Posted on 10/22/2025 6:08:50 AM PDT by MtnClimber
When the long march through the institutions gives destructive and ridiculous people control of the institutions, the institutions become destructive and ridiculous, and then they become destroyed and ridiculous.
The law professor Glenn Reynolds has talked for years about the premise, in public policy, that people can be brought into the middle class if you give them the markers of middle-class status. Having a college degree is middle class, so make it easier to get a college degree. Owning a house is middle class, so lower the barriers to homeownership. 1.) Make it all much easier. 2.) Give people way more free stuff. 3.) Larger middle class!
“But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class,” he writes. “Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.”
Mistaking the markers for the substance, for the things that cause the creation of the desired thing, gives us this: [X post at link]
The idea behind the “long march through the institutions” is that the capture of the symbols of cultural authority is the same thing as the capture of cultural authority. The markers are the substance. See, people listen to their ministers and their professors, so if we get jobs as ministers and professors, people will listen to us. The job title is the authority. “As your minister, I advise you to embrace socialism and get a lot of abortions, and I direct you to notice that I am wearing a clerical collar, so.”
This language is ubiquitous in 21st-century America. It’s status markers all the way down. Experts say. Officials say. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is dismantling the CDC, and that’s very dangerous, because our health authorities are the experts. A lot of very important professors are telling you to do [insert thing here]. You can’t advise your child against gender transition — you don’t even have the right credentials.
Antonio Gramsci, and the New Left activists who followed him, looked at institutions like churches and universities and concluded that they had authority because they were churches and universities. They looked like authority, they performed the symbols of authority, they made authority noises, and so people followed. SNIP
The left only knows how to tear down. They want to build back something more to their liking, but they can’t.
The goal of leftism and islamism is The Destruction of Western Civilization.
Bkmk
to what end?
Very true.
Communisis doesn’t make things better it destroys them.
Leaving every one except the upper party member worse off.
Good post.
We need to be sharp and notice when the left has destroyed an institution—and refuse to defer to their phony baloney “experts”.
The “experts” have the burden of proof to show their work.
We do not need the burden of proof to debunk them.
I think the destruction leads to the real goal, validation.
This is a well-reasoned piece, and a natural extension of the axiom “The Revolution eats its own”.
To implement their respective dystopias.
To the end of power. If you end Western civilization, then your civilization takes its place and you are in power. But to get there, you have to break down every institution so that there is nothing left for people to hold onto.
Back when BLM had the NFL kneeling and a lot of fans (including me) not watching any longer, I said this is exactly they want because those not watching have lost faith in that part of the American sports institution and those still watching have accepted the new form which is kneeling. It may seem to be a reach to equate the NFL with Western civilization, but it's part of our social fabric and it was being changed into something new.
Meantime, a much larger assault on an institution was going on and continues, and that is the institution of gender. You have this sustained movement to make gender subject to what others say it is, not nature. Those others have the power when that's the case.
Now let's throw in the border and the notion that everyone is entitled to be in this country. There is no American citizen with rights and privileges, just people who can walk in and get things and vote and act like they own the place.
When you put these three things together, admittedly one of them not in the class of the other two, you see where the plan to devalue American institutions is designed to get people to say, "Nothing is the same. Nothing works anymore. We need a new thing." And it's not just those three things under assault, it's every institution. And again, all for power.
Once they destroy the institutions, we must on the fly create substitutions outside their control. Home schooling is an example of this. If DAs continue to release violent criminals and criminalizing political speech they do not approve of (as in England), vigilantism will be unavoidable.
If there is no substitute rising from the ashes, circumstances are still ripe for their revolution, as there would be no checks on totalitarianism. The response to Communism began in Poland, with the Catholic Church, and a non-Communist labor union.
Whoever chose to look at these things as institutions made the first mistake.
People need to remember or just become aware of a basic fact.
EVERY human atrocity on a mass scale has been spearheaded by the university thought maker “elites.” They have been the drivers for ideas like “The Final Solution” and Communism. The Wannsee Conference was a large group of the Doctorate, lawyers and Military officers of the day, that is what college gives us.
Colleges are responsible for the ideologies of hate and blood, time we stop valuing college for anything and burn down the system so we can get back to education, not the inhumanities of our credentialism institutions.
My wife and I have had this discussion. The Left is happy either way. If they can co-opt an institution and turn it to their own use, they are good with that. If in trying to do so they destroy the institution and the good it does, they’re good with that too. The Boy Scouts are a perfect example. They didn’t care if they took it over and molded it into a queer recruiting ground or if they just destroyed it and all the good it brought to society. They win either way and they did.
Valid post.
The solution—discussed upthread—is we are going to have to do the hard work to create new institutions that serve our needs.
Start locally.
“ The left only knows how to tear down. They want to build back something more to their liking, but they can’t.”
This is part of the left wanting to be called progressives, when in reality they are regressives. These “no kings” marches take’s us back to 1917 Russia and even further back to the 1789-94 French Revolution. Once someone takes charge and gets the inner circle seated as ministers, the people rioting in the streets will be the first rounded up and killed.
It’s happened throughout history, this version being the “night of the useful idiots”.
Their actions expose that those institutions were never “our” institutions.
Well, they have imploded my view of government and business, that is for sure.
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