“Comrade,
your statement is factually incorrect.”
“Yes, it is. But it is politically correct.”
“Yes, it is. But it is politically correct.”
The
notion of political correctness came into use among Communists in the 1930s as
a semi-humorous reminder that the Party’s interest is to be treated as
a reality that ranks above reality itself. Because all progressives,
Communists included, claim to be about creating new human realities, they are
perpetually at war against nature’s laws and limits. But since reality does not
yield, progressives end up pretending that they themselves embody those
new realities. Hence, any progressive movement’s nominal goal eventually ends
up being subordinated to the urgent, all-important question of the movement’s
own power. Because that power is insecure as long as others are able to
question the truth of what the progressives say about themselves and the world,
progressive movements end up struggling not so much to create the promised new
realities as to force people to speak and act as if these were real: as if what
is correct politically—i.e., what thoughts serve the party’s interest—were
correct factually.
Communist
states furnish only the most prominent examples of such attempted groupthink.
Progressive parties everywhere have sought to monopolize educational and
cultural institutions in order to force those under their thumbs to sing their
tunes or to shut up. But having brought about the opposite of the prosperity,
health, wisdom, or happiness that their ideology advertised, they have been
unable to force folks to ignore the gap between political
correctness and reality.
Especially
since the Soviet Empire’s implosion, leftists have argued that Communism failed
to create utopia not because of any shortage of military or economic power but
rather because it could not overcome this gap. Is the lesson for today’s
progressives, therefore, to push P.C. even harder, to place even harsher
penalties on dissenters? Many of today’s more discerning European and American
progressives, in possession of government’s and society’s commanding heights,
knowing that they cannot wield Soviet-style repression and yet intent on
beating down increasing popular resistance to their projects, look for another
approach to crushing cultural resistance. Increasingly they cite the name of
Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), a brilliant Communist theoretician for whom
“cultural hegemony” is the very purpose of the struggle as well as its
principal instrument. His writings envisage a totalitarianism that eliminates
the very possibility of cultural resistance to progressivism. But owing more to
Machiavelli than to Marx or Lenin, they are more than a little complex about
the means and are far from identical with the raw sort of power over culture
enforced by the Soviet Empire or, for that matter, that is rife among us today.
My
purpose here is to explain how progressives have understood and conducted their
cultural war from the days of Lenin, and how Gramsci’s own ambiguous writings
illustrate the choices they face in conducting that war in our time and
circumstances—especially with regard to political correctness in our present
culture war.
Culture
Wars
Every
form of progressivism bases itself on the claim of a special, “scientific,”
knowledge of what is wrong with humanity and how to fix it. The formula is
straightforward: the world is not as it should be because society’s basic,
“structural” feature is ordered badly. Everything else is “superstructural,”
meaning that it merely reflects society’s fundamental feature. For Marx and his
followers that feature is conflict over the means of production in “present-day
society.” From the dawn of time, this class warfare has led to
“contradictions”: between types of work, town and country, oppressors or
oppressed, and so on. The proletariat’s victory in that conflict will establish
a new reality by crushing all contradictions out of existence. Other branches
of progressivism point to a different structural problem. For Freudians it’s
sexual maladjustment, for followers of Rousseau it’s social constraint, for
positivists it is the insufficient application of scientific method, for others
it is oppression of one race by another. Once control of society passes
exclusively into the hands of the proper set of progressives, each sect’s
contradictions must disappear as the basic structural problem is straightened
out.
But
wherever progressives have gained power, all manner of contradictions have
remained and new ones have arisen. Progressive movements have reacted to this
failure by becoming their own reason for being. Theoretically, the Revolution
is about the power and necessity to recreate mankind. In practice, for almost
all progressive movements it is about gaining power for the revolutionaries and
making war on those who stand in their way. For example, transcending private
property, the division of labor, and political oppression was never
Marxism-Leninism’s core motive any more than worker/peasant proletarians were
ever its core protagonists. In fact, Communism is an ideology by, of,
and for ideologues, that ends up empowering and celebrating those very
ideologues. This is as true of progressivism’s other branches as it is
of Marxism.
