCollector.com:
"... Antonio Gramsci sought to explain why the revolution wasn’t taking place in advanced capitalist countries and how we could make it happen. Central to this explanation is his notion of cultural hegemony, which is omnipresent in civil society. Through the institutions of civil society, the ruling class spreads its moral, political, and social values, which are instilled by the ruled class."
As the progressives attempt to transform America into a socialist workers' paradise, they will take every opportunity to impose their values on us. The left seeks cultural hegemony by reframing the public discourse to revolve around wokeness; intersectionality; diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI); and other nihilistic, radical, egalitarian notions.
Let's note that their fanaticism persists irrespective of the fact that in every one of the dozens of times the left has seized power it produced a hell on Earth.
Not paradise. This, as Napoleon observed in another context, is fanaticism.
That's what is behind tearing down statues and renaming Army bases.
Few "progressives" understand that that tactic drives actual workers, including people of color, out of their coalition.
They, like me, trend proletarian. We yearn for a better opportunity to join the middle class, not conduct class warfare.
Or wallow in historical revisionism.
Gramsci's second major contribution was that in the Western world communists were too weak to take over the government, yet were strong enough to infiltrate respected civic institutions and convert them to left wing redoubts.
From Renew.org,
"The 'Long March through the Institutions' was a phrase attributed to the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) and then coined as a succinct mission statement by Marxist student activist Rudi Dutschke in the 1960s.
"The phrase is used to describe the intellectual takeover of a society without need to resort to a military conflict. Instead, the strategy focuses on slowly winning over the chief institutions that determine the direction of a culture and thereby creating a soft revolution from within those institutions. So, the focus was on the universities, then the unions, the arts, the K-12 schools, the media, then corporations, and finally the society as a whole."
We now are locked in a cultural revolution led by the neo-communists and counterattacked by conservatives, the counter-cultural revolutionaries. The sooner we recognize the left's rules of engagement, adopt their tactics, and flip the script, the sooner we will prevail.
Conservatives of the world unite. We have nothing to lose but our chains.
Ralph Benko, co-author of "The Capitalist Manifesto" and chairman and co-founder of the 200,000+ follower "The Capitalist League," is the founder of The Prosperity Caucus and is an original Kemp-era member of the Supply-Side revolution that propelled the Dow from 814 to its current heights and world GDP from $11T to $104T. Read Ralph Benko's reports — More Here.
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