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The story has been told many times over the years. There are, indeed, many ways to tell it, although a passage from the beginning of Roger Kimball’s 2000 book The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America can serve as a more than suitable summary of all of them:
In the Sixties and Seventies, after fantasies of overt political revolution faded, many student radicals urged their followers to undertake “the long march through the institutions.”…In the context of Western societies, [this] signified – in the words of Herbert Marcuse – “working against the established institutions while working within them.” It was primarily by this means – by insinuation and infiltration rather than confrontation – that the countercultural dreams of radicals like Marcuse have triumphed.
For what it’s worth, the phrase “long march through the institutions” – a reference to the long march of Mao’s army in 1934 in retreat from the Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek – has been attributed by some to the German socialist Rudi Dutschke (1940-79) and by others to the Italian socialist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937).
In any event, in recounting the American left’s long march, who or what should be foregrounded? No two writers have exactly the same answer. Kimball, for his part, chose to focus on a range of individuals and institutions, including Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, the “Beat Generation” writers, Timothy Leary, and The New York Review of Books. Two decades later, in a 2020 book that was also entitled The Long March, the British writer Marc Sidwell traced the gradual countercultural subversion of the West back to Gramsci before delving into the roles played in that process by György Lukács, E. P. Thompson, and Marcuse in that process. James Lindsay, whose 2022 book The Marxification of Education limits its purview largely to the subversion of the academy, puts the Brazilian socialist Paulo Freire (1921-97) at the heart of the story; and my own 2012 book The Victims’ Revolution, which also confines itself to the leftist takeover of higher education, splits the responsibility for that dire development among Gramsci, Freire, and the Afro-Caribbean Marxist Frantz Fanon (1925-69).
Christopher Rufo’s incisive new book America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything covers essentially the same territory as Kimball’s and Sidwell’s books while giving attention, along the way, to the events reported by Lindsay and me. Rufo, now a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is a remarkable young man (he turns 39 on August 26) who increasingly needs no introduction: during the last few years, he’s become a leading voice in the struggle against the mainstreaming at American schools and colleges of critical race theory (CRT), transgender ideology, and the tyranny of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). In addition to writing extensively on these topics (notably at City Journal), he’s been impressively active on the barricades, leading the effort to have CRT banned from public schools in no fewer than 22 states, inspiring President Trump to ban CRT “training” in the federal government, and rolling back radicalism at New College in Florida, at which Governor Ron DeSantis named him a trustee. The progressive reaction to his activities is summed up in the fatuous headline of a 2021 New Yorker hit job: “How a Conservative Activist Invented the Conflict over Critical Race Theory.”
In America’s Cultural Revolution, Rufo confesses that it took him a while to recognize that CRT’s ascent was only one aspect of the latest phase in a gradual, decades-long process of far-left cultural infiltration that has targeted not only schools and colleges but also America’s other major institutions, including corporations, media, and government. His own subsequent investigations led him to see the whole business as starting with Marcuse, who initiated the process of “sanitiz[ing] and adapt[ing]” the radical ideas that motivated the militant groups of the 1970s “into the official ideology of America’s elite institutions.”
In order to impose some order onto a sprawling and multifaceted topic, Rufo subdivides his book into four parts. Each depicts a different aspect of the cultural insurgency, which Rufo identifies with a specific prophet of revolution and a particular postmodern perversion of critical thinking, to wit: while Marcuse, with his “critical theory,” was a prophet of political revolution, Angela Davis (1944-), with her “critical praxis,” was a prophet of race war, Freire, with his “critical pedagogy,” was a prophet of academic coup-making, and Derrick Bell (1930-2011), with his “critical race theory,” was a prophet of power. Of course this fourfold division is mainly a structural conceit; in reality, the egregious developments that Rufo identifies with these four horsepersons of the apocalypse are all about revolution and all about power.
For those to whom Marcuse is just a name, Rufo fills in his backstory: a German Jew who was given refuge in America in the 1930s, Marcuse thanked his new homeland, two decades later, by formulating ways to overthrow it; in the late Sixties, celebrating Mao, Fidel, and Che as heroes of “freedom” while savaging American conformism and consumerism from his faculty perch at UC San Diego, he became the New Left’s #1 guru.
Then the New Left collapsed, UCSD cut Marcuse loose, and he went back to the drawing board.