Lenin’s
seminal contribution was explicitly to recognize the revolutionary party’s
paramount primacy, and to turn the party’s power and prestige from a means to
revolution into the Revolution’s candid end. Lenin’s writings, like Marx’s,
contain no positive description of future economic arrangements. The Soviet
economy, for all its inefficiencies, functioned with Swiss precision as an
engine of privilege for some and of murderous deprivation for others. The
Communist Party had transcended communism. The key to understanding what
progressive parties in power do is the insight, emphasized by “elite theorists”
like Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca, that any organization’s practical
objectives turn out to be what serves the interests and proclivities of its
leaders.
What
serves progressive revolutionaries’ interests is not in doubt. Although each of
progressivism’s branches differs in how it defines society’s “structural”
fault, in its own name for the human reality that it seeks to overcome, and in
the means by which to achieve its ends, progressives from the 19th century to
our time are well nigh identical in their personal predilections—in what and
whom they hate even more than in what they love. They see the culture of what
Marxists call “bourgeois morality” as the negation of their identity and
authority. That identity, their identity, is to be promoted, endlessly, by
endless warfare against that culture. That is why the cultural campaigns of
otherwise dissimilar progressives have been so similar. Leninist Russia no less
than various Western democrats have tried to eradicate religion, to make it
difficult for men, women, and children to exist as families, and to demand that
their subjects join them in celebrating the new order that reflects their
identity. Note well: cultural warfare’s substantive goal is less important than
the affirmation of the warriors’ own identity. This is what explains the animus
with which progressives have waged their culture wars.
Yet,
notwithstanding progressivism’s premise that individual minds merely reflect
society’s basic structure and hence are incapable of reasoning independently
about true and false, better and worse,reality forces progressives to
admit that individuals often choose how they think or act despite lacking the
“structural” basis for doing so, or that they act contrary to the economic,
social, or racial “classes” into which progressive theories divide mankind.
They call this freedom of the human mind “false consciousness.”
Fighting
against false consciousness is one reason why Communists and other progressives
end up treating cultural matters supposedly “superstructural” as if they were
structural and basic. They do so by pressuring people constantly to validate
progressivism’s theories, to concelebrate victories over those on the “wrong”
side of history by exerting control over who says what to whom.
The
Soviet Model
The
Soviet regime aimed at the forcible transcendence of “bourgeois culture” by
using its totalitarian power to the maximum. By destroying nearly all churches,
killing nearly all priests, punishing even the hint of dissent, as well as by
making rejection of bourgeois culture a condition for ascending to the ruling
class, it succeeded in pushing the old culture to near-destruction. But, rather
than establishing a new and better culture, much less the final and best, this
step turned out instead to destroy the very basis of Soviet power.
Progressive
regimes demand that persons who express themselves in public (even in private)
affirm any and all things that pertain to the regime’s identity lest they lose
access to jobs or privileges, and be exposed to the shunning or ire of regime
supporters—if not treated as criminals. But even totalitarian regimes can
reward or punish only a few people at a time. Tacit collaboration by millions
who bite their lip is even more essential than lip service by thousands of
favor seekers. Hence, to stimulate at least passive cooperation, the party
strives to give the impression that “everybody” is already on its side.
But why
then did the Communist Party always spare a few churches? Why report criticisms
of itself from abroad? Why, from time to time, did the party publicize
dissidents from its ranks? Whenever the party would mount a campaign on behalf
of one of its cultural-political causes, it would designate a few persons to
personify the opposition, and direct all socially acceptable organs and
spokespersons to unload their worst upon them. Why, from the Soviet Union to
China to Cuba, would the party school its young cadres by taking them to
observe and mock church services attended by poor, old, socially repulsive
outcasts? In part, because each smiting of cultural enemies reinforced the
cadre’s identity. It made them feel better about themselves, and more powerful.
Had there been no remnants of the old society, or dissidents, the party might
have manufactured them.
But
continued efforts to force people to celebrate the party’s ersatz reality, to
affirm things that they know are not true and to deny others they know to be
true—to live by lies—requires breaking them, reducing them to a sense of
fearful isolation, destroying their self-esteem and their capacity to trust
others. George Orwell’s novel 1984 dramatized this culture
war’s ends and means: nothing less than the substitution of the party’s
authority for the reality conveyed by human senses and reason. Big Brother’s
agent, having berated the hapless Winston for preferring his own views to
society’s dictates, finished breaking his spirit by holding up four fingers and
demanding that Winston acknowledge seeing five.
