Democracy in America – John Malcolm

Why There is a Culture War: Gramsci and Tocqueville in America

By John Fonte | December 1, 2000 | Orthodoxy Today

John Fonte examines the philosophical antecedents of the culture war to show why the culture war takes the shape that is has. He reveals why a constant vigilance towards the permanent things that breathe life into the culture is necessary. The essay runs about fifteen printed pages but the time spent reading it will prove worthwhile.

As intellectual historians have often had occasion to observe, there are times in a nation’s history when certain ideas are just “in the air.” Admittedly, this point seems to fizzle when applied to our particular historical moment. On the surface of American politics, as many have had cause to mention, it appears that the main trends predicted over a decade ago in Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History?” have come to pass — that ideological (if not partisan) strife has been muted; that there is a general consensus about the most important questions of the day (capitalism, not socialism; democracy, not authoritarianism); and that the contemporary controversies that do exist, while occasionally momentous, are essentially mundane, concerned with practical problem-solving (whether it is better to count ballots by hand or by machine) rather than with great principles.

And yet, I would argue, all that is true only on the surface. For simultaneously in the United States of the past few decades, recurring philosophical concepts have not only remained “in the air,” but have proved influential, at times decisive, in cultural and legal and moral arguments about the most important questions facing the nation. Indeed: Prosaic appearances to the contrary, beneath the surface of American politics an intense ideological struggle is being waged between two competing worldviews. I will call these “Gramscian” and “Tocquevillian” after the intellectuals who authored the warring ideas — the twentieth-century Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci, and, of course, the nineteenth-century French intellectual Alexis de Tocqueville. The stakes in the battle between the intellectual heirs of these two men are no less than what kind of country the United States will be in decades to come.

Refining class warfare

We’ll begin with an overview of the thought of Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), a Marxist intellectual and politician. Despite his enormous influence on today’s politics, he remains far less well-known to most Americans than does Tocqueville.

Gramsci’s main legacy arises through his departures from orthodox Marxism. Like Marx, he argued that all societies in human history have been divided into two basic groups: the privileged and the marginalized, the oppressor and the oppressed, the dominant and the subordinate. Gramsci expanded Marx’s ranks of the “oppressed” into categories that still endure. As he wrote in his famous Prison Notebooks, “The marginalized groups of history include not only the economically oppressed, but also women, racial minorities and many ‘criminals.'” What Marx and his orthodox followers described as “the people,” Gramsci describes as an “ensemble” of subordinate groups and classes in every society that has ever existed until now. This collection of oppressed and marginalized groups — “the people” — lack unity and, often, even consciousness of their own oppression. To reverse the correlation of power from the privileged to the “marginalized,” then, was Gramsci’s declared goal.

Power, in Gramsci’s observation, is exercised by privileged groups or classes in two ways: through domination, force, or coercion; and through something called “hegemony,” which means the ideological supremacy of a system of values that supports the class or group interests of the predominant classes or groups. Subordinate groups, he argued, are influenced to internalize the value systems and world views of the privileged groups and, thus, to consent to their own marginalization.

Far from being content with a mere uprising, therefore, Gramsci believed that it was necessary first to delegitimize the dominant belief systems of the predominant groups and to create a “counter-hegemony” (i.e., a new system of values for the subordinate groups) before the marginalized could be empowered. Moreover, because hegemonic values permeate all spheres of civil society — schools, churches, the media, voluntary associations — civil society itself, he argued, is the great battleground in the struggle for hegemony, the “war of position.” From this point, too, followed a corollary for which Gramsci should be known (and which is echoed in the feminist slogan) — that all life is “political.” Thus, private life, the work place, religion, philosophy, art, and literature, and civil society, in general, are contested battlegrounds in the struggle to achieve societal transformation.

It is perhaps here that one sees Gramsci’s most important reexamination of Marx’s thought. Classical Marxists implied that a revolutionary consciousness would simply develop from the objective (and oppressive) material conditions of working class life. Gramsci disagreed, noting that “there have always been exploiters and exploited” — but very few revolutions per se. In his analysis, this was because subordinate groups usually lack the “clear theoretical consciousness” necessary to convert the “structure of repression into one of rebellion and social reconstruction.” Revolutionary “consciousness” is crucial. Unfortunately, the subordinate groups possess “false consciousness,” that is to say, they accept the conventional assumptions and values of the dominant groups, as “legitimate.” But real change, he continued to believe, can only come about through the transformation of consciousness.

