I hear Kamala Harris has conceded. For just a moment, I’m going to abandon the high-decoupling rationalist stance I normally post from and talk about what I personally wanted from this election and now hope I might get.
For me, a good outcome in this election meant not Trump winning, but his enemies losing.
I’m not MAGA, and not a tribal conservative of either the old-school or new-school kind. I’m a libertarian, and have some serious differences with substance with Trump and his partisans.
Also I have never much liked Trump as a person. He’s vulgar and under-controlled; he talks and postures too much and, I think the charge that he’s a narcissist has some weight. But…he chooses his enemies well.
I will also admit that I think better of Trump now than I did three months ago. He has demonstrated literal courage under fire, which is an important quality in a man who may need to make life or death decisions about the fate of a nation. I went to see him speak, and I saw a man much calmer and more together than I was expecting.
But I’m not really posting about Trump today, and the only other thing I’m going to say about him is that his most valuable quality is that he enrages evil people into unmasking themselves.
I have believed for decades that the central problem of American politics is defeating the Gramscian long march through our institutions. Covert and not-so-covert Marxists have waged a remarkably successful memetic war. it has many manifestations - blatant bias in the mainstream media, welfare statism, DEI, climate alarmism, transgender ideology, open borders - but the goal is always the same. To cripple and destroy the Main Enemy, the United States of America and everyone in it who loves liberty.
Trump’s victory is the worst defeat of the Gramscians in my lifetime. They went all-in with an unprecedented campaign of lies, vitriol, hate propaganda, lawfare, and election rigging. He beat them anyway, and for that he has my respect.
What I want from the immediate aftermath of the election is to rejoice in their agonized screaming. What I want from Trump and Republican control of both houses is follow-through:
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Impose election security measures so we can’t be frauded again.
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Abolition of every federal firearms law and regulation, including the disbandment of the ATF. We must restore the proper Constitutional order in which the government is frightened of the people, not the reverse.
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Massive cuts in the reach and power of the administrative state. No unelected bureaucrat should ever have the power to effectively make law.
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A concerted and conscious attempt to drive the Communists and Communist tools out from everywhere that they have burrowed into our institutions, perhaps starting with the complete defunding of any educational institution that harbors academic Marxists.
Yes, I know, many of these people don’t know they’re Communist tools. I’m past caring. I’ve been ready to throw them out of helicopters with my own hands since about 2014, hoping against hope that something would happen to make that kind of violence unnecessary.
Now, maybe, we have a path to defeating them peacefully. I’m not sure Trump fully understands this necessity himself, but there are people close to him - notably Elon Musk and Ron Paul - who I’m pretty sure do.
The first thing we need to do is be able to name the enemy. Conservatives have been cowards about this ever since the Army-McCarthy hearings a few years before I was born. They became afraid to speak about or explicitly oppose Communist infiltration, and we have been paying an increasing price for that cowardice through my entire lifetime.
Conservatives? MAGA people? If you really want to make America great again, make defeat of the Gramscians your cause. Name the enemy. Expose them. Defeat them. They have crippled, divided, and corrupted us for far too long. It’s time to take our country back.
Gramscians are people who are influenced by the ideas of Antonio Gramsci, a Marxist theorist, philosopher, and linguist. Gramsci’s theories are often applied to the study of international relations and the global political economy. His ideas are also influential in Western academia and society, and have been described as “entrenched dogma”.
Some of Gramsci’s ideas include:
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Cultural hegemony The state and ruling class use cultural institutions to maintain power and wealth. Gramsci believed that the bourgeoisie uses ideology to develop a hegemonic culture, rather than violence, economic force, or coercion.
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Civil society A public sphere where political parties and trade unions gain concessions from the state, and where ideas and beliefs are shaped.
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Internationalism The capitalist world system must be overthrown internationally. However, Gramsci also believed that the workers’ movement must “nationalize” itself to be effective.
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Common sense The ruling classes manipulate common sense to achieve domination. Gramsci argued that common sense prevents people from perceiving institutional exploitation.
Gramsci’s ideas have inspired strategies to contest hegemonic norms of legitimacy, including: Popular education practices, Liberation theology, and Participatory action research.
