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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.
Refining class
warfare
We’ll begin with an overview of
the thought of Antonio Gramsci
(1891-1937), a Marxist intellectual and
politician. Despite his enormous influence
on today’s politics, he remains far
less well-known to most Americans than
does Tocqueville.
Gramsci’s main legacy arises
through his departures from orthodox
Marxism. Like Marx, he argued that all
societies in human history have been
divided into two basic
groups: the privileged and the
marginalized, the oppressor and the
oppressed, the dominant and the
subordinate. Gramsci expanded Marx’s
ranks of the "oppressed" into categories
that still endure. As he wrote in his
famous Prison Notebooks, "The
marginalized groups of history include not
only the economically oppressed, but also
women, racial minorities and many
‘criminals.’" What Marx and his
orthodox followers described as "the
people," Gramsci describes as an
"ensemble" of subordinate groups and
classes in every society that has ever
existed until now. This collection of
oppressed and marginalized groups —
"the people" — lack unity and, often,
even consciousness of their own
oppression. To reverse the correlation of
power from the privileged to the
"marginalized," then, was Gramsci’s
declared goal.
Power, in Gramsci’s
observation, is exercised by privileged
groups or classes in two ways: through
domination, force, or coercion; and
through something called "hegemony," which
means the ideological supremacy of a
system of values that supports the class
or group interests of the predominant
classes or groups. Subordinate groups, he
argued, are influenced to internalize the
value systems and world views of the
privileged groups and, thus, to consent to
their own marginalization.
Far from being content with a mere
uprising, therefore, Gramsci believed that
it was necessary first to delegitimize the
dominant belief systems of the predominant
groups and to create a "counter-hegemony"
(i.e., a new system of values for the
subordinate groups) before the
marginalized could be empowered. Moreover,
because hegemonic values permeate all
spheres of civil society -- schools,
churches, the media, voluntary
associations -- civil society itself, he
argued, is the great battleground in the
struggle for hegemony, the "war of
position." From this point, too, followed
a corollary for which Gramsci should be
known (and which is echoed in the feminist
slogan) — that all life is
"political." Thus, private life, the work
place, religion, philosophy, art, and
literature, and civil society, in general,
are contested battlegrounds in the
struggle to achieve societal
transformation.
It is perhaps here that one sees
Gramsci’s most important
reexamination of Marx’s thought.
Classical Marxists implied that a
revolutionary consciousness would simply
develop from the objective (and
oppressive) material conditions of working
class life. Gramsci disagreed, noting that
"there have always been exploiters and
exploited" — but very few
revolutions per se. In his
analysis, this was because subordinate
groups usually lack the "clear theoretical
consciousness" necessary to convert the
"structure of repression into one of
rebellion and social reconstruction."
Revolutionary  "consciousness"
is crucial. Unfortunately, the subordinate
groups possess "false consciousness," that
is to say, they accept the conventional
assumptions and values of the dominant
groups, as "legitimate." But real change,
he continued to believe, can only come
about through the transformation of
consciousness.
Just as Gramsci’s analysis of
consciousness is more nuanced than
Marx’s, so too is his understanding
of the role of intellectuals in that
process. Marx had argued that for
revolutionary social transformation to be
successful, the world views of the
predominant groups must first be unmasked
as instruments of domination. In classical
Marxism, this crucial task of demystifying
and delegitimizing the ideological
hegemony of the dominant groups is
performed by intellectuals. Gramsci, more
subtly, distinguishes between two types of
intellectuals: "traditional" and
"organic." What subordinate groups need,
Gramsci maintains, are their own "organic
intellectuals." However, the defection of
"traditional" intellectuals from the
dominant groups to the subordinate groups,
he held, is also important, because
traditional intellectuals who have
"changed sides" are well positioned within
established institutions.
The metaphysics, or lack thereof,
behind this Gramscian worldview are
familiar enough. Gramsci describes his
position as "absolute historicism,"
meaning that morals, values, truths,
standards and human nature itself are
products of different historical epochs.
There are no absolute moral standards that
are universally true for all human beings
outside of a particular historical
context; rather, morality is "socially
constructed."
Historically, Antonio Gramsci’s
thought shares features with other writers
who are classified as "Hegelian Marxists"
— the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs,
the German thinker Karl Korsch, and
members of the "Frankfurt School" (e.g.,
Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse), a
group of theorists associated with the
Institute for Social Research founded in
Frankfurt, Germany in the 1920s, some of
whom attempted to synthesize the thinking
of Marx and Freud. All emphasized that the
decisive struggle to overthrow the
bourgeois regime (that is, middle-class
liberal democracy) would be fought out at
the level of consciousness. That is, the
old order had to be rejected by its
citizens intellectually and morally before
any real transfer of power to the
subordinate groups could be
achieved.
