From “Laying Siege to the Institutions” by Christopher F. Rufo in the April/May 2022 issue of Imprimis:
The leftist dream of a working-class rebellion in America fizzled after the ’60s. By the mid-1970s, radical groups like the Black Liberation Army and the Weather Underground had faded from prominence. But the leftist dreamers didn’t give up. Abandoning hope of a Russian-style revolution, they settled on a more sophisticated strategy–waging a revolution not of the proletariat, but of the elites, and specifically of the knowledge elites. It would proceed not by taking over the means of production, but by taking control of education and culture–a strategy that German Marxist Rudi Dutschke, a student activist in the 1960s, called “the long march through the institutions.”
This idea is traceable to Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, who wrote in the 1930s of “capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches, and the media by transforming the consciousness of society.”
Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.