What to do? Marx had vested his revolutionary hopes in the poor, downtrodden workers, but Marcuse recognized that in postwar America that demographic was, by most historical standards, rich: they owned their own homes, they vacationed in the Caribbean, and they enjoyed every imaginable creature comfort. Rather than recognizing this as a victory for capitalism, however, Marcuse saw it as a gyp: blue-collar Americans, he complained, had been bought off by “the hell of the Affluent Society”; while they might think they were free and happy and well off, in reality they were wage slaves, repressed without even knowing it, and hence useless to anyone seeking to foment a good old-fashioned Marxist rebellion.
Where to turn, then? Marcuse was smart enough to see that if blue-collar Americans, damn them, tended to be patriotic and contented, a great many of America’s supposedly well-educated elites were ripe for propagandizing; with disgruntled blacks serving as their foot soldiers, they could, over time, capture major institutions and implement a “dictatorship of the intellectuals.” To be sure, this meant replacing class struggle with race struggle – that is, encouraging whites to feel guilty about their purported racial privilege while encouraging blacks to believe that they stood no chance whatsoever of achieving social equality or economic advancement in capitalist America.
And, damn it, it worked: over the years, as Rufo puts it, “Marcuse’s students and followers gained professorships at dozens of prestigious universities,” where they dedicated themselves to the noble work of brainwashing. Weathermen terrorist Bernadette Dohrn was hired by Northwestern University; Bill Ayers, who’d planted bombs at the U.S. Capitol and Pentagon (and who would go on to help launch Barack Obama’s political career), won a sinecure at the University of Illinois; and Kathy Boudin, who’d taken part in the notorious 1981 Brinks robbery that left two cops (and whose son Chesa would be San Francisco’s DA from 2020 to 2022), ended up at Columbia.
And in turn, many of their students became professors, and continued the work of indoctrination. Among them was Davis, a graduate student of Marcuse’s (and member of the Black Panther Party) who became famous for supplying the guns used in the 1970 kidnapping and murder of a judge, and who, after being acquitted (probably because of the worldwide Kremlin campaign to paint her as a victim of racism), spent several years in Cuba, traveled to the USSR to accept the Lenin Prize, planted flowers at the Berlin Wall in memory of an East German border guard, and ran for president of the U.S. on the Communist Party line. Not least, in a time while serious scholars with humanities and social-science Ph.D.s struggled to find teaching jobs, Davis held the University of California Presidential Chair at UCLA, was a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Syracuse and Rutgers, and ended up as a Distinguished Professor Emerita at UC Santa Cruz. (Davis, observes Rufo dryly, has always displayed “a unique talent for securing the support of the institutions she was revolting against.”)
In the 1980s and 90s, the American political center moved to the right. But academia – especially the Ivy League and other elite universities – moved leftward. Did parents notice? If so, they didn’t seem to care. Those who did notice usually felt that it didn’t matter – that once students entered the real world, they’d shed their seditiousness. Back in the day, this was true enough: elite graduates who took jobs at white-shoe law firms or Fortune 100 companies used to kick radicalism to the curb quickly enough. But this gradually turned around. Nowadays, as soon as graduates get hired, they set about radicalizing their workplaces. This process started years ago, but as Rufo points out, the nationwide hysteria surrounding the death of George Floyd in May 2020 sent it into overdrive.
One massive trophy for Marcuse’s heirs was the New York Times. After the 2008 recession, the Times unloaded many veteran reporters, replacing them with fresh Ivy grads who “capture[d]” the newspaper for the left – an event that Rufo rightly calls “a pivotal turn in the long march through the institutions.” Soon the Washington Post, NPR, and MSNBC also fell. The impact of this media takeover, and of the ensuing transformation of these media companies into hard-core propaganda machines, has been incalculable. “In 2009,” notes Rufo, “only 32 percent of Democrats believed that racism in the United States was a ‘big problem’; by 2017, that number had more than doubled to 76 percent. In 2021, most “very liberal” Americans guessed that police had killed over 1000 unarmed black men in 2019; one-fifth of those said that the number was over 10,000. In fact, the real figure was 14.
Yes, there’s a difference between the Black Panthers of yesteryear – who preached violent warfare, mass executions, and the rape of white women as “an insurrectionary act” – and today’s woke hand-wringing about “systematic racism” and “white supremacy.” But the more you look at then and now, the more superficial the difference seems. In both cases, the long-term objective is precisely the same: total societal upheaval, a wholesale transfer of power, and the replacement of individual liberty with victim-group dominance. A gloved fist is still a fist. You don’t really have to kill the opposition as long as you can get him fired, evicted, and deplatformed.
