The Left Isn’t Just Marching Through Institutions, It’s Razing Them

The law professor Glenn Reynolds has talked for years about the premise, in public policy, that people can be brought into the middle class if you give them the markers of middle-class status. Having a college degree is middle class, so make it easier to get a college degree. Owning a house is middle class, so lower the barriers to homeownership. 1.) Make it all much easier. 2.) Give people way more free stuff. 3.) Larger middle class!

“But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class,” he writes. “Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.”

Mistaking the markers for the substance, for the things that cause the creation of the desired thing, gives us this:

The idea behind the “long march through the institutions” is that the capture of the symbols of cultural authority is the same thing as the capture of cultural authority. The markers are the substance. See, people listen to their ministers and their professors, so if we get jobs as ministers and professors, people will listen to us. The job title is the authority. “As your minister, I advise you to embrace socialism and get a lot of abortions, and I direct you to notice that I am wearing a clerical collar, so.”

This language is ubiquitous in 21st-century America. It’s status markers all the way down. Experts say. Officials say. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is dismantling the CDC, and that’s very dangerous, because our health authorities are the experts. A lot of very important professors are telling you to do [insert thing here]. You can’t advise your child against gender transition — you don’t even have the right credentials.

Antonio Gramsci, and the New Left activists who followed him, looked at institutions like churches and universities and concluded that they had authority because they were churches and universities. They looked like authority, they performed the symbols of authority, they made authority noises, and so people followed. The reasoning is roughly this:

The hegemony theorists were unable to penetrate the markers to get to the substance. They were unable to see the ways that the institutions had authority because they worked — as, for example, religious faith gave people a sense of comfort and purpose, and religious instruction offered a set of rules that enabled people to live in ways that produced order and satisfaction. They authored a shortcut. First we get the clerical collars, then we get the culture, then we get the abortions. When we’re pastors, people have to do what we say, ’cause that’s all like respectable and sh-t.

When the long march through the institutions gives destructive and ridiculous people control of the institutions, the institutions become destructive and ridiculous, and then they become destroyed and ridiculous. The captured institutions become a wasteland.

So any form of we’re losing, because the left controls the universities misses the point. So what?

Imagine how much cultural authority this very important professor has. Imagine how much power she has to direct the course of society through the hegemonic instrument of her institutional status. She is one of the world’s leading experts on how lesbians feel about Gilmore Girls. How important.

Look again at the picture of the minister in Planned Parenthood vestments. She has the cultural authority of the pulpit, and she’s telling you, as a religious authority, that opposition to abortion is ungodly. God wants you to abort your children. Do you submit? She’s wearing a clerical collar, so you agree? “Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.”

That’s how important the long march through the institutions has turned out to be.

This article was originally published on the author’s Substack, “Tell Me How This Ends.”

Chris Bray is a former infantry sergeant in the U.S. Army, and has a history PhD from the University of California Los Angeles. Find his Substack, “Tell Me How This Ends,” here.