Thus
did the Soviet regime create dysfunctional, cynical, and resentful subjects.
Because Communism confused destruction of “bourgeois culture” with cultural
conquest, it won all the cultural battles while losing its culture war long
before it collapsed politically. As Communists identified themselves in
people’s minds with falsehood and fraud, people came to identify truth with
anything other than the officials and their doctrines. Inevitably, they also
identified them with corruption and privation. And so it was that, whenever the
authorities announced that the harvest had been good, the people hoarded
potatoes; and that more and more people who knew nothing of Christianity except
that the authorities had anathematized it, started wearing crosses.
The
Road Not Taken
Few
progressives have been humble enough to understand the Soviet experience and
hence to search for a better path to replacing “bourgeois” culture with their
own. Antonio Gramsci blazed such a trail, but, given its ambiguities,
progressives have followed it in very different directions.
Gramsci
started from mixed philosophical premises. First, orthodox Marxism: “There is
no such thing as ‘human nature,’ fixed and immutable,” he wrote. Rather, “human
nature is the sum of historically determined social relationships.” The modern
prince’s job is to change it. Wholly unorthodox, however, was his scorn for
Marxism’s insistence that economic factors are fundamental while all else is
superstructural. No, “stuff like that is for common folk,” a “little formula”
for “half-baked intellectuals who don’t want to work their brains.” For
Gramsci, economic relations were just one part of social reality, the chief
parts of which were intellectual and moral. He retained Aristotelian roots. For
him, physical science is “the reflection of an unchanging reality” in which
“teleology” and “final causality” exist. But orthodox Marxism and Aristotle
come together in what he calls “the dialectic,” the point of which is to create
a new reality out of the old.
Gramsci
co-founded Italy’s Communist Party in 1921. In 1926, Mussolini jailed him. By the
time he died eleven years later, he had composed twelve “prison notebooks.” In
private correspondence, he criticized Stalin’s literary judgment and deemed his
attacks on Leon Trotsky “irresponsible and dangerous.” But publicly, he
supported every turn of the Soviet Party line—even giving his party boss,
Palmiro Togliatti,authority to modify his writings. Imprisoned and in
failing health, he was intellectually freer and physically safer than if he had
been exposed to the intra-Communist purges that killed so many of his comrades.
Gramsci’s
concept of “cultural hegemony” also swung both ways. Its emphasis on
transforming the enemy rather than killing him outright was at odds with the
Communist Party’s brute-force approach. His focus on cultural matters, reversing
as it did the standard distinction between structure and superstructure,
suggested belief in the mind’s autonomy. On the other hand, the very idea of
persuading minds not through reasoning on what is true and false, good and bad,
according to nature, but rather by creating a new historical reality, is
precisely what he shares with Marx and other progressives—indeed with the
fountainhead of modern thought, Niccolò Machiavelli.
Gramsci
turned to Machiavelli more than to Marx to discover how best to replace the
existing order and to secure that replacement. Chapter V of Machiavelli’s The Prince stated
that “the only secure way” to control a people who had been accustomed to live
under its own laws is to destroy it. But Machiavelli’s objective was to conquer
people though their minds, not to destroy them. In Chapter VI of The
Prince he wrote that nothing is more difficult than to establish “new
modes and orders,” that this requires “persuading” peoples of certain things,
that it is necessary “when they no longer believe to make them believe by
force,” and that this is especially difficult for “unarmed prophets.” But
Machiavelli also wrote that, if such prophets succeed in inculcating a new set
of beliefs, they can count on being “powerful, secure, honored and happy.” He
clarified this insight in Discourses on Livy Book
II, chapter 5: “when it happens that the founders of the new religion speak a
different language, the destruction of the old religion is easily effected.”
The Machiavellian revolutionary, then, must inculcate new ways of thinking and
speaking that amount to a new language. In the Discourse Upon Our
Language, Machiavelli had compared using one’s own language to infiltrate
the enemy’s thoughts with Rome’s use of its own troops to control allied armies.
This is the template that Gramsci superimposed on the problems of the Communist
revolution—a template made by one “unarmed prophet” for use by others.
