Can Dissidents Ever Win?
From stagnation to hope
Dissidents are winning elections, and they increasingly dominate the online political-cultural entertainment sphere, but nothing substantial seems to change in the lives of ordinary citizens. Quite the contrary. Not to sound defeatist, but it’s important to honestly describe our reality. European populists gave us a sense of excitement that Europe could revive itself, yet the economy is increasingly stagnant, young people cannot afford to create their own families or fulfil their professional aspirations, and mass migration is accepted as the new, inevitable normal. The Trump election promised to usher in a new “Golden Age”, yet Americans continue to live through more precariousness, cultural and spiritual degradation, and more Middle Eastern wars. The Epstein revelations gave us hope that we would finally see a glimpse of justice for an unaccountable elite, but the story quickly lost its shock appeal, and nothing came of it. All of these events teach us a valuable lesson if we choose to see it. They reveal how little power voting serves in changing the status quo, and how the organic online community that gives rise to these electoral victories is more limited in function than we believed.
Today, dissidents can learn from those in the past, but I propose a new, adapted format. Antonio Gramsci, the former head of the Italian Communist Party, perhaps the most influential political theorist for the Left, provided progressives with a roadmap to rise up the ranks of institutional power and consolidate their influence. In his book Prison Notebooks, written while imprisoned by Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime, he coined the term “cultural hegemony”, by which he meant:
In the new order, socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches, and the media by transforming the consciousness of society.
Gramsci was a prominent founder of neo-Marxism, a movement that was born to explain the failure of 20th-century communism. Karl Marx’s original theory of history was called dialectical materialism; it was composed of a base, defined as the mode of production (in modern society, that was capitalism), which dictated the superstructure, defined as the cultural institutions that constitute the dominant ideology. Marx’s dialectical materialism follows Friedrich Hegel’s “dialectics”, whereby a thesis is confronted by an opposing antithesis, resulting in a synthesis which unifies the two opposing concepts. In contrast to Hegel, Marx believed the material world held precedence over the ideal world, hence the term “dialectical materialism”. However, Gramsci attempted to break away from Marx’s material determinism. In his understanding, Marx was wrong; the false consciousness of the proletariat would be awakened, not by overthrowing the means of production, but the other way around - by taking over the cultural institutions that shape the dominant consensus. No violent revolution was necessary. Control of the superstructure of these cultural institutions was enough for this to trickle down to economics. It was a continuation, and simultaneously an inversion of Marx’s theory of history.
What lessons can neo-Marxists like Gramsci teach dissidents today about the importance of cultural institutions in creating a new ideological consensus? I will use dissidents as an umbrella term to identify today’s intelligentsia who loosely disagree with the dominant neoconservative, neoliberal, and progressive agenda: they include Christian traditionalists, neo-Pagans, classical liberals, new-right wingers, certain libertarians, and old-school leftists who have rebelled against “wokeism” (though it’s a term that I’m allergic to using because of its abuse). I will amalgamate these various emerging ideologies into a single term, “dissidents”, despite their significant differences, because they share a common element in their beliefs. They seek to find an alternative to the prevailing orthodoxy in Western society. They also share a failure, which is their inability to replace it.