As I’ve said, Rufo is covering well-trodden ground here. But to say this isn’t to suggest that America’s Cultural Revolution is in any way superfluous. On the contrary, even now, several years into the woke era, roughly half of Americans still think that woke just means being nice. To quote a meme I saw on Facebook earlier this week, “Woke means awakened to the needs of others. To be well informed, thoughtful, compassionate, humble and kind. Eager to make the world a better place for all people. “The clueless characters who repost nonsense like this have been told a thousand times – and they really, truly believe – that Democrats like Joe Biden, Adam Schiff, Chuck Schumer, and Jerry Nadler are champions of democracy and that the MAGA movement stands for fascist insurrection, toxic masculinity, and white supremacy. These benighted souls desperately need the comprehensive reality check that Christopher Rufo provides in this wise, trenchant, and utterly timely book.
I read the book. Excellent summary, Bruce!
As Bruce mentions, other books deal with this history but Rufo’s tour-de-force summary is powerful. It also filled in many gaps in my knowledge.
I’m 75 years old and graduated from CSU-Chico in 1969. I’ve been reading your site for a few months. I often read it on my smart phone.
I’m puzzled and frustrated by the formatting of the pages on your site, especially the comments pages. I’ve read some comments which are formatted with such narrow columns that I have to scroll all the time I’m reading. Why don’t you make a standard-sized box which can take more words to a line?
Welcome John, do you use the larger text setting on your phone? I’m only in my late 50s, and I do. As a result, most sites and many apps read poorly for me. Good luck, I’d start with the text settings in your phone or browser. Also, the forum at the phone and browser websites might have an explanation, and maybe a fix.
Brilliant review of a brilliant book, sir!?
What has disturbed me, though, is the almost chronic obliviousness of many to the fact that DEI sections and departments are simply communist political minder systems ——— why otherwise would a small univeristy like that of the University of Utah have thirty–four DEI personnel?!
The diabolical brilliance of the left’s big guns was to realize that successful revolutions have been brought about by the intellectuals. As Davis understood, once ensconced in a university or government job, they get paid to bring the institution down! Another option is to be fed money and revolutionary ideas by billionaires, NGOs or formerly conservative foundations.
We have no such options and seem to rely on the epiphanies of a few individuals at a time.
In countering the left’s juggernaut how do we get people off their phones and into reading or at least listening to, relevant books and essays, and then finding the time and money to fight against the very institutions that once symbolized freedom and individualism?
I just finished David Greenfield’s essay, American Unreality. (To lie and be believed has become the only right.) I sent it to a few friends who will, hopefully, spread its idea. We are in our seventies and have the time to read.
Unfortunately, the hidden punch line of the long march through the institutions is a totalitarian world government harkening back to the days of royalty ruling and serfs serving. Only today bloodlines have disappeared, replaced by scientism and technocracy.
By the time enough citizen’s realize the end-game, it will be too late.
Remember the revelation at the end of the Twilight Zone’s, To Serve Man – It’s a Cookbook!
One of history’s great injustices is that there has never been a Nuremberg trial for crimes against humanity perpetuated by the communists.
That’s very true.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn talked about that issue many times in Gulag Archipelago.
And in her book “Gulag”……….Anne Appelbaum has a pretty good explanation as to why.
Rufo’s book is a superb depiction of the long march of the left through American institutions and values.
The reason why so much of the population is revulsed by prosperity (either their own or others) is the time difference between biological evolution (300 Millenia) and economic/cultural evolution (30 decades). Hunters and farmers evolved to flourish in privation and hardship.
Marcuse, Gramsci et al were successful in delivering their message against prosperity because they had a sympathetic (emotional) audience.
It’s not about economics it’s about morality. If men have to choose between prosperity and morality they will choose morality even if that morality leads them to their death.
The Jihadists who flew to their suicides were rejecting the morality of the pursuit of happiness on earth for what they believed was the higher morality of altruistic self-sacrifice for God.
“Facts don’t matter when you’re morally right.” – AOC
What morality is AOC talking about? What morality can be divorced from the facts of reality? AOC is talking about the morality of altruism and self-sacrifice. Altruism claims that man’s highest virtue and duty is NOT the pursuit of his personal happiness but to sacrifice his happiness for society. Altruism is the moral basis for theocracy, collectivism, and socialism.
Capitalism, i.e., the moral pursuit of personal happiness on earth is based on Ayn Rand’s moral code of rational selfishness. The moral code which defends each man as end in himself not the means for the ends of others.