Machiavelli
is the point of departure in a section of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks that
describes how the party is to rule as “the modern prince.” But the modern
prince’s task is so big that it can be undertaken seriously only by a party (in
some 50 references he leaves out the word “Communist”), which he defines as “an
organism; a complex, collective element of society which has already begun to
crystallize as a collective will that has become conscious of itself through
action.” This prince, this party, has to be “the organizer and the active
expression of moral and intellectual reform...that cannot be tied to an
economic program.” Rather, when economic reform grows out of moral and
intellectual reform, from “germs of collective will that tend to become
universal and total,” then it can become the basis of the secularization of all
life and custom.
The party-prince
accomplishes this by being Jacobin “in the historic and conceptual sense.”
Gramsci writes: “that is what Machiavelli meant by reform of the militia, which
the Jacobins did in the French Revolution.” The party must gather consensus
from each of society’s discrete parts by persuading—inducing—people who had
never thought of such things to join in ways of life radically different from
their own. The party develops “its organized force” by a “minutely careful,
molecular, capillary process manifested in an endless quantity of books and
pamphlets, of articles in magazines and newspapers, and by personal debates
repeated infinitely and which, in their gigantic altogether, comprise the work
out of which arises a collective will with a certain homogeneity.” But note
well that the Jacobins used no little coercion to achieve their “nation in
arms.”
Which
is it then for Gramsci? Does the party inspire or perhaps cajole consensus—or
does it force it? His answer is ambiguous: “Machiavelli affirms rather clearly
that the state is to be run by fixed principles by which virtuous citizens can
live secure against arbitrary treatment. Justly, however, Machiavelli reduces
all to politics, to the art of governing men, of assuring their permanent
consensus.” The matter, he writes, must be regarded from the “‘double
perspective’...[that] corresponds to the double nature of Machiavelli’s
centaur, beastly and human, of force and consensus, of authority and
hegemony...of tactics and strategy.” Indeed that is Machiavelli’s point:
whatever it takes.
The key
to Gramsci’s generalities and subtleties is to be found in his gingerly
discussion of the relationship between the party and Christianity. “Although
other political parties may no longer exist, there will always exist de facto
parties or tendencies...in such parties, cultural matters predominate...hence,
political controversies take on cultural forms and, as such, tend to become
irresolvable.” Translation: the progressive party-state (the party acting as a
government, the government acting as a party) cannot escape the role of
authoritative—perhaps forceful—mediator of societal conflicts having to do with
cultural matters and must see to it that they are resolved its way.
Specifically:
as Gramsci was writing, Mussolini’s 1929 Concordat with the Vatican was proving
to be his most successful political maneuver. By removing the formal enmity
between the Church and the post-French-Revolution state, making Catholicism the
state religion and paying its hierarchy, Mussolini had turned Italy’s most
pervasive cultural institution from an enemy to a friendly vassal. Thousands of
priests and millions of their flock would bend thoughts, words, and deeds to
fit the party-state’s definition of good citizenship. Gramsci described the
post-Concordat Church as having “become an integral part of the State, of
political society monopolized by a certain privileged group that aggregated the
Church unto itself the better to sustain its monopoly with the support of that
part of civil society represented by the Church.” A morally and intellectually
compromised Church in the fascist state’s hands, Mussolini hoped and Gramsci
feared, would redefine its teachings and its social presence to fascist
specifications. The alternative to this subversion—denigrating and restricting
the Church in the name of fascism—would have pushed many Catholics to embrace
their doctrine’s fundamentals ever more tightly in opposition to the party. The
Concordat was the effective template for the rest of what Mussolini called the
corporate state.
Gramsci
called the same phenomenon a “blocco storico,” historic bloc, that
aggregates society’s various sectors under the party-state’s direction. The
intellectuals, said Gramsci, are the blocco’s leading element. In
any given epoch they weld workers, peasants, the church, and other groups into
a unit in which the people live and move and have their being, and from within
which it is difficult if not impossible to imagine alternatives. Power, used
judiciously, acts on people the way the sun acts on sunflowers. Within this
bloc, ideas may retain their names while changing in substance, while a new
language grows organically. As Gramsci noted, Machiavelli had argued that
language is the key to the mastery of consciousness—a mastery more secure than
anything that force alone can achieve. But note that Machiavelli’s metaphors on
linguistic warfare all refer to violence. How much force does it take to make
this historic bloc cohere and to keep recalcitrants in it? Gramsci’s silence
seems to say; “whatever may be needed.” After all, Mussolini used as much as he
thought he needed.
