Kerby Anderson

If you want to understand the collapse of the Judeo-Christian consensus in this country, you need to look beyond individual programs and policies and take a more expansive view. In a speech for Hillsdale last year, Christopher Rufo (Manhattan Institute) provided a multi-decade description.

The original leftist dream expected a rebellion from the working class in America. That never took place by the end of the 1960s. Leftists, therefore, abandoned their original plan of waging a revolution with the proletariat and instead, they focused on the elites.

That idea can be easily traced to an Italian communist by the name of Antonio Gramsci, who I sometimes mention on my radio program. He proposed, “capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches, and the media by transforming the consciousness of society.” This long march through American institutions began a half-century ago. If you look around today, you can see it has been most successful.

Christopher Rufo says he has “looked at the federal bureaucracy, the universities, K-12 schools, and big corporations.” What he found is that the revolutionary ideas of the 1960s “have been repackaged, repurposed, and injected into American life at the institutional level.”

He adds that most Americans were shocked to discover this. They were outraged that children were being taught gender theory and critical race theory. And that the educational elite saw no problem with teaching about race, sex, and gender at very young ages.

Those revelations and the inevitable backlash had an impact on various state and local elections and will continue to be issues that parents will need to address in the future. The lesson here is that all this didn’t happen by chance but was planned decades ago.