One limitation of Rufo’s book is that he presents history as if a small group of radicals slowly took over starting 50 years ago. We know it goes back further. The faculty in the 60s were already supportive. Rand wrote about in “The Cashing-In: The Student Rebellion” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. Reading it you’ll see everything today was already there with minor changes in style. She explains why the faculty was already leftist.
You’re right.
Check out the Frankfurt School of Marxism relocating to Columbia University in NYC from Germany in the 1930s.
The Marxists knew they had a limited future when Hitler came to power.
Columbia U. was more than happy to welcome them to the Big Apple.
Uh oh. School’s back in session. Get ready for more moral preening from our rezident “teacher”
You (THX) write: “The Jihadists who flew to their suicides were rejecting the morality of the pursuit of happiness on earth for what they believed was the higher morality of altruistic self-sacrifice for God.”
No. The jihadis flew into buildings because “fighting in Allah’s cause” is, per Islam, the only surefire way of entering Paradise (Jannah in Arabic), where carnal and sensual pleasures abound forever, far more than what can be enjoyed in this life. These pious savages did not consider what they did to be a sacrifice as Rand and you define it, i.e. giving up something of greater value for something of lesser value. Your knowledge of Islam is deficient, with all due respect.
The late great novelist Tom Wolfe once gave a lecture which I was lucky to hear.
In that lecture Wolfe talked about a prediction that F. Nietzsche made in the early 1900s.
I’m paraphrasing and going off distant memory………..but FN made the point that because the West was based on Christianity.
And the central figure of Christianity was Jesus who FN considered to be a “victim”………the West would devolve into victimhood as its central characteristic.
It was an astounding prediction which has come true.
But I believe Nietzsche had a twisted view of Christianity and that the return of the Crusader mentality will occur before the final eschatology of Revelation is played out.
What is the correct interpretation of Christianity if not that altruism and self-sacrifice for others is man’s highest virtue and duty?
The message of Christianity is not “enjoy your life on earth, pursue your personal happiness, make lots of money and enjoy it”. The message of Christianity is “Adam and Eve are guilty of Original Sin and so is every man, God punished mankind for Original Sin by sending Adam and Eve to toil and die on earth. You must seek salvation and redemption by practicing renunciation and self-sacrifice for God and neighbor”.
That’s not a twisted view of Christianity, that’s a precise distillation of the Bible and what the Bible says. It’s what the Church fathers Tertullian and Augustine believed. It’s what Martin Luther and John Calvin believed.
The modern Christians on the Right like Joel Osteen or Reverend Ike who interpret Christianity as sanctioning and encouraging the personal pursuit of happiness on earth and sanctioning and encouraging Laissez-Faire Capitalism are the ones who have a twisted and mistaken view of Christianity.
All of the major American Christian Churches (Catholic, Lutheran, Methodist, Southern Baptist) are now at the border in partnership with Joe Biden receiving millions upon millions of tax-payer dollars to aid and abet the Illegal Alien Invasion of America in the name of Christian altruism and self-sacrifice for God and neighbor. “You are your brother’s keeper”, “The meek shall inherit the earth”, etc.
“The roots of America’s welfare state lie in the Populist-Progressive Era of the late 19th century and early 20th century, especially with the Protestant social gospel movement, which held that Christian ethics and “social justice” should drive public policy, including wealth redistribution, trust-busting, graduated tax rates to punish the rich, cradle-to-grave handouts, and missionary-style imperialistic ventures abroad to spread the faith and make the world “safe for democracy.” The concept of social justice, which jettisoned the idea that we actually earn and deserve what we get in life, was first adopted by the Jesuit Luigi Taparelli in the 1840s, as drawn from the work of St. Thomas Aquinas.” – Richard M. Salsman “Holy Scripture and the Welfare State”
One of the main reasons our institutions have become so toxic is the insistence by courts that they be secular. For most of American history, there was a consensus about general Judeo-Christian morals, and it was not seen as violated the Establishment Clause. Children were taught the ten commandments, not to get drunk or fornicate and to look to the Bible for moral guidance. Almost no one disputed this consensus until liberal educators started reinterpreted the Establishment Clause. We have many awful ideologies because loyalty to the Constitution and adherence to Judeo-Christian morals is no longer expected in public life, the university or public schools. Instead of having professors and teachers who help students avoid the perils of binge drinking and promiscuity, we have teachers who emphasize personal freedom over self-control. I recently saw a 1950’s film about college students. They mentioned in passing that the Dean would expel students who drank! How much better would student achievement be if they had to refrain from alcohol. And how much better would achievement be if dorms again were sex-segregated with curfews? We need to return to the old moral consensus, armed with data showing that people who actually practice those morals (versus merely expose them) have better adjusted children and a better life on most metrics.
