The Long March Through the Institutions Is Already Here
Media. Schools. Universities. Churches. Corporations. Charities. Every single one of them has been either fully or partly captured by the ideology of neo-Marxism.
A friend sent me an article written by Andrew Sullivan, which mentioned that Coleman Hughes got into hot water last year after delivering a (pre-approved) TED talk embracing Martin Luther King’s Jr. principle that we shouldn’t judge people by the color of their skin.
Hughes, a heterodox black thinker and fellow at the Manhattan Institute, had his TED talk thrown into the Memory Hole after it angered several leftists who disagreed with Hughes’ message.
The episode had Sullivan wondering if MLK would be allowed to give a TED talk today, but what really gave me pause was this paragraph in his article.
“…the philosophy that underpins the stymieing of Hughes’ speech and so many other appalling incidents of intolerance over the last few years is a real one, constructed quite recently. And the leaders of this movement, unlike its more winsome critics, really believe, as I do, that ideas matter — which is why, since the failure of 1960s campus activism and domestic terrorism, they have worked from the universities outward to control and change the world. And triumphed!” (emphasis added)
This paragraph troubled me.
Sullivan is hardly a crank. A gay, British-American Catholic, Sullivan is one of the most established and celebrated commentary writers of the 21st century. The former editor of The New Republic, he hung his hat at Time, The Atlantic, and The Daily Beast before he landed at New York magazine in 2016, where he spent about five years before leftists drove him out during the Covid madness.
Nor is Sullivan a partisan. Though he once described himself as an Oakeshott-style conservative, I still recall his bitter disavowal of Bushism during the War on Terror and his later (odd) spats with Sarah Palin. (He also detests Donald Trump, a figure he sees as absurd.)
Sullivan is a rare creature: a bipartisan figure in an era that demands partisanship. So when he writes things like this—“since the failure of 1960s campus activism and domestic terrorism, they have worked from the universities outward to control and change the world. And triumphed!”—you should pay attention.
Sullivan isn’t exactly endorsing Christopher Rufo’s new book America’s Cultural Revolution, which explores how neo-Marxist radicals took over America’s institutions, but he clearly agrees with its thesis.
If you doubt this thesis is true, you should read Sullivan’s article. (I haven’t read Rufo’s book yet, so I can’t speak to that.) He focuses on a handful of radical thinkers Rufo discusses in his book—Paulo Freire, Derrick Bell, Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paulo Freire and Derrick Bell—and explains how we now live in the world their ideas created.
It’s staggering how clearly you can see in their once-marginal writing and speaking the world we now live in. The old America — rooted in individual freedom, civil rights, equality of opportunity, merit, hard work, family and country — is swept away in their worldview. And not just swept away: inverted. In this ideology, liberal societies are actually the most effective forms of oppression; “civil rights” are just Jim Crow in disguise; equality of opportunity is a myth, to be replaced by equality of outcome, or “equity”; imprisoning black criminals is the same as enslaving innocent human beings; racial progress is a lie; the individual is a mere unit of a collective identity; and a free society as a whole is merely a set of interlocking oppressions designed to favor white, cis, straight men. It’s all there — decades ago!
Sullivan is describing the der lange Marsch durch die Institutionen (the long march through the institutions, a phrase attributed to Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) and later coined by Marxist student activist Rudi Dutschke in the 60s.
Thomas Bradley wrote about Gramsci and “the long march” in a 2019 FEE article.
Gramsci argued that the Bolshevik Russian revolution of 1917 worked because the conditions were ripe for such a sudden upheaval. He described the Russian revolution as an example of a “war of movement” due to its sudden and complete overthrow of the existing governing structure of society. Gramsci reasoned that in Russia in 1917, “the state was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous.” As such, a direct attack on the current rulers could be effective because there existed no other significant structure or institutions of political influence that needed to be overcome.
In Western societies, by contrast, Gramsci observed that the state is “only an outer ditch” behind which lies a robust and sturdy civil society.
Gramsci believed that the conditions in Russia in 1917 that made revolution possible would not materialize in more advanced capitalist countries in the West. The strategy must be different and must include a mass democratic movement, an ideological struggle.
This is where “the long march through the institutions” comes in. The ideological struggle Gramsci described could only be won by converting the institutions. Which institutions?
“Gramsci spoke of organizations including churches, charities, the media, schools, universities and ‘economic corporate’ power as organizations that needed to be invaded by socialist thinkers,” Thomas writes.
Media. Schools. Universities. Churches. Corporations. Charities. Every single one of them has been either fully or partly captured by the ideology of neo-Marxism. Coleman Hughes getting bounced from a TED talk for preaching a message about judging people by character and not skin color is just one example.
At some point between 1970 and 2023, the institutions were claimed. I can’t watch a football game without getting pummeled with social justice messaging. It’s everywhere—in church pews on Sunday morning, in corporate board rooms, in medicine and policing.
It’s true that for now ideas that run counter to the neo-Marxist gospel can be tolerated, but not by influential and powerful institutions. They live in quiet terror of being on the wrong side of the woke mobs. Like TED, they will cave a the slightest pushback.
Where this goes from here nobody knows, but Sullivan is right when he says that ideas actually matter and that “once obscure scribblers like Hobbes, Machiavelli, Locke, Marx, or Nietzsche created the world we live in.”
And I fear he’s correct in his conclusion.
You cannot graft deeply illiberal practices and neo-Marxist ideology onto a liberal polity for very long, before the contradictions force a resolution. A House divided so profoundly cannot stand. But the surrender of the Democratic liberals and the insane radicalization of the GOP almost certainly means that peaceful, liberal politics may well not be capable of resolving this contradiction. Which means that something much darker and more violent will.
Marxism brought the world nothing but suffering in 20th century. When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, some naively wrote of “the end of history.”
They were wrong.
It’s a cliché to say that history repeats itself, but clichés are clichés for a reason. And I fear we’ll be learning the truth of this in the not-too-distant future.
These institutions need a controlled burn to remove the Marxist dead wood. Otherwise the rot will continue to fester.
Hi, Jon - Thanks for pointing me to yet another book to add to my gargantuan TBR. I actually found the audio version of Rufo's book on Spotify, so it's on-deck following Enough Already by Scott Horton - though being old school, I do want to read both books in hard copy since I've always absorbed info better when I see it as opposed to listening while trying to multi-task.
And I can attest to sports outlets having nonsense like DEI and "social justice" shoved down our throats. I barely watch the NFL these days, and my overall love of professional sports has become null and void because of the way they shove these messages down our throats.
Sooner rather than later, let's hope more people start seeing through this and stop it in its tracks by tuning into other forms of entertainment or other outlets.