The Democratic Party displays more traits of a revolutionary party, bent on gaining control over thought and speech. This power allows the Democratic Party’s progressive leaders to invariably steer the country towards their goals, having already established the boundaries of language and debate.
Lenin defined revolutionary parties as those that awaken and cultivate working-class consciousness capable of replacing bourgeois owners. The revolutionary party’s aim is to steer this consciousness toward the creation of a socialist regime that will rule in the name of the proletariat. The key is to subdue the property-owning, bourgeois regime and bury them.
Antonio Gramsci, an Italian communist, proposed a different path that was less violent but not less comprehensive in its goals. His goal was for the left to obtain cultural hegemony by dictating the meaning of words and thus imagination giving the socialist rulers comprehensive power because they controlled people’s minds.
Gramsci was not as opposed to violence and subjugation like Lenin. He wanted to forge alliances among different groups and factions within the society in support of socialist goals. This was best done by a combination hard and soft measures aimed at reworking the imagination, thought and language.
The socialists would then define what is possible. Gramsci didn’t exactly define what would be needed to do this. Gramsci left open many despotic options in practice. His frequent appeals for Machiavelli suggest that the state would undoubtedly loom large in his methods to control.
Angelo Codevilla, the brilliant political thinker who understood our country, died in 2009. ruling class in masterful fashion, brilliantly unpacked the behavior of progressives in a 2016 essay titled “The Rise of Political Correctness” by pointing out the difference between Lenin and Gramsci’s approaches to gaining power.
Codevilla’s analysis is greatly needed as we confront a Democratic Party that seeks Gramsci’s cultural hegemony but acts positively Leninist towards its opponents, aiming to inter them through aggressive state and corporatist machinations.
The party, state and regime work together as an interlocking unit to enforce norms, behavior and thought. The Democratic Party is bound to a set ideologies it wants to force upon the wider population, even at great cost to its electoral prospects.
Build Back Better critical race theory, Defund the Police, COVID-19 safety measures, transgender-maniaPublic opinion is increasingly against progressives due to the rise in violent crime and moderating or forgoing these policies. Their inability to modify or foregoing these policies reflects a stubborn refusal to abandon the progressive dream of reshaping law and reality.
Many people have observed that Democratic representatives in Congress behave as if there were no limits to their power on a national scale. The push for massive increases in spending, green energy regulations and transfer payments, as well as voting reform, would increase the state’s power beyond what was possible under the Great Society. This is not the Johnson administration. And unlike then, Democrats don’t run Washington with large majorities.
Both the Senate and the House of Representatives have Democrats with slim majorities. Instead of compromising their agenda, they favor large-scale reforms reforms such as the Build Back Better bill. The Democratic majorities depend on swing-district and swing-state members who cannot afford to support the party’s radical efforts—this similarly does not restrain the leadership of the party. These strict limits on their power are being ignored.
This is the message that both the White House and the House Democrats are expressing: They believe they can alter reality and force the country to make sweeping, progressive changes without having to take stock of the means and ends required to achieve this.
The best evidence is perhaps the attempt to nationalize the election law in one piece. State control over election law was a key bargain made in our nation’s founding. Washington did not want the states to dictate their rules, and that is still a large part of what Washington does today. To change election law by removing Washington’s locus of authority would require enormous power.
The Democrats are clearly far away from such an opportunity. Their failures here are a clear example of this. The fact that Joe Biden, along with other prominent Democrats, said that opponents to reforming election law were Confederates, racists, and Jim Crow types suggests that his presidency, his conceptions of statemanship, and his ideology of government, are strongly tied to ideology, regardless of the possibility of substantive change. Could the end simply be to proclaim ideological superiority in comparison to many of his opponents and the rest of the country?
It is clear that the answer to a question that ignores competitive party politics will be no. But we must dig down to the core of progressivism. This core is egalitarianism, as proven by history and embodied by policy.
