Why There Is A Culture War - Gramsci and Tocqueville in America

Policy Review ^ | John Fonte

[Peelod]

http://www.policyreview.org/dec00/fonte_print.html

Why There Is A Culture War

Gramsci and Tocqueville in America

By John Fonte

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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[Peelod]

Tie these thoughts into B16's comments on the "dictatorship of relativism". B16 is a Tocquevillian. I suspect that he will be more aggressive than JPIIm in this cause. The American MSM will attempt to characterize him as a medieval advocate of a stratified, European aristocracy. The European MSM will probably take the National Socialist tack to discredit him. The Vatican PR machine will have them squealing in outrage.

[swilhelm73]

BTTT

[wildcatf4f3]

Thank you!!! I have forwarded to all my contacts. Great find!

[djreece]

marking

[jocon307]

I'm pinging this for later. Too early, need more coffee!

[x1stcav]

Is Gramsci still alive?.

Too bad if he is.

[Peelod]

No.

http://www.zabalaza.net/texts/anarchism_guerin/italy.html