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Why There is a Culture War
By John Fonte
Gramsci and Tocqueville in America |
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Sources:
Why
There Is A Culture War: Gramsci and Tocqueville in America -- by John Fonte
via ORTHODOXY
Why
There Is A Culture War: Gramsci and Tocqueville in America -- by John Fonte
via THE HOOVER INSTITUTE
Why
There Is A Culture War via Free Republic - Has links |
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Foreword from ORTHODOXY:
John Fonte examines the philosophical
antecedents of the culture war to show why the culture war takes the shape
that is has. He reveals why a constant vigilance towards the permanent
things that breathe life into the culture is necessary. The essay runs
about fifteen printed pages but the time spent reading it will prove worthwhile. |
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As
intellectual historians have often had occasion to observe, there are times
in a nation’s history when certain ideas are just "in the air." Admittedly,
this point seems to fizzle when applied to our particular historical
moment. On the surface of American politics, as many have had cause to
mention, it appears that the main trends predicted over a decade ago in
Francis Fukuyama’s "The End of History?" have come to pass — that ideological
(if not partisan) strife has been muted; that there is a general consensus
about the most important questions of the day (capitalism, not socialism;
democracy, not authoritarianism); and that the contemporary controversies
that do exist, while occasionally momentous, are essentially mundane, concerned
with practical problem-solving (whether it is better to count ballots by
hand or by machine) rather than with great principles.
And yet, I would argue, all
that is true only on the surface. For simultaneously in the United States
of the past few decades, recurring philosophical concepts have not only
remained "in the air," but have proved influential, at times decisive,
in cultural and legal and moral arguments about the most important questions
facing the nation. Indeed: Prosaic appearances to the contrary, beneath
the surface of American politics an intense ideological struggle is being
waged between two competing worldviews. I will call these "Gramscian" and
"Tocquevillian" after the intellectuals who authored the warring ideas
— the twentieth-century Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci, and, of course,
the nineteenth-century French intellectual Alexis de Tocqueville. The stakes
in the battle between the intellectual heirs of these two men are no less
than what kind of country the United States will be in decades to come. |
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Refining class warfare
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We’ll
begin with an overview of the thought of Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), a
Marxist intellectual and politician. Despite his enormous influence on
today’s politics, he remains far less well-known to most Americans than
does Tocqueville.
Gramsci’s main legacy arises
through his departures from orthodox Marxism. Like Marx, he argued that
all societies in human history have been divided into two basic groups:
the privileged and the marginalized, the oppressor and the oppressed, the
dominant and the subordinate. Gramsci expanded Marx’s ranks of the "oppressed"
into categories that still endure. As he wrote in his famous Prison
Notebooks, "The marginalized groups of history include not only the
economically oppressed, but also women, racial minorities and many ‘criminals.’"
What Marx and his orthodox followers described as "the people," Gramsci
describes as an "ensemble" of subordinate groups and classes in every society
that has ever existed until now. This collection of oppressed and marginalized
groups — "the people" — lack unity and, often, even consciousness of their
own oppression. To reverse the correlation of power from the privileged
to the "marginalized," then, was Gramsci’s declared goal.
Power, in Gramsci’s observation,
is exercised by privileged groups or classes in two ways: through domination,
force, or coercion; and through something called "hegemony," which means
the ideological supremacy of a system of values that supports the class
or group interests of the predominant classes or groups. Subordinate groups,
he argued, are influenced to internalize the value systems and world views
of the privileged groups and, thus, to consent to their own marginalization.
Far from being content
with a mere uprising, therefore, Gramsci believed that it was necessary
first to delegitimize the dominant belief systems of the predominant groups
and to create a "counter-hegemony" (i.e., a new system of values for the
subordinate groups) before the marginalized could be empowered. Moreover,
because hegemonic values permeate all spheres of civil society -- schools,
churches, the media, voluntary associations -- civil society itself, he
argued, is the great battleground in the struggle for hegemony, the "war
of position." From this point, too, followed a corollary for which Gramsci
should be known (and which is echoed in the feminist slogan) — that all
life is "political." Thus, private life, the work place, religion, philosophy,
art, and literature, and civil society, in general, are contested battlegrounds
in the struggle to achieve societal transformation.
It is perhaps here that
one sees Gramsci’s most important reexamination of Marx’s thought. Classical
Marxists implied that a revolutionary consciousness would simply develop
from the objective (and oppressive) material conditions of working class
life. Gramsci disagreed, noting that "there have always been exploiters
and exploited" — but very few revolutions per se. In his analysis,
this was because subordinate groups usually lack the "clear theoretical
consciousness" necessary to convert the "structure of repression into one
of rebellion and social reconstruction." Revolutionary "consciousness"
is crucial. Unfortunately, the subordinate groups possess "false consciousness,"
that is to say, they accept the conventional assumptions and values of
the dominant groups, as "legitimate." But real change, he continued to
believe, can only come about through the transformation of consciousness.
