The Long March Through the Institutions is Ending in Nothing Much (Updated)

As a prisoner of Mussolini’s fascist regime, the Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci used his prison notebooks to describe the importance of hegemony as a reinforcement of power. Control of the instruments of force works alongside a cultural project that more subtly dominates through signals and speech: You obey in part because the secret police will come throw you in the camps, but also because the regime is normal, the protector of the thing presented as our shared values.

1. Don’t be a freak and an extremist, living in opposition to society

2. By the most remarkable coincidence, that means obeying the party and the state

Building on Gramsci’s idea of a societal “war of position” to capture the culture, a German student leader of the 1960s New Left named Rudi Dutschke proposed a “long march through the institutions” as a political strategy, capturing the sensemaking institutions for the ultimate purpose of political victory. Your pastor and your teachers and the television news tell you to abandon bourgeois so-called norms of property and family, friend. Don’t you want to be normal? Don’t you want to listen to the experts?

And so:

See, clerical collar. The pastor has shared the word of God, which is to get a lot of abortions. You can’t argue with this, because you haven’t been ordained. Do you even have a graduate degree from a seminary, you loser? The cultural authorities have spoken! Famous description of the capture of normative institutions by the left:

Standing on the back end of the long march, Sean Davis — the founder of The Federalist, and an important figure in a movement for conservative counter-hegemony — is blackpilling:

That’s not wrong, but it’s also not right. The political left has very successfully captured a bunch of cultural institutions — that began to shrivel and lose their authority once they were captured. They’re doing for media and academia what the Great Leap Forward did for agriculture.

In 2023, the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences awarded its prestigious Governor’s Award to the LGBTQ advocacy group GLAAD, and the president of the organization used her acceptance speech at the Emmys to demand more more more more more transgender television. She made a hegemonic argument: More trans characters and storylines causes more trans acceptance. People who see a lot of trans everything in their nightly entertainment find themselves wanting a more wonderfully trans-everything real world, and ohhh, friend, don’t they start yearning to be warm and caring and castrate their sons and make them turn into their daughters? Screenshots from that linked video:

There’s the hegemonic premise. Stories are culture-changing. The industry got the memo:

Also, all the forms of corporate television — broadcast, cable, streamers — are in trouble, and being shoved aside by distributed production taking place outside Hollywood and presented through the open avenue of the Internet. Recent headline in the Hollywood Reporter:

And so on:

Look around: capture is decline. During the Biden years, the American military turned to DEI and transgender fetishism. Cultural politics got into every nook and cranny. As The Federalist just reported, the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division distributed an all-hands Pride Month message celebrating the proud legacy of America’s wonderful gay, lesbian, and transgender paratroopers. Also:

The left captured academia, and also:

They captured everything, and everything they captured is turning to ashes. The loss of cultural status has extremely serious practical effects. Television, including children’s television, is full of constant transgender messaging. Also, the industry that provides sex change procedures for children is dying rapidly. Headline last week in the Boston Globe:

The political model is broken: You fools, we have hegemonic control! DON’T YOU SEE THE TRANSGENDER STORIES ON TELEVISION!?!?!?

The long march through the institutions delivered the institutions, but it didn’t deliver the hegemonic authority that was supposed to come with the control of the sensemaking apparatus. The Nazis just don’t want to castrate their sons — they’re persisting in their cultural backwardness, even though we fully control the sociology departments! Part One worked, but Part Two didn’t.

There’s a counter-argument to be made, centered on the decline of marriage and the collapse of First World birth rates, but the story isn’t simply leftist capture of institutions followed by victory. The contest continues.

Underlying all of this is a story about the capture of family functions by the “helping professions,” and the related feminization of institutions. I assume most people here have already read the new essay from Helen Andrews on the “Great Feminization,” but there’s the link if you haven’t. As always, the discussion is about averages and tendencies, not about all men and all women, and arguably no one has done more to destroy transgender fetishism (for example) than JK Rowling. In a different context, but on the theme I’ve discussed above, John Carter describes the same kind of decline that follows capture. Opening paragraphs, and click the link to read the whole thing:

That institutional collapse into “background noise” is real, and it’s the emerging story of the coming generations. That “pastor” combining a clerical collar with Planned Parenthood vestments hasn’t seized hegemonic control by capturing the pulpit as a place of authority, because the performance is just ludicrous. The long march through the institutions ends with…that.

Have faith, take heart, keep going.

UPDATE:

Take THAT, Orange Man! The power of the mass resistance is, is, the power…hold on, the nurse is here.