HEGEMONY AND THE PROGRESSIVE MINDSET

It has often been pointed out that the classical liberalism of the US founding fathers has long been replaced, first by secularist capitalism and now by a strange melee of radical corporate cultural Marxism combined with consumerist hedonism (so-called ‘woke capitalism’). This toxic doctrine now has a complete free hand in academia and in all aspects of public life in the West. Despite years of indoctrination, events like Trump, Brexit and Le Pen show that there still exists a deep residue of the ‘bad old world’, mostly in those born before 1995. This is not to say that people before this date are free from brainwashing, but that those born after it rarely are. What we have today is a control over peoples’ minds and belief systems far greater than anything Mao could have dreamed of. The omnipresence of the new oppressor/victim doctrine is taken for granted as the ‘new common sense’, which is exactly what Gramsci promoted as the alternative to bloody revolutions. 

Astonishing though it may sound, there are progressives in the West who even today see themselves as the victims of the ‘reactionary patriarchal theocracy’ which we so obviously inhabit. The facts of Trump and Brexit are enough to make them claim victim status despite the total control progressives hold over the airwaves and everything else.

 

This surprises and infuriates deplorables. It is one thing to stamp on my face with your rainbow jackboot, but then to claim victim status on top is beyond belief. If any progressive ever reads this article I would invite them to take the ‘progressive vs deplorable challenge’ with me: Get up in the morning and switch on the BBC or any MSM, note down all the pro-Trump or even vaguely-neutral-about-Trump comments. Put on your “Trump 2020” cap and take a ride on the metro. When you get to work, spark up a conversation by the coffee machine, ‘Isn’t it sad about Trump – now the US could have the most extreme liberal abortion laws in the world.’ See how that goes down. When someone asks what you are doing at the weekend, say you are going to your traditionalist Catholic or Evangelical church. On your social media account post some messages about the upcoming pro-life, pro-family march. You could add a few quotes from the Bible, such as ‘male and female he created them.’ By contrast, instead of a MAGA hat on my journey to work, I will wear a Biden, or maybe Chairman Mao hat (that great progressive who killed about 60 million Chinese peasants). I will ask people to support my crowdfunding for oppressed LGBT people in Russia and so on. We can do this for a week or two and then we can exchange notes? I wager that at the very least you will be unemployed, or you could be in hospital or prison. 

 

 

The omnipresence of the new progressive pseudo-religion results in the self-censorship which is the sine non qua of our era.  It means that progressives almost never encounter opposing beliefs, except as ‘examples of stupidity’ by the media. What comes out of the media goes directly into their minds and straight out of their mouths, almost unfiltered. But how could such a situation have arisen, and so quickly in just a generation or two? The answer lies in the astonishing success of Gramscian cultural Marxism, first by the intelligentsia and from there to almost every sphere of public life. Gramsci proposed that a lasting revolution in the West would not be possible until the existing ‘hegemony’ of the ‘oppressors’ was replaced with a new hegemony of the ‘victims’. Bourgeois hegemony masqueraded as such things as ‘common sense’ and ‘natural law’ but was in fact an invention of the oppressor to maintain power. There is no pre-existing or transcendent morality, everything is to be invented from a tabula rasa. Hegemonic patriarchy must be replaced by the hegemony of feminism and the male and female sexes become gender ideology. Perhaps most important of all, Christianity is singled out as a bundle of oppressor axioms to be neutralised and excluded from the public sphere. Far from being dismissive of the Catholic Church, Gramsci lauded its ability to colonise all aspects of life and all strata of society, from peasants to kings. He proposed that the control of the new hegemony must be at least as all-pervasive. Gramsci thus placed a huge emphasis on education as the key to revolution. First to be colonised by the new hegemony were the post-war universities, leading to student rebellion, the permissive society and the ‘swinging sixties’. The so-called ‘long march through the institutions’ (Rudi Dutschke) did not take very long. It has culminated in the adoption of radical cultural Marxism by today’s mega-corporations. The hegemonic ‘woke capitalism’ of Google, Facebook et al signalled the irreversible victory of the new religion. Once academia and the media had been seized, the collapse of any resistance elsewhere was precipitous. 

 

Gramsci was right in that the origins of this struggle were ancient and could probably be traced back to the Garden of Eden. The so-called ‘Enlightenment’ and the French Revolution were the pivotal events in modern history. After this, the genie was out of the bottle, and attempts to return to order such as Tsar Alexander’s Holy Alliance were always fragile and short-lived. The new hegemony is first and foremost at war with Christianity, but not only so. Traditional cultures of all kinds are in the crosshairs of the new religion. The aim is to destroy all such cultures completely, or replace them with gutless, ersatz ‘museum versions’, in which everything is reduced to superficial cultural praxis and nothing is about traditional hierarches and belief-systems. The stupefying banality of such a world is reflected in the young today who are not steeped in the beliefs and history of their ancestors, and as a result are more monochrome than even Mao’s hysterical students. These drifting masses should inspire pity in us, rather than animosity. The craven obsession with quaint old towns and churches, long-ago rendered repulsive by hordes of Erasmus students, is itself an expression of this longing and listlessness. Even the current absurd fad for Victoriana (beards and retro bikes etc) is a manifestation of a generation with no real roots, desperately seeking authenticity. 