Just as Gramsci’s analysis
of consciousness is more nuanced than Marx’s, so too is his understanding
of the role of intellectuals in that process. Marx had argued that for
revolutionary social transformation to be successful, the world views of
the predominant groups must first be unmasked as instruments of domination.
In classical Marxism, this crucial task of demystifying and delegitimizing
the ideological hegemony of the dominant groups is performed by intellectuals.
Gramsci, more subtly, distinguishes between two types of intellectuals:
"traditional" and "organic." What subordinate groups need, Gramsci maintains,
are their own "organic intellectuals." However, the defection of "traditional"
intellectuals from the dominant groups to the subordinate groups, he held,
is also important, because traditional intellectuals who have "changed
sides" are well positioned within established institutions.
The metaphysics, or lack
thereof, behind this Gramscian worldview are familiar enough. Gramsci describes
his position as "absolute historicism," meaning that morals, values, truths,
standards and human nature itself are products of different historical
epochs. There are no absolute moral standards that are universally true
for all human beings outside of a particular historical context; rather,
morality is "socially constructed."
Historically, Antonio
Gramsci’s thought shares features with other writers who are classified
as "Hegelian Marxists" — the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs, the German
thinker Karl Korsch, and members of the "Frankfurt School" (e.g., Theodor
Adorno and Herbert Marcuse), a group of theorists associated with the Institute
for Social Research founded in Frankfurt, Germany in the 1920s, some of
whom attempted to synthesize the thinking of Marx and Freud. All emphasized
that the decisive struggle to overthrow the bourgeois regime (that is,
middle-class liberal democracy) would be fought out at the level of consciousness.
That is, the old order had to be rejected by its citizens intellectually
and morally before any real transfer of power to the subordinate groups
could be achieved. |
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Gramsci’s long reach
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The
relation of all these abstractions to the nuts and bolts of American politics
is, as the record shows, surprisingly direct. All of Gramsci’s most innovative
ideas -- for example, that dominant and subordinate groups based on race,
ethnicity, and gender are engaged in struggles over power; that the "personal
is political"; and that all knowledge and morality are social constructions
-- are assumptions and presuppositions at the very center of today’s politics.
So too is the very core of the Gramscian-Hegelian world view — group-based
morality, or the idea that what is moral is what serves the interests of
"oppressed" or "marginalized" ethnic, racial, and gender groups.
What, for example, lies behind
the concept of "jury nullification," a notion which now enjoys the support
of law professors at leading universities? Building on the Hegelian-Marxist
concepts of group power and group-based morality, jury nullification advocates
argue that minorities serving on juries should use their "power" as jurors
to refuse to convict minority defendants regardless of the evidence presented
in court, because the minority defendants have been "powerless," lifelong
victims of an oppressive system that is skewed in favor of dominant groups,
such as white males.
Indeed, what is called
"critical theory" — a direct descendant of Gramscian and Hegelian-Marxist
thinking — is widely influential in both law and education. Critical legal
studies posits that the law grows out of unequal relations of power and
therefore serves the interests of and legitimizes the rule of dominant
groups. Its subcategories include critical race theory and feminist legal
theory. The critical legal studies movement could hardly be more Gramscian;
it seeks to "deconstruct" bourgeois legal ideas that serve as instruments
of power for the dominant groups and "reconstruct" them to serve the interests
of the subordinate groups.
Or consider the echoes
of Gramsci in the works of yet another law professor, Michigan’s Catharine
MacKinnon. She writes in Toward a Feminist Theory of the State
(1989), "The rule of law and the rule of men are one thing, indivisible,"
because "State power, embodied in law, exists throughout society as male
power." Furthermore, "Male power is systemic. Coercive, legitimated, and
epistemic, it is the regime." Therefore, MacKinnon notes, "a rape is not
an isolated event or moral transgression or individual interchange gone
wrong but an act of terrorism and torture within a systemic context of
group subjection, like lynching." Similarly, MacKinnon has argued that
sexual harassment is essentially an issue of power exercised by the dominant
over the subordinate group.
Such thinking may begin
in ivory towers, but it does not end there. The United States Supreme Court
adopted MacKinnon’s theories as the basis for its interpretation of sexual
harassment law in the landmark Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson (1986).
This is only one example of how major American social policy has come to
be based not on Judeo-Christian precepts nor on Kantian-Enlightenment ethics,
but on Gramscian and Hegelian-Marxist concepts of group power. |
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Hegel among the CEOs
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Quite
apart from their popularity among academics and in certain realms of politics,
Gramscian and Hegelian-Marxist ideas are also prominent in three other
major sectors of American civil society: foundations, universities, and
corporations.