Gramsci’s
long reach
The relation of all these
abstractions to the nuts and bolts of
American politics is, as the record shows,
surprisingly direct. All of Gramsci’s
most innovative ideas -- for example, that
dominant and subordinate groups based on
race, ethnicity, and gender are engaged in
struggles over power; that the "personal
is political"; and that all knowledge and
morality are social constructions -- are
assumptions and presuppositions at the
very center of today’s politics. So
too is the very core of the
Gramscian-Hegelian world view —
group-based morality, or the idea that
what is moral is what serves the interests
of "oppressed" or "marginalized" ethnic,
racial, and gender groups.
What, for example, lies behind the
concept of "jury nullification," a notion
which now
enjoys the support of law professors at
leading universities? Building on the
Hegelian-Marxist concepts of group power
and group-based morality, jury
nullification advocates argue that
minorities serving on juries should use
their "power" as jurors to refuse to
convict minority defendants regardless of
the evidence presented in court, because
the minority defendants have been
"powerless," lifelong victims of an
oppressive system that is skewed in favor
of dominant groups, such as white
males.
Indeed, what is called "critical
theory" — a direct descendant of
Gramscian and Hegelian-Marxist thinking
— is widely influential in both law
and education. Critical legal studies
posits that the law grows out of unequal
relations of power and therefore serves
the interests of and legitimizes the rule
of dominant groups. Its subcategories
include critical race theory and feminist
legal theory. The critical legal studies
movement could hardly be more Gramscian;
it seeks to "deconstruct" bourgeois legal
ideas that serve as instruments of power
for the dominant groups and "reconstruct"
them to serve the interests of the
subordinate groups.
 Or
consider the echoes of Gramsci in the
works of yet another law professor,
Michigan’s Catharine MacKinnon. She
writes in Toward a Feminist Theory of
the State (1989), "The rule
of law and the rule of men are one thing,
indivisible," because "State power,
embodied in law, exists throughout society
as male power." Furthermore, "Male power
is systemic. Coercive, legitimated, and
epistemic, it is the regime." Therefore,
MacKinnon notes, "a rape is not an
isolated event or moral transgression or
individual interchange gone wrong but an
act of terrorism and torture within a
systemic context of group subjection, like
lynching." Similarly, MacKinnon has argued
that sexual harassment is essentially an
issue of power exercised by the dominant
over the subordinate group.
Such thinking may begin in ivory
towers, but it does not end there. The
United States Supreme Court adopted
MacKinnon’s theories as the basis for
its interpretation of sexual harassment
law in the landmark Meritor Savings
Bank v. Vinson (1986). This is only
one example of how major American social
policy has come to be based not on
Judeo-Christian precepts nor on
Kantian-Enlightenment ethics, but on
Gramscian and Hegelian-Marxist concepts of
group power.
Hegel among the
CEOs
Quite apart from their popularity
among academics and in certain realms of
politics, Gramscian and Hegelian-Marxist
ideas are also prominent in three other
major sectors of American civil society:
foundations, universities, and
corporations.
As laymen and analysts alike have
observed over the years, the major
foundations — particularly Ford,
Rockefeller, Carnegie, and MacArthur
— have for decades spent millions of
dollars promoting "cutting edge" projects
on racial, ethnic, and gender issues.
According to author and foundation expert
Heather Mac Donald, for example, feminist
projects received $36 million from Ford,
Rockefeller, Mellon, and other large
foundations between 1972 and 1992.
Similarly, according to a Capital Research
Center report by Peter Warren, a policy
analyst at the National Association of
Scholars, foundations have crowned
diversity the "king" of American campuses.
For example, the Ford Foundation launched
a Campus Diversity Initiative in 1990 that
funded programs in about 250 colleges and
universities at a cost of approximately
$15 million. The Ford initiative promotes
what sounds like a Gramscian’s
group-rights dream: as Peter Warren puts
it, "the establishment of racial, ethnic,
and sex-specific programs and academic
departments, group preferences in student
admissions, group preferences in staff and
faculty hiring, sensitivity training for
students and staff, and campus-wide
convocations to raise consciousness about
the need for such programs."
 Alan
Kors, a history professor at the
University of Pennsylvania, has described
in detail how Ford and other foundation
"diversity" grants are put to use. As he
noted in "Thought Reform 101" in the March
2000 issue of Reason, "at almost
all our campuses, some form of moral and
political re-education has been built into
freshmen orientation." A "central goal of
these programs," Kors states, "is to
uproot ‘internalized
oppression,’ a crucial concept in the
diversity education planning documents of
most universities." The concept of
"internalized oppression" is the same as
the Hegelian-Marxist notion of "false
consciousness," in which people in the
subordinate groups "internalize" (and thus
accept) the values and ways of thinking of
their oppressors in the dominant
groups.
