Political Correctness and Voter Resistance

In October, I published an article about Angelo Codevilla’s article, “After the Republic.”
has done it again.
I have worked with him for over 40 years, when we were both on Capitol Hill as researchers. I regard him as the smartest guy in the conservative movement. His specialty is foreign policy, but in recent years, he has become the top political analyst. His latest essay is “The Rise of Political Correctness.” Download it here. (Print it out at 80%.)
He is a scholar. He is going to take you through the labyrinths of communist history. He takes us back to the 1930s in the Soviet Union. He argues that the whole concept of political correctness as we know it today had its origin in the USSR under Stalin. It had its origins there because the Communist Party believed that what the party said was true was in fact true, and any attempt to challenge that was met with resistance.
He goes on to argue that the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci recognized early that Marxism had to deal with the issues of Western Christian culture. Marxism would not be successful simply by revolutionary violence because the people as a whole were not committed to the goals of the revolutionaries in the realm of culture. He correctly observes that in this sense, Gramsci was not an orthodox Marxist. I have been arguing this way for 25 years, and this is the first time I have found anybody writing about cultural Marxism who recognizes this fact. In other words, what we see today is a form of deviant Marxism, sometimes called cultural Marxism, which was opposed to the original formulations of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Marx believed that the structure of production or the mode of production is the substructure of society, and culture, philosophy, and morals are simply part of the superstructure which grew out of a prevailing mode of production. Gramsci thought this was dead wrong, and he was right.

This post was published at Gary North on Gary North – January 07, 2017.