As laymen and analysts alike
have observed over the years, the major foundations — particularly Ford,
Rockefeller, Carnegie, and MacArthur — have for decades spent millions
of dollars promoting "cutting edge" projects on racial, ethnic, and gender
issues. According to author and foundation expert Heather Mac Donald, for
example, feminist projects received $36 million from Ford, Rockefeller,
Mellon, and other large foundations between 1972 and 1992. Similarly, according
to a Capital Research Center report by Peter Warren, a policy analyst at
the National Association of Scholars, foundations have crowned diversity
the "king" of American campuses. For example, the Ford Foundation launched
a Campus Diversity Initiative in 1990 that funded programs in about 250
colleges and universities at a cost of approximately $15 million. The Ford
initiative promotes what sounds like a Gramscian’s group-rights dream:
as Peter Warren puts it, "the establishment of racial, ethnic, and sex-specific
programs and academic departments, group preferences in student admissions,
group preferences in staff and faculty hiring, sensitivity training for
students and staff, and campus-wide convocations to raise consciousness
about the need for such programs."
Alan Kors, a history professor
at the University of Pennsylvania, has described in detail how Ford and
other foundation "diversity" grants are put to use. As he noted in "Thought
Reform 101" in the March 2000 issue of Reason, "at almost all our
campuses, some form of moral and political re-education has been built
into freshmen orientation." A "central goal of these programs," Kors states,
"is to uproot ‘internalized oppression,’ a crucial concept in the diversity
education planning documents of most universities." The concept of "internalized
oppression" is the same as the Hegelian-Marxist notion of "false consciousness,"
in which people in the subordinate groups "internalize" (and thus accept)
the values and ways of thinking of their oppressors in the dominant groups.
At Columbia University,
for instance, new students are encouraged to get rid of "their own social
and personal beliefs that foster inequality." To accomplish this, the assistant
dean for freshmen, Katherine Balmer, insists that "training" is needed.
At the end of freshmen orientation at Bryn Mawr in the early 1990s, according
to the school program, students were "breaking free" of "the cycle of oppression"
and becoming "change agents." Syracuse University’s multicultural program
is designed to teach students that they live "in a world impacted by various
oppression issues, including racism."
Kors states that at an
academic conference sponsored by the University of Nebraska, the attendees
articulated the view that "White students desperately need formal ‘training’
in racial and cultural awareness. The moral goal of such training should
override white notions of privacy and individualism." One of the leading
"diversity experts" providing scores of "training programs" in universities,
corporations, and government bureaucracies is Hugh Vasquez of the Todos
Institute of Oakland, California. Vasquez’s study guide for a Ford Foundation-funded
diversity film, Skin Deep, explains the meaning of "white
privilege" and "internalized oppression" for the trainees. It also explains
the concept of an "ally," as an individual from the "dominant group" who
rejects his "unmerited privilege" and becomes an advocate for the position
of the subordinate groups. This concept of the "ally," of course, is Gramscian
to the core; it is exactly representative of the notion that subordinate
groups struggling for power must try to "conquer ideologically" the traditional
intellectuals or activist cadres normally associated with the dominant
group.
The employees of America’s
major corporations take many of the same sensitivity training programs
as America’s college students, often from the same "diversity facilitators."
Frederick Lynch, the author of the Diversity Machine, reported "diversity
training" is rampant among the Fortune 500. Even more significantly, on
issues of group preferences vs. individual opportunity, major corporate
leaders tend to put their money and influence behind group rights instead
of individual rights.
After California voters
passed Proposition 209, for example — a referendum outlawing racial and
gender preferences in employment — Ward Connerly, the African-American
businessman who led the effort, launched a similar antipreferences initiative
in the state of Washington. The Washington initiative I-200 read as follows:
"The State shall not discriminate against or grant preferential treatment
to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity,
or national origin in the operation of public employment, or public contracting."
This language was almost identical to California’s Proposition 209. Atlantic
Monthly editor Michael Kelly reported in the Washington Post
on August 23 that when asked his opinion on Proposition 209 during the
referendum debate, Sen. Joseph Lieberman replied, "I can’t see how I could
be opposed to it. . . . It is basically a statement of American values
. . . and says we shouldn’t discriminate in favor of somebody based on
the group they represent."
However, Washington’s
business
leaders disagreed. In his autobiography CreatingEqual, Ward Connerly
wrote that the "most important significant obstacle we faced in Washington
was not the media, or even political personalities, but the corporate world.
. . . Boeing, Weyerhauser, Starbucks, Costco, and Eddie Bauer all made
huge donations to the No on I-200 campaign. . . . The fundraising was spearheaded
by Bill Gates, Sr., a regent of the University of Washington, whose famous
name seemed to suggest that the whole of the high-tech world was solemnly
shaking its head at us."
