"ALL CAPS IN DEFENSE OF LIBERTY IS NO VICE."

Wednesday, November 05, 2008

GRAMSCI TRIUMPHANT!

Andrew C. McCarthy notes the leftward drift of youthful voters:
Preliminary indications are that the youth vote (ages 18-29) was way up: an increase of somewhere over 2.2 million (maybe way over) from 2004 (a year in which it was very high), and as much as 13% over 2000. The Left's dominance of the academy is now having a material impact on electoral politics. As we think about the future of conservatism, we ignore that at our peril. [Emphasis added.]
The "left's dominance of the academy" includes not only Ivy League institutions, large State universities, but also the teachers' colleges that prepare young people to promulgate the Teachings of Chairmen Chomsky, Zinn, and Ayers to elementary and high school students. This is the triumph of the Gramscian walk through the institutions of the West, weakening our culture from within.

There was never any chance for a Maoist peasant revolt in the 20th century West, and the Leninist vanguard of the working class has also faltered. But Gramsci's approach is still working. Gramsci was perhaps the most dangerous communist strategist of all.
Lenin held that culture was 'ancillary' to political objectives but for Gramsci it was fundamental to the attainment of power that cultural hegemony be achieved first.
It is no accident that self-avowed revolutionary communist and unrepentant would-be mass murderer Bill Ayers chose to follow up his underground career in terrorism with a career as an "educator," transforming America's schools from places where our history, our freedoms, and our technological know how are preserved, into places where our own children are indoctrinated into becoming the radical insurgents who will bring down their own country, and with it the rest of the free world.

McCarthy recommends study of Roger Kimball's book, Tenured Radicals. In addition to that resource, I'd like to add a note of praise to the often unheralded but surely vital work of David Horowitz, who has struggled against the radical corruption of the academy for years. Check out the resources at Front Page.

No comments: