The Sincerest Form of Flattery

Antonio Gramsci 

For more than half a century America has been arguably a conservative-majority country. Yet liberals have controlled what and how the country talks about through their capture of academia, entertainment, and mass media. Conservatives have studied leftist political thinkers and begun employing their methods with some success. One such writer was Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937):

Gramsci died in 1937, but he can be seen as the godfather of today’s culture wars. A dedicated opponent of Italy’s fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, he spent most of his last decade in prison, where he developed a highly influential new way of thinking about politics that put culture, rather than economics, at the center of the class struggle...

In particular, Gramsci stressed the importance of universities in shaping culture. That makes him a model for American conservatives in their “fight against critical race theory, against trans ideology, against captured higher education institutions, against DEI,” [conservative Christopher] Rufo believes...

Javier Milei, the right-wing, libertarian president of Argentina, told Tucker Carlson in a 2023 interview that he had to “wage a culture war every single day” because his left-wing opponents “have no problem with getting inside the state and employing Gramsci’s techniques: seducing the artists, seducing the culture, seducing the media or meddling in educational content.”

In the U.S., the Italian thinker’s influence grew more slowly. Gramsci’s name appears in the writing of paleoconservative thinkers Paul Gottfried, Thomas Fleming and Sam Francis, who influenced Pat Buchanan’s Republican presidential bids in the 1990s. One of Gramsci’s biggest proponents in the pre-Trump era was Andrew Breitbart, the founder of Breitbart News, who quoted his axiom that “politics is downstream of culture.”

More recently, far-right writers like Curtis Yarvin, who’s influenced Vice President JD Vance, have talked about how to capture power through a culture war. “This war is not fought with bombs and bullets, or even laws and judges,” Yarvin wrote in 2022. “This war is fought with books and films and plays and poems. It is still a savage war!

Conservatives couldn't make much headway in steering the national discussion until the rise of alternate media (podcasts, blogs, social media). Once they gained a foothold, conservatives could wage counterattacks more successfully by focusing on the Gramscian cultural priority and using leftist tactics, e.g., Saul Alinsky's Rule 5 "Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon".

Leftist institutions, now that their biases have been exposed, are fighting for their lives, because public funding is no longer automatic. In the immediate future American politics will be more competitive, more vicious, and more personal. Your humble blogger will not disengage but will avoid audio and visual content, which tends to rouse emotions at the expense of rational thinking.

Containment 2.0

George F Kennan (Wilson Center)

In July, 1947, Foreign Affairs published “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” by "X," the pseudonym for George F. Kennan, who was stationed in Moscow by the State Department from 1944 to 1946. The article became the basis for Soviet "containment," the U.S. policy throughout the Cold War:

It is rather a question of the degree to which the United States can create among the peoples of the world generally the impression of a country which knows what it wants, which is coping successfully with the problems of its internal life and with the responsibilities of a World Power, and which has a spiritual vitality capable of holding its own among the major ideological currents of the time. To the extent that such an impression can be created and maintained, the aims of Russian Communism must appear sterile and quixotic, the hopes and enthusiasm of Moscow’s supporters must wane...

the United States has it in its power to increase enormously the strains under which Soviet policy must operate, to force upon the Kremlin a far greater degree of moderation and circumspection than it has had to observe in recent years, and in this way to promote tendencies which must eventually find their outlet in either the break-up or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power.

Containment was the guiding philosophy behind: 1) the Marshall Plan (1948-1951); 2) the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949; 3) the Korean War (1950-1953); and 4) the Vietnam War (1955-1975), with the U.S. taking the lead role from the French in 1964-1965.

Events that seemed to justify containment were 1) the Soviet atomic bomb (1949); 2) the creation of the People's Republic of China (1949); 3) the growth of communism in Latin America, of which the revolution in Cuba and the Cuban Missile crisis in 1962 were the most important historically.

The point of the above is not to rehash the history of the Cold War, but to point out that the Trump Administration's seemingly endless foreign policy disputes over tariffs, Ukraine, energy, technology transfers, etc, may be clearing the decks for a Cold War 2.0 with China under Containment 2.0. [bold added]

Soon after Donald Trump won the presidential election in November, Xi Jinping asked his aides to urgently analyze the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union.

