The Long March Through the Institutions DEBUNKED

The Low Key Revolution that Right Gramscians get wrong

This is me explaining my ideas to you

A cornerstone narrative of the modern American right presupposes the notion of a creeping Marxist usurpation of institutional power. Self-proclaimed bane of the libtard Chris Rufo is an influential proponent of this view that essentially traces the genesis of social justice movements to the book Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972) by Herbert Marcuse, specifically the idea of waging non-violent revolutionary struggle within the existing capitalist framework from the perch of commanding positions in culture, academia, and the judiciary. The basic premise here is that the left refused to acknowledge its decisive political defeat of the late 60s, duplicitously resorting to a patient long-term plan of ideological subversion with the goal of ‘preconditioning the population for left-wing political conclusions'¹. While the Right Gramscians are more or less correct on the factional domination of institutions, their faith in the causal importance of a tenuous intellectual lineage is naïve; the phenomenon deserves a more nuanced reading. Most profoundly retarded of all is the theory that Marxists have burrowed their way to the commanding heights of the superstructural apparatus and now lay in wait until the public are fully primed for their egalitarian utopia to drop. I deign to clarify this fumbling analysis with an alternative reading of that I call The Low Key Revolution.

Right Gramscians provocatively assert that, since few of the progressive victories of the modern era were achieved through popular consent, the liberal ideological consensus is by definition an illegitimate tyranny. Desegregation, affirmative action and abortion were all judicial fiats that deliberately bypassed the legislative process because - according to this view - they would undoubtedly have been defeated at the ballot box. The problem with this claim of egalitarian despotism is that it doesn’t align chronologically with the Marxist infiltration angle; Brown v. Board of Education - the catalyst for desegregation and the civil rights movement - was in 1954, so unless Chief Justice Earl Warren was on the equivalent of the Marxist Mayflower sent to colonize the judiciary this supposed nexus strains credulity. Considering that the big losers of desegregation, busing and affirmative action were the working class themselves, we’re either dealing with truly abysmal praxis, or a policy architecture that is in fact not Marxist at all. Unmasking the true “conspirators” requires a re-examination of crucial postwar shifts in the nature of political power.

The long political arc from Kennedy to Bush 41 reveals a curious theme of progress: The New Dealers of the 60s succeeded in codifying greater social justice but failed to deliver material equality, while the Reaganites succeeded in reviving material stratification but failed to inspire their desired moral reawakening. Following this logic of change, we begin to discern a locus of power residing in a class of socially cosmopolitan/economically laissez-faire gentry whose interests have ostensibly predominated at every major hingepoint of the past half century. Contemporary politics can essentially be reduced to this class adjudicating a conflict over which aspect of their program should be walked back and which expanded upon.

The Right Gramscians have to some extent been aware of this murky Rawlsian-Friedmanite grouping for decades, but because they reject class analysis they’re like the blind men and the elephant, never quite able to accurately identify what they’re describing. This leads them to theorize a spurious and contradictory set of distinctions - such as that between an activist bureaucratic/cultural elite and a more patriotic and libertarian business elite. But since some cultural elites (like Rufo) are ironically against the inordinate influence of their own “class” (what are any of these guys if not activist cultural elites?) and many business elites embrace wokeness, the enemy turns out to be anyone who plays for the other team, regardless of their class position. The “Long March” narrative is thus little more than a thinly-veiled re-reading of the culture war, despite in some ways accurately discerning the contours of a genuine paradigm shift.

In fairness to the Right Gramscians, giving an accurate account of class is difficult. The traditional Marxian sense of the term has long been recognized as overly rigid, imputing excessive explanatory force to the idea that certain classes are able to identify, collectively agree upon and consciously pursue a set of interests as a cohesive whole. Yet the premise that a bunch of lefty college professors were able to smuggle communist ideals in through the backdoor of culture without the blessing of the predominant class power in America is facile. The ideas of a society are, in one way or another, the aggregated ideas of the ruling class. The question, therefore, is: why did the predominant class interest in America, which had historically never been particularly cosmopolitan, change its orientation rather suddenly after the 1960s?