In sum,
Mussolini, not Stalin; forceful seduction, not rape, is Gramsci’s practical
advice regarding “cultural hegemony.” He imputes this preference to
Machiavelli, who “wants to create new relationships among forces and must
occupy himself with that which should be.” But this is not “an arbitrary
choice, nor is it merely desire, love with the clouds.” A political man such as
Machiavelli is a creator and inciter “who does not create from nothingness, nor
does he move in the empty whirl of his desires and dreams. He grounds himself
on the effectual truth...a relationship of forces in constant movement and
equilibrium.” Gramsci means to replace Western culture by subverting it, by
doing what it takes to compel it to redefine itself, rather than by picking
fights with it.
Gramsci’s
Choice
The
Gramscian vision of hegemony over culture is not a panacea. In practice,
today’s progressive intellectuals are in the same fix as Marx, Lenin, or
Mussolini: society’s socioeconomic forces are not beating down the doors to
join any Gramscian “historic bloc,” any more than “the workers” had rushed to
be the Marxist revolution’s battering ram. Today’s progressive intellectuals,
deeply engaged in cultural warfare, face the same choices as Lenin or
Mussolini: weld together society’s disparate cultural sectors authoritatively
and judiciously, or destroy them. The choice is basically between Mussolinian seduction
or Leninist rape.
This
difference in preference is, roughly, what divides continental European
Gramscians from Anglo-American ones.
By the
1970s, socialist parties in Europe had achieved something like monopolies of
political power. But the “working classes” came to resent the cultural
preferences that the socialists imposed, in addition to their unsatisfactory
government. In our time, socialist parties in Europe poll in the teens or
single digits. Some progressive politicians have sought the reason and the
remedy for this by reference to Gramsci—primarily to the Mussolinian version of
Gramscian politics. The French socialist Gael Brustier in his book,A Demain
Gramsci (Bye-Bye Gramsci, 2015) is prototypical.
“The
Left,” writes Brustier, “is no longer in a position of cultural hegemony”
because it lost its grip on “what Gramsci called ‘the common sense,’ the
complex of ideas and beliefs that people take for granted.” It lost that grip
because it mistook the positions of power that it had conquered for power
itself. Hence, while the Left “nourished illusions about itself,” the Right was
“winning a vigorous cultural war” by “profiting from collective anguish
provoked by decline and loss of class status” among ordinary people. While the
Left was winning power, “the Right was winning minds.” Brustier concludes by
asking “What is to be done with power in which no one believes any longer?”
That
slap in his comrades’ faces is factually mistaken only in that it confuses the
Right with the de-cultured masses of Europeans who reject the formal or
informal “uniparty” coalitions that are the legacy of the Left’s
cultural-political hegemony. In fact, as in former Soviet lands, progressive
hegemony in Europe produced people who believe in nothing. Nevertheless, these people
inhabit a world very different from that in which leftist intellectuals live.
Progressives, Brustier warns, must not attribute this cultural difference to
“false consciousness.” He recalls that Gramsci taught: “the people are neither
blind nor stupid nor slaves.” Gramsci’s whole point, Brustier reminds his
comrades, was to lead classes who really are different from the intellectuals
to adhere to them. “Therefore, fighting over values is, in itself, a negation
of cultural hegemony.” He complains, that his colleagues make themselves feel
good by singing “The Internationale.” But by way of answering to the problems
of today, they offer only “submission.” Behaving this way is counterproductive.
Brustier
cites “the disdain in which the Socialist Party has held the Catholic world” as
a typical error, spoiling any chance of cultural hegemony. This should have
been clear to the Left, he declares, well before a million Frenchmen
demonstrated in the streets of Paris against the socialist government’s
extension of marriage to homosexuals in 2013 and 2014. By promulgating that
law, the Left had insulted “the way in which that world makes sense of its
members’ daily experiences.” By calling hundreds of thousands of young people
“old bigots,” it made enemies of people who had not been enemies before. What
sense does it make, he wonders, to pick fights with people whom we cannot
coerce? That law made the socialists feel good. But what did championing it do
to advance the socialist revolution? By this Gramscian standard, the law is
stupid.