Returning to Codevilla’s analysis of political correctness, the point, he says, is to define reality as “the point of the state and progressive party in power.” The progressive, Codevilla argues, is charged with creating new truths and is perpetually “at war against nature’s laws and limits.”
Codevilla’s masterful use of Lenin and Gramsci opens before us both the ends and means of progressivism. Both thinkers mean to rule us for revolutionary ends, the progressive chooses between intentional destruction of opponents via Lenin or the cooptation of them with Gramsci’s redefinition of language.
We might see Democrats using Gramsci’s soft coercion through its ability to tell us what to say and celebrate, but Codevilla sees the party as positively Leninist. America’s constitutional order and its preconditions of limited power, property, family, and civil society, held together by a Judeo-Christian morality must be wiped away.
Biden called his opponents racists when he criticized them in his Atlanta speech, including those within his own party who would not end the use of the filibuster, his goal was to treat the party’s ideological interest as a reality “that ranks above reality itself” to use Codevilla’s stirring formulation.
This is the essence of political correctness: the party’s reality is the truth. In this effort, Biden failed short-term and in his major social spending plans under the Build Back Better bill. But the progressives will always return, and nothing is over.
The progressive dilemma is that, in its constant war against the natural world, reality doesn’t give. This reality and progressive political correctness are always in conflict. In this sense, progressives must embody these realities. This is achieved by exercising power over others.
People must be forced into acting and speaking as if these realities are real. What is more important: the substantive policy goal or the forced affirmation of progressive aims by the wider society? So, in other words, do we accept that male simulacra are females and allow them to participate in female athletic competitions?
Refusal to admit this fact results in expulsion from polite societies. Or, as Codevilla notes, “cultural hegemony is the goal.”
The new addition to the progressive power is its ability to enlist corporations in their struggles. The Democrats use the state as a tool to enlist corporations, and most importantly tech companies in their favor. You’ll recall the many companies that insisted that the support for the election reform bill was equivalent of ensuring that minorities have the right to vote, despite the fact that the Republican party’s state legislative minions were determined to take their voting rights away.
Often, the Biden White House appeals to tech firms regarding speech that should not be preferred or prohibited. rejectedon their platforms. Technology, media companies and the government are increasingly working in synergy.
Perhaps the ideology party’s longer-term goal is to influence opinion change with the immense power they possess. Few institutions are not heavily influenced or dominated by progressive opinion and its favored diktats.
Even if they lose an election, the Democrats can still speak into millions’ minds by using the federal bureaucracy and corporate media to ensure them multiple bites at the apple. They will continue to lay the foundation for great change when they return to power.
This suggests that the attempt to centralize electoral law might have been an attempt by an ideological party to rewrite rules in its favor. It was an attempt by an ideological party to rewrite election laws precisely as an ideology party, one that knows it cannot win elections within the coasts except for major metropolitan areas. This is the ultimate goal: to end trench warfare. This legislation is currently in limbo, but it will be reintroduced in subsequent iterations. The foundation is always being built.
Opponents of the ideology party now have an opportunity to exploit the huge gap that has been created between political correctness, reality. Americans aren’t rushing to support the broad platform of the Democratic Party. They will be forced to accept it. The revolutionary party has a strategy to do that. It will use a state-created, Wall Street-led green energy economy to force reality. We’ll learn that energy is a luxury item.
The education system will ensure that the American founding and its truths will be buried by a Marxist-inspired pedagogy, despite parental resistance. Charter schools and educational choice will be restricted. Voting reform will offer Democrats more favorable rules for winning. Massive social spending further consolidates progressive gains by increasing the dependence of citizens on government programs.
It is now that conservatives are in a clear position. The moment for conservatives is now. This can only happen if there are a few proposals that address the fear and distrust Americans have about the present moment. Give them the freedom and confidence they need to live their life on their terms, free from any government orders reinforced by corporate and social media.
The failure to do so will lead to the revolutionary party’s ability to consolidate us into their altered reality.
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