In October, I published an article about Angelo Codevilla's article, "After the Republic."
He has done it again.
I have worked with him for over 40 years, when we were both on Capitol Hill as researchers. I regard him as the smartest guy in the conservative movement. His specialty is foreign policy, but in recent years, he has become the top political analyst. His latest essay is "The Rise of Political Correctness." Download it here. (Print it out at 80%.)
He is a scholar. He is going to take you through the labyrinths of communist history. He takes us back to the 1930s in the Soviet Union. He argues that the whole concept of political correctness as we know it today had its origin in the USSR under Stalin. It had its origins there because the Communist Party believed that what the party said was true was in fact true, and any attempt to challenge that was met with resistance.
He goes on to argue that the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci recognized early that Marxism had to deal with the issues of Western Christian culture. Marxism would not be successful simply by revolutionary violence because the people as a whole were not committed to the goals of the revolutionaries in the realm of culture. He correctly observes that in this sense, Gramsci was not an orthodox Marxist. I have been arguing this way for 25 years, and this is the first time I have found anybody writing about cultural Marxism who recognizes this fact. In other words, what we see today is a form of deviant Marxism, sometimes called cultural Marxism, which was opposed to the original formulations of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Marx believed that the structure of production or the mode of production is the substructure of society, and culture, philosophy, and morals are simply part of the superstructure which grew out of a prevailing mode of production. Gramsci thought this was dead wrong, and he was right.
Codevilla accurately goes back to the writings of Machiavelli in search of the modern concept of political correctness. Machiavelli recognized that the revolutionary state had to control, suppress, and ultimately replace the existing attitudes of the public toward morality and culture. But it is not easy to do this. If the state pushes too hard, there will be push back.
This is what modern PC advocates, who are leftists and progressives, refuse to acknowledge. They believe that they can push and push and push against the standards of Western civilization, and the peons of the general public are going to have to go along with it. But they aren't, and they won't, and we are now seeing significant political resistance. The progressives are not prepared for this. They have nothing but contempt for the standards of the broad mass of the American people: "bourgeois morality." They expect to be able to control the public because they control the media. But as the Trump election indicates, the Left is incorrect. This is why this article is so important.
Let me tantalize you with the conclusions.
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.
The decentralized social media have created a decentralized wall of resistance to the Left: walls of resistance. The Left does not know what to do about this.
You can humiliate the typical American into silence. This works for a long time. But push him beyond where he wants to go, and you get this: "You and who else?" The Left is now there. The Left is apoplectic about Trump. But it is really apoplectic about Trump's deplorables. Yet the Left by its very nature cannot stop whining, cannot stop demanding silence. It has no self-restraint.
The fat lady has not yet sung, but she has started to hum.
© 2022 GaryNorth.com, Inc., 2005-2021 All Rights Reserved. Reproduction without permission prohibited.