But, by
that standard, writes Brustier, the American comrades are even more stupid.
Following the advice of such as Noam Chomsky, American Leftists had gone so far
as to “recognize a number of enemies of ‘the empire’ (the United States) as
potential allies...this certainly does not correspond with the feelings of the
American people’s majority.” By doing such things, argues Brustier, the U.S.
Left is making itself a “political fringe.”
American
progressive intellectuals, however, see themselves as the soul of the
Democratic Party, which is at the head of America’s ruling class. Not yet
having experienced the kind of rejection that their European counterparts have,
they revel in their success in changing American culture over the past half-century,
and look to Gramscian notions of cultural hegemony as confirming their practice
of forcing their own cultural identities onto America. The Democratic Party’s
constituencies already endorse its intellectuals’ aim not to convince the rest
of society, but to subdue it. For them, this is the Revolution. They have
chosen the Leninist rather than the Mussolinian alternative.
They
reason that America’s socio-political order is founded on racism, patriarchy,
genocidal imperialism, as well as economic exploitation. Gramsci’s “historic
bloc” can come about through the joint pursuit of racial justice, gender
justice, economic justice, and anti-imperialism. The Revolution is all about
the oppressed classes uniting to inflict upon the oppressors the retribution that
each of the oppressed yearns for. This intersubjective community includes the
several groups whose identity negates a piece of American culture—religious,
racial, sexual, economic. Together, they negate it all.
Regardless
of what Gramsci wrote or meant about using the party-state’s power over
cultural institutions to subvert and transform the rest of society, for the
American Left cultural hegemony means using this power to suffocate
Judeo-Christian civilization in its several cradles; to allow in public
discourse only such thoughts as serve the identity of the party’s constituent
groups; and to denigrate, delegitimize, and possibly outlaw all others. In
short, it means political correctness as we know it.
Political
Correctness
For
most Americans who have heard of Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony, it
signifies P.C.’s suffocating purpose. But because P.C. consists precisely of
what Gramsci condemned as picking fights with the common sense of people whom
it cannot wholly control, the American Left’s understanding of cultural
hegemony suggests that its culture war will not end as it intends.
Beginning
in the 1960s, from Boston to Berkeley, the teachers of America’s teachers
absorbed and taught a new, CliffsNotes-style sacred history: America was born tainted
by Western Civilization’s original sins—racism, sexism, greed, genocide against
natives and the environment, all wrapped in religious obscurantism, and on the
basis of hypocritical promises of freedom and equality. Secular saints from
Herbert Croly and Woodrow Wilson to Franklin Roosevelt and Barack Obama have
been redeeming those promises, placing America on the path of greater justice
in the face of resistance from the mass of Americans who are racist, sexist,
but above all stupid. To consider such persons on the same basis as their
betters would be, as President Obama has called it, “false equivalence.”
Thus
credentialed, molded, and opinionated, a uniform class now presides over nearly
all federal, and state, government bureaucracies, over the media, the
educational establishment, and major corporations. Like a fraternity, it
requires speaking the “in” language signifying that one is on the right side,
and joins to bring grief upon “outsider” Americans who run afoul of its
members. Video the illegal trafficking in aborted babies’ body parts by
government-financed Planned Parenthood, as did David Daleiden and Sandra
Merritt, and you end up indicted for a felony as the ruling class media tells
the world that the video really does not show what it shows.
No more
than its European counterparts does America’s progressive ruling class offer
any vision of truth, goodness, beauty, or advantage to attract the rest of
society to itself. Like its European kin, all that American progressivism
offers is obedience to the ruling class, enforced by political correctness. Nor
is there any endpoint to what is politically correct, any more than there ever
was to Communism. Here and now, as everywhere and always, it comes down to
glorifying the party and humbling the rest.