Interestingly, private
corporations are also more supportive of another form of group rights —
gay rights — than are government agencies at any level. As of June 2000,
for example, approximately 100 Fortune 500 companies had adopted health
benefits for same-sex partners. According to the gay rights organization,
Human Rights Campaign, the companies offering same-sex benefits include
the leading corporations in the Fortune 500 ranking: among the top 10,
General Motors (ranked first), Ford (fourth), IBM (sixth), AT?T (eighth),
and Boeing (tenth), as well as Hewlett-Packard, Merrill Lynch, Chase Manhattan
Bank, Bell Atlantic, Chevron, Motorola, Prudential, Walt Disney, Microsoft,
Xerox, and United Airlines.
Corporate reaction to
gay activist attacks on Dr. Laura Schlessinger is another indication of
how Hegelian-Gramscian the country’s business leaders have become. Sears
and EchoStar have lately joined a long list of advertisers — Procter and
Gamble, Xerox, ATandT, Toys R Us, Kraft, General Foods, and Geico — in
pulling their advertising from the popular talk show host. Whether these
decisions favoring gay (read: group) rights were motivated by ideology,
economic calculation, or an opportunistic attempt to appear "progressive,"
they typify American businesses’ response to the culture war. |
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The Tocquevillian
counterattack
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The
primary resistance to the advance of Gramscian ideas comes from an opposing
quarter that I will call contemporary Tocquevillianism. Its representatives
take Alexis de Tocqueville’s essentially empirical description of American
exceptionalism and celebrate the traits of this exceptionalism as normative
values to be embraced. As Tocqueville noted in the 1830s (and as the World
Values Survey, a scholarly comparative assessment, reaffirmed in the 1990s),
Americans are different from Europeans in several crucial respects. Two
recent books — Seymour Martin Lipset’s American Exceptionalism (1997)
and Michael Ledeen’s Tocqueville on American Character (2000) —
have made much the same point: that Americans today, just as in Tocqueville’s
time, are much more individualistic, religious, and patriotic than the
people of any other comparably advanced nation.
What was particularly exceptional
for Tocqueville (and contemporary Tocquevillians) is the singular American
path to modernity. Unlike other modernists, Americans combined strong religious
and patriotic beliefs with dynamic, restless entrepreneurial energy that
emphasized equality of individual opportunity and eschewed hierarchical
and ascriptive group affiliations. The trinity of American exceptionalism
could be described as (1) dynamism (support for equality of individual
opportunity, entrepreneurship, and economic progress); (2) religiosity
(emphasis on character development, mores, and voluntary cultural associations)
that works to contain the excessive individual egoism that dynamism sometimes
fosters; and (3) patriotism (love of country, self-government, and support
for constitutional limits).
Among today’s Tocquevillians
we could include public intellectuals William Bennett, Michael Novak, Gertrude
Himmelfarb, Marvin Olasky, Norman Podhoretz, and former Clinton White House
advisor and political philosopher William Galston, and scholars Wilfred
McClay, Harvey Mansfield, and Walter MacDougall. Neoconservatives, traditional
conservatives of the National Review-Heritage Foundation stripe,
some students of political philosopher Leo Strauss, and some centrist Democrats
are Tocquevillian in their emphasis on America’s special path to modernity
that combines aspects of the pre-modern (emphasis on religion, objective
truth, and transcendence) with the modern (self-government, constitutional
liberalism, entrepreneurial enterprise). The writings of neoconservative
Irving Kristol and NationalReview-style conservative Charles Kesler
clarify this special American path to modernity. Like thoughtful scholars
before them, both make a sharp distinction between the moderate (and positive)
Enlightenment (of Locke, Montesquieu, and Adam Smith) that gave birth to
the American Revolution and the radical (and negative) Enlightenment (Condorcet
and the philosophes) that gave birth to the Revolution in France.
Like their ideological
opposites, Tocquevillians are also represented in business and government.
In the foundation world, prevailing Gramscian ideas have been challenged
by scholars funded by the Bradley, Olin, and Scaife foundations. For example,
Michael Joyce of Bradley has called his foundation’s approach "Tocquevillian"
and supported associations and individuals that foster moral and religious
underpinnings to self-help and civic action. At the same time, Joyce called
in "On Self-Government" (Policy Review, July-August 1998)
for challenging the "political hegemony" of the service providers and "scientific
managers" who run the "therapeutic state" that Tocqueville feared would
result in "an immense and tutelary" power that threatened liberty. As for
the political world, a brief list of those influenced by the Tocquevillian
side of the argument would include, for example, Sen. Daniel Coats of Indiana,
Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, and Gov. George W. Bush of Texas.
All have supported Tocquevillian initiatives and employed Tocquevillian
language in endorsing education and welfare measures that emphasize the
positive contributions of faith and responsibility.
There is also a third
category to be considered here — those institutions and and individuals
that also oppose the Gramscian challenge, but who are not Tocquevillians
because they reject one or more features of the trinity of American exceptionalism.
For example, Reason magazine editor Virginia Postrel sees the world
divided into pro-change "dynamists" and anti-change "stasists." Postrel’s
libertarianism emphasizes only one aspect of American exceptionalism, its
dynamism, and slights the religious and patriotic pillars that in the Tocquevillian
synthesis provide the nation’s moral and civic core.