At Columbia University, for
instance, new students are encouraged to
get rid of "their own social and personal
beliefs that foster inequality." To
accomplish this, the assistant dean for
freshmen, Katherine Balmer, insists that
"training" is needed. At the end of
freshmen orientation at Bryn Mawr in the
early 1990s, according to the school
program, students were "breaking free" of
"the cycle of oppression" and becoming
"change agents." Syracuse
University’s multicultural program is
designed to teach students that they live
"in a world impacted by various oppression
issues, including
racism."
Kors states that at an academic
conference sponsored by the University of
Nebraska, the attendees articulated the
view that "White students desperately need
formal ‘training’ in racial and
cultural awareness. The moral goal of such
training should override white notions of
privacy and individualism." One of the
leading "diversity experts" providing
scores of "training programs" in
universities, corporations, and government
bureaucracies is Hugh Vasquez of the Todos
Institute of Oakland, California.
Vasquez’s study guide for a Ford
Foundation-funded diversity film,
Skin Deep, explains the
meaning of "white privilege" and
"internalized oppression" for the
trainees. It also explains the concept of
an "ally," as an individual from the
"dominant group" who rejects his
"unmerited privilege" and becomes an
advocate for the position of the
subordinate groups. This concept of the
"ally," of course, is Gramscian to the
core; it is exactly representative of the
notion that subordinate groups struggling
for power must try to "conquer
ideologically" the traditional
intellectuals or activist cadres normally
associated with the dominant
group.
The employees of America’s
major corporations take many of the same
 sensitivity
training programs as America’s
college students, often from the same
"diversity facilitators." Frederick Lynch,
the author of the Diversity
Machine, reported "diversity
training" is rampant among the Fortune
500. Even more significantly, on issues of
group preferences vs. individual
opportunity, major corporate leaders tend
to put their money and influence behind
group rights instead of individual
rights.
After California voters passed
Proposition 209, for example — a
referendum outlawing racial and gender
preferences in employment — Ward
Connerly, the African-American businessman
who led the effort, launched a similar
antipreferences initiative in the state of
Washington. The Washington initiative
I-200 read as follows: "The State shall
not discriminate against or grant
preferential treatment to, any individual
or group on the basis of race, sex, color,
ethnicity, or national origin in the
operation of public employment, or public
contracting." This language was almost
identical to California’s Proposition
209. Atlantic Monthly editor
Michael Kelly reported in the
Washington Post on
August 23 that when asked his opinion on
Proposition 209 during the referendum
debate, Sen. Joseph Lieberman replied, "I
can’t see how I could be opposed to
it. . . . It is basically a statement of
American values . . . and says we
shouldn’t discriminate in favor of
somebody based on the group they
represent."
 However,
Washington’s business
leaders disagreed. In his autobiography
Creating Equal, Ward
Connerly wrote that the "most important
significant obstacle we faced in
Washington was not the media, or even
political personalities, but the corporate
world. . . . Boeing, Weyerhauser,
Starbucks, Costco, and Eddie Bauer all
made huge donations to the No on I-200
campaign. . . . The fundraising was
spearheaded by Bill Gates, Sr., a regent
of the University of Washington, whose
famous name seemed to suggest that the
whole of the high-tech world was solemnly
shaking its head at us."
Interestingly, private corporations
are also more supportive of another form
of group rights — gay rights —
than are government agencies at any level.
As of June 2000, for example,
approximately 100 Fortune 500 companies
had adopted health benefits for same-sex
partners. According to the gay rights
organization, Human Rights Campaign, the
companies offering same-sex benefits
include the leading corporations in the
Fortune 500 ranking: among the top 10,
General Motors (ranked first), Ford
(fourth), IBM (sixth), AT&T (eighth),
and Boeing (tenth), as well as
Hewlett-Packard, Merrill Lynch, Chase
Manhattan Bank, Bell Atlantic, Chevron,
Motorola, Prudential, Walt Disney,
Microsoft, Xerox, and United Airlines.
Corporate reaction to gay activist attacks
on Dr. Laura Schlessinger is another
indication of how Hegelian-Gramscian the
country’s business leaders have
become. Sears and EchoStar have lately
joined a long list of advertisers —
Procter and Gamble, Xerox, AT&T, Toys
R Us, Kraft, General Foods, and Geico
— in pulling their advertising from
the popular talk show host. Whether these
decisions favoring gay (read: group)
rights were motivated by ideology,
economic calculation, or an opportunistic
attempt to appear "progressive," they
typify American businesses’ response
to the culture war.
The
Tocquevillian
counterattack
The primary resistance to the
advance of Gramscian ideas comes from an
opposing  quarter
that I will call contemporary
Tocquevillianism. Its representatives take
Alexis de Tocqueville’s essentially
empirical description of American
exceptionalism and celebrate the traits of
this exceptionalism as normative values to
be embraced. As Tocqueville noted in the
1830s (and as the World Values Survey, a
scholarly comparative assessment,
reaffirmed in the 1990s), Americans are
different from Europeans in several
crucial respects. Two recent books —
Seymour Martin Lipset’s American
Exceptionalism (1997) and Michael
Ledeen’s Tocqueville on American
Character (2000) — have made
much the same point: that Americans today,
just as in Tocqueville’s time, are
much more individualistic, religious, and
patriotic than the people of any other
comparably advanced nation.
What was particularly exceptional
for Tocqueville (and contemporary
Tocquevillians) is the singular American
path to modernity. Unlike other
modernists, Americans combined strong
religious and patriotic beliefs with
dynamic, restless entrepreneurial energy
that emphasized equality of individual
opportunity and eschewed hierarchical and
ascriptive group affiliations. The trinity
of American exceptionalism could be
described as (1) dynamism (support for
equality of individual opportunity,
entrepreneurship, and economic progress);
(2) religiosity (emphasis on character
development, mores, and voluntary cultural
associations) that works to contain the
excessive individual egoism that dynamism
sometimes fosters; and (3) patriotism
(love of country, self-government, and
support for constitutional
limits).
Among today’s Tocquevillians we
could include public intellectuals William
Bennett, Michael Novak, Gertrude
Himmelfarb, Marvin Olasky, Norman
Podhoretz, and former Clinton White House
advisor and political philosopher William
Galston, and scholars Wilfred McClay,
Harvey Mansfield, and Walter MacDougall.
Neoconservatives, traditional
conservatives of the National
Review-Heritage Foundation stripe,
some students of political philosopher Leo
Strauss, and some
centrist Democrats are Tocquevillian in
their emphasis on America’s special
path to modernity that combines aspects of
the pre-modern (emphasis on religion,
objective truth, and transcendence) with
the modern (self-government,
constitutional liberalism, entrepreneurial
enterprise). The writings of
neoconservative Irving Kristol and
National Review-style
conservative Charles Kesler clarify this
special American path to modernity. Like
thoughtful scholars before them, both make
a sharp distinction between the moderate
(and positive) Enlightenment (of Locke,
Montesquieu, and Adam Smith) that gave
birth to the American Revolution and the
radical (and negative) Enlightenment
(Condorcet and the philosophes)
that gave birth to the Revolution in
France.
Like their ideological opposites,
Tocquevillians are also represented in
business and government. In the foundation
world, prevailing Gramscian ideas have
been challenged by scholars funded by the
Bradley, Olin, and Scaife foundations. For
example, Michael Joyce of Bradley has
called his foundation’s approach
"Tocquevillian" and supported associations
and individuals that foster moral and
religious underpinnings to self-help and
civic action. At the same time, Joyce
called in "On Self-Government"
(Policy Review,
July-August 1998) for challenging the
"political hegemony" of the service
providers and "scientific managers" who
run the "therapeutic state" that
Tocqueville feared would result in "an
immense and tutelary" power that
threatened liberty. As for the political
world, a brief list of those influenced by
the Tocquevillian side of the argument
would include, for example, Sen. Daniel
Coats of Indiana, Sen. Joseph Lieberman of
Connecticut, and Gov. George W. Bush of
Texas. All have supported  Tocquevillian
initiatives and employed Tocquevillian
language in endorsing education and
welfare measures that emphasize the
positive contributions of faith and
responsibility.
There is also a third category to be
considered here — those institutions
and and individuals that also oppose the
Gramscian challenge, but who are not
Tocquevillians because they reject one or
more features of the trinity of American
exceptionalism. For example,
Reason magazine editor Virginia
Postrel sees the world divided into
pro-change "dynamists" and anti-change
"stasists." Postrel’s libertarianism
emphasizes only one aspect of American
exceptionalism, its dynamism, and slights
the religious and patriotic pillars that
in the Tocquevillian synthesis provide the
nation’s moral and civic
core.
Similarly, paleoconservatives such
as Samuel Francis, a leading Buchananite
intellectual, oppose modernism and the
Enlightenment in all its aspects, not
simply its radical wing. Likewise secular
patriots such as historian Arthur
Schlesinger Jr. embrace a positive form of
enlightened American nationalism, but are
uncomfortable with the religious and
entrepreneurial (including the
antistatist) traditions that complete the
Tocquevillian trinity. Catholic social
democrats like E.J. Dionne accept the
religious part of the Tocquevillian
trinity, but would like to curb its risky
dynamism and deemphasize its
patriotism.