Good points. I agree that a return to something other than this moral mess would be better for mental health, physical health and make for a thriving country. This is a view so unpopular it is unfathomable to todays young or to college administrators. And I thank you for remembering to write Judeo-Christian. Some others, who are promoting divisiveness, in a troubled and dangerous time, have forgotten that our founders were well people who had insight into history and human nature.
Just wait until the whiny brainwashed woke meet Islam head on. I predict that if it comes to that they’ll genuflect immediately and begin growing beards, wearing cover-ups and spouting new slogans.
well-read people
> Just wait until the whiny brainwashed woke meet Islam head on.
I think this is already happening, in Sweden.
And how do you resolve a conflict between Judaic Law and Christian Law? How do you resolve a conflict between Roman Catholic Law and Anglican Law? Between Anglican Law and Calvinist Law? Between Calvinist Law and Lutheran Law?
Among Jews, how do you resolve a conflict between the Hasidim and some other branch of Judaism with a different interpretation of Holy Scripture?
How many centuries of intra-Christian war, conflict, and murder did Christians go through because of differences in competing interpretations of Holy Scripture? The Reformation and Counter Reformation were three centuries of Christians killing Christians over exegesis and interpretation of Christian Law.
“[In a free country] All laws must be objective (and objectively justifiable): men must know clearly, and in advance of taking an action, what the law forbids them to do (and why), what constitutes a crime and what penalty they will incur if they commit it….
That which cannot be formulated into an objective law, cannot be made the subject of legislation—not in a free country, not if we are to have “a government of laws and not of men.” An undefinable law is not a law, but merely a license for some men to rule others….
In accordance with the principles of America and of capitalism, I recognize your right to hold any beliefs you choose — and, on the same grounds, you have to recognize my right to hold any convictions I choose. I am an intransigent atheist, though not a militant one. This means that I am not fighting against religion — I am fighting for reason. When faith and reason clash, it is up to the religious people to decide how they choose to reconcile the conflict. As far as I am concerned, I have no terms of communication and no means to deal with people, except through reason.” – Ayn Rand
What are you talking about? Personal freedom and self-control are not mutually exclusive. The personal pursuit of happiness requires personal responsibility and self-control. Achieving your rational, personal, goals is no easy task, it requires the responsibility of self-control.
“Happiness is the successful state of life, pain is an agent of death. Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values. A morality that dares to tell you to find happiness in the renunciation of your happiness—to value the failure of your values—is an insolent negation of morality. A doctrine that gives you, as an ideal, the role of a sacrificial animal seeking slaughter on the altars of others, is giving you death as your standard. By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man—every man—is an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.
But neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. Just as man is free to attempt to survive in any random manner, but will perish unless he lives as his nature requires, so he is free to seek his happiness in any mindless fraud, but the torture of frustration is all he will find, unless he seeks the happiness proper to man. The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live….
Happiness is not to be achieved at the command of emotional whims. Happiness is not the satisfaction of whatever irrational wishes you might blindly attempt to indulge. Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy—a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but of using your mind’s fullest power, not the joy of faking reality, but of achieving values that are real, not the joy of a drunkard, but of a producer. Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions.” – Ayn Rand
Like an invasive cancer, the woke movement will be impossible to stop until it has consumed all its internal organs (the institutions). We are already starting to not recognize the world that we were born in.
Wow, fascinating.
Reminds me of our Congress.
In every event I love you Daniel but in every event absolutely nothing has been done.
At last, you and I completely agree. We all love Daniel. He gives us so much. Even if a quick fix is not among the gifts he shares with us.
Who’s Daniel? Daniel Greenfield? This article is by Bruce Bawer.
I think that attributing today’s woke progressivism to a Marxist takeover of institutions misses the point. The great march through the institutions was really the great march into the institutions. The guru for the new left wasn’t Marcuse. It was C Wright Mills.
The idea that latching on to the various victim identities and the green agenda would lead to a redistribution of wealth and power in America was a fool’s errand. The co-optive powers of American capitalism combined with the reality of human nature made it inevitable that these movements would simply become part of the process of the centralization of wealth and power in America.
