Marxism: the Next Generation
If more Americans had been familiar a couple of decades ago with the history recounted in the pages of Next Gen Marxism... a lot would be different. For one thing, Barack Obama would almost certainly never have been elected president. Fewer people would've been suckered into the George Floyd hysteria...
For the history told in Next Gen Marxism is the history of what we now know as wokeness - the leftist sociocultural ascendancy manifested in (among much else) cancel culture, the Antifa and BLM riots, DEI, "judicial reform," "squatter's rights," the near-ubiquitous promotion of transgender ideology, and (not least) the conspiracy of Hollywood, the media, the D.C. swamp, and Big Tech to destroy Donald Trump's first term and deny him a second...
But in fact, this toxic creature has a long lineage that leads back to Rousseau and the French Revolution in the 18th century, Marx and Engels in the 19th, and the Russian Revolution in the 20th. Then there's Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), whose revolutionary writings - notably his theory of hegemony - have made him, in the authors' words, "the unrivaled Marxist political theorist of the past half century." (And guess who, of all people, is America's "top Gramsci scholar"? None other than Pete Buttigieg's father, Joseph. It's one of a number of surprises here...)
Another key player in this story is Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), father of the New Left of the 1960s and 70s... For Marx, the revolution was all about class... But... American workers didn't want to revolt... they were free, ambitious citizens of a constitutional Republic who knew that their hopes for economic betterment lay in capitalism, not communism. So American radicals changed their tune. Dropping class struggle, they shifted focus to categories like race and sex...
Donald Trump's surprise win in 2016 - thanks to an electorate that was increasingly tuned in to the left's skullduggery - threw a monkey wrench into the radicals' plans, necessitating a DEFCON 1 response: the Russia collusion hoax, the 2020 election steal, the "insurrection" lie, the "threat to our democracy" mantra, the two impeachments, and the multitude of baseless lawsuits...
Twenty years after Roger Kimball's landmark study The Long March (2000), a British writer named Marc Sidwell wrote another volume, also entitled The Long March. Both my book The Victims' Revolution (2012) and James Lindsay's The Marxification of Education (2022) examined the radicalization of the academy. And just last year, Christopher Rufo published America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything.
Which is not to suggest that Next Gen Marxism is superfluous. Far from it: this story needs to be told and retold until everybody gets it...
Students Deserve to Know the Truth About Socialism, by Chris Talgo, American Thinker, 5 April 2024.
Must read book: American Marxism. 'American Marxism' Is Mark Levin's Most Important Book Ever
Cultural Marxism, Political Correctness, and Critical Theory
Identity Socialism - Herbert Marcuse's toxic legacy
Leftism - a Hegelian spiral toward Marxism
Socialism, Democratic Socialism, and Social Democracy
Watch this short video: Scripted Reality. It's a real eye-opener.