A few years ago, several
conservative and religious intellectuals
writing in a First
Things magazine symposium suggested
that American liberal democracy was facing
a crisis of legitimacy. One of the
symposium writers, Judge Robert Bork ,
suggests in his book Slouching Towards
Gomorrah that "revolutionary"
upheavals of the 1960s were "not a
complete break with the spirit of the
American past," but inherent in the
Enlightenment framework of America’s
founding principles. Bork and others
— including Paul Weyrich and Cal
Thomas — appear to have speculated
that perhaps America’s path to
modernity was itself flawed (too much
dynamism and too little morality). What
could be called a partial Tocquevillian
position of some conservative
intellectuals and activists could be
contrasted with the work of American
Catholic Whigs — for example, the
American Enterprise Institute’s
Michael Novak and the Faith and Reason
Institute’s Robert Royal — who
have argued, in essence, that
America’s founding principles are
sound and that the three elements of the
Tocquevillian synthesis (entrepreneurial
dynamism, religion, and patriotism) are at
the heart of the American experience and
of America’s exceptional contribution
to the idea of ordered liberty.
At the end of the day it is unlikely
that the libertarians, paleoconservatives,
secular patriots, Catholic social
democrats, or disaffected religious right
intellectuals will mount an effective
resistance to the continuing Gramscian
assault. Only the Tocquevillians appear to
have the strength — in terms of
intellectual firepower, infrastructure,
funding, media attention, and a
comprehensive philosophy that taps into
core American principles — to
challenge the Gramscians with any chance
of success.
Tocquevillianism
as praxis
Writing in Policy Review in
1996, Adam Meyerson described the task of
 cultural
renewal as "applied Tocquevillianism." In
explaining one of his key points,
Tocqueville writes in Democracy in
America that "mores" are central to
the "Maintenance of a Democratic Republic
in the United States." He defines "mores"
as not only "the habits of the heart," but
also the "different notions possessed by
men, the various opinions current among
them, and the sum of ideas that shape
mental habits" — in short, he
declares, "the whole moral and
intellectual state of a people."
One of the leading manifestos of the
Tocquevillians is "A Call to Civil
Society: Why Democracy Needs Moral
Truths," published by the Council on Civil
Society. It outlines the traditional civic
and moral values (Tocqueville’s
"mores") that buttress the republic. The
document (endorsed by, among others, Sens.
Coats and Lieberman, in addition to Don
Eberly, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Francis
Fukuyama, William Galston, Glenn Loury,
Cornel West, James Q. Wilson, and Daniel
Yankelovitch) states that the "civic
truths" of the American regime are "those
of Western constitutionalism, rooted in
both classical understandings of natural
law and natural right and in the
Judeo-Christian religious tradition. . . .
The moral truths that make possible our
experiment in self-government," according
to this statement, "are in large part
biblical and religious," informed by the
"classical natural law tradition" and the
"ideas of the Enlightenment." The "most
eloeloquent expressions" of these truths
are "found in the Declaration of
Independence, Washington’s Farewell
Address, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address
and Second Inaugural Address, and
King’s Letter from the Birmingham
Jail."
The Tocquevillians, then, emphasize
"renewing" and "rediscovering" American
mores, suggesting that there is a healthy
civic and moral core to the American
regime that needs to be brought back to
life. Moreover, if the first task is
cultural renewal, the second task is
cultural transmission. Thus, the "Call to
Civil Society" declares that the "central
task of every generation is moral
transmission." Religion, in particular,
"has probably been the primary force" that
"transmits from one generation to another
the moral understandings that are
essential to liberal democratic
institutions." Moreover, "[at]
their best . . . our houses of worship
foster values that are essential to human
flourishing and democratic civil society:
personal responsibility, respect for moral
law, and neighbor-love or concern for
others." In addition, the statement
declares that a "basic responsibility of
the school is cultural transmission,"
particularly "a knowledge of [the]
country’s constitutional heritage, an
understanding of what constitutes good
citizenship, and an appreciation of
[this] society’s common civic
faith and shared moral
philosophy."
I n
the matter of practice, the past few years
have also witnessed what could be called
"Tocquevillian" initiatives that attempt
to bring faith-based institutions
(particularly churches) into federal and
state legislative efforts to combat
welfare and poverty. In the mid-1990s,
Sen. Coats, working with William Bennett
and other intellectuals, introduced a
group of 19 bills known as the Project for
American Renewal. Among other things these
bills advocated dollar for dollar tax
credits for contributions to charitable
organizations, including churches.
Coats’s goal in introducing this
legislation was to push the debate in a
Tocquevillian direction, by getting policy
makers thinking about new ways of
involving religious and other civic
associations in social welfare issues.
Coats and others were asking why the faith
community was being excluded from
participating in federal social programs.
At the same time there are other
Tocquevillians, including Michael Horowitz
of the Hudson Institute, who favor tax
credits, but worry that by accepting
federal grant money the faith institutions
could become dependent on government money
and adjust their charitable projects to
government initiatives.
