By PAUL KRAUSE
It is no secret that America, and American culture — indeed, anything Western — is under assault. Everything from the rule of law manifested through law and order, American history, heritage, and culture, and Christianity are under the crosshairs of the anti-American left. Once upon a time, Americans were united in a common understanding of themselves despite their political and economic differences. What happened?
The current zeitgeist of politics is moved by an idolatry of the perverse, the wicked, and the strange. This quasi-religious glorification of the other, which now permeates every level of American society and its institutions, is but the latest manifestation of the politics of negation. But this isn’t mere Marxism as all the hoopla often claims.
The greatest revolution of the twentieth century wasn’t the proletariat revolution. Marx was wrong. But his idea of a politics of utopianism emerging out of the fires of revolutionary destruction remained the hope of his bastardized children. The most famous being Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault.
Postmodernism means many things to many people. I do not wish to get caught up in the semantics of postmodernism. Gramsci and Foucault are generally recognized as postmodernists, whatever that term means. What they taught, however, is the more illustrative point to understand.
Gramsci was an Italian intellectual and journalist who was imprisoned by Benito Mussolini after Mussolini took power in Italy. While in prison, Gramsci authored his influential Prison Notebooks. In it, Gramsci discussed the concept of cultural hegemony whereby the majority culture is sustained through its institutional power and culture.
According to Gramsci, the bourgeoisie would remain the dominant force in politics because they controlled the organs of industry, media, civil law, and religion, just to name a few obvious institutional pillars important for the well-being of any civilization.
So long as the majority culture was sustained by a patriotic cultural hegemony reinforced by institutions they would remain in power. It was Gramsci’s revision of Marx which gave credence for why the proletariat revolution failed. They held no cultural hegemony because they were not in control of any of the major institutions.
Gramsci’s idea of cultural hegemony through institutional power was an influence on the Communist student radical Rudi Dutschke. Moved by Gramsci’s thinking, Dutschke coined the term “the long march through the institutions.” Without radicals seizing control of the institutions of business, the courts, churches, and other engines of civil society, the revolutionary fantasy could never become a reality.
Dutschke’s call for institutional subversion in Europe then spread to America.
Subversion of the institutions was necessary to unleash cultural revolution, the true precursor to the end of history revolution which Marx failed to understand. So the radicals turned to seizing the academy, then the churches, then businesses — displacing the old majority and its values and propagating the new revolutionary dogma. This would lead to the real formation of universal revolutionary consciousness as the next generation was indoctrinated by the new revolutionary tenets.
Michel Foucault, the notorious French philosopher-journalist who was a known pederast, authored the ideas that we also see prominent in the revolutionary phantasmagoria.
Foucault is known for many things, but several of these notable contributions to the history of thought and ideas were his works on sex, the deranged, and rationalism in civilization. His History of Sexuality and Madness and Civilization are generally required readings in advanced history and philosophy in university, works that I read while an undergraduate student.
The contents of both works are too voluminous to get into here. Suffice to say, they share a common theme: the valorization of the strange, the perverse, the insane — what Joe Sobran later dubbed the “alienist ideology.” In Madness and Civilization, Foucault writes, “The ultimate language of madness is that of reason.”
What Foucault meant by this remarkable statement is the language of reasonableness is one of tyranny and oppression. Facts and reason are weaponized to exclude, to punish, to oppress. Reasonableness, according to Foucault, is a veil for unjust oppression. Pretty much everyone on the left today agrees — knowingly or unknowingly — with Foucault now. Reason and facts obscure the reality of injustice and oppression, according to the left. Hence no police despite rising crime, among other things.
Throughout his writings on sexuality and civilization, Foucault continues to argue that the majority is always tyrannical and engages in a sort of cathartic scapegoating of the minority. The sexually strange, the mentally deranged, insert whatever minority you wish, is therefore targeted and oppressed by the majority. In this tyrannical “othering” of the minority, the majority reveal their own insanity and inferiority.
According to Foucault, the minority that is scapegoated to relieve the stricken consciences of the majority becomes the martyr for liberation, the paragon of righteousness who is oppressed for no other reason than being different from the majority. The minority becomes the altar on which all future politics rests. The oppressed minority is the true embodiment of humanity from Foucault’s thinking.
Through a radical synthesis of Gramsci and Foucault, spearheaded by the 60s radicals, we reach the politics of negation and the idolatry of the other at the core of contemporary anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism.
The majority culture — its history, heritage, and values — is demonized everywhere as bigoted, cruel, and oppressive. The new martyrology focuses on those minorities whom Foucault praised. It doesn’t so much matter what kind of minority they are, as long as they are a noticeable minority who have some sort of grievance against the majority, they are, by definition, pure and wholesome no matter what.
This idolatry of the alien is reinforced by the institutions that the radicals now control. Thus we see all the former pillars of culture: education, religion, and business, worshipping at the foot of the perverse — the strange idols that serve as the destructive battering ram to obliterate the heritage and values of the old majority.
The utopia, you see, cannot emerge through piecemeal reform. It can only come into existence by the total obliteration of the old: the total negation of the America of history, of Christianity, of the adventurous spirit that guided the pilgrims, Founding Fathers, and pioneers. Everything that was once, or remains, part of the majority must be destroyed. Art, media, history, everything.
It is no good for patriotic Americans to complain about the dangers running rampant through our society. It is necessary to wage a cultural war against the enemy as they do against us. Gramsci, for his part, was right. He who controls the culture controls politics. So too was Dutschke right in recognizing societal institutions as pillars of cultural hegemony so essential in this struggle.
We must return to the valorization of the city upon a hill, our history and heritage, the values and virtues that once held dominant sway over our society. From our religious forebears who ventured into a new world with missionary hearts, from the Founding Fathers and heroic pioneers who ventured west, to the American family and its spiritual heart — this is what needs to be reclaimed as good and noble.
Failure to do so will only hasten the eradication of what we know to be profoundly good in American culture and society because that is what is deliberately targeted for destruction by the anti-American ideology. It is incumbent upon us to reclaim our history, heritage, and the nobility of our faith to help resuscitate our civilization.
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