The American Long March: The Communist Plot to Destroy American Universities
The average person who senses something has gone wrong in American cultural life is not a paranoid conspiracy theorist.
Karl Marx’s central theory was that capitalism would, under the weight of its own contradictions, generate the conditions for its own overthrow. The working class would eventually recognize the purportedly poor conditions under capitalism, collectively revolt against the state, and — after mass death and a ‘transitional’ dictatorship — history would miraculously end in a global bohemian utopia.
This obviously didn’t happen. In fact, the opposite happened.
What followed was a significant societal improvement under capitalism. The welfare state progressed, the middle class expanded, wages rose, and workers in the West stopped being particularly interested in seizing the means of production. The American working classes, on whom the entire communist project depended, instead of revolting, bought high-tech refrigerators on credit and comfortably watched baseball on the newest TV that capitalism had to offer.
By mid-century, it was apparent to any candid Marxist observer that the proletariat was not behaving as Marx predicted.
When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, and the USSR dissolved two years later, the economic question finally seemed internationally resolved. On the purely material question of which system produces more goods and distributes them more efficiently, capitalism won decisively.
With the bastion of international communism dead, Francis Fukuyama began drafting what would become The End of History, and Western civilizationalists naively celebrated what they believed to be the fall of the red specter as a credible threat. Sadly, they were wrong.
The Soviet Union did not collapse merely because of the failure of the command economy. To maintain national cohesion, the USSR, like any large empire, needed to atomize the many different peoples spread across its territories, breaking up the intermediate institutions that stood between them and the state.
Many of these in-groups were freshly acquired following the Second World War, with the USSR eating up entire nations that were just recently independent. The Soviet regime had spent 70 years attempting to systematically dismantle the family, church, and ethnic and national identity. These were not incidental casualties of its territory, but deliberate targets representing competing sources of loyalty to the Marxist project.
The attempted collectivist ‘Soviet’ identity project to counter and abolish these distinctions was a total failure. When the economic crisis came in the late 1980s, there proved to be nothing beyond political repression holding the USSR together. What re-emerged were the nations of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, and a dozen other suppressed identities whose nationalistic pride rematerialized as sovereign states overnight.
So, what is a committed Marxist intellectual in the 1990s, sitting with this post-Cold War wreckage, to do? Does he just pack up his literature, admit he was wrong, and abandon the communist project entirely? Unfortunately, almost every devoted Marxist chose not to. For them, communism had not failed. Instead, they concluded that the failure was not within communism itself, but the inoperability of economic communism when imposed on top of intact traditional societies.
The family unit, national identity, and religion had proven themselves to be larger political obstacles than originally anticipated. In other words, for communists to succeed, the cultural revolution must precede the economic revolution. Ironically, this is almost exactly the opposite of what Marx originally prescribed.
The Frankfurt School had been working on this problem from the 1930s onward. Why, given the material conditions that Marx predicted would produce radicalization, had workers in the West been so defensive of the nation and existing order? Their diagnosis was that capitalism had successfully pacified the revolutionary impulse via physical comforts and “manufactured consent,” — communist pejoratives for quality living and national community.
The things normal people take as signs of prosperity — homeownership, consumer credit, the suburban dream — have no revolutionary appeal. Therefore, if the working class had found success under capitalism and could no longer be relied upon, new agents of revolution had to be found.
This realization, with the prior in mind, was the precise moment communists reoriented themselves from economic politics to cultural politics. Liberation was no longer about ownership of the means of production, but the deconstruction of Western Civilization and its institutions, whose existence proved to be incompatible with the transformations required of revolutionary ideology.
What followed over the next several decades was the development of a theoretical program on the left variously termed critical theory, poststructuralism, or postmodernism. These are the theories that are being taught in universities all over America today.
The core move in each case is the same: take a traditional category that represents a source of social stability and “reveal” it as a historically contingent arrangement. If the category is constructed, the argument goes, it can be deconstructed and therefore reconstructed differently — conveniently on the communists’ terms.
The most aggressive extension of this program reaches epistemology: if rationality and objectivity are capitalist ideological constructs, as they claim, then this program is unchallengeable. You cannot refute an argument for someone whose first move is to discredit objectivity and the tools of refutation. Every one of us on the right who has ever witnessed an open-mic free-speech event on a major college campus dissolve into protest has seen this firsthand.
The strategic implication of this analysis had been articulated some years prior by the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, whose writings became extremely influential on the Western Left. Gramsci’s central contribution was the concept of cultural hegemony: the idea that the ruling class maintains dominance through the production of “common sense,” the natural, self-evident truths we hold that maintain social order.
He describes a patient generational project of installing a counter-hegemony until the traditional order no longer has the cultural oxygen left to survive. It operates through the gradual shift in this “common-sense” until they become the default assumptions of educated, credentialed people, and a particular ideology becomes “simply how things are.”
Rudi Dutschke, an East German radical, later popularized the strategic application of Gramsci’s thought as the “long march through the institutions,” a tribute to Mao’s long march. The result of this effort, compounding for 50 years across America, was the successful application of this theory to the institutions that produce the American elite.
Power in the contemporary United States is distributed across a vast, decentralized network: graduate schools, media and journalism, the nonprofit sector, think tanks, philanthropic foundations, corporate HR departments, professional associations, and above all, the elite universities that produce the people who staff these places. Political scientists such as Lee Jussim have documented the dramatic change in the ideological composition of American university faculties between roughly 1990 and 2020, with self-identified liberal to conservative faculty in the humanities and social sciences moving from 3:1 to upward of 12:1 in some disciplines.
The reason it is hard to see for some is that, by the time it becomes visible in these downstream expressions, it becomes the status quo or “simply how educated people think,” rather than an imposed ideology. The hegemony, as Gramsci wrote, once established, reproduces itself. They have been trained within an intellectual framework that makes certain conclusions “common-sense” and others indefensible, or shocking and even offensive.
The average person who senses something has gone wrong in American cultural life is not a paranoid conspiracy theorist. The average American college student who complains about their woke teachers, when a major university seems to have a political agenda, when an American corporation scraps merit-based hiring, or when a medical school inserts social justice modules into its curriculum, is recognizing the terminal expression of a deeply communist plot to conquer American institutions.
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