From the industrial revolution until around the mid-twentieth century, a loose group that we’ll call the “technical intelligentsia”² were in a sometimes awkward class alliance with the blue collar worker. At times they would fly the banner of worker solidarity, but could also appear more ambivalent to collectivist ideals, sometimes preferring to wage bargain individually or as part of a narrow class of specialists. Scholars like Thorstein Veblen and Daniel Bell prophesized that this class, rather than the proletariat, is the true revolutionary force of the industrial age. In their view, the proletarian masses were too easy to divide, manipulate and replace to be effective as a serious revolutionary force. If some kind of social revolution were to take place, it would be spearheaded by this smaller, more cohesive and more functionally essential grouping. But since the mentality of the technical intelligentsia was that of the upwardly-mobile striver rather than the humble worker ‘with nothing to lose but his chains’, what did it mean that this class was most likely to predominate the future configuration of class power?

The postwar boom - not to mention the unifying experiences of the Depression and WWII - probably further prolonged the awkward class alliance of the proletarian and technical intelligentsia, but the exogenous economic shocks of the early 70s precipitated what I claim should be viewed as a kind of a low key revolution: the technical intelligentsia were swayed to change allegiances. The primary class power in America - the group whose aggregate interests usually predominated domestic policy - had from the New Deal to the 70s been the alliance of the working class and the middle class (of which the technical intelligentsia comprised a section). It thereafter became the technical intelligentsia/PMC aligned with the haute bourgeois. Most of the superstructural shifts described by the Right Gramscians can be attributed to the post 70s American transformation from a production economy to an information and consumption economy, and the emergent class configurations that prevailed.

But wait, didn’t I just write that class is difficult to provide an accurate account of before proceeding to offer a highly generalized over-simplification of how class works? Let me try to frame it more comprehensively: class is not necessarily about how much wealth one has. Wealth is certainly a component of class, but it’s more about binding interests and the mentalities (or consciousness) that flow from those interests. For example, Elon Musk and Charles Koch are both billionaires. By virtue of wealth, their interests undoubtedly align on some issues, but are also fundamentally opposed on others; Musk would benefit from a more aggressive environmental policy, while the opposite would benefit Koch³. Moving down the ladder, an independent contractor and an employee of a large firm who earn comparable incomes would still favour a different suite of policies. The contractor would benefit from health care coverage, tax incentives for entrepreneurs etc, while the employee - who’s likely insured through work - would be either indifferent or hostile to those policies. An accurate account of class must recognize that it refers to the consciousness that flows from mutual interests rather than a mystical union among those with comparable levels of wealth. When we speak of a technical intelligentsia as a distinct class, we’re really talking about a mentality as opposed to an income cohort. So where does this mentality come from?