In 1996 Congress included a
"charitable choice" provision in the
landmark welfare reform legislation. The
charitable choice section means that if a
state receives federal funds to provide
services, it could not discriminate
against religious organizations if they
wanted to compete for federal grants to
provide those services. The section
includes guidelines designed
simultaneously to protect both the
religious character of the faith-based
institutions receiving the federal funds
and the civil rights of the individuals
using the services. However, in 1998 the
Clinton administration attempted to dilute
the "charitable choice" concept in another
piece of legislation by stating that
administration lawyers opposed giving
funds to what they described as
"pervasively sectarian" institutions that
could be inferred to mean churches doing
charitable work.
Besides activity at the federal
level, some states have started similar
projects. Faithworks Indiana, a center
sponsored by the state government, assists
faith-based institutions with networking.
In Illinois state agencies are reaching
out to faith-based institutions through
the "Partners for Hope" program. In
Mississippi Governor Kirk Fordice launched
the "Faith and Families" program with the
ambitious goal of linking each of the
state’s 5,000 churches with a welfare
recipient.
Both Gov. George W. Bush in Texas
and Sen. Joseph Lieberman in Congress have
been friendly to some Tocquevillian
approaches to legislation. Bush has
promoted legislation to remove licensing
barriers to church participation in social
programs. He has also supported faith
initiatives in welfare-to-work and prison
reform projects. Lieberman supported the
charitable choice provision of the welfare
reform act and co-sponsored the National
Youth Crime Prevention Demonstration Act
that would promote "violence free zones"
by working with grass-roots organizations,
including faith-based
organizations.
Legislative
battlegrounds
Gramscian concepts have been on the
march through Congress in recent years,
meeting in at least some cases
Tocquevillian resistance and
counterattack. For example, the
intellectual underpinning for the Gender
Equity in Education Act of 1993 (and most
gender equity legislation going back to
the seminal Women’s Educational
Equity Act, or WEEA, of the 1970s) is the
essentially Gramscian and Hegelian-Marxist
concept of "systemic" or
"institutionalized oppression." In this
view, the mainstream institutions of
society, including the schools, enforce an
"oppressive" system (in this case, a
"patriarchy") at the expense of a
subordinate group (i.e., women and
girls).
 The
work of Harvard education professor Carol
Gilligan, promoted by the American
Association of University Women (AAUW),
was influential in persuading Congress to
support the Gender Equity in Education
Act. Professor Gilligan identifies the
main obstacles to educational opportunity
for American girls as the "patriarchial
social order," "androcentric and
patriarchical norms," and "Western
thinking" — that is to say, the
American "system" itself is at
fault.
In speaking on behalf of the bill,
Republican Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine
made a Gramscian case, decrying "systemic
discrimination against girls." Democratic
Rep. Patsy Mink of Hawaii likewise
attacked the "pervasive nature" of
antifemale bias in the educational system.
Maryland Republican Rep. Connie Morella
declared that throughout the schools
"inequitable practices are widespread and
persistent." Not surprisingly, she
insisted that "gender equity training" for
"teachers, counselors, and administrators"
be made available with federal funds. As
noted earlier, one of the remedies to
"systemic oppression" is "training" (of
the "reeducation" type described by
Professor Kors) that seeks to alter the
"consciousness" of individuals in both the
dominant groups and subordinate groups.
Thus, Sen. Snowe also advocated "training"
programs to eliminate "sexual harassment
in its very early stages in our
Nation’s schools."
In a related exercise in Gramscian
reasoning, Congress in 1994 passed the
Violence Against Women Act. According to
Democratic Senator Joseph Biden of
Delaware, the "whole purpose" of the bill
was "to raise the consciousness of the
American public." The bill’s
supporters charged that there was an
"epidemic" of violent crime against women.
Echoing Catharine MacKinnon (e.g., rape is
"not an individual act" but "terrorism"
within a "systemic context of group
subjection like lynching"), the
bill’s proponents filled the
Congressional Record with the
group-based (and Hegelian-Marxist) concept
that women were being attacked because
they were women and belonged to a
subordinate group. It was argued by
bill’s proponents that these "violent
attacks" are a form of "sex
discrimination," "motivated by gender,"
and that they "reinforce and maintain the
disadvantaged status of women as a group."
Moreover, the individual attacks create a
"climate of fear that makes all women
afraid to step out of line." Although
there was no serious social science
evidence of an "epidemic" of violence
against women, the almost Marxist-style
agitprop campaign worked, and the bill
passed.
In 1991, the Congress passed a civil
rights bill that altered a Supreme Court
decision
restricting racial and gender group
remedies. The new bill strengthened the
concept of "disparate impact"; which is a
group-based notion that employment
practices are discriminatory if they
result in fewer members of "protected
classes" (minorities and women) being
hired than their percentage of the local
workforce would presumably
warrant.
Nine years later, in June 2000, the
U.S. Senate passed the Hate Crimes
Prevention Act, which would expand the
category of hate crimes to include crimes
motivated by hatred of women, gays, and
the disabled (such crimes would receive
stiffer sentences than crimes that were
not motivated by hatred based on gender,
sexual orientation, or disability status).
