Revolutionaries without a Cause

American Greatness ^ | 4 May, 2026 | Stephen Soukup

[MtnClimber]

Modern Western unrest stems from a long institutional “war of position” that outlived its revolutionary purpose, leaving frustration, drift, and recurring political violence.

In the week-plus since the latest attempt on President Trump’s life, many on the Right and in the political Center are, at long last, waking up to the possibility that the political opposition today is not entirely normal. It’s not unprecedented either, but it’s far from what we have come to expect in the so-called “civilized” world. As the polymath and public intellectual Eric Weinstein put it on Twitter/X, “These aren’t deranged liberals. They are normalized revolutionaries.”

By now, the story of how these revolutionaries came to be normalized is well-worn. In the aftermath of World War I, during which the workers of the world failed to unite, failed to lose their chains, and chose instead to fight for God and country, Europe’s Marxists realized that their long-promised and much-anticipated proletarian revolution was not going to happen—or at least it was not going to happen on its own, without a spark of some sort. The most influential of these Marxists congregated in Germany and Austria—Karl Korsch and Carl Grünberg in Frankfurt, Antonio Gramsci and György Lukács in Vienna, and so on. Although the details here are complicated and the differences between the various factions significant, in general, the conclusion the various theorists reached was that the religious, artistic, intellectual, and cultural hegemony of the Christian/bourgeois order made it impossible for the revolutionary classes to understand their “true” interests and to unite in revolution against their oppressors.

In response, the Marxists determined that the existing cultural hegemony had to be broken, and the means for doing so involved taking over the institutions of cultural transmission: education, the arts, entertainment, the news media, and even religion. Thus, they began what the German student activist Rudi Dutschke would later call “the long march through the institutions.”

Again, it’s important to recognize that the differences between the various factions of the postwar Left were numerous and significant. One thing they did agree on, however, was that the march was supposed to be “instrumental,” which is to say that it was the means to an end. Gramsci called the long march the “war of position,” in which Marxist intellectuals would take up roles within the institutions of society, positioning themselves for that which was to come, namely, the “war of maneuver.” The long march/war of position was never an end in itself. It was merely a part of the process, undertaken in service of the war of maneuver, which would, of course, be the workers’ revolution.

The catch, as late-Frankfurt-Schooler Herbert Marcuse pointed out, is that capitalism is pretty good at placating the workers of the world, satisfying their needs and desires. Marcuse, therefore, replaced the workers with a new and more readily radicalized revolutionary class, the marginalized of society. Here too, though, democratic capitalism threw a wrench into the gears of revolutionary change. As a rule, political and cultural recognition leads to power, which, in turn, enables the fulfillment of needs and wants that might otherwise have been expected to prompt revolution. It all becomes a repeating cycle. The expression of power creates a tiered society, which, by its nature, produces an “out-group.” The out-group becomes frustrated and agitated, is recognized as potentially revolutionary, and is consequently empowered by the institutions. They express that power, creating a society with new tiers, which, by its nature, produces a new “out-group.” And so it goes. This is, in simple terms, what most of the cultural leftists missed: the fact that political and social integration are the goals of a democratic capitalist society, and it is very good at producing them—just not for everyone at the same time.

It is also why Theodor Adorno, one of the Frankfurt School’s leaders and towering intellectuals, developed his theory of “negative dialectics,” what he called the only intellectually honest analysis of society. According to Adorno, there is—and can never be—a positive philosophy that explains man’s existence and behavior and, by extension, no positive end to man’s struggles. Adorno’s dialectics are self-defeating. They acknowledge, in secular–Hegelian terms, the ideas of human frailty, weakness, and imperfectability that Rousseau largely emasculated.

In the non-intellectual world, the results of all of this—the severing of the war of position from the war of maneuver and the subsequent failure of society to achieve Marx’s utopia—are chaotic and frustrating. For the better part of a century now, the cultural institutions of the West have been preparing the people of the West to expect a revolution of some sort or another. But that revolution never comes. The time is never right. The revolutionary classes are never sufficiently animated. Expectations are created and never met. The telos is never achieved.

The one outcome the post-war Marxist revisionists never anticipated was that their war of position would be overwhelmingly successful, but that their war of maneuver would never find its motivation, that their means would never produce any ends. They never anticipated, therefore, that they would repeat the mistakes of their Enlightenment-era predecessors, that they would tear down the institutional and moral frameworks of their era, only for them to be replaced with nothing of consequence, leaving a lost generation (or more).

In the late 19th century, the sociologist Emile Durkheim diagnosed this condition—derived largely from the century-long institutional collapse that followed the Enlightenment—as anomie. Anomie, as Durkheim described it, is the condition of individuals who have been released from traditional normative frameworks without being given new ones to replace them. Durkheim identified anomie not as a condition of too little social formation but of disoriented formation—people who have been mobilized by a set of values and expectations that the social order cannot actually fulfill. His research suggested anomie produces not passivity but agitation, aggression, and self-destruction. Durkheim explained the condition most explicitly in his 1897 book Suicide, in which he described the manifestation of “anomic suicides” that spike during periods of rapid social change and institutional and community breakdown.

It is also worth noting that this era was characterized by periodic social revolutions, frequent assassinations, and anarchic political violence—very much like our own. Then, as now, near-perfect laboratory conditions existed for an increase in suicides and political violence.

The difference now is that the anomie we are witnessing is, at least in part, the result of the dissolution of the implied relationship between revolutionary formation and revolutionary purpose. This is not to say that all of the anomie is driven directly by the suppression of revolutionary purpose. As I noted in these pages just three weeks ago, similar social and cultural displacement and community breakdown are both explained by and help explain Americans’ frustration in less immediately violent aspects of their lives.

Nevertheless, one should hardly be surprised that our country and our world appear to be moving from violent crisis to violent crisis. Eric Weinstein saw Trump’s would-be assassins and his supporters as “normalized revolutionaries.” They are this, no doubt. But they are also frustrated revolutionaries, meaning that they are purposeless and volatile as well.

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TOPICS: Society
KEYWORDS: bolsheviks; domesticenemies; leftism; undermining

[MtnClimber]

When they don’t have enough malcontents to vote for communism, they have to generate more miserable people.

[ClearCase_guy]

Bfl

[Uncle Miltie]

One cannot explain the whole of the world in one short article.

But this does well explain our current endpoint of unmoored anti-Western political violence.

[Gen.Blather]

My impression of society’s malcontents...liberals...is that they want to tear down what is but have no concept of what to replace it with. They’ve been radicalized but for destruction without rebuilding into something new. It reminds me of a cartoon where a scientist has scribbled a massive equation on the left chalkboard. On the middle board he wrote “And then a miracle occurs” before finishing the equation on the right. Their equation on the right would be “paradise.”

[FreedomPoster]

The proper response to these “normalized revolutionaries”:

🚁

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🤸🏼