Just as Gramsci’s analysis of consciousness is more nuanced than Marx’s, so too is his understanding of the role of intellectuals in that process. Marx had argued that for revolutionary social transformation to be successful, the world views of the predominant groups must first be unmasked as instruments of domination. In classical Marxism, this crucial task of demystifying and delegitimizing the ideological hegemony of the dominant groups is performed by intellectuals. Gramsci, more subtly, distinguishes between two types of intellectuals: “traditional” and “organic.” What subordinate groups need, Gramsci maintains, are their own “organic intellectuals.” However, the defection of “traditional” intellectuals from the dominant groups to the subordinate groups, he held, is also important, because traditional intellectuals who have “changed sides” are well positioned within established institutions.

The metaphysics, or lack thereof, behind this Gramscian worldview are familiar enough. Gramsci describes his position as “absolute historicism,” meaning that morals, values, truths, standards and human nature itself are products of different historical epochs. There are no absolute moral standards that are universally true for all human beings outside of a particular historical context; rather, morality is “socially constructed.”

Historically, Antonio Gramsci’s thought shares features with other writers who are classified as “Hegelian Marxists” — the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs, the German thinker Karl Korsch, and members of the “Frankfurt School” (e.g., Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse), a group of theorists associated with the Institute for Social Research founded in Frankfurt, Germany in the 1920s, some of whom attempted to synthesize the thinking of Marx and Freud. All emphasized that the decisive struggle to overthrow the bourgeois regime (that is, middle-class liberal democracy) would be fought out at the level of consciousness. That is, the old order had to be rejected by its citizens intellectually and morally before any real transfer of power to the subordinate groups could be achieved.

Read the full article here.

Understanding the Culture War: Gramscians, Tocquevillians and Others (johnmalcolm.me)
Bill Whittle: Our Progressive Nightmare and the Conservative Solution (Parts 1 & 2) (johnmalcolm.me)
Gramsci said (kkcygnet.wordpress.com)
Antonio Gramsci (earthpages.wordpress.com)
Book of the Day: The role of faith in the creation of a counter-hegemony for the commons (p2pfoundation.net)

Understanding the Culture War: Gramscians, Tocquevillians and Others

By Steven Yates | January 6, 2001 | Lew Rockwell

We start the new century and the new millennium with a problem of major proportions: the seemingly unstoppable march of political correctness through American institutions and life. A recent article in the journal Policy Review, published by the Heritage Foundation, is worth reading for its insights into how we have ended up in this predicament – and also for why we seem unable to figure a way out of it. The article is by John Fonte, of the Hudson Institute, and is entitled “Why There Is a Culture War.” If this article is any indication, Fonte’s forthcoming book Building a Healthy Culture, of which the article is an excerpt, is likely also worth reading as a barometer of where we stand.

Fonte contrasts “two competing worldviews” that are currently struggling for dominance in America. It would be fair to say that the two really are at war: Fonte somewhat euphemistically calls the contest an “intense ideological struggle.” One he calls “Gramscian”; the other, “Tocquevillian,” after the intellectuals he credits with having authored the respective warring ideologies: the Italian neo-Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, author of Prison Notebooks and other works, and the French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, author of the influential Democracy in America.

It becomes clear that one cannot understand either the meteoric rise or apparent immunity of political correctness to attack without understanding Gramsci. Rarely would I recommend actually studying a Marxist social philosopher, but this guy merits our attention. Gramsci (1891-1937) agreed with Karl Marx that every society could be divided into “oppressor” and “oppressed” classes (e.g., Marx’s own “bourgeois” and “proletariat”), but for the first time, expanded the latter into an ensemble of subordinate, marginalized groups instead of a single, homogeneous group. Whereas Marx had spoken only of the proletariat, Gramsci spoke not just of propertyless workers but also of “woman, racial minorities and many ‘criminals.’” Fonte documents how Gramsci distinguished two ways the dominant group exercises control, whereas Marx had only written of one. First, there is direct domination through coercion or force – political might in service of the economic interests of the bourgeoisie. Second, there is what Gramsci calls hegemony, which means the pervasive and mostly tacit use of a system of values that supports and reinforces the interests of the dominant groups. The repressed groups may not even know they are repressed, in Gramsci’s view, because they have internalized the system of values that justifies their repression. They have internalized a “false consciousness” and become unwitting participants in their own domination.

Is this sounding familiar yet? Think of the radical feminist philosophy professors and law professors who speak of romantic candlelight dinners – a staple of ordinary American life – as a form of prostitution. They justify this seemingly outrageous claim on the grounds that American women exist in “false consciousness,” the hegemonic product of male-dominated (and capitalistic) values. The sense of abhorrence felt by “ordinary” women at radical feminist claims is nothing more than this “false consciousness” asserting itself. Gramsci went on to argue that before there could be any “revolution” in Marx’s sense it would be necessary to build up a “counter-hegemony,” or system of values favoring the repressed groups that would undermine or delegitimize the hegemony-created consciousness. And because hegemonic values permeate the whole of society and are embodied in the warp and woof of daily life, daily life becomes part of the ideological battleground. All the institutions we take for granted – schools, churches, the media, businesses, as well as art, literature, philosophy, and so on – become places where the “counter-hegemonic” values can be seeded and allowed to take root. They become domains to be infiltrated, and brought into the service of the movement. As the radical feminists put it, “the personal is the political.” It is interesting how the latter have lifted this idea from a white male European philosopher mostly without credit. The point, however, is to create a new kind of “consciousness” free of the values that allow the dominant group(s) to repress the subordinate groups. Only this will throw off the shackles of “hegemony” and lead to true revolution.