Similarly, paleoconservatives
such as Samuel Francis, a leading Buchananite intellectual, oppose modernism
and the Enlightenment in all its aspects, not simply its radical wing.
Likewise secular patriots such as historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. embrace
a positive form of enlightened American nationalism, but are uncomfortable
with the religious and entrepreneurial (including the antistatist) traditions
that complete the Tocquevillian trinity. Catholic social democrats like
E.J. Dionne accept the religious part of the Tocquevillian trinity, but
would like to curb its risky dynamism and deemphasize its patriotism.
A few years ago, several
conservative and religious intellectuals writing in a First Things
magazine symposium suggested that American liberal democracy was facing
a crisis of legitimacy. One of the symposium writers, Judge Robert Bork,
suggests in his book Slouching Towards Gomorrah that "revolutionary"
upheavals of the 1960s were "not a complete break with the spirit of the
American past," but inherent in the Enlightenment framework of America’s
founding principles. Bork and others — including Paul Weyrich and Cal Thomas
— appear to have speculated that perhaps America’s path to modernity was
itself flawed (too much dynamism and too little morality). What could be
called a partial Tocquevillian position of some conservative intellectuals
and activists could be contrasted with the work of American Catholic Whigs
— for example, the American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Novak and the
Faith and Reason Institute’s Robert Royal — who have argued, in essence,
that America’s founding principles are sound and that the three elements
of the Tocquevillian synthesis (entrepreneurial dynamism, religion, and
patriotism) are at the heart of the American experience and of America’s
exceptional contribution to the idea of ordered liberty.
At the end of the day
it is unlikely that the libertarians, paleoconservatives, secular patriots,
Catholic social democrats, or disaffected religious right intellectuals
will mount an effective resistance to the continuing Gramscian assault.
Only the Tocquevillians appear to have the strength — in terms of intellectual
firepower, infrastructure, funding, media attention, and a comprehensive
philosophy that taps into core American principles — to challenge the Gramscians
with any chance of success. |
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Tocquevillianism
as praxis
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Writing
in Policy Review in 1996, Adam Meyerson described the task of cultural
renewal as "applied Tocquevillianism." In explaining one of his key points,
Tocqueville writes in Democracy in America that "mores" are central
to the "Maintenance of a Democratic Republic in the United States." He
defines "mores" as not only "the habits of the heart," but also the "different
notions possessed by men, the various opinions current among them, and
the sum of ideas that shape mental habits" — in short, he declares, "the
whole moral and intellectual state of a people."
One of the leading manifestos
of the Tocquevillians is "A Call to Civil Society: Why Democracy Needs
Moral Truths," published by the Council on Civil Society. It outlines the
traditional civic and moral values (Tocqueville’s "mores") that buttress
the republic. The document (endorsed by, among others, Sens. Coats and
Lieberman, in addition to Don Eberly, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Francis Fukuyama,
William Galston, Glenn Loury, Cornel West, James Q. Wilson, and Daniel
Yankelovitch) states that the "civic truths" of the American regime are
"those of Western constitutionalism, rooted in both classical understandings
of natural law and natural right and in the Judeo-Christian religious tradition.
. . . The moral truths that make possible our experiment in self-government,"
according to this statement, "are in large part biblical and religious,"
informed by the "classical natural law tradition" and the "ideas of the
Enlightenment." The "most eloeloquent expressions" of these truths are
"found in the Declaration of Independence, Washington’s Farewell Address,
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural Address, and King’s Letter
from the Birmingham Jail."
The Tocquevillians, then,
emphasize "renewing" and "rediscovering" American mores, suggesting that
there is a healthy civic and moral core to the American regime that needs
to be brought back to life. Moreover, if the first task is cultural renewal,
the second task is cultural transmission. Thus, the "Call to Civil Society"
declares that the "central task of every generation is moral transmission."
Religion, in particular, "has probably been the primary force" that "transmits
from one generation to another the moral understandings that are essential
to liberal democratic institutions." Moreover, "[at] their best . . . our
houses of worship foster values that are essential to human flourishing
and democratic civil society: personal responsibility, respect for moral
law, and neighbor-love or concern for others." In addition, the statement
declares that a "basic responsibility of the school is cultural transmission,"
particularly "a knowledge of [the] country’s constitutional heritage, an
understanding of what constitutes good citizenship, and an appreciation
of [this] society’s common civic faith and shared moral philosophy."
