“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears,” George Orwell writes in Nineteen Eighty-Four. “It was their final, most essential command.” That’s the situation of totalitarian rule. However, the Party can achieve something approximating this rule by portraying the institutions they govern as neutral and objective. This is where we’re at presently in the United States (and the West more broadly). Many of our fellow citizens have fallen for the trick, even though no Ministry of Love tortures them into loving Big Brother. At least not yet.
This situation is what Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci described in his Prison Notebooks as ideological hegemony. Those in power write history from their standpoint and act as if the narrative they socialize is the only or truthful one. They do the same with science. How is it that so many people came to believe that men could be women? How can the progressive prole appeal to academic journals to support such an absurd claim? Because progressives colonized science and corrupted its publications. Queen theory is anti-science. Yet it is portrayed as though it’s science. Doctors perpetrate medical atrocities on its basis. This occurs because elites substitute pseudoscience for science. What has replaced science is scientism (see The Corporate Character of Scientism and embedded links).
You can see the trick when a new power comes around. The new party may reset the dial to truth. Those who lost power depict the reset as ideological. The cry goes up: “The Republican Party is assaulting the truth!” Republicans are the ones revising history—by moving the date of America’s founding from 1619 to 1776 and declaring that gender is binary and immutable. Here, the change is the opposite of revisionism: it is the restoration of truth that comes with taking from those who have controlled the institutions the power they used to radically revise history and corrupt science.
A case in point is Trump’s changes at the Smithsonian. What the panic obscures is that the Smithsonian under progressive rule was never neutral or objective. The Smithsonian has been ideological for a very long time. It has promoted, among other things, critical race theory, portraying the Protestant work ethic as white supremacist design. Progressives redesigned the Smithsonian to advance Party power, attempting to manufacture a new common sense. To a large extent, they have succeeded. America is already so far down the road to Ingsoc that millions of proles think that it’s Trump who’s the historical revisionist. Bobby Kennedy Jr. is the anti-science guy.
The left across the West used Gramsci’s insights to embark on the long march through the institutions. In the United States, even though most Americans reject progressive ideas, these ideas nonetheless shape the national understanding because progressives command the sense-making and policy-making institutions. Progressives chill the air and marginalize opposition by portraying the common man as a heathen who just doesn’t understand. The progressive worldview is assumed as orthodoxy. That is ideological hegemony.
The Smithsonian’s corruption proves the reality of the long march through the institutions the left began decades ago. One sees it in public education and elsewhere—everywhere, in fact. One sees it in Americans having soured on their country. It is manifest in the rabble in the streets. Hoffer’s “true believer” has been mobilized. The corruption of Western sensibilities is what lies behind the reemergence of virulent antisemitism, which is infecting both the left and the far-right. Hating America and the West is by design. It is a plan to weaken conventional society by disordering the mind with distorted knowledge. It puts the common man on the defensive by making him appear as the problem. He becomes “bigoted,” “racist,” etc., because he loves his country.
We see this on the other side of the Atlantic, where the rise of the right-wing AfD in Germany has European elites in a full panic. They’re terrified of losing their grip on power to ordinary Germans, whom they see as hobbits who should play no role in the affairs of Middle-Earth. Elites bemoan the rise of the extremism they say they defeated in WWII. But how can the AfD be extreme if 44 percent of those in Saxony-Anhalt voted for them—and the next runner-up only got 17 percent of the vote? That’s not extreme. That’s mainstream. That’s the orthodoxy. And that’s what terrifies elites. The Hobbits are carrying the ring to the furnace of Mount Doom. They’ve eluded the Great Eye’s gaze. Barad-dûr is shaking. (See The Lord of the Rings as a Meditation on the Clash of Civilizations and Peril of Technocracy.)
The struggle over the Smithsonian isn’t over truth versus ideology, but over competing worldviews. But it is more than this. Trump’s intervention is an attempt to reclaim the Smithsonian from progressive ideology. For the left, knowledge is less about truth than it is about power; losing the Smithsonian to truth means losing control to those who seek it. The Hobbits aren’t supposed to have the integral truth; from integral truth derives a different kind of power—authentic legitimacy that makes power authority. Across space and time, elites have always trembled at what the proles might do with authority.
freedom and reason 