Reversing the Long March Through the Institutions

Sometimes, ostensibly discrete global events come into focus and form a unified pattern. When that happens, the world suddenly starts making sense.

Here are some examples of “disparate” occurrences: The governments of Europe’s three most powerful countries suddenly complain that Elon Musk’s X is allowing conservatives to communicate and unite on a global basis, Facebook does an about-face and joins X in renouncing censorship, and “woke” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau finally accepts reality and resigns.

Finally, on Saturday, President Joe Biden gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, to George Soros, a nonagenarian billionaire who is a sworn enemy of all the above. “I just wish he loved, rather than hated, humanity,” Musk said of Soros in an X post.

The award to Soros, who has poured billions into all the worst ideas of the Left, from abortion to ethnic balkanization to rogue prosecutors who won’t prosecute criminals, ironically marked a turning point. It signaled the last fetid wind escaping the body politics of a dying world order.

The other events, which all took place at lightning speed within a 36-hour period, signal the winds of change blowing throughout the world.

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American journalist Bari Weiss, who’s done so much to expand free expression, calls this “the crackup of the old consensus.” French President Emmanuel Macron, a charter member of this leftist unanimity of thought, bitterly complained at a conference in Paris that it’s the birth of a “new international reactionary movement.”

Macron is on to something: Conservatives across the globe are indeed uniting more than ever, and social media has helped. As someone who, for the past few years, has participated in the growing number of international confabs where like-minded conservatives share best practices, I toyed in my mind with the idea of promoting the NIRM as an acronym. But “reactionary” doesn’t really capture what is taking place.

My colleague and friend Roger Severino called it “the long reverse march” in an email this week. I love that because that is really what is taking place: Conservatives around the world are reversing the cultural advances the “woke” Left has made in the past few decades.

In the late 1960s, the West German radical Rudi Dutschke took a page from Antonio Gramsci’s cultural Marxist teachings and christened that strategy “the long march through the institutions.” What we conservatives are doing now, across the globe, is reversing the long march.

This clawing of lost ground on all cultural matters has been made possible, necessary, actually, by the political earthquake of 2024: the election of President-elect Donald Trump and the rallying to his cause by Musk and other like-minded tech giants, such as Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, and Peter Thiel. These men, and others, such as financier Bill Ackman, showed real courage in supporting Trump, the archnemesis of the leftist consensus.

The economist Thomas Sowell, an American treasure who labors at the Hoover Institution, calls it “the political vision of the Left.” Everyone across the political spectrum has a vision, Sowell acknowledges. But there is a difference, and it goes to the heart of what unites the events of the past week.

“What is surprising, however, is how often the opinions of those on the Left are accompanied by hostility and even hatred,” Sowell writes. “Anyone who studies the history of ideas should notice how much more often people on the political Left, more so than others, denigrate and demonize those who disagree with them—instead of answering their arguments. In a sense, the political Left’s attempts to silence ideas they cannot, or will not, debate are a confession of intellectual bankruptcy.”

We see this authoritarian drive to harden the Left’s vision into a consensus constantly, and if truth becomes collateral damage, so be it. “Our reverence for the truth might have become a bit of a distraction that is preventing us from finding consensus and getting important things done,” NPR President and CEO Katherine Maher intoned.

Since Musk bought Twitter in October 2022, later renaming it “X,” he has opened it to free debate, getting in the way of consensus-building. This has incensed the Left, precisely for the reasons Sowell explains, and many leftists have thrown a hissy fit and left X, some for alternative platforms such as Threads and BlueSky.

But they don’t drive the global conversation. X does. This was what led Macron to exclaim in exasperation on Monday from Paris, “If we had been told that the owner of one of the largest social networks in the world would support the new international reactionary movement and directly intervene in elections … who would have imagined it?”

From Berlin, a spokesman for the government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz accused Musk of trying to use “untruths or half-truths or expressions of opinion” to change the opinions of 84 million Germans, according to the national broadcaster Deutsche Welle.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer made a similar allusion, though without directly referring to Musk.

“Those that are spreading lies and misinformation as far and as wide as possible are not interested in victims,” he told Sky News. “They’re interested in themselves.”

The German, British, and French governments are incensed that Musk has been commenting on the politically sensitive case of the rapes of young girls by Muslims in Britain, something that has been going on for years, and on the electoral prospects of the right-wing Alternative fur Deutschland party in Germany.

But Scholz and his Social Democratic Party are headed to defeat in elections next month. Polls have the SPD winning a miserly 17% of the vote, 2 percentage points lower than AfD. Scholz is, therefore, as unpopular as Trudeau, the poster child for the old consensus now cracking up.

“What’s happening in Canadian politics is not happening in a vacuum,” Weiss wrote this week. “It is a symptom of a much broader phenomenon.”

That consensus “held that immigration was an absolute good, with multiculturalism the end goal. Arguments contrary to progressive social attitudes [were] ‘disinformation’ that must be combated by robust online censorship,” Weiss wrote, channeling Sowell. “People would quickly adjust to massive changes in social attitudes around sex and gender because objections would be seen as bigoted. And anyone who said anything that questioned the consensus would become a pariah. This consensus is being rejected across the West.”  

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Why? Trump’s victories in 2016 and last year had reverberations that shattered the political vision of the Left.

“In Italy,” Weiss adds, “Giorgia Meloni—who launched her political career on the far-right—now leads perhaps the most stable country in Western Europe. In Britain, Labour’s Keir Starmer was able to wrest control of Downing Street after 14 years of Conservative rule, largely because Conservatives had not delivered on immigration restrictions. Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration Reform UK party is now ascendant there, in large part because of his muscular stance against Islamism and immigration. Austria just elected its most right-wing government since the end of World War II. And Germany, once the heart of the old consensus under Chancellor Angela Merkel, is still dealing with the fallout with her 2015 decision to accept roughly a million asylum-seekers from the Middle East.”

It will further accelerate the crackup that Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, announced on Tuesday that it was ditching censorship, which it blamed the Biden administration for pressuring it into practicing. Meta will eliminate third-party fact-checking, switching instead to the “community notes” system pioneered by X, and lifting restrictions on topics such as immigration and gender issues.

“We’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship,” Zuckerberg said in a video released Tuesday. He also acknowledged the unavoidable: “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point toward once again prioritizing speech,” so Meta would “restore free expression on our platforms.”

Expect more signs of the crackup, and the restoration of free expression.

Mike Gonzalez
https://www.heritage.org/progressivism/commentary/reversing-the-long-march-through-the-institutions
January 17, 2025
heritage.org