Increasingly, we are seeing more and more people declare that “there are no rules” and that we must “fight like the Left” to the point of adopting Leftist thinking and frameworks, both of which are necessary prerequisites to engage in “tactics” of Gramsci, Marcuse, or Alinsky. The line of “thinking” is that everything has already been blown up by the Left so that we have to “join ‘em to beat ‘em” at their own game. That this ignores the little fact that the “rules for radicals” or “repressive tolerance” are tailor made to achieve goals antithetical to America seems beyond too many who foolishly believe that they can highjack the immanentization to steer it towards their own chosen eschaton, by sheer manliness or oracular intervention.
To put it bluntly, NO, Marx or his pseudo-intellectual dependents did not have any “good ideas” or any “good points”/insights into society or power. In reality, the adoption of Leftist thinking is nothing less than a triumph for the Left, for the Right has become them… the debate merely one of who is the bolshevik and who is the menshevik.
What the Gramscians did is replace the old with their framework via the “Long March Through The Institutions”, waiting for the Right get frustrated and toss out “the rules”. The Right only had superficial normalcy left; without those rules, they had only that new framework left—the framework of, by, and for the Left.
Totalitarian is, ultimately, in the mind, and one can’t break free because of internal capture, and nothing underlying to replace it. The superficial means nothing, at that point, at least nothing of true value or worth.
Many on the Right, purported or otherwise, only opposed things because they were outside that superficial layer of normalcy. It was alien only because it was alien and due to the momentum and habit, once it became normal in society it became normal for them individually, because the underlying fundamentals upon which lay “normalcy” had changed.
Such is the case with same-sex marriage, which has broad bipartisan support because it became the new normal. People opposed it because it wasn’t normal, which it wasn’t until it was. Once that sheer veneer of normalcy was gone, people readily fell into that Leftist framework hook, line, and sinker. Now, there are, aside for a lonely few such as your humble author, scant few who oppose same sex marriage outside of token religious opposition, which is to say no substantial opposition in a legal sense that could ever convince who were not already so religiously opposed—and even then those so opposed tend to not oppose it legally.
This is why it was so important to not blow things up; that remnant of normalcy was the only thing preventing the immanentization of that eschaton! Rather than be gambled away foolishly, it must be preserved, no matter how slight, threadbare, or thin, so as to rebuild the old pillars and fundamentals through an even longer walk back through not only the institutions but the very fabric of society. Ironic, then, that those who wish to “fight like the Left” would eschew a long march of their own in favor of a short bus drive.
In many ways, were are past the point where breaking stuff appart would lead to the old fundamentals or societal pillars reasserting themselves. Those are likely gone unless they are rebuilt; that undisturbed superficial sense of normalcy and the remnant of what came before is, as unlikely as it may be, the only true was back. It is the only authentic “RETVRN” even possible.
What the Left offers is not a tool to return, but parasitism that inevitably kills the host. The tactics of the Left are the tactics of the destructive parasite, and unwavering faith will not change its nature. It is a method of tyranny and mutation. In order to defeat the “opium of the masses”, one must become the “opium of the masses”. Rather than impose, by force, a new faith, it corrupts the old and struts about as in a LARP while wearing a skinsuit. The costume may change, but the roleplay goes on.
And oh how the fundamentals of the Left are now accepted as being part n’ parcel of the modern post- conservative Right. When confronted with the plain truth, people adopt the thinking of “four legs good; two legs bad”. It is an engagement in doublethink as a subconscious defense mechanism to prevent the entire ontological worldview they have assembled, which they use to define their very being and place in the world, from collapsing. When that doesn’t quite work, they “trust the plan” or engage in nth dimensional chess, or otherwise collapse into cultish infallibility.
To accept Marxist (or Gramscian or Frankfurt School) analysis is to accept their worldview and literally “beg the question”.
The answer being begged is Marxism.
