Gramsci's Revenge: Reconstructing American Democracy.

Sometime during the 1990s the culture war entered a second stage. If the period from the late 1960s to the mid 1990s could be called the era of "deconstruction," the early to mid 1990s witnessed the beginnings of the period of "reconstruction." More precisely, these two stages work in tandem and can be seen as two waves of the leftist assault on the traditional core of the American regime.

The first wave emphasizes the negative and attempts (in Antonio Gramsci's terms) to "demystify" such core American norms as the value of the Judeo-Christian heritage, individual rights, and the Western cultural tradition. Since the 1960s this first deconstructionist wave has achieved some success, but has also met stiff resistance. Through decades of ideological struggle, opponents of the left, armed with the ideas of Bennett, Bloom, Bork, DeSouza, Himmelfarb, Kimball, Kramer, Kristol, Neuhaus, Schlesinger, and others, have erected a series of defenses, which have checked the momentum of this first wave.

Thus centrist, conservative, and (for that matter) liberal critics of the intellectualleft emphasize the search for truth and condemn relativism; defend the liberal and humane vision of the Western tradition, while acknowledging its sins; and argue that the assimilative powers of American society will conquer all ethnic, linguistic, and cultural separatism. Meanwhile progressive intellectuals during the 1990s--while not abandoning negative rhetoric--began to present a more positive vision that has not undergone as much critical analysis, but in the long run is potentially more damaging to the traditional core of the American regime.

This reconstructionist or second wave of progressive argument tells us that the democratic ideals of the American Founding are worthy, but unfulfilled. These "democratic ideals" go beyond traditional liberal democratic concepts and include radical egalitarian, utopian, multicultural, and open-ended projects. All the different interpretations assume the eventual transformation of the American regime. The American project itself--this second wave argument tells us--is utopian, porous, and open to radical reconstruction.

The American University as the Modern Prince

This progressive argument is articulated mostly by academic intellectuals comfortably housed in American universities. The academy is unwittingly fulfilling the role of the modern prince outlined by Antonio Gramsci, one of the leading Hegelian Marxist thinkers of the twentieth century. Hegelian in this sense means emphasizing "consciousness" or winning the war of ideas, as opposed to orthodox Marxism's focus on material conditions and capturing the means of production. In the Prison Notebooks Gramsci developed his theory of the "modern prince." Leading Gramsci scholar Joseph Femia notes that the Italian thinker built his theory "around the analogy of Machiavelli's Prince, which was intended to arouse and educate politically the Italian people."(1) The modern prince, Gramsci wrote in the Prison Notebooks, "must be devoted" to altering consciousness, to "the problem of an intellectual and moral reform."(2) However, in Gramsci's theory the modern prince was an institution, not an individual. He saw the revolutionary party as the modern prince.

Since the main battleground was the struggle for ideological hegemony--the arena of ideas and values--intellectuals were crucial. Thus, within the revolutionary party the key role was played by what Gramsci called "organic intellectuals," whom he distinguished from "traditional intellectuals."According to Gramsci, the role of the organic intellectuals was first to demystify dominant values and then to provide a new conceptual framework or world view for the subordinate classes. On the other hand, traditional intellectuals, Gramsci maintained, although outwardly apolitical, reinforced (often subconsciously) the value structure of the dominant groups. Today, of course, there is no revolutionary party of any importance. However, there are adversary intellectuals in the academy fulfilling the role of Gramsci's modern prince by first deconstructing, then reconstructing the core values of the American regime.