In supporting the bill, Republican Sen.
Gordon Smith of Oregon declared, "I have
come to realize that hate crimes are
different" because although they are
"visited upon one person" they "are really
directed at an entire community" (for
example, the disabled community or the gay
community). Democratic Sen. John Kerry of
Massachusetts supported the legislation
because, he insisted, "standing law has
proven inadequate in the protection of
many victimized groups."
In a Wall Street Journal
opinion piece, Dorothy Rabinowitz penned a
Tocquevillian objection to this Gramscian
legislation. Rabinowitz argued that hate
crimes legislation undermined the
traditional notion of equality under the
law by "promulgating the fantastic
argument that one act of violence is more
significant than another because of the
feelings that motivated the criminal."
Using egalitarian and antihierarchical
(that is, Tocquevillian) rhetoric,
Rabinowitz declared that Americans
"don’t require two sets of laws
— one for crimes against
government-designated victims, the other
for the rest of America."
The Supreme
Court and the White
House
Like the congress, the Supreme Court
has witnessed intense arguments over
 core
political principles recognizable as
Gramscian and Tocquevillian. Indeed, the
court itself often serves as a
near-perfect microcosm of the clash
between these opposing ideas.
A provision of the Violence Against
Women Act, for example, that permitted
women to sue their attackers in federal
rather than state courts was overturned by
a deeply divided Supreme Court 5-4. The
majority argued on federalist grounds that
states had primacy in this criminal
justice area. In another 5-4 decision the
Supreme Court in 1999 ruled that local
schools are subject to sexual
discrimination suits under Title IX if
their administrators fail to stop sexual
harassment among schoolchildren. The case,
Davis v. Monroe County Board
of Education, involved two 10-year
olds in the fifth grade. Justice Anthony
Kennedy broke tradition by reading a
stinging dissent from the bench. He was
joined by Justices Rehnquist, Scalia, and
Thomas. Justice Kennedy attacked the
majority view that the actions by the 10
year-old boy constituted "gender
discrimination."
American Enterprise Institute
scholar Christina Hoff Sommers in The
War
Against Boys noted that the
court majority appears to accept the
position of gender feminist groups that
sexual harassment is "a kind of hate crime
used by men to maintain and enforce the
inferior status of women." Thus, Sommers
explains, in terms of feminist theory
(implicitly accepted by the court), the
10-year-old boy "did not merely upset and
frighten" the ten-year old girl, "he
demeaned her as a member of a socially
subordinate group." In effect, the court
majority in Davis endorsed
Gramscian and Hegelian-Marxist assumptions
of power relations between dominant and
subordinate groups and applied those
assumptions to American fifth
graders.
Recently, a similarly divided
Supreme Court has offered divergent
rulings on homosexual rights. In June 2000
the court overturned the New Jersey State
Supreme Court and ruled 5-4 in Boy
Scouts of America v. Dale that the
Boy Scouts did not have to employ an
openly gay scoutmaster. The
majority’s reasoning was
quintessentially Tocquevillian -- the
First Amendment right of "freedom of
association." Writing for the majority,
Chief Justice Rehnquist declared that
"judicial disapproval" of a private
organization’s values "does not
justify the State’s effort to compel
the organization to accept members where
such acceptance" would change the
organization’s message. The law,
Rehnquist continued, "is not free to
interfere with speech for no better reason
than promoting an approved message or
discouraging a disfavored one, however
enlightened either purpose may strike the
government."
The dissent written by Justice
Stevens, by contrast, declared that the
states have the "right" to social
experimentation. Stevens noted that
"atavistic opinions" about women,
minorities, gays, and aliens were the
result of "traditional ways of thinking
about members of unfamiliar classes."
Moreover, he insisted, "such prejudices
are still prevalent" and "have caused
serious and tangible harm to members of
the class (gays) New Jersey seeks to
protect." Thus, the dissenters in this
case agreed with the New Jersey Supreme
Court that the state had "a compelling
interest in eliminating the destructive
consequences of discrimination from
society" by requiring the Boy Scouts to
employ gay scoutmasters.
In 1992 Colorado voters in a
referendum adopted Amendment 2 to the
state constitution barring local
governments and the state from adding
"homosexual orientation" as a specific
category in city and state
antidiscrimination ordinances. In 1996 in
Romer v. Evans, the U.S. Supreme
Court in a 6-3 ruling struck down
Colorado’s Amendment 2. The court
majority rejected the state of
Colorado’s position that the
amendment "does no more than deny
homosexuals special rights." The
amendment, the court declared, "imposes a
broad disability" on gays, "nullifies
specific legal protections for this class
(gays)," and infers "animosity towards the
class that it affects." Further, the
majority insists that Amendment 2, "in
making a general announcement that gays
and lesbians shall not have any particular
protections from the law, inflicts on them
immediate, continuing, and real
injuries."
