Hegemony

 

I subscribe to email-supported publications from Chris Rufo. I received one, titled Harvard and Hegemony, on 12/14/2023, which I will selectively quote from and comment on below.

 

Rufo (R after this): “Higher education’s ideological rot has been exposed for Americans to see—but the elites who adhere to such thinking retain control of these institutions.”

 

My response: The public should deprive them of tax dollars, contribute no more as donations, tax their endowments, send kids to private, conservative colleges, take over public institutions as Rufo and DeSantis led the legislature to do in Florida, urge kids not to go to college, and get degrees from colleges online like the one Jordan Peterson is starting. If we cut of their funding, then they will atrophy and come back to be more reasonable and less relevant.

 

R: “The struggle for Harvard’s presidency is ostensibly about anti-Semitism, freedom of speech, and a rapidly unfolding plagiarism scandal. A group of challengers—most notably, New York representative Elise Stefanik, hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman, and journalists Christopher Brunet, Aaron Sibarium and myself—has contested the leadership of Claudine Gay, arguing that she epitomizes the moral and intellectual rot within the institution.

 

Despite the firestorm, the Harvard Corporation has stubbornly defended Gay. And it appears that, for now, the outsider offensive has failed to remove her from power.

 

Why? To answer that question, one might consult the twentieth-century Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, who outlined the distinction between the ‘war of maneuver,’ in which a political actor can quickly topple a centralized, weakly structured regime, and the ‘war of position,’ in which a political actor must wage a protracted fight against an entrenched hierarchy that protects itself via a dispersed yet hegemonic ideology.”

 

My response: Rufo is right: some bad or foolish leaders can be easily toppled by Gay is protected unjustly by powerful, entrenched elites and their hegemonic ideology.

 

R: “At Harvard, the war of maneuver has failed, but there is a silver lining: the institution’s ruling ideology is exposed to the public. The university has sacrificed its academic integrity to retain a president who minimized genocidal rhetoric against Jews, oversaw discriminatory admission systems, ensnared herself in multiple personnel scandals, and lifted sections of at least four academic papers—all because she is the living embodiment and administrative enforcer of DEI ideology.

 

What should the critics of Harvard and other elite institutions do now? As Gramsci warns, they must prepare for a war of position: a long, grueling form of conflict in which ideological opponents contest the ruling regime at each part of the front lines. In practice, the means continuing to uncover the ideological corruption within America’s institutions and building a counter-elite capable of challenging these institutions.”

 

My response: She needs to go and coming up with and Rufo’s suggestion of producing a  counter-elite is a good idea, but I have another way to hurt corrupt, ideological elites wrecking America and its institutions, and my recommendation goes deeper and is a more permanent counter-revolution.

 

If we teach the young, as a majority of their generation, to believe that they can make a difference, that they should accept a life of self-realization chasing after what they love and will be creative and brilliant at doing, as committed, acting self-realizers, then we create anarchist-individuator supercitizens; these heroic citizens are half average people--the masses that are politically very involved, well-informed, principled, independent thinking—and are half powerful, very educated, informed and wise intellectuals, each in her own right. This elite-acting, elite caliber of supercitizens render it impossible for actual elites or would-be elites to run society or its institutions any longer. The supercitizenized masses will tolerate no one to tyrannize, indoctrinate, brainwash, command, subjugate or exploit them anymore, and they will not allow their own generation of supercitizens to become replace, ruling elites, as Marxist and fascist revolutionaries always if secretly aspire to bring about.

 

R: “This work has already begun. Recent campaigns against critical race theory, gender ideology, and DEI have eroded trust in educational institutions. Elites in tech and finance, such as hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman, have become increasingly comfortable criticizing left-wing orthodoxy. Meantime, the Left’s rhetorical magic—smearing critics as ‘racist,’ ‘sexist,’ and ‘homophobic’—has lost its power, due to years of unjustified use.

