Liberal college professors outnumber conservatives five to one. Only seven percent of journalists are conservatives. Eighty percent of all teachers are liberal. As a consequence, most millennials associate with liberalism. Conservativism seems to be a dying ideology, with many on the left actively cheering for the day when conservativism takes its last dying breath.
How did we get here?
Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) wrote, in his first book, Hegemony, and in his seminal works, collectively known as The Prison Notebooks, that communists could not just march in and seize power in the West, as Western societies were far too rich to accept the meager existence communism provided, and were far too individualistic, culturally, to accept collectivism in general. Gramsci’s solution was what he called ‘The Long March,’ focusing on the institutions of government, and on those things that contribute to the culture of society: arts, entertainment, journalism, and educational systems. Gramsci suggested that communists infiltrate those institutions, and use them to convince the public that the Western World is a world of paternalist nationalism, in which white men use their economic power to hold women, ethnic minorities, and non-white nations, down. Gramsci didn’t spend much time looking into whether or not the Western World really was built on paternalist nationalism, nor into whether or not the oppression he imagined was real. In fairness to Gramsci, at the time of his writing, it largely was real, but that wasn’t Gramsci’s focus. Gramsci’s focus was on infiltrating the parts of society that influence culture, in order to make the culture one that believes in a white, paternalist nationalism, that oppresses everyone, and everything else. Gramsci wrote that if Western Societies can be convinced that this is what they are, and what they do, then Communists will not need to tear down Western culture – the people in the West will eventually do that for them.
The most pernicious thing about Gramsci’s Long March is that, while it was true at the time that Western Societies (as well as all other societies) had a level of oppression built into them, Gramsci’s Long March ignored that there was far less oppression in the West than there was anywhere else, and perhaps more significantly, the Long March would continue whether the oppression in the West continued to exist, or not.
How successful has the Gramsci-inspired ‘Long March’ been? Successful enough that a GQ columnist can post on The Root that ‘We do not have a gun problem – we have a white people problem,’ and be lauded for his courage rather than ostracized for his racism. I posted on the war on men yesterday. The Long March is absolutely occurring, and it has had a great deal of success.
The real question we need to ask, is how we can counter the Long March. There are a number of answers. One is to fight the battle against Cultural Marxism in the trenches, where the Long March occurs. Conservativism needs more journalists, with more reach. Conservativism needs activism, in terms of teachers (and students) preaching conservative values in our schools and universities. Conservatives need to take jobs in bureaucratic positions, using the power of the ‘deep state’ to forward conservative causes. The only thing we can’t do that the left does, is to use activist, conservative judges to forward our agenda, through dishonest interpretations of the law. If we resorted to that tactic – which the left uses with great success – then the law ceases to be the law, and we become leftists ourselves.
We can use honest judges who interpret the law honestly, to hold liberals accountable for their actions, and to stomp-out activist judicial decisions. As long as we have a conservative Supreme Court that is willing to defend the letter of the law, as written (using the definitions of words from the time laws were written), we will eventually win in the courts.
We need conservative professors in English departments, and in sociology departments. We particularly need conservatives in sociology departments, who can call-out the pseudo-science that claims to be legitimate research stemming from today’s sociology professors.
We also have to fight the ever-changing definitions liberals use. Anything that has a positive connotation begins to have a liberal spin. Even the word, ‘liberal’, has been taken over by the left. ‘Liberal,’ ‘liberty,’ and ‘libertarian’ all have the same root for a meaning – the original ‘liberals’ were what today we call ‘libertarians’. Today, the left tries to link libertarianism with the alt-right, in spite of the fact that libertarianism believes the exact opposite of everything the alt-right believes.
An anti-fascist sounds like a good person, but look at ANTIFA. How is it that someone can be against fascism, while acting just like a fascist? The answer is simple: the left has redefined the term ‘fascist’ to mean ‘anyone who disagrees with the left.’ Real fascism is a version of socialism that focuses on government control over the economy rather than government ownership. The original fascists watched the Red Revolution in Russia, and realized that socialism lacked any incentives to produce, other than the threat of violence. Fascism was an attempt to provide incentives to produce, while still maintaining the kind of state control over the economy socialists call for. Leftists don’t like the real definition of fascism, as it makes many of them fascists.
Racism is another word the left changes the meaning of. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, ‘Racism’ means the following:
rac·ism
[ˈrāˌsizəm]
NOUN
- prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior.
There are few on the left who will agree with this definition, as it allows ethnic minorities to be racist. To the left, only the majority ethnicity can be racist, and often anyone in the majority ethnicity is called racist whether they believe racist things or not. Conservatives need to stop backing down when called ‘racist,’ and need to force liberals to support that allegation whenever they make it where it does not apply. The low expectations the left has for women, and for ethnic minorities, is racism, based on the actual definition of that word, and this is something we need to make every liberal understand.
Note the phrasing the left uses. When I initially wrote the above paragraph, I used the phrase ‘dominant ethnicity’ rather than ‘majority ethnicity,’ and I think most people reading this will think that ‘dominant ethnicity’ sounds less awkward. ‘Majority ethnicity’ is actually the correct phrase, as it does not imply that one ethnicity dominates others. The left, of course, wants us to view ethnicity in terms of dominance, and as a result the phrase ‘dominant ethnicity’ is what we hear in the media. Stop using the phrase ‘dominant ethnicity’ unless you really think white people dominate ethnic minorities.
One would think that the opposite of ‘gun control’ would be guns that are out of control, and as a result, conservatives gave up a great deal when we allowed the phrase, ‘gun control,’ to become the common thing anti-gun zealots are called.
The left is much better at using the subtleties of word and phrase connotation as ideological weapons, than are those on the right. We need to improve in this regard, correcting those on the left who use phrases that are not truly descriptive. We actually did well when we made ‘pro-life’ a thing, but ‘pro-choice’ should be called ‘pro-abortion.’ We need to think about who we phrase things – and about how the left phrases things – very carefully.
We need to stop watching movies that have a clear liberal slant, and to boycott celebrities who use their fame to forward a negative social agenda. When businesses cow-tow to liberals, we need to make them feel the wrath of the right. The best way to shut-up Sean Penn, and others like him, is to ensure that it is not profitable to use him in a movie. The best way to stop Google, Facebook, and YouTube is to start using webcrawler.com, wepluribus.com, and Vimeo instead. We have to make a dent in their profitability to force them to play fair.
The left forwards their arguments with emotional appeals of ‘right vs wrong,’ in which they invariably make conservatives the bad guys, and themselves the guardians of the weak and oppressed. Conservatives tend to fight this with facts and logic, but while facts and logic should appeal to the majority of the public, emotional appeals are far more compelling. We should use facts on logic on the right, and particularly since the facts and logic tend to agree with us, but we have to use facts and logic to turn the emotional appeal of ‘right vs wrong’ against liberals. We can’t let them claim that hating men, or hating white people, is a fight for social justice. We have to show that what the left calls ‘social justice’ is really just an excuse to practice sexism and racism.
Ours is still by a large a center-right country, but it is moving leftward. More to the point, the center constantly moves leftward, and the center-right moves with it. It is time for conservatives to stop fighting a defensive war, as if slowing down the leftward migration is the best we can hope for. We need to go on the offensive, and make a Long March of our own. We’ve had a Long March toward leftism for long enough. It is time to start a Long March Back to where our nation belongs.
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