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Wednesday, November 27, 2002

 
AMERICAN PROBLEMS PART II

By Kenneth J. Schmidt

A correspondent has asked for a clarification on how Nationalists of the Third-Position can use the tactics of the Left to defeat the Left

You see, there are two Marxist theories or tools that we can use: this is the concept of "Critical Social Theory":from the Frankfurt School and the concept of
"Social Hegemony" from the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (who died in one of Mussolini's Prisons, Good work Duce!.)

Let us look at Gramsci first. Gramsci's theory is quite simple and complementary to the Frankfurt School. Political power is not something that simply arises from the ether. Gramsci improved upon Marx by contending that you must capture the culture before you capture the levers of political power. For example, I think the Reagan Administration learned this. They captured the White House, but only won a few political battles because his opponents controlled the media, the think tanks, big business and the academic world. The Left emerged from the Reagan era in good political shape.

Now the Frankfurt School's concept of Critical Social Theory is important. The theory behind CST is that you must entirely reject and criticize the dominant culture, both social and political. Theodore Adorno combined Marx with Freud and determined that all conservatives are mentally ill in his seminal work "The Authoritarian Personality." Another Frankfurt School guy was Herbert Marcuse, who gave us the sexual revolution with his concept of polymorphous perversity. These Jewish intellectuals also invented modern feminism as we know it. The Frankfurt School gave up on the idea that the working classes were the vanguard of the revolution. The vanguard of the revolution is now the modern intellectual. They had to explain the fact that Europe did not entirely fall to the Reds after WW1. They also had to explain away why they personally had failed to keep the Jew-Communist Bela Kun regime in power in Hungary (it only lasted 18 months).

Now the New Left picked up on all this stuff during the sixties and hence you had the "March Through the Institutions." The ex-hippies of the New Left, their heads filled with Gramsci and the Frankfurt school, gradually replaced the Old Rooseveltian Left in the US.

I think the trick of winning the battle for Nationalism is to attract intellectuals. Now a smart observer might counter my argument by saying that the Paleo-Conservatives have a lot of intellectuals and they are going nowhere. Good point, but with the exception of the esteemed Sam Francis (and possibly Paul Gottfried) most Paleo-Conservative intellectuals are either Classicists or Confederate nostalgics. Now I think every young man should read the Classics and that the Confederate cause was a just one, but we can't live on nostalgia alone. Men won't put their lives on the line for nostalgia. We need thinkers that can dream and be idealistic, but we need more practical thinkers too. In short we have to win the cultural/intellectual battle before we win the political one.

Get a copy of "Fascism" edited by Roger Griffin from the Oxford University Press, 1995. On pages 348-349 there is an essay by Nouvelle Droit German thinker Pierre Krebs on this same issue. Now I have my disagreements with the Nouvelle Droite people on some things, but on this particular issue they are correct.