As the revolutionary fevers of the sixties were calming in
the seventies, the Right Wing was alarmed by what they took to be the sneaky
new strategy of subversion by the New Left, the so called “long march through
the institutions”. The Modern Age, a
magazine that was proudly to the right of National Review, published an article
by a certain Helmut Schelsky (translated by Edward Shils) in 1974 that laid out
the program in the most apocalyptic terms possible: “The unity of “left-wing
radicalism” which resides in this consensus regarding strategy embraces the
German Communist Party and its university affiliate “Spartakus”, as well as the
most diverse anarchist grups, the leadersip of the Young Socialists, as well as
important sections of the Young Democrats.” Schelsky’s message was not just for
Germans (West Germans, who lived in a country, incidentally, where the Communist
party was as illegal as it had been in the 1930s, under the Nazis), but for all
defenders of the West. Schelsky puts upfront the fact that the systematic strategy
of subverting the system is about “the conquest of the universities and of
teacher training colleges…”
Schelsky’s sense of the Long March through the institutions was
not exactly an illusion. Indeed, in the seventies, the return of student
radicals to graduate programs was a long event. In many ways, the second wave
of feminism was nurtured in English departments – to my mind, one of the great
triumphs of liberal civilization. Similarly, gay civil rights was an exercise in
both the streets and the classrooms.
Although I am quoting an article from 1974, I could be
quoting Chris Rulfo in 2023. He even uses the verb conquest in his articles and
podcast about how the “radical left conquered everything.” It is a curious
thesis – in the year 2023, without a peep from the Democrats or the “radical
left”, billionaire wealth surged by 2 trillion dollars. Not, from this “radical
leftist”, a banner year in our conquest. But if one keeps in mind that the
conquest has a nub of truth – the oppression of women, of gays, of blacks,
Hispanics, etc in America was, at the very least, discredited, even if out
there in the fields it was still doing its work – and one looks at that surge
of wealth for those at the top, it was obvious that the so called “cultural war”
– which is really a civil rights struggle, disguised as a struggle against “woke
censorship” – was about to take a new turn. The universities and schools simply
cannot hold out in their aging liberal sensibility against the massive changes
in the composition of wealth not only in America but throughout the “West”. The
American liberal cult of the savior “billionaire” – the ex of Bezos, or Bezos
himself, or Soros, or some other moneybags – signals that everything has gone
wrong. The long march had become a wholly owned subsidiary, in the standard
centrist Democratic party narrative, of the “good rich people”.
Thus, the Potemkin villages were easy targets of
destruction. Much easier than anybody thought. The news channels, newspapers
and universities have been rolling over at speed in a mere three months due to
the efforts of the truly stupidest collection of bozos ever to have used the
Oval office to sell baseball caps.
When a collective collectively loses its backbone like this,
one must look at more than individual vice. The long march of plutocracy
through the parties, starting with the Dem surrender to Reaganism, has borne
its poisoned fruit.
There is some relief, I suppose, in knowing who you can’t
rely on. In this acid test of American democracy, we can see the savior
billionaire groupies looking for some win-win figleaf, some way of making
retreat and surrender look like the most reasonable thing ever done by a
Democratic politico in the gym basement of the Senate building. In other words,
we see the sheer comedy and parody on display of the woke-lite brigade. They
will, when the cards are down, join the Trumpies.
Tin soldiers and Columbia folding/this spring we’re on our
own, to parody an old song.
We are on our own.
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