Justice Anton Scalia wrote a
blistering dissent that went straight to
the Gramscian roots of the decision. He
attacked the majority "for inventing a
novel and extravagant constitutional
doctrine to take victory away from the
traditional forces," and for "verbally
disparaging as bigotry adherence to
traditional attitudes." The court, Scalia
wrote, "takes sides in the culture war";
it "sides with the knights," that is, the
elites, "reflecting the views and values
of the lawyer class." He concluded that:
"Amendment 2 is designed to prevent the
piecemeal deterioration of the sexual
morality favored by the majority of
Coloradans, and is not only an appropriate
means to that legitimate end, but a means
that Americans have employed before.
Striking it down is an act, not of
judicial judgment, but of political
will."
Finally, Gramscian and
Hegelian-Marxist concepts have advanced in
the executive branch as well. In the
1990s, the federal government attempted
both to limit speech that adversely
effected subordinate groups; and to
promote group-based equality of result
instead of equality of individual
opportunity.
In 1994, for example, three
residents of Berkeley, Calif., protested a
federal Department of Housing and Urban
Development (HUD) plan to build subsidized
housing for the homeless and mentally ill
in their neighborhood. The residents wrote
protest letters and organized their
neighbors. HUD officials investigated the
Berkeley residents for "discrimination"
against the disabled and threatened them
with $100,000 in fines. The government
offered to drop their investigation (and
the fines) if the neighborhood residents
promised to stop speaking against the
federal housing project.
Heather Mac Donald reported in the
Wall Street Journal that one
lawyer supporting HUD’s position
argued that if the Berkeley
residents’ protest letters resulted
in the "denial of housing to a protected
class of people, it ceases to be protected
speech and becomes proscribed conduct."
This is classic Hegelian-Marxist thinking
-- actions (including free speech) that
"objectively" harm people in a subordinate
class are unjust (and should be outlawed).
Eventually, hud withdrew its
investigation. Nevertheless, the Berkeley
residents brought suit against the HUD
officials and won.
In 1999, to take another example,
the Wall Street Journal reported
that for the first time in American
history the federal government was
planning to require all companies doing
business with the government to give
federal officials the name, age, sex,
race, and salary of every employee in the
company during routine affirmative action
audits. The purpose of the new plan,
according to Secretary of Labor Alexis
Herman, was to look for "racial and gender
pay disparities." The implicit assumption
behind the Labor Department’s action
is that "pay disparities" as such
constitute a problem that requires a
solution, even if salary differences are
not the result of intentional
discrimination. The Labor Department has
long suggested that the continued
existence of these disparities is evidence
of "institutionalized
discrimination."
Transmission
— or
transformation
The slow but steady advance of
Gramscian and Hegelian-Marxist ideas
through the major institutions of American
democracy, including the Congress, courts,
and executive branch, suggests that there
are two different levels of political
activity in twenty-first century America.
On the surface, politicians seem
increasingly inclined to converge on the
center. Beneath, however, lies a deeper
conflict that is ideological in the most
profound sense of the term and that will
surely continue in decades to come,
regardless of who becomes president
tomorrow, or four or eight or even 20
years from now.
 As
we have seen, Tocquevillians and
Gramscians clash on almost everything that
matters. Tocquevillians believe that there
are objective moral truths applicable to
all people at all times. Gramscians
believe that moral "truths" are subjective
and depend upon historical circumstances.
Tocquevillans believe that these civic and
moral truths must be revitalized in order
to remoralize society. Gramscians believe
that civic and moral "truths" must be
socially constructed by subordinate groups
in order to achieve political and cultural
liberation. Tocquevillians believe that
functionaries like teachers and police
officers represent legitimate authority.
Gramscians believe that teachers and
police officers "objectively" represent
power, not legitimacy. Tocquevillians
believe in personal responsibility.
Gramscians believe that "the personal is
political." In the final analysis,
Tocquevillians favor the
transmission of the American
regime; Gramscians, its
transformation.
While economic Marxism appears to be
dead, the Hegelian variety articulated by
Gramsci and others has not only survived
the fall of the Berlin Wall, but also gone
on to challenge the American republic at
the level of its most cherished ideas. For
more than two centuries America has been
an "exceptional" nation, one whose
restless entrepreneurial dynamism has been
tempered by patriotism and a strong
religious-cultural core. The ultimate
triumph of Gramscianism would mean the end
of this very "exceptionalism." America
would at last become Europeanized:
statist, thoroughly secular,
post-patriotic, and concerned with group
hierarchies and group rights in which the
idea of equality before the law as
traditionally understood by Americans
would finally be abandoned. Beneath the
surface of our seemingly placid times, the
ideological, political, and historical
stakes are enormous.
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