His concern, according to people who consult with senior Chinese officials, was that as President Trump gears up for a showdown with Beijing, China could get isolated like Moscow during that era.

He’s not wrong to worry. Even though Trump may be the one who currently looks isolated on the world stage—picking trade fights with erstwhile allies like Mexico and Canada, alarming Europe over his handling of the war in Ukraine and vowing to annex Greenland and the Panama Canal—the truth is that China doesn’t hold a strong hand.

With a domestic economy in crisis, Xi is playing defense, hoping to salvage as much as possible of a global trade system that helped pull his country out of poverty. Across the Pacific, Trump is intent on rewiring that very trading system, which he and his advisers see as having benefited the rest of the world—and China most of all—at the U.S.’s expense.

It isn’t just trade. The competing agendas of the leaders of the world’s two largest economies are poised to lead to precisely what China is trying to avoid: a superpower clash not seen since the Cold War, an all-encompassing rivalry over economic, technological and overall geopolitical supremacy.

Seen in that light, President Trump is willing to take the hit for being called Putin's stooge in the matter of Ukraine. The U.S. cannot afford to have Russia and China allied against it in a contemporary version of Monolithic Communism, now regarded, to be sure, as over-exaggeration by historians decades later.

His critics say that he is crazy, stupid, impulsive, and narcissistic. Perhaps the question should be: is Donald Trump that smart?

1949 Redux: Who Lost China?

Chiang Kai-Shek And Mao Zedong (NY Books)

72 years ago the United States suffered a "geopolitical disaster" that makes Afghanistan look like a stubbed toe.

The current parallels to "Who Lost China?" are obvious: in 1949 the intelligence and diplomatic agencies showed that they had totally misjudged the situation on the ground, and the widespread corruption of the U.S.-supported Nationalist government made the success of "our side" impossible.

Wikipedia: [bold added]

During World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt had assumed that China, under Chiang Kai-shek's leadership, would become a great power after the war, along with the U.S., the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union.

John Paton Davies Jr. was among the "China Hands" who were blamed for the loss of China. While they predicted a Communist victory, they did not advocate one. Davies later wrote that he and the Foreign Service officers in China reported to Washington that material support to Chiang Kai-shek during the war against Japan would not transform the inefficient and corrupt Nationalist government, adding that Roosevelt's poor choice of personal emissaries to China contributed to the failure of his policy. Historian Arthur Waldron argues that the president mistakenly thought of China as a great power securely held by Chiang Kai-shek, whose hold on power was actually tenuous. Davies predicted that after the war China would become a power vacuum, tempting to Moscow, which the Nationalists could not deal with. In that sense, says Waldron, "the collapse of China into communism was aided by the incompetence of Roosevelt's policy."

In August 1949, Secretary of State Dean Acheson issued the China White Paper, a compilation of official documents to defend the administration's record and argue that there was little that the United States could have done to prevent Communist victory.

In 1949, the fall of the Kuomintang government was widely viewed within the United States as a catastrophe...At the time, Acheson's China White Paper with its catalog of $2 billion worth of American aid provided to China since 1946 was widely mocked as a lame excuse for allowing what was widely seen as a geopolitical disaster which allowed the formation of a Sino-Soviet bloc with the potential to dominate Eurasia.

One '50's parallel that I hope doesn't repeat: the subsequent "witch hunt" by Congress, particularly Sen. Joseph McCarthy, searching for those "who lost China." The accusations went far beyond incompetence to treason and ruined some individuals who were only marginally involved.

In my humble opinion, the backlash against the Afghan debacle won't abate, the reckoning will come, and the establishment should pray the investigation is as finely targeted as the American rules of engagement in Afghanistan.

Tail-Gunner Joe Was Early

The May 29, 2017 cover.

Senator Joseph McCarthy was one of the most vilified Americans of the 20th century. He saw a Communist under every bed.

To believe today's media, he was just early.

A McCarthy quote, updated for the 21st century:

Our job as Americans and as Republicans Democrats is to dislodge the traitors from every place where they've been sent to do their traitorous work.

Time Magazine is coming around to Tail-Gunner Joe's point of view...