One of the all time classics on this phenomenon is White Collar by C. Wright Mills. Mills describes how the frontier spirit and the ethos of the rugged American individualist rapidly began disappearing after WWII. The traditional American ideal of prosperity had always been to succeed as an entrepreneur. Whether opening a general store or a private law practice, there was a common preference for self-proprietorship as opposed to a wage relationship with an employer. The corporatization of the employment landscape, and the shift from the traditional ideal of making it on one’s own to the modern careerist ideal of working one’s way up a corporate ladder can be traced to the new bureaucratic economy of the 1950s. The industrial technical intelligentsia, who’d previously worked on or adjacent to the shop floor, were given offices and asked to wear a suit and tie. They were also, because of historically higher salaries, more likely to live in the newer suburbs than their factory floor colleagues. Since it was rarer for this type of specialist to find employment in their own hometown or neighbourhood, they’d probably moved their family at least once, and usually lived among other people who’d also moved from elsewhere. Whereas the entrepreneur of a previous age, if not from the community where he’d founded his business, often had established social ties to the community by virtue of his proprietorship of a local institution, the new specialist class didn’t have the same means of forging ties to the community; social bonds became based on consumption habits and culture. While guys in the old neighbourhood or hometown also discussed baseball and family vacations, culture and consumption don’t function as the bases of those relationships in the same way that they do for the rootless specialist, who is a stranger among strangers that builds new bonds based on what each stranger has in common: the consumption of mass culture. Work and identity also become subtly bifurcated; the local butcher or parish priest is commonly identified through their vocation in a way that a local chemical engineer is not, because the latter’s relationship to labour is fundamentally different. For the gemeinschaft entrepreneur, all labour is personal and unalienated, whereas the stratified and impersonal nature of modern corporations leads the technical specialist towards an identity based on leisure. This new rootless anonymity - characterized by social bonds formed on the basis of shared cultural consumption habits (golfing, going to baseball games etc) - is far more characteristic of the technical intelligentsia than its wealth, and carries with it important implications.

If in the second half of the twentieth century this ascendent technical intelligentsia began to bind together more on the basis of mass culture and consumption than through older communal ties, then it would appear - considering mass culture had always been left-leaning - that this key power bloc had already been “conditioned for left-wing political conclusions” even before the 60s. By that stage, they’d largely left the inner cities, and since they had transferable skills they weren’t tied to specific employers or areas. This led them in the 70s and 80s to view the original sins of culture war - deindustrialization, integration, busing - from an entirely different vantage point than the working class; largely watching the controversies unfold on television through the rationalizing lense of corporate media. For them, ‘preserving the character of communities’ appeared backwards and potentially racist because the physical atomisation of office work and suburbia gave them a different perspective of what community was. This class never bore the brunt of any major social changes of the past half century, which functionally explains why those changes occured in the first place. And while it could be argued that the ethos of the technical intelligentsia is that of the upwardly-mobile striver - politically contemptuous of lessers and equals, but rarely to superiors - based on its lack of wealth, its New Age college-educated suburban lifestyle, and its rootless identification with left-leaning mass culture, this group still sees itself as an essentially progressive force. I claim that these unique characteristics - rather than a covert Marxist takeover - reveals why the United States has become such a deeply cosmopolitan society; the people who sway elections are cosmopolitans.

Does this shift deserve to be called a revolution (even a low key one)? Maybe not, and yet if one defines “revolution” in the softer sense of the ‘ascension of a new power bloc’, absent fundamental alterations to the machinery of state, then this is precisely what occurred after the 70s. Moreover, it should be recognized that the total conquest and vanquishment of a ruling class is historically exceptional. More common are fusions between two previously distinct groups, new class coalitions, or the formal recognition of new centers of power and influence. The technical intelligentsia were better able to adapt to the recalibration of the US economy after the shocks of the 70s, which allowed them to keep their seat at the table. This meant that their socially cosmopolitan values - reflected in the leftward lurch of the institutions - would come to predominate the values of the country as a whole.

The universalization of wokeness and its institutional expression was not the result of a hostile ideological palace coup ala the ‘Long March’ narrative, but a reflection of the aggregate values of the predominant class interest.

1. C. Rufo, America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything, (Broadside Books, 2023), p. 53

2. Basically, the technical intelligentsia are those without capital, but with skills considered essential for the functioning of a modern economy, engineers being the paradimatic example. Barbara and John Ehrenreich defined a similar class grouping as the “Professional Managerial Class” (PMC), but I’d argue that the PMC is better understood as the upper crust of this set. The technical intelligentsia are the Knights to the PMCs Dukes.

3. As an aside, it’s interesting to note how Trump’s pivot to Elon and overtures to environmentalism have occurred in parallel to being cut off from Koch funds (see "Where the Koch Network Is Putting Their Money—Anywhere But Trump" - Time Magazine)