Unwoke: How the Left Took Over the America

 Ted Cruz has another article advertising his new book Unwoke: how To Defeat Cultural Marxism in America at The Federalist today. This time, Cruz describes how the thoughts of Antonio Gramsci, and Italian Marxist revolutionary, writing in the late 1920s and 1930s, came to be the dominate the methodology of the New Left.  Along the way, Gramsci's ideas had to be refined by Rudi Dutschke and Herbert Marcuse to become an actionable "long march through the institutions."

Cruz writes that Gramisci's had tried to overthrow the Italian government and failed.  The Italians were resistant to his messages.  Nonetheless, he didn't give up:

But Gramsci didn’t blame himself or his fellow communists for their constant failure. He certainly didn’t blame the bad ideas of Karl Marx.

Instead, like so many Marxists before and after him, he blamed society. In his view Italy, and other societies in the West, were especially resistant to Marxism because they were made up of institutions that were not connected to the government: universities, schools, churches, and newspapers, as well as publishing houses and other means of distributing popular culture. This made implementing Marxism, which relied on the central power of the government to control everything, extremely difficult.

...snip...

According to Gramsci, the only way to truly change society was not by violent revolution, but by infiltrating the institutions that make Western society unique. If Marxists could get inside the universities, for instance, where knowledge is effectively “made,” or get jobs at publishing houses, which were the main avenues through which ideas were distributed at the time, they might be able to change the ways people thought in subtle ways, rather than having to resort to the kind of outward revolution that Karl Marx had planned on.

Cruz points out that Gransci's ideas had to percolate through the so-called Marxist "intellectual" circles for a number of years

At some point in the 1960s, they reached the United States, and by the end of the decade the New Left in America was already beginning to burn out. The primary means of transmission was a professor named Herbert Marcuse, who had done some organizing with Dutschke before coming to the United States and who’d grown to admire Dutschke’s plan for the “long march through the institutions.” In a letter to Dutschke written in 1971, Marcuse said that the long march would be “the only effective way” to bring about a true left-wing revolution in the United States.

Marcuse described the strategy in detail in a book published the next year. He described how leftists would now work “against the established institutions while working within them, but not simply by ‘boring from within,’ rather by ‘doing the job,’ learning (how to program and read computers, how to teach at all levels of education, how to use the mass media, how to organize production, how to recognize and eschew planned obsolescence, how to design, et cetera), and at the same time preserving one’s own consciousness in working with others.”

Which brings us to today, where the Left is in effective control of all the major institutions and a lot of the not so major ones as well. I have noted that most of the Christian denominations have buckled to some degree or another of the Leftist ideologies, even though these go against the Bible. What amazes me is that so many apparently intelligent people can look at the record of absolute failure of Marxist ideas when put into practice, and still dedicate their lives to it. Don't they know the history of murder and death? Don't they know the history of misery, of bread lines, of the denial of people's individuality? Surely, they do, but they either agree with it, or discount it. Which prompts the question: What has sustained the Marxist idea for going on 200 years?

The Church has been sustained through 2000 years by the Holy Spirit working through the men and women who constitute the true saints. The Apostles were witnesses to the death and resurrection of our Lord. Their testimony, and the constant work of the Holy Spirit continues to build and sustain the Church despite the missteps of fallen mankind. So, what has sustained the Marxist movement despite the history of failure to deliver anything like a paradise on earth. The recent attack on Israel and the outpouring of antisemitism in Europe and the United States might give us a clue.  It is not like Marxism whether Communist, Fascist, or Socialist has not been tried, all have been tried and failed.  

I believe that the Marxist movement has been sustained through all these years by the guiding intelligence of Satan himself.