by Ted Cruz at the Federalist
The following is an excerpt from Unwoke: How to Defeat Cultural Marxism in America.
The New Left of the early 1970s knew they could not mount a violent revolution against the government. Not if they wanted to be successful. They could no longer throw bricks through windows, scream at police officers, and hold unruly demonstrations in the public square if they wanted to win hearts and minds to their cause — at least not yet.
For now, they had to take the ideas of Marx, the ones that they had worked so hard to bring to the United States, and quietly slip them into the minds of people in some other way.
The question was: How?
The answer, oddly enough, came in part from an obscure series of political essays called Prison Notebooks, selections from which had just appeared in translation in the United States, in 1971.
These notebooks were written by a man named Antonio Gramsci, who had been imprisoned in the last years of his life, from 1926 to 1937, by Benito Mussolini shortly after Mussolini became dictator in Gramsci’s home country of Italy. For years, Gramsci had been an active member of the Italian Communist Party, attempting to overthrow the government and bring about a worker’s paradise on Earth just as his hero Karl Marx had envisioned.
But he kept hitting walls. The society Gramsci and his comrades were living in seemed especially resistant to the doctrines of communism that they were pushing — not to mention that their Marxist groups kept splitting apart on account of infighting and poor organization.
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,…
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