Winning the Culture War
And the Next Generation
Editor’s note: Below is the video of the panel discussion
“Assault on the Culture,” featured at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 2013 West Coast Retreat. The event was held February 22nd-24th
at the Terranea Resort in Palos Verdes, California.
A transcript of the discussion follows.
Mark Tapson: As your mutual friend, the late great Andrew Breitbart, was fond of pointing out, politics flows downstream from culture. And the results of the last election confirm that. Conservatives lost last November in the political arena because for decades the radical Left has laid the groundwork for it in the cultural arena.
There’s no way the radical and insubstantial Barack Obama would ever have been taken seriously as a presidential candidate, much less be elected to two terms in the White House, if the Left had not previously and successfully infiltrated the key cultural arenas — education, the news media and entertainment — and spent decades indoctrinating generations. Our task now is to retake the culture or create a parallel one, deprogram that indoctrination, and seduce subsequent generations to a renewed vision of American exceptionalism.
So, gentlemen, what are the symptoms of the assault on the culture? And what is the cure?
We’ll begin with Ron.
Ron Radosh: As the moderator mentioned — I started out, as David did, as a young Marxist. And let me take a page from Marx. Just [as] people have learned that the Left organizes around the Alinsky playbook, here’s another leftist we can learn something from — the brilliant Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, who developed a theory of hegemony. He argued that before there could be any radical change or revolution, which is what he desired, there had to be first a total change in and control of the culture, so that the dominant ideas that would emerge would be those that would lead to the potential for revolutionary action.
He was really onto something. He realized correctly that you had to wage what he called, in his Marxist terminology, a war of position to demand and create hegemonic control of the culture, so that the majority of people think alike and then would be ripe for and become vehicles for creating a revolution.
Well, the problem is, in this country — to make it very simple — that even if we win elections — and we are winning it in state and local level, but not in the national level — even if we win elections, the culture is at present controlled by the political Left. Have no doubts about that.
The first thing — look at the polls and the studies that have been done in the past year. I meant to bring it with me, but I can just mention it without reading through what this professor found out, from a very finely tuned study. He studied the majority of liberal arts universities and colleges in the United States. And he found out that almost 80, 90 percent of the faculty define themselves as liberal or radical and on the left. And you can be sure that in the humanities — history, philosophy, political theory — the professors there are almost entirely on the left.
Undoubtedly you’ve all seen the recent studies of how many faculty members in the major Ivy universities gave to the Romney campaign. They looked at Harvard and Princeton and Yale. And I think at Harvard, everybody gave — 98, 99 percent gave to Obama. And there were, I think, two faculty members — two people employed by Harvard — who gave to Romney; one was a janitor.
(Laughter)
So, this is the reality we’re facing.
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