Gramsci saw an important role in the transformation of society for those he called “organic” intellectuals (as opposed to “traditional” intellectuals). “Organic” intellectuals were to be intellectuals belonging to the repressed groups and making an effort to undermine the “hegemony” with the assistance of any “traditional” intellectuals they could persuade to defect from the dominant point of view. They will flourish as the roots of counter-hegemony grow. In other words, Gramsci was recommending recruiting radicalized women, members of minority groups, and others into the fold – affirmative action before that term was coined. Changing the minds of “traditional” intellectuals was particularly valuable, as they were already well positioned within the dominant educational institutions. The “long march through the institutions” – a phrase we also owe to Gramsci – began.

Antonio Gramsci’s name is not exactly a household word. Many people concerned about political correctness have no doubt never heard of him. To describe him as important, however, is probably the understatement of the new year. He sketched, in works such as Prison Notebooks, the basic outline of the agenda that would begin to be implemented in American colleges and universities, and then carried to the rest of society, in the final quarter of the 20^th century. The efforts accelerating in the 1990s, no doubt helped along by having one of their own (perhaps it was two of their own) in the White House. Clearly, we find echoes of Gramsci’s notion of an “organic” intellectual in today’s calls for more and more “diversity” in all areas of society: universities, the workplace, etc. The mass conversion of “traditional” intellectuals to the Gramscian struggle helps explain why this diversity is a diversity of faces and not ideas. “Traditional” intellectuals have power, especially in education. The gatekeepers control who is admitted to the academic club, and the “traditional” intellectuals control the gatekeepers. Today, an outspoken conservative might as well not even apply for an academic appointment in a public university. But feminists of all stripes and colors (and sexual preferences and fetishes) are more than welcome!

Gramsci, we ought also to note, described himself as an “absolute historicist,” whose views derive from the philosopher Hegel. All systems of value, all moral codes, etc., are entirely the products of the historical epoch and culture which gave rise to them. There is no such thing as an “absolute” or an “objective” morality. There are only systems of value that represent either the (mainly economic) interests of those in power or of those not in power; and one of the jobs of “organic” intellectuals is to develop systems of value that will undermine the former. Capturing control over language, especially the language of morality, has a major role to play in this because of the doors it opens to psychological control over the masses. Most people will reject ideas and institutions if they become convinced of their basic immorality; most people, too, lack the kind of training that will equip them to untangle the thicket of logical fallacies that might be involved. This all helps pave the way for the Gramscian transformation of society.

Clearly, political correctness in all its manifestations, from academic schools of radical feminism, “critical race theory,” gay and lesbian “queer theory,” etc., to the preoccupation with “diversity” as an end in itself, is the direct descendent of Gramsci, and the chief arm of enforcement of the ongoing Gramscian transformation of American society. Consider efforts to transform our understanding of the law. Fonte observes: “Critical legal studies posits that the law grows out of unequal relations of power and therefore serves the interests of and legitimizes the rule of dominant groups.” The academic movement known as “deconstruction,” however one defines it, is a systematic effort to destroy the legitimacy of the values of “dominant groups”: straight white Christian males of (non-Marxist) European descent. The values to be destroyed: truth as the goal of inquiry, transcendent morality as the guide to human conduct, freedom and independence as political ideals, hiring and contracting based on merit. All are rationalizing myths of the dominant consciousness, in the Gramscian scheme of things.

The transformation is now very much underway, as Gramscian footsoldiers have captured not just the major institutions in the English-speaking world (Ivy League universities) but also huge tax-exempt foundations (Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and so on) that have been bankrolling Gramscian projects for decades. Fonte cites author after author to document the millions that have flowed to academic feminist endeavors, diversity-engineering projects in universities and sensitivity-training re-education programs in corporations. The plain truth is, we can no longer trust large corporations. Fortune 500 companies have become as reliable footsoldiers in the creation of a politically correct America as universities. Even Bill Gates of Microsoft has gotten on the official bandwagon, with his creation of minority-only scholarships last year. With the money now behind it, small wonder political correctness has become so difficult to oppose!

Read the full article here.