The right-wing culture war and its Communist antecedents

What happens to a society in which a minor segment of that society objects to the very premises of that society, then decides to change the basic political institutions that teach those premises and have them instead teach the ideology of the minority to everyone?

Paul Rosenberg explains that this is what movement conservatism has been attempting to do to America since the 1960's, and it is the basis of what is being called America's culture war. The strategy was first defined by the Italian Marxist theorist, Antonio Gramsci, as he attempted to explain why workers did not become Communists as Communist theory said they would. His explanation was that the central institutions of existing society indoctrinated workers so that instead of becoming Communists, they instead aspired to become members of the bourgeois themselves. Gramsci's proposed solution was that ideological Communists had to take control of the basic social institutions and use them to teach Communist ideology.

This is a good description of what the American right wing conservatives have been doing for fifty years. Recently they have been somewhat politically successful, but have totally failed to change the ideological premises of the majority of Americans. This has caused them a great deal of frustration and has resulted in their redoubled and more extreme efforts to destroy basic American ideology and replace it with their conservative social, economic and religious ideologies.

Paul uses this discussion to briefly address Obama's Kumbaya politics. In Paul's view, Obama's idea is based on the assumption that the culture wars are the result of equal warfare between both the extremist right-wing and the left-wing Americans, but Paul considers this a flawed assumption. Instead the American "left-wing" has not been fighting to repress the right-wing. The aggressive fight and the attempt to repress the ideas of their opponents comes entirely from the side of the movement conservatives.

I think that Paul's description of the flaw behind Obama's Kumbaya politics is correct. America has simply not taken the movement conservative threat to basic American values seriously, since one of the most basic American values is that both sides in any argument should be freely heard and then Americans will independently decide which is correct. The movement conservatives use this basic American value to present their side, but then work extremely hard to repress their opponents is much the same manner as the Communist ideologues did. This leads to a failure of the American system to deal with the threat to its very existence. Paul attributes this to a failure to understand that there really is a highly organized and well-financed effort to create the culture war and use it to destroy America's basic values so that those of the right-wing conservatives can replace them.

I'm not yet sure how far I agree with Paul Rosenberg, but some of what he writes does strike a chord. He plans a series of articles which explain what the right-wingers have been doing, and that may clarify the situation and answer my questions. But in the meantime, he is offering an interesting explanation of what the culture wars is all about, one that certainly supports my belief that Obama's Kumbaya politics is both flawed and dangerous.

So go read his article and see what you think.