If
cultural hegemony merely meant achieving the progressive ruling class’s near
monopoly of America’s cultural institutions, the conflict ended a generation
ago: the rulers won. But because the ruling class acts as if the old culture’s
recalcitrant remnants merit ever more intensive efforts to crush them, cultural
hegemony by P.C. means an endless cycle of insult and resentment, guaranteeing
the conflict’s permanence. By contrast, Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony
(following Machiavelli), sought a definitive victory: the transformation and
synthesis of society’s several cultural strains into something that so
transcends them that no one could possibly look backward—e.g., as Christianity
obviated the gods of Rome and of the barbarians alike. Most important,
Machiavelli, followed by Gramsci, sought cultural hegemony’s seal on power as a
means to a greater end: for Machiavelli, that meant political grandeur like
that of Rome (or maybe Renaissance Spain). For Gramsci, it meant achieving the
Marxist utopia.
Why
does the American Left demand ever-new P.C. obeisances? In 2012 no one would
have thought that defining marriage between one man and one woman, as enshrined
in U.S. law, would brand those who do so as motivated by a culpable
psychopathology called “homophobia,” subject to fines and near-outlaw status.
Not until 2015-16 did it occur to anyone that requiring persons with male
personal plumbing to use public bathrooms reserved for men was a sign of the
same pathology. Why had not these become part of the P.C. demands previously?
Why is there no canon of P.C. that, once filled, would require no further
additions?
Because the
point of P.C. is not and has never been merely about any of the items that it
imposes, but about the imposition itself. Much less is it about creating a
definable common culture or achieving some definable good. On the retail level,
it is about the American’s ruling class’s felt need to squeeze the last drops
of voter participation out of the Democratic Party’s habitual constituencies. On
the wholesale level, it is a war on civilization waged to indulge identity
politics.
How
Does This Movie End?
The
imposition of P.C. has no logical end because feeling better about one’s self
by confessing other people’s sins, humiliating and hurting them, is an
addictive pleasure the appetite for which grows with each satisfaction. The
more fault I find in thee, the holier (or, at least, the trendier) I am than
thou. The worse you are, the better I am and the more power I should have over
you. America’s ruling class seems to have adopted the view that the rest of
America should be treated as inmates in reeducation camps. As Harvard Law
School Professor Mark Tushnet argued earlier this year in a blog post, this
means not “trying to accommodate the losers, who—remember—defended, and are
defending, positions that liberals regard as having no normative pull at all.
Trying to be nice to the losers didn’t work well after the Civil War.”
This
vicarious yearning for the power of victors in civil war, however, has nothing
to do with Gramsci, never mind with Machiavelli, who thought in terms of subverting the
enemies one does not kill, rather than of reveling in breaking their spirit by
inflicting indignities. People, he wrote, “are to be caressed or extinguished.”
Insulting people who are not permanently disempowered is fun—but of the
expensive and dangerous kind, because it engenders at least as much sullenness
and revolt as submission.
The
question that Gael Brustier asked of the French Socialist Party can be asked of
America’s ruling class: what do you think you are doing? By demanding ever more
insulting conditions of potential allies, you jeopardize a campaign of
subversion that is going very well for you. Why issue calls to arms to your
enemies?
Consider
the main enemy: religion. America’s mainline Protestant denominations have long
since delivered their (diminishing) flocks to the ruling class’s progressive
priorities. Pope Francis advertises his refusal to judge attacks on Western
civilization, including the murder of priests. His commitment of the Catholic
Church to the building of “a new humanity,” as he put it at July’s World Youth
Day in Krakow, opens the Catholic Church to redefining Christianity to
progressive missions in progressive terms, a mission already accomplished at
Georgetown University, Notre Dame, and other former bastions of American
Catholicism now turned into bastions of American progressivism. Evangelical
leaders seem eager not to be left behind. Gramsci would have advised that
enlisting America’s religious establishments in the service of the ruling
class’s larger priorities need not have cost nearly as much as Mussolini paid
in 1929. Refraining from frontal challenges to essentials would be enough.
Instead,
America’s progressives add insult to injury by imposing same-sex marriage,
homosexuality, “global warming,” and other fashions because they really have no
priorities beyond themselves. America’s progressive rulers, like France’s, act
less as politicians gathering support than as conquerors who enjoy punishing
captives without worry that the tables may turn.
But as
the turning point against progressive cultural hegemony came to other lands, it
seems to be coming to America as well. Gramsci had written of Machiavelli’s
prince and of his own “new prince” that his realm would be one in which all
good citizens could feel secure from arbitrariness. But arbitrariness is
precisely what our masters of P.C. have fastened onto the American political
system.
