Antonio Gramsci, born 1891, was a journalist and one of Italy's most influential writers. In his writings, Gramsci accepted Marx's assertion that perpetual struggle between the ruling class and the subordinate working class was the driving mechanism that ultimately made social progress possible. But he rejected the notion that direct physical coercion by police and armies was the method of choice for achieving and maintaining victory in that struggle. Rather, Gramsci held that if a population at large could, for a period of time, be properly indoctrinated with a new “ideology”—specifically, a set of values, beliefs, and worldviews consistent with Marxist principles—a Marxist system could be sustained indefinitely and without coercion or force. In short, Gramsci held that Marxists needed to focus their efforts on gaining “hegemony” (i.e., control or dominion) over the core beliefs of non-Marxist societies; to change the population's understanding of what constitutes basic common sense.
Such a development, said Gramsci, would never occur naturally as a result of some inexorable, unseen, “historical laws” that Marx had accepted as axiomatic. Rather, Gramsci called for Marxists to actively spread their ideology in a gradual, incremental, stealth manner, by infiltrating all existing societal institutions and embedding it, largely without being noticed, in the popular mind. This, he emphasized, was to be an evolutionary, rather than a revolutionary, process that, over a period of decades, would cause an ever-increasing number of people to embrace Marxist thought, until at last it achieved hegemony. Gramsci described this approach as a “long march through the institutions.” Among the key institutions that would need to be infiltrated were the cinema and theater, the schools and universities, the seminaries and churches, the media, the courts, the labor unions, and at least one major political party. According to Gramsci, these institutions constituted society's “superstructure,” which, if captured and reshaped by Marxists, could lead the masses to abandon capitalism of their own volition, entirely without resistance or objection.
In this regard, Gramsci’s views bore a great resemblance to those of the famed godfather of community organizing, Saul Alinsky, who likewise viewed Revolution as a slow, patient process requiring the stealth penetration of existing institutions that could then be transformed from within.
Gramsci saw clearly how to produce socialism. America, like all failed nations before her, has embraced it. Antonio Gramsci
Identification of Authoritarian Societies:
- cult of personality
- populist appeals to emotion and nationalism
- determination to viciously eliminate political opponents
- blatant disregard for individual freedoms
- government control of the media
- theft of private property
- taking political advantage of any crisis ("Never let a good crisis go to waste.")
- manipulation of children as political tools
- attacks on free trade
- propagation of "Big Lies"
- ubiquitous use of political symbols
- an ostentatious elite class possessing rights and privileges unavailable to others.
This is why Obama, Hitler, and Lenin are conflated.
