Melanie Phillips explains Gramsci
Sometimes a particular combination of headline and author catches your eye and you just know where the article is going to go. So I must admit a certain sense of keen anticipation when I spotted the words ‘We were fools to think the fall of the Berlin Wall had killed off the far Left. They’re back - and attacking us from within’ in conjunction with the name ‘Melanie Phillips’.
At first reading, the piece appeared to be a corker, right down to the stab at summarising Gramsci for a Daily Mail audience. Sure, I know that idea sounds counterintuitive, in a ‘Richard Littlejohn outlines his debt to the theology of Reinhold Niebuhr’ or ‘Seumas Milne ponders the downsides of Serbian nationalism’ kind of way, but to my mind that just made it all the better.
So imagine my disappointment, dear reader, when a quick Google revealed that both the underlying thesis - not to mention chunks of text - are simply rehashed from a 2007 piece authored by Linda Kimball on the US far right fringe website American Thinker. It transpires that Ms Phillips may not have read Prison Notebooks after all, and really should cut Kimball in for at least 50% of the presumably not ungenerous fee she got for the feature.
But in District Line terms, the argument advanced by these two women is totally Dagenham, as psychiatrists dub patients who are clearly three stops beyond Barking. If Kimball and Phillips are to be believed, me and my mates are running the world. Yep, the liberal left has only been pretending to be on the back foot for the last three decades, the better to gull the masses.
Thankfully, our heroines have twigged that we have secretly ditched class struggle at the point of production, only to resume it at the level of ideology. Moreover, the tactic has worked brilliantly, and we have virtually succeeded in installing the dictatorship of the politically correctariat.
Our basic problem is that we are ‘hostile towards western civilisation’ and thus seeking to bring it down. We just can’t help hating freedom, thanks to our ‘totalitarian mindset that replicates the way communist societies clamped down on any other than permitted views’. This is tantamount to reconstituted ‘communist ideology’ that is actually worse than full on Stalinism, being ‘even more deadly’ as an ‘active enemy of western freedom.’
Got that, folks? Forget the Red Terror, forced collectivisation, the Great Purge, Hungary 1956, the Cultural Revolution, the suppression of the Prague Spring, and Cambodia in the Year Zero. Political correctness is ‘even more deadly’.
Now, I have to admit that feminist friends sometimes do tick me off for cracking mildly sexist jokes, and rightly so. But this has not so far resulted in a knock on the door at midnight from a detachment of Beria-inspired bulldykes, come to carry me off to PC re-education camp so that I can learn from the peasantry.
Now for the clever bit; all of this stuff was theorised in the scribbled thoughts of some Italian bloke banged up by Mussolini for his opposition to fascism, and subsequently ‘taken up by Sixties radicals’.
Phillips: This was what might be called ‘cultural Marxism’. It was based on the understanding that what holds a society together are the pillars of its culture: the structures and institutions of education, family, law, media and religion. Transform the principles that these embody and you can thus destroy the society they have shaped.
Kimball: The new battleground, reasoned Gramsci, must become the culture, starting with the traditional family and completely engulfing churches, schools, media, entertainment, civic organizations, literature, science, and history. All of these things must be radically transformed and the social and cultural order gradually turned upside-down with the new proletariat placed in power at the top.
Phillips proceeds to list the consequences: ‘the nuclear family has been widely shattered’ … ‘education was wrecked’ … ‘law and order were similarly undermined’ … ‘illegal drugtaking tacitly encouraged’ … ‘turned morality inside out’. Then we get to the real target of the broadside:
Feminism, anti-racism and gay rights thus turned men, white people and Christians into the enemies of decency who were forced to jump through hoops to prove their virtue.
Indisputably, there has been an erosion of social cohesion in Britain since the 1970s. But the primary reason is not the clandestine machinations of closet Gramscians, but the abandonment of social democracy for exactly the kind of inegalitarian society driven by the very market forces that Phillips applauds for ‘carrying the torch of liberty’.
And if feminism, anti-racism and gay rights really are that wicked, with what should they be replaced? Presumably the return of the traditional mother and wife, penalty-free racial discrimination and a retreat to the times of hush-hush homosexuality.
Whatever anyone thinks of society today, it is the creation of Thatcherism and Blairism, which are both essentially variations on a neoliberal theme. Lenin would not - as Phillips crassly concludes - be smiling if he could somehow see it from his mausoleum. But Hayek certainly would be.
In short, Phillips already lives in the kind of country that is the only conceivable outcome of the brand of rightwingery she herself represents; she might at least be that little bit more graceful about it.
Source: Liberal Conspiracy