"The first phase in achieving 'cultural hegemony' over a nation is the undermining of all elements of traditional culture. Churches are thus transformed into ideology-driven political clubs, with the stress on 'social justice' and egalitarianism, with worship reduced to trivialized entertainment, and with age-old doctrinal and moral teachings 'modernized' or diminished to the point of irrelevancy. Genuine education is replaced by 'dumbed down' and 'politically correct' curricula, and standards are reduced dramatically. The mass media are fashioned into instruments for mass manipulation and for harassing and discrediting traditional institutions and their spokesmen. Morality, decency, and old virtues are ridiculed without respite. Tradition-minded clergymen are portrayed as hypocrites and virtuous men and women as prudish, stuffy, and unenlightened.
"Culture is no longer a buttress supporting the integrity of the national heritage and a vehicle for imparting that heritage to future generations, but becomes a means for 'destroying ideals and ... presenting the young not with heroic examples but with deliberately and aggressively degenerate ones,' as theologian Harold O.J. Brown writes. We see this in contemporary American life, in which the great historical symbols of our nation's past, including great presidents, soldiers, explorers, and thinkers, are shown to have been unforgivably flawed with 'racism' and 'sexism' and therefore basically evil. Their place has been taken by pro-Marxist charlatans, pseudo-intellectuals, rock stars, leftist movie celebrities, and the like. At another level, traditional Christian culture is condemned as repressive, 'Eurocentric,' and 'racist' and, thus, unworthy of our continued devotion. In its place, unalloyed primitivism in the guise of 'multiculturalism' is held as the new model.
"Marriage and family, the very building blocks of our society, are perpetually attacked and subverted. Marriage is portrayed as a plot by men to perpetuate an evil system of domination over women and children. The family is depicted as a dangerous institution epitomized by violence and exploitation. Patriarchally oriented families are, according to the Gramscians, the precursors of fascism, Nazism, and every organized form of racial persecution.
from Gramsci's Grand Plan
by Fr. James Thornton, from The New American .
Oh, shades of Father Coughlin! Wasn't this all over after the Berlin wall came down? And pass the brie and chardonnay, won't you? That's the likely response of an awful lot of "educated" Americans these days. You won't hear it at The Weekly Standard, however, or at Front Page, former leftist star David Horowitz's conservative daily Web newspaper. But we know about them! (snicker, snicker)
How much we loved Professor Fukuyama's claim! Like the French in 1918, we were sure that our values had been, to borrow a word from the Catholic rite, transubstantiated, gone from dream to actuality when the Red flag came down from the Kremlin in December of 1991. However, a good question when reflecting on historical parallels is this: what happened next?
Of course, we know. The Germans came back 22 years later and knocked over the French army in 30 days, requiring five years of war and fifty million dead to restore order in Europe. The dead included French delusions of the end of history, one imagines.
Let me say that I am not convinced that cadres of Gramsci-ites are solely responsible for the disintegration of family and community, church and culture. A lot of that I ascribe to a perfectly normal decadence, one that occurs in every society, large or small, confronted by time, not by revolutionary cadres. However, I would also aver that, without fail, when the intellectual and political leadership of a society sees this normal breakdown of order, they are confronted by two choices: to exercise the power of their knowledge and that of political persuasion on behalf of restoring order; or to become agents of chaos by rationalizing and institutionalizing such decay as desirable.
It is clear that in the United States, a substantial majority of the intellectual leadership, at least in universities and in politics, has taken the latter choice. Further, it would not take long to create a geneology of intellectual life in the United States, one which would demonstrate that the current generation of intellectuals is heir, in thought and in deed, to a generation that generally preferred the solutions of the hard Left to those of freedom and free enterprise. And it would not be hard to demonstrate that this generation, confronted by the abject failure and collapse of the Soviet Union, and by the ineffectual tenure of Leftist economics and of Leftist politics in general, might seek another route toward the same goals.
Gramsci, a hugely influential figure on the Left for many decades, offered one route. And it will be often explored here in the future. It's worth doing because so much of what Gramsci offered as a means of undermining freedom and free enterprise has already happened in the United States and Europe, especially among the purveyors of intellectual wisdom and of cultural artifacts. Another commentator, the late Malachi Martin, who disguised a long career as a commentator on the Catholic Church as the author of numerous roman a clefs, suggested that Gramsci's entire program, including the subversion of the Jesuit order, and of the Church's mission itself, was implemented in the 1960's and 1970's at the Vatican. It's a thesis that can't be ignored, lest we end up like the French in 1940, watching the Germans do an end run around the Maginot Line of our delusions.
Luther
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