In the matter of practice,
the past few years have also witnessed what could be called "Tocquevillian"
initiatives that attempt to bring faith-based institutions (particularly
churches) into federal and state legislative efforts to combat welfare
and poverty. In the mid-1990s, Sen. Coats, working with William Bennett
and other intellectuals, introduced a group of 19 bills known as the Project
for American Renewal. Among other things these bills advocated dollar for
dollar tax credits for contributions to charitable organizations, including
churches. Coats’s goal in introducing this legislation was to push the
debate in a Tocquevillian direction, by getting policy makers thinking
about new ways of involving religious and other civic associations in social
welfare issues. Coats and others were asking why the faith community was
being excluded from participating in federal social programs. At the same
time there are other Tocquevillians, including Michael Horowitz of the
Hudson Institute, who favor tax credits, but worry that by accepting federal
grant money the faith institutions could become dependent on government
money and adjust their charitable projects to government initiatives.
In 1996 Congress included
a "charitable choice" provision in the landmark welfare reform legislation.
The charitable choice section means that if a state receives federal funds
to provide services, it could not discriminate against religious organizations
if they wanted to compete for federal grants to provide those services.
The section includes guidelines designed simultaneously to protect both
the religious character of the faith-based institutions receiving the federal
funds and the civil rights of the individuals using the services. However,
in 1998 the Clinton administration attempted to dilute the "charitable
choice" concept in another piece of legislation by stating that administration
lawyers opposed giving funds to what they described as "pervasively sectarian"
institutions that could be inferred to mean churches doing charitable work.
Besides activity at the
federal level, some states have started similar projects. Faithworks Indiana,
a center sponsored by the state government, assists faith-based institutions
with networking. In Illinois state agencies are reaching out to faith-based
institutions through the "Partners for Hope" program. In Mississippi Governor
Kirk Fordice launched the "Faith and Families" program with the ambitious
goal of linking each of the state’s 5,000 churches with a welfare recipient.
Both Gov. George W. Bush
in Texas and Sen. Joseph Lieberman in Congress have been friendly to some
Tocquevillian approaches to legislation. Bush has promoted legislation
to remove licensing barriers to church participation in social programs.
He has also supported faith initiatives in welfare-to-work and prison reform
projects. Lieberman supported the charitable choice provision of the welfare
reform act and co-sponsored the National Youth Crime Prevention Demonstration
Act that would promote "violence free zones" by working with grass-roots
organizations, including faith-based organizations. |
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Legislative battlegrounds
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Gramscian
concepts have been on the march through Congress in recent years, meeting
in at least some cases Tocquevillian resistance and counterattack. For
example, the intellectual underpinning for the Gender Equity in Education
Act of 1993 (and most gender equity legislation going back to the seminal
Women’s Educational Equity Act, or WEEA, of the 1970s) is the essentially
Gramscian and Hegelian-Marxist concept of "systemic" or "institutionalized
oppression." In this view, the mainstream institutions of society, including
the schools, enforce an "oppressive" system (in this case, a "patriarchy")
at the expense of a subordinate group (i.e., women and girls).
The work of Harvard education
professor Carol Gilligan, promoted by the American Association of University
Women (AAUW), was influential in persuading Congress to support the Gender
Equity in Education Act. Professor Gilligan identifies the main obstacles
to educational opportunity for American girls as the "patriarchial social
order," "androcentric and patriarchical norms," and "Western thinking"
— that is to say, the American "system" itself is at fault.
In speaking on behalf
of the bill, Republican Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine made a Gramscian
case, decrying "systemic discrimination against girls." Democratic Rep.
Patsy Mink of Hawaii likewise attacked the "pervasive nature" of antifemale
bias in the educational system. Maryland Republican Rep. Connie Morella
declared that throughout the schools "inequitable practices are widespread
and persistent." Not surprisingly, she insisted that "gender equity training"
for "teachers, counselors, and administrators" be made available with federal
funds. As noted earlier, one of the remedies to "systemic oppression" is
"training" (of the "reeducation" type described by Professor Kors) that
seeks to alter the "consciousness" of individuals in both the dominant
groups and subordinate groups. Thus, Sen. Snowe also advocated "training"
programs to eliminate "sexual harassment in its very early stages in our
Nation’s schools."
In a related exercise
in Gramscian reasoning, Congress in 1994 passed the Violence Against Women
Act. According to Democratic Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware, the "whole
purpose" of the bill was "to raise the consciousness of the American public."
The bill’s supporters charged that there was an "epidemic" of violent crime
against women. Echoing Catharine MacKinnon (e.g., rape is "not an individual
act" but "terrorism" within a "systemic context of group subjection like
lynching"), the bill’s proponents filled the Congressional Record
with the group-based (and Hegelian-Marxist) concept that women were being
attacked because they were women and belonged to a subordinate group. It
was argued by bill’s proponents that these "violent attacks" are a form
of "sex discrimination," "motivated by gender," and that they "reinforce
and maintain the disadvantaged status of women as a group." Moreover, the
individual attacks create a "climate of fear that makes all women afraid
to step out of line." Although there was no serious social science evidence
of an "epidemic" of violence against women, the almost Marxist-style agitprop
campaign worked, and the bill passed.
