Gramsci noted in his prison notebooks, a new edition which came out last year, and in other earlier editions, that the ruling class will create the norms which society itself creates subjectively and in various groupings, after the quiet overthrow of religion and other class distinctions. As I have noted before, Gramsci benefited in his life, outside of his prison days, of course, from the Western life-style of an intellectual. However, he did not see his own inconsistencies, as his own well-being depended largely on the capitalism of Western Europe and the music, art, and literature of that culture. His idea of hegemony, which merely means ruling class, is that the ideas of the dominant culture, or political will becomes the lords and masters of the masses. History will see this momentum. He foresaw the failure of a violent Marxist take-over, and therefore came up with this mode of revolution in changing the education and then cultural mores to move along Marxist principles. A slow removal of the norms of Western civilization, especially in areas of morals and religious thought, can be removed from the public life merely by the agreement of the culture itself, having various groupings coming into agreement through common goals.
I must correct myself, as I made an error in an earlier posting that Gramsci created the phrase "the long march through the institutions", a phrase of Rudy Dutschke, a liberation theology-type revolutionary, who coined the phrase. The ideals of Gramsci inspired this phrase, however, and I am happy to retract the error.
The point of all of this is that we are now seeing in America the result of these revolutionary ideals and the hegemony of society, which now dictates, through Washington and other means, such as the media, a culture which denies natural law philosophy and the normal Western moral norms for the godless, relativistic and subjective pursuit of power and complete autonomy. Of course, the great enemy of the ruling class, which basically is the same as de Tocqueville's Tyranny of the Majority, is the Catholic Church.
