The hegemony still exists
How to break the complacency that has led to the Left’s stranglehold
Contributing Writer
david J. GuenniResearcher & Educator, PhD Candidate
Read his bio.
A dangerous complacency has set in, an unintended consequence of the consolidation of a certain anti-Left echo chamber in the U.S. and in other Western nations.
It is true that the triumph of the Trump-Vance ticket in the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election brought back an interesting Center-Right coalition to the White House.
No Kings Protest in Dallas, Texas
It is also true that this triumph locks in some potential pro-America gains brought forth by a slim Republican majority in both chambers of the U.S. Congress. These electoral successes are strategic victories – in absolute, political terms.
However, in relative terms, these wins are no more than victorious tactical skirmishes in a much, much larger war. In fact, the current era is very far removed from being a time of celebration.
The state of the Left today
A transitional period in the history of Western civilization is taking place. It is a very strange period, worthy of a full season of The Twilight Zone.
An entire chunk of the political-ideological spectrum, in fact, the largest chunk, by virtue of its own intellectual bankruptcy, has been driven to live in a state-of-mind that is completely and indefinitely divorced from reality, referring here to the organized Left.
When one hears about the groundbreaking policy changes inaugurated by the Trump Administration in the realm of economic protectionism, for instance, against the doctrine (dogma) of “free international trade,” one who was raised in the post-Cold-War decade would expect at least moderate cheer from Left-wing commentary. Instead, one hears outcry and protest.
The above point is just a single example, but it’s a very telling one.
Hasn’t the Left portrayed itself to be the champion of the working class? Shouldn’t the Left be happier with efforts to reverse the decades of de-industrialization suffered by the American economy? Wasn’t it all about the economy (objective material conditions)?
Did mainstream Leftists become Austrian School advocates all of a sudden?
Well, no.
It might be that the doctrinal change that Marxism underwent in the 1960s has become obvious. Western Marxism, also known now as Cultural Marxism, was greatly influenced by the American Marxist experience.
The so-called revolutionary subject, the societal group most prone to acquiring full class consciousness ahead of the revolutionary struggle, shifted.
Karl Marx
Theory substituted the working class with the student movement in that decade (the sixties); hence, the world witnessed the several youth uprisings of 1968, as the manifestation of that shift in Marxist (i.e., “critical”) theory.
Clearly, the shift didn’t end there.
The Marxist intellectuals’ cherry-picking of adequate revolutionary subjects, to comply with theory, evolved and diversified over time, adopting an ever-more post-material undertone (i.e., less and less related to the socio-economic conditions of the majorities).
This theoretical tendency mushroomed, especially after the disbandment of the Soviet Union, which coincided with a final takeover of the Liberal Arts, Humanities, and Human Sciences colleges by postmodern neo-Marxism and its scholar-activist cadre.
This progressive push induced the birth of what we know today as the Woke movement’s ideology.
This worldview can be roughly summarized as a cornucopia of the perceived grievances of multiple minoritarian groups, such as angered non-Caucasian ethnicities, the sexually “queer,” females advocating for gynocracy, the good-old alienated students, etc., and their intersections.
Every single one of these groups, and/or combinations thereof, is material for potentially exhibiting revolutionary agency, by virtue of their being revolutionary subjects, by virtue, in turn, of their perceived status as marginalized victims of perceived oppression under the status quo.
This is crucial because it is the absolute justification that morally fuels the contemporary Left’s crusade.
Except, there’s nothing new under the sun.
One can easily detect the genealogy here – it’s all cloaked Cultural Marxism. In other words, it’s old wine in new bottles, but made palatable to a willfully ignorant audience that did not experience the 20th century and believes that such inexperience excuses its ignorance.
The premise and corollary of cultural hegemony
Now one might ask how…How did such a state of severance from reality survive so many decades, in multigenerational fashion?
Surely, irrefutable empirical evidence and facts of life should have made the aforementioned worldview crash and burn? There is just no chance that this unreal worldview, which is the pure definition of ideology in Marxist terms, survives organically – not with so much historical evidence along the way!
And that would be correct.
This doctrine has been artificially generated, artificially disseminated, artificially bolstered to sustain it, and artificially propped up to be the most salient feature of the modern Western Left.
In socialist theory, it’s because authors such as Gramsci, during the interwar period, not only advocated for socialists to “construct” a socialist world, parallel and alternative to the liberal and/or the conservative models, but also indirectly advocated for socialists to co-opt the liberal-democratic institutions, by way of replacing a so-called capitalist cultural hegemony with a socialist cultural hegemony.
Today’s social justice warriors trace their intellectual lineage all the way back to this strategic imperative hinted at by Gramsci, picked up by Lukács, and later by the Frankfurt School.
They’ve had plenty of help in America, as well, and it’s not merely help financially, from both public and private sectors – a problem that stretches far back, to the days of the Second International.
They’ve also been helped operationally.
Anyone who has seen and scrutinized the recorded testimony of Soviet and other Warsaw Pact defectors to the West, particularly of those who had been trained or involved in what was called active measures (“political warfare” might express it best), understands this.
Samplings of such testimony show the monumental efforts expended by the Communist Bloc, including the People’s Republic of China and other ongoing Marxist regimes, to subvert many free Western nations into self-destruction.
These efforts include, but are not limited to, subverting and/or capturing: Academia, the Arts, Literature, the entire education system, the halls and councils of government, the churches and other religious institutions, the cultural (and historical) heritage institutions, the mass media outlets, the labor unions, the professional associations, the main political parties, and even the business class.
What if the communist effort against the liberal West of the 20th century bore its fruits in the 21st century?
Couple the latter praxis with the former theory, in good dialectic-historic materialist (i.e., Marxist) fashion, what’s left is self-destructive human environment which we have barely endured in the West for over 35 years: self-censorship, “political correctness,” neo-language imposition, hateful intolerance, persecution, indoctrination, rioting and organized political violence, intimidation, silenced national majorities, anti-national government policies, dissolution of sovereignty at all levels of the nation-state, perpetual aid to hostile foreign powers and groups, and more.
At this point one can almost hear the dangerous bubble of complacency bursting; that bubble of the Center-Right echo chamber that can capture the minds of patriotic Americans in times like these.
One simply does not defeat 100+ years of subversive effort with some electoral wins.
The Left still very much controls the cultural institutions and most of the State's ideological apparatuses.
Just because conservatives and other anti-Leftists might attain political power here and there, it doesn't mean that the work against the organized Left is over or now somehow less important.
The work has only just begun – the hegemony still exists.
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