In 1991, the Congress
passed a civil rights bill that altered a Supreme Court decision restricting
racial and gender group remedies. The new bill strengthened the concept
of "disparate impact"; which is a group-based notion that employment practices
are discriminatory if they result in fewer members of "protected classes"
(minorities and women) being hired than their percentage of the local workforce
would presumably warrant.
Nine years later, in June
2000, the U.S. Senate passed the Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which would
expand the category of hate crimes to include crimes motivated by hatred
of women, gays, and the disabled (such crimes would receive stiffer sentences
than crimes that were not motivated by hatred based on gender, sexual orientation,
or disability status). In supporting the bill, Republican Sen. Gordon Smith
of Oregon declared, "I have come to realize that hate crimes are different"
because although they are "visited upon one person" they "are really directed
at an entire community" (for example, the disabled community or the gay
community). Democratic Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts supported the legislation
because, he insisted, "standing law has proven inadequate in the protection
of many victimized groups."
In a Wall Street Journal
opinion piece, Dorothy Rabinowitz penned a Tocquevillian objection to this
Gramscian legislation. Rabinowitz argued that hate crimes legislation undermined
the traditional notion of equality under the law by "promulgating the fantastic
argument that one act of violence is more significant than another because
of the feelings that motivated the criminal." Using egalitarian and antihierarchical
(that is, Tocquevillian) rhetoric, Rabinowitz declared that Americans "don’t
require two sets of laws — one for crimes against government-designated
victims, the other for the rest of America." |
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The Supreme Court
and the White House
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Like
the congress, the Supreme Court has witnessed intense arguments over core
political principles recognizable as Gramscian and Tocquevillian. Indeed,
the court itself often serves as a near-perfect microcosm of the clash
between these opposing ideas.
A provision of the Violence
Against Women Act, for example, that permitted women to sue their attackers
in federal rather than state courts was overturned by a deeply divided
Supreme Court 5-4. The majority argued on federalist grounds that states
had primacy in this criminal justice area. In another 5-4 decision the
Supreme Court in 1999 ruled that local schools are subject to sexual discrimination
suits under Title IX if their administrators fail to stop sexual harassment
among schoolchildren. The case, Davis v. Monroe County Board
of Education, involved two 10-year olds in the fifth grade. Justice
Anthony Kennedy broke tradition by reading a stinging dissent from the
bench. He was joined by Justices Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas. Justice
Kennedy attacked the majority view that the actions by the 10 year-old
boy constituted "gender discrimination."
American Enterprise Institute
scholar Christina Hoff Sommers in The War Against Boys noted
that the court majority appears to accept the position of gender feminist
groups that sexual harassment is "a kind of hate crime used by men to maintain
and enforce the inferior status of women." Thus, Sommers explains, in terms
of feminist theory (implicitly accepted by the court), the 10-year-old
boy "did not merely upset and frighten" the ten-year old girl, "he demeaned
her as a member of a socially subordinate group." In effect, the court
majority in Davis endorsed Gramscian and Hegelian-Marxist assumptions
of power relations between dominant and subordinate groups and applied
those assumptions to American fifth graders.
Recently, a similarly
divided Supreme Court has offered divergent rulings on homosexual rights.
In June 2000 the court overturned the New Jersey State Supreme Court and
ruled 5-4 in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale that the Boy Scouts did
not have to employ an openly gay scoutmaster. The majority’s reasoning
was quintessentially Tocquevillian -- the First Amendment right of "freedom
of association." Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Rehnquist declared
that "judicial disapproval" of a private organization’s values "does not
justify the State’s effort to compel the organization to accept members
where such acceptance" would change the organization’s message. The law,
Rehnquist continued, "is not free to interfere with speech for no better
reason than promoting an approved message or discouraging a disfavored
one, however enlightened either purpose may strike the government."
The dissent written by
Justice Stevens, by contrast, declared that the states have the "right"
to social experimentation. Stevens noted that "atavistic opinions" about
women, minorities, gays, and aliens were the result of "traditional ways
of thinking about members of unfamiliar classes." Moreover, he insisted,
"such prejudices are still prevalent" and "have caused serious and tangible
harm to members of the class (gays) New Jersey seeks to protect." Thus,
the dissenters in this case agreed with the New Jersey Supreme Court that
the state had "a compelling interest in eliminating the destructive consequences
of discrimination from society" by requiring the Boy Scouts to employ gay
scoutmasters.
In 1992 Colorado voters
in a referendum adopted Amendment 2 to the state constitution barring local
governments and the state from adding "homosexual orientation" as a specific
category in city and state antidiscrimination ordinances. In 1996 in Romer
v. Evans, the U.S. Supreme Court in a 6-3 ruling struck down Colorado’s
Amendment 2. The court majority rejected the state of Colorado’s position
that the amendment "does no more than deny homosexuals special rights."