 

But critics of the current regime should not  be too sanguine. The surface-level ideology is merely the outer shell of cultural hegemony. The Left’s deeper power is institutionally embedded: left-wing administrators hold the key to power: left-wing faculty have consolidated control over academic departments; left-wing ideas have been shaped into rules, regulations, manners, and mores. Gay may have been revealed as a fraud, but the institution will continue to protect her, confirming that the ideology trumps older notions of academic honor. Harvard’s motto, Veritas, is now subordinate to the principles of DEI.”

 

My response: Rufo is wise to warn that the rot and ideology go all the way down in these education and other governmental and even corporate institutions. It will be tough to eradicate let alone mitigate but fight it we must. By deinstitutionalizing higher education, and teaching the young to maverize, these reforms will work overtime.

 

R: “A century ago, Gramsci made clear that all politics is elite politics. This is even more true today, as our institutions have expanded in size, scope, and complexity. If conservatives are to have any hope of recapturing the culture, they must work, not to enlist what Gramsci called the ‘traditional intellectuals’ of the previous era, but to recruit, cultivate and co-opt the ‘organic intellectuals’ of our modern technological society. More bluntly, conservatives cannot rely on a populist, blue-collar coalition alone but must also elevate a new class of professionals with the capacity to wield power within complex institutions.”

 

My response: We can do all the Rufo recommends, but he wants to use a counter-elite of self-appointed intellectuals that are professional to replace the entrenched, Leftist, ideological professional running and ruining the huge, bloated institutions. That needs to happen, but I have two reservations about Rufo’s solution.

 

 First, it does not go far enough. We need elite level leadership, credentialed education, intelligence, competence, expertise to replace the Marxist elite running the universities, but that elite must be populistic, maverizing millions of supercitizens to capture elitism and give it to the average person in society, to protect society against elites sickened by their power-gathering schemes, addicted to centralized control of the masses.

 

We need to downsize, right-size and devolve bureuacrcies of all types with the power, money, say and intelligence given back to the anarchist supercitizens running things with real power and say and liberty in the hands of each citizen willing to wiled his share of the power, and to take up his burden to run society.

 

We need tens of millions of amateur, self-educated, self-realizing capitalists, farmers, blue-collar skilled and unskilled workers (from factories, transportation and the service industry) to deinstitutionalize (right-size institutions and government), defund (largely not entirely) these bureaucracies, and to serve as the organized, driving, controlling, populist masses, that as anarchist-individuator supercitizens, topple elites and institutions peacefully, and give power, liberty and operation to the people for the first time in human history. This is the only counter-revolution that will work.

 

Eric Hoffer is now forgotten, but his message is that elites are corrupted by their aristocratic self-conception that they have the right and duty to rule society and run the lives of the people. This self-delusion corrupts them to the core, and they cannot help being sickened by their drive to gather all power unto themselves. This delusion makes them stupid, ignorant, cruel, inefficient, incompetent, feckless but arrogant and supremely confident that they are noble and effective at ruling the masses.

 

We need institutions, elites, professional, credentialed experts, and leadership for society to survive and thrive but only if elitism and the right to rule is imparted and embedded in the political and bureaucratic roles played by each individual anarchist-individuator supercitizen. When elitism is wedded into being an average person in the personality and role that each supercitizen plays privately and publicly, then elitism is relatively incorruptible, and control is dispersed among the people as it should be.

 

R: “Conservatives, who have in recent years focused on heaping scorn on ‘elites,’ should begin educating and organizing a counter-elite of their own. Then they can begin to answer the key questions: What would this counter-elite look like? How should it wield political power? And what is its vision for American institutions? Without answers to these questions, the prospects for successfully disrupting left-wing hegemony at Harvard and beyond will always be dim.”

 

My response: We need our own elite as conservatives, but not a new class of rulers or autocrats, the intellectual philosopher kings to tell the masses how to live, and these professionally educated rulers of the masses crack the whip and push around the little people from their lofty offices in the high rises of these various institutions.

 

Rather, the masses must be the new elite, for leadership is required for anything to work, but the people can lead themselves and society as a cooperative, negotiated, compromising party of the masses running America for, by and of the people, each of whom is an anarchist-individuator supercitizen.