After several days of hullaballoo regarding Phil Roberson’s comments, A&E’s resulting suspension, threats of the family to walk, indignation from the PC crowd, Conservatives rising in defense, point, counterpoint, and arguments about rights or lack thereof, one can see with some clarity what it means to embrace the progressive virtue of “tolerance.” This Newspeak term has become a buzzword to suggest that we should all simply tolerate people, lifestyles, beliefs, actions, and the like that are different from our own, because from a value standpoint they’re basically all the same. In the ideal, this would mean that people from all walks of life can come together and sit down at the utopian table of progressive brotherhood, free of power structures and hungry for a cruelty-free feast. In practice, tolerance and other PC-buzzwords, like equality, are used to subvert culture and encourage relativism by infiltrating otherwise fringe and radical ideas into the mainstream.
Cultural warfare of this nature is the application of theory developed by Antonio Gramsci. Acknowledging that a violent overthrow of the Italian system was impossible, Gramsci realized that the country could still be turned communist if the same radical ideas were instead inserted slowly, over the course of time, rather than in a single upheaval. In other words, the Bolshevik ‘war of maneuver’ could not be reproduced in Italy; it would be necessary to pursue a ‘war of position’, which focused on society and culture with a goal changing the fabric from the inside, to encourage socialism through gradualism and salami tactics. This slow whittling away the fabric of society and replacing it with their own eventually causes a passive revolution in which the hegemonic group, culture, way of life, even civilization, is replaced by a new counterhegemony (read: communism).
This idea was focused around the institutions of society. Institutions are full of intellectuals, which perform specialized functions, are seen as experts, and so on. To Gramsci, everyone was an intellectual, but not everyone’s function was to be an intellectual; just because one can make an omelet does not make one a chef. Gramsci distinguished some intellectuals are “organic” intellectuals, brought up within the educational system to lead a particular societal function. He believed that the cultivation of this type of intellectual is what propagated the status quo, or cultural hegemony. If the communists wanted to dominate this culture, it was through this type of intellectual that they would do it. It is pursuant of this thought that communists have come to dominate the education of our children, control of teachers unions, curriculum, and academia. (For more, see here.)
Hegemony is the status quo, it is the way things function, it is ‘common sense’ to everyone, it is that which communists seek to replace. For our purposes especially, it is the Constitution and Western Civilization. To break the hegemony, one must simultaneously chip away at pervasive ideas and push otherwise unacceptable ideas closer toward the mainstream. To accomplish this feat, imposing the will of the minority upon the majority, dissenting views are to be demonized and ostracized. It therefore becomes social suicide to disagree with the new mainstream, as views that dissent from the new version of mainstream are met with indignant reactions, demonization, and ridicule. The fear of the result causes individuals to self-censor when discussing divisive issues of cultural importance. If Gramsci can’t get you to join him, he’ll at least get you to keep your opinions to yourself, tacitly approving of whatever otherwise radical agenda item he might be peddling.