The amendment, the court declared, "imposes a broad disability" on gays,
"nullifies specific legal protections for this class (gays)," and infers
"animosity towards the class that it affects." Further, the majority insists
that Amendment 2, "in making a general announcement that gays and lesbians
shall not have any particular protections from the law, inflicts on them
immediate, continuing, and real injuries."
Justice Anton Scalia wrote
a blistering dissent that went straight to the Gramscian roots of the decision.
He attacked the majority "for inventing a novel and extravagant constitutional
doctrine to take victory away from the traditional forces," and for "verbally
disparaging as bigotry adherence to traditional attitudes." The court,
Scalia wrote, "takes sides in the culture war"; it "sides with the knights,"
that is, the elites, "reflecting the views and values of the lawyer class."
He concluded that: "Amendment 2 is designed to prevent the piecemeal deterioration
of the sexual morality favored by the majority of Coloradans, and is not
only an appropriate means to that legitimate end, but a means that Americans
have employed before. Striking it down is an act, not of judicial judgment,
but of political will."
Finally, Gramscian and
Hegelian-Marxist concepts have advanced in the executive branch as well.
In the 1990s, the federal government attempted both to limit speech that
adversely effected subordinate groups; and to promote group-based equality
of result instead of equality of individual opportunity.
In 1994, for example,
three residents of Berkeley, Calif., protested a federal Department of
Housing and Urban Development (HUD) plan to build subsidized housing for
the homeless and mentally ill in their neighborhood. The residents wrote
protest letters and organized their neighbors. HUD officials investigated
the Berkeley residents for "discrimination" against the disabled and threatened
them with $100,000 in fines. The government offered to drop their investigation
(and the fines) if the neighborhood residents promised to stop speaking
against the federal housing project.
Heather Mac Donald reported
in the Wall Street Journal that one lawyer supporting HUD’s position
argued that if the Berkeley residents’ protest letters resulted in the
"denial of housing to a protected class of people, it ceases to be protected
speech and becomes proscribed conduct." This is classic Hegelian-Marxist
thinking -- actions (including free speech) that "objectively" harm people
in a subordinate class are unjust (and should be outlawed). Eventually,
hud withdrew its investigation. Nevertheless, the Berkeley residents brought
suit against the HUD officials and won.
In 1999, to take another
example, the Wall Street Journal reported that for the first time
in American history the federal government was planning to require all
companies doing business with the government to give federal officials
the name, age, sex, race, and salary of every employee in the company during
routine affirmative action audits. The purpose of the new plan, according
to Secretary of Labor Alexis Herman, was to look for "racial and gender
pay disparities." The implicit assumption behind the Labor Department’s
action is that "pay disparities" as such constitute a problem that requires
a solution, even if salary differences are not the result of intentional
discrimination. The Labor Department has long suggested that the continued
existence of these disparities is evidence of "institutionalized discrimination." |
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Transmission — or
transformation
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The
slow but steady advance of Gramscian and Hegelian-Marxist ideas through
the major institutions of American democracy, including the Congress, courts,
and executive branch, suggests that there are two different levels of political
activity in twenty-first century America. On the surface, politicians seem
increasingly inclined to converge on the center. Beneath, however, lies
a deeper conflict that is ideological in the most profound sense of the
term and that will surely continue in decades to come, regardless of who
becomes president tomorrow, or four or eight or even 20 years from now.
As we have seen, Tocquevillians
and Gramscians clash on almost everything that matters. Tocquevillians
believe that there are objective moral truths applicable to all people
at all times. Gramscians believe that moral "truths" are subjective and
depend upon historical circumstances. Tocquevillans believe that these
civic and moral truths must be revitalized in order to remoralize society.
Gramscians believe that civic and moral "truths" must be socially constructed
by subordinate groups in order to achieve political and cultural liberation.
Tocquevillians believe that functionaries like teachers and police officers
represent legitimate authority. Gramscians believe that teachers and police
officers "objectively" represent power, not legitimacy. Tocquevillians
believe in personal responsibility. Gramscians believe that "the personal
is political." In the final analysis, Tocquevillians favor the transmission
of the American regime; Gramscians, its transformation.
While economic Marxism
appears to be dead, the Hegelian variety articulated by Gramsci and others
has not only survived the fall of the Berlin Wall, but also gone on to
challenge the American republic at the level of its most cherished ideas.
For more than two centuries America has been an "exceptional" nation, one
whose restless entrepreneurial dynamism has been tempered by patriotism
and a strong religious-cultural core. The ultimate triumph of Gramscianism
would mean the end of this very "exceptionalism." America would at last
become Europeanized: statist, thoroughly secular, post-patriotic, and concerned
with group hierarchies and group rights in which the idea of equality before
the law as traditionally understood by Americans would finally be abandoned.
Beneath the surface of
our seemingly placid times, the ideological, political, and historical
stakes are enormous. |
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Copyright © 2009 by the Board
of Trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University
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