by Cauf Skiviers, Cultural Inappropriation, ©2023
(Jun. 14, 2023) — “Politics is downstream from culture.” Andrew Breitbart’s insight is not only ever more relevant, but also represents a conservative reversal against an eminently Gramscian idea; it is cultural appropriation at its finest.
Antonio Gramsci noted that ruling classes maintained power not just through the monopoly on violence or economic control, but mainly by influencing cultural norms and beliefs. This, in turn, shaped political systems — a phenomenon he termed ‘cultural hegemony’.
Side note: It is interesting how the BLM rioting and the growing phenomenon of legal shoplifting also represent an expansion of the monopoly on violence to include other protected classes.
One of the godfathers of Cultural Marxism, Gramsci deviated from Marx’s stance. Marx was a firm believer in economic determinism — that economic factors, such as wealth distribution, are the primary forces shaping society. In Marx’s view, political structures arise mainly from economic relationships. He believed that government and laws exist primarily to protect the interests of the capitalist class.
Interestingly, Gramsci’s thoughts seemed to align more with Max Weber, who was considered Marx’s nemesis. Weber’s magnum opus, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, provided a counter-argument to Marx’s theories, asserting that various factors, including economics, politics, culture, and ideas, all play a role in shaping society.
More recently, Sir Roger Scruton extensively discussed the loss of beauty and the rise of utilitarianism and its societal and cultural effects, arguing that beauty is an objective value and an integral part of the human experience, playing a significant role in various areas of life, including art and architecture, which ultimately shape society, politics, and even morality.
Scruton was highly critical of modernist architecture and urban planning, which often lack beauty and fail to resonate with the human spirit. He advocated for more traditional and classical forms of architecture that harmonise with human nature and culture. He believed that utilitarianism failed to account for the importance of aesthetic and spiritual values, which can’t be easily measured or quantified.
Reading Scruton, it becomes quite evident how the Left’s cultural hegemony could lead us to be enclosed within the confines of 15-minute cities.
So, Breitbart, by flipping Gramsci’s ideas on their head, illuminated the path, and Scruton spelt it out in case we still couldn’t understand it. It’s not like we don’t know that, so what happened? Why did we become complacent, allowing conservative beauty to be replaced by progressive utilitarianism in our culture? Did we also sell out?
It seems to me that conservative culture suffered a brain freeze since the so-called ‘end of history‘ period, an idea that still echoes in many minds. While we assumed a peaceful common culture, the Left viewed it as a colonising, oppressive culture that needed to be defeated, and they worked relentlessly to dismantle it.
As the cauldron that had been simmering boiled over during the internet and social media era, the inevitable happened. We had not considered taking on the role of counter-culture, but here we are. The Overton Window has shifted, and we find ourselves out of the picture.
Read the rest here.