 

To return to the blindness of today’s progressives. With regards to the oppressor/victim doctrine, Rod Dreher has astutely pointed out that the new cultural Marxism of the globalists is not so much interested in wealth vs poverty as in ‘virtue’ vs ‘non-virtue’. Perhaps this is something to with the fact that the whole narrative is controlled today by a few massive global companies turning over trillions of dollars. More important than wealth is membership of an elevated ‘victim group’:  sexual preference (gender), race, migrants, Palestinians etc. To paraphrase Dreher: ‘a disabled white Evangelical man living on benefits in a trailer park is an “oppressor” whilst a black lesbian university professor is a ‘victim’. Thus it is that because the victim/oppressor paradigm is one of identity, that you are still an oppressor, even when 10,000 people are shaming you in a football stadium, as frequently happened in China’s Cultural Revolution. The very fact that some people voted for Trump and Brexit, sends shivers down a progressive’s spine. Even if just one deplorable was left, it would mean that a ‘return to the old hegemony’ was only a step away. 

 

Most woke fanatics do not overtly talk in terms of creating a new hegemony as this still has negative connotations. However, this situation is changing, as more and more progressives see free speech itself as a backward ‘oppressor concept’ like ‘common sense’. At time of writing, the preferred method of the woke commissars is passive-aggressive euphemistic double-speak. Thus, in the words of Dreher again: ‘Diversity and inclusion means excluding those who object to ideological uniformity.’ Similarly, the new hegemonic moral code (if such it can be called), promotes as a crime anything which limits individual ‘freedom’. The idea of humanity struggling against our sins, passions and evil inclinations to adhere to external moral laws is completely anathema to the new ideology. Anyone who promotes this is considered to be ‘not nice’, and thus the division between the ‘nice’ and the ‘not nice’ becomes a war to exclude ‘former people’ from public life altogether. The ‘not nice’ inspire fear and incomprehension in the minds of progressives. I know this because I was myself for most of my adult life an adherent of this monstrous nonsense. This is why the liberal mind simply ‘cannot compute’ how anyone could hold a different set of beliefs to their own. The fish does not know what water is. They do not care about the self-censorship which we engage in every day because it does not affect them. 

 

Perhaps also, part of the problem lies in that today’s morality (if such it can be called) is, even now, still very Christian in origin. True, it is a morality which promotes individual freedom above all else, but it is also a very different morality from that which would have developed from pagan Rome, or Aztec civilisation, for example. Despite abortion, murder is still the sine qua non of the justice system. This is because, apart from a few exceptions, such as war, we cannot decide when we live and die. Some people die before birth whilst others die at 100. For Christians this is part of the great mystery of God’s creation. Murder is one residue of Christian morality that remains, but the individual struggle against sin, for example, has been largely jettisoned as it limits individual freedom. This distortion of the Christian moral system promotes a kind of hysteria in which (in the famous words of G.K. Chesterton) ‘all the Christian virtues have run mad.’ It follows that the only thing that can be done with deplorables who argue for sin and repentance is to exclude them from the public sphere completely, lest their voices cause progressives’ brains to malfunction. Recently this belief was highlighted to me by a friend who was told that ‘well, Christians will just have to not work in the public sphere, what’s the problem with that?’. Chillingly, the person making the remark, saw no problem with it at all. 

 

For now, this policy of exclusion allows for the existence of traditionalists insofar as they remain quaint fossils who remain in their museums. Although it is difficult to live in a complete ghetto, at least where children are concerned. Personally, I have a big problem with this method of dealing with the current crisis. As Christians, we are called to ‘live in the world, but not of the world’. Moreover, the so-called ‘Benedict option’ (hunkering down in the ghetto to await better times – or the End of Times), is exactly what they want (Woe betide any of us who challenge the hegemony!). Proponents of the Benedict Option start from the wrong premise. They presume that the culture wars are about winning and losing. They are not. Dreher is right to point out that we lost the culture wars and that traditional Christians underestimate the visceral hatred that progressives have towards them. But some doctrines of the new religion (for example, so-called ‘reproductive rights’) are so wrong that we cannot but confront them, without ourselves becoming complicit. Even if I were the last person on earth who believed that killing the unborn is wrong, I would still have to say it. 

 

What then can we do? The first thing should be a basic principle of all Christians and deplorables of all colours. Although we do not take the Benedict Option we should completely opt out of the mainstream media. Let us take the BBC as an example. The BBC is probably the most sophisticated and insidious propaganda machine the world has ever known. I mean that in all seriousness. The BBC is an organisation whose very purpose is the hegemony of Gramscian cultural Marxism in all aspects of life. They do not scream from the airwaves like Mussolini, instead it is done with a raised eyebrow, a sneer or ‘a scientific study’. The BBC is probably more obsessed with LGBT than any other organisation on earth. Its hatred of Trump is so visceral that I would wager there is not a single person who is even vaguely neutral about Trump in the entire organisation. One example to me was interesting recently, I heard a reporter saying something like, ‘Trump has asked his supporters to pray to God…’ with the inflection raised on the last word to denote the ridiculous and absurd. It is a small example, but such speech peppers almost every single sentence of every BBC reporter. The BBC is only one example, all others are the same, the BBC is just the most sophisticated. If we deal with the MSM at all, the first thing is to assume malicious intent.

 

 

To end on a word of optimism. Tolkien said that in this world he would most often be on the losing side, but we must continue to fight. It is important to feel empathy for the rootless progressives who want to destroy our world. Even the heads of Google and the like. I for one would rather be an impoverished nobody than be one of these people. I feel so lucky and thank God every day for that. Today in the West we are not being torn to shreds in the amphitheatre, but the red lines might suddenly crop anywhere when we least expect it. We might be at the coffee machine at work when someone asks: ‘why didn’t you come to the LGBT march yesterday?’. In many parts of the world Christians are still being burned alive, drowned, and mutilated. In the West we are moving towards a different kind of martyrdom which is less lauded, but just as necessary. As St Theophan the Recluse said: ‘in the last days, the martyrdom will not be of the body, but of the mind.’ As all the shepherds become wolves and either go with the flow, or run to the hills, we should remember that each of us is called to greatness. As the saying goes: ‘The darker the night, the brighter the stars.’