As Eric Hoffer said, “all great causes begin as movements, become businesses and end up as rackets.”
It is not the working class or even much of the middle class that has marched through the institutions. It is the continuing centralization of wealth and power of a super wealthy group of billionaires, surrounded and protected by a highly credentialed professional elite who rule the country in their own selfish interest and use their woke politics to shield themselves from the majority of Americans who are not benefited by open borders, the exporting of jobs to china and other countries, the privileging of Ivy League graduates and especially from the condescension of the media, the academic community, the tech moguls and the ultra rich entertainment scolds.
In the last scene of Orwell’s “Animal Farm”, the animals stare into the farm house and see the pigs have turned into people. In the end, there were really very few who wanted to create a fairer world. They just wanted to become part of the elite, their privileged piece of the pie..
VERY SIMPLE
The master enablers who are CURRENTLY working as such are Obama and Soros. Each with their own destructive psychopathies, but sharing the same goal – to bring about the collapse of Western civilization, via their first and most hated target, America.
As Soros tries to outdo his fuhrer’s destruction and power, so does Obama via his affinity for Marxist/communist and radical Islamic ambitions, such as the Muslim Brotherhood.
You can add sports to the institution corrupted by the woke disease. The NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL are simpering collections of woke morons.
Let’s face the truth:
The depraved woke leftist psychopathic democrat party murdered America, with some complicity from the right..
Unfortunately, the Republican party did not find out about the assassination until the
body had become quite cold.
Restoring “America the Beautiful” is unlikely.
Its more important now for families and individuals to find a way to survive
and take care of each other in the new America the Depraved and Corrupt.
Excellent references in this article.
There is one more to go along with those mentioned.
Patrick J. Buchanan wrote Death of the West at the end of 2001.
In that seminal work is a chapter called “Four Who Made a Revolution”.
He profiles Marcuse, Gramsci etc.
And he tells the story of how the Frankfurt School of Marxism relocated to Columbia University in NYC in the 1930s to escape Hitler.
it’s a great read.
The toxic ideals of people like Herbert Marcuse and Angela Davis which have infiltrated their way into academic institutions and institutions of public interest, have influenced the like-minded of unstable and insecure personalities like themselves.
Sadly, the people influenced by these revolutionaries can be found in our political parties; among our “supposedly” duly elected representatives in government.
When government is supportive of these revolutionary idea’s in attempt to destabilize a country like we have seen with BLM and Antifa, then it’s no wonder when we notice how successful they are because government is the one financing it.
When the government supports revolutionary ideals designed to destabilise a country, as we have seen with BLM and Antifa, it’s no wonder they succeed.
A case in point is the government’s support for the lawlessness in California under Governor Gavin Newsom; not to mention the lawlessness in other states.
Marxism has not kept to its original objective. Its core values have always been compromised. The true purpose of communism was for the bourgeoisie to distribute or share their wealth equally with the workers, or proletariat. This objective has never been achieved because the powerful and influential have always benefited. Marxism is a failure!
Every coup d’état that has led to a communist takeover has always resulted in the perpetrators enriching themselves to become the new bourgeoisie of the old one they overthrew.
Marxist measures used by governments should certainly have, by now, grasped the attention of most of us of the present administration.
I thank the Lord for people like Christopher Rufo and others who blaze ahead to reform the minds of the people in the institutions affected.
The least anyone can do is pray for their success, and for the leadership of our government, as the apostle Paul saw and wrote to us about in Scripture (Romans 13:1-7; 1 Timothy 2:1-4).
Our culture has been pulling away from God for many years, moral values, life, honesty, ethics, laws, debt,
committment to our families and our country. We used to be a great nation, One Nation under God, with Liberty, and Justice for all., a nation that couldn’t be beaten because we obeyed the Commandments of our God. ( Learn a hard lesson about those who used to be blessed ). but sacrificed their belief of the ONE that made them GREAT in the first place. We didn’t get where we were because of man, we got there because of God and his blessings.
As I look through history it seems to me that all governments proceed to tyranny and through to dissolution. Then rebuilding begins. The history of U.S. government has been one of dissolution since 1860. I can think of no reason why an unchanging humanity can stop this process through a miracle of some political ideology.
Thanks, Bruce, for an incisive and valuable review. Now I know my trust and regard for Christopher Rufo is well-founded.
I must say that you have elicited a lot of fascinating replies. Unlike some, I have not given up on this country quite yet. It is, I hope and believe, still, in Lincoln’s words, ‘the last best hope of man on earth.’