Consider
our ruling class’s very latest demand: Americans must agree that someone with a
penis can be a woman, while someone else with a vagina can be a man. Complying
with such arbitrariness is beyond human capacity. In Orwell’s 1984,
as noted, Big Brother’s agent demanded that Winston acknowledge seeing five
fingers while he was holding up four. But that is small stuff next to what the
U.S. ruling class is demanding of a free people. Because courts and agencies
just impose their diktats, without bothering to try to persuade, millions of
precisely the kind of citizens who prize stability have become willing to take
a wrecking ball to what little remains of the American republic, not caring so
much what happens next.
It is
surprising that, in 2015-16, our ruling class was surprised by Donald Trump.
Though he remained obedient to most of P.C.’s specific demands and remained
largely a liberal Democrat, it sufficed for him to disdain P.C. in general, and
to insult its purveyors, for Trump to become liberalism’s Public Enemy Number
One. William Galston’s column in the Wall Street Journal barely
begins to get a sense of how his class’s Leninist seizure of America’s culture
has miscarried.
[Trump’s]
campaign has ruthlessly exposed the illusions of well-educated middle-class
professionals—people like me. We believed that changes in law and public norms
had gradually brought about changes in private attitudes across partisan and
ideological lines....
Mr.
Trump has proved us wrong. His critique of political correctness has destroyed
many taboos and has given his followers license to say what they really think.
Beliefs we mocked now command a majority in one of the world’s oldest political
parties, and sometimes in the electorate as a whole.
The
point is not Trump, but the fact that though the ruling class pushed Western
civilization aside, it did not replace it with any cultural hegemony in the
Gramscian-Machiavellian sense. Rather, by pushing P.C. defined as inflicting
indignities, the progressives destroyed the legitimacy of any and all authority,
foremost their own.
My 2010
article for the American Spectator, “The Ruling Class and the
Perils of Revolution,” argued that “some two-thirds of Americans—a few
Democratic voters, most Republican voters, and all independents—lack a vehicle
in electoral politics.” Resentment of the patent disregard for the Constitution
and statutes with which the ruling class has permeated American life, along
with its cultural war enforced by P.C., meant that “Sooner or later, well or
badly, that majority’s demand for representation will be filled.” I noted:
“Unfortunately, it is easier for anyone who dislikes a court’s or an official’s
unlawful act to counter it with another unlawful one than to draw all parties
back to the foundation of truth.”
That is
because a majority of Americans—realizing that the Constitution and the laws
have ceased to protect them from unending injuries to their way of life;
aggravated by being insulted as “irredemable” and “deplorable” racists,
sexists, etc.; eager for relief and, yes, for payback with interest; knowing
that the ruling class is closed to argument from those it considers its
inferiors—have no option but to turn the tables in the hope that, suffering the
same kind of insulting oppression, the ruling class might learn the value of treating
others as they themselves like to be treated. More likely, doing this would be
one more turn in the spiral of reprisals typical of revolutions. And yet, there
seems no way of avoiding this.
What is
to be done with a political system in which no one any longer believes? This
is a revolutionary question because America’s ruling class largely destroyed,
along with its own credibility, the respect for truth, and the culture of
restraint that had made the American people unique stewards of freedom and prosperity.
Willful masses alienated from civilization turn all too naturally to
revolutions’ natural leaders. Donald Trump only foreshadows the implacable men
who, Abraham Lincoln warned, belong to the “family of the lion and the tribe of
the eagle.”
In short,
the P.C. “changes in law and public norms” (to quote Galston again) that the
ruling class imposed on the rest of America, rather than having “gradually
brought about changes in private attitudes across partisan and ideological
lines” as the ruling class imagined (and as Gramsci would have approved) have
set off a revolution—of which we can be sure only that it won’t be pretty.
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Angelo
M. Codevilla is Professor Emeritus of International Relations at
Boston University, and the author of the books, The Ruling Class: How
They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It, Informing Statecraft,
War: Ends and Means (with Paul Seabury), The Character of
Nations, and Between the Alps and a Hard Place: Switzerland in
World War II and the Rewriting of History.
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