Gramsci and the Democratic Party: two

Here are some points from Gramsci on how to teach the proletariat to change so that the old ways of religion and culture, including natural law, as thrown out. My comments are in bold, large, not italic. Listen to what is being said at the DNC and compare.

1. Never to tire of repeating its own arguments (though offering literary variation of form): repetition is the best didactic means for working on the popular mentality.

Keep saying the same thing. Keep up racism talk and speeches of division. Keep up saying change and hope. Blur distinctions and deny or ignore natural law philosophy.

2. To work incessantly to raise the intellectual level of ever-growing strata of the populace, in other words, to give a personality to the amorphous mass element. This means working to produce elites of intellectuals of a new type which arise directly out of the masses, but remain in contact with them to become, as it were, the whalebone in the corset.
This second necessity, if satisfied, is what really modifies the ‘ideological panorama’ of the age. But these elites cannot be formed or developed without a hierarchy of authority and intellectual competence growing up within them. The culmination of this process can be a great individual philosopher. But he must be capable of re-living concretely the demands of the massive ideological community and of understanding that this cannot have the flexibility of movement proper to an individual brain, and must succeed in giving formal elaboration to the collective doctrine in the most relevant fashion, and the one most suited to the modes of thought of a collective thinker.

Keep talking about government, not the people. Keep the focus on group, not the individual. Do not speak of individual or religious rights, but civil rights, as if these are the same.

It is evident that this kind of mass construction cannot just happen ‘arbitrarily’, around any ideology, simply because of the formally constructive will of a personality or a group which puts it forward solely on the basis of its own fanatical philosophical or religious convictions. Mass adhesion or non-adhesion to an ideology is the real critical test of the rationality and historicity of modes of thinking. Any arbitrary constructions are pretty rapidly eliminated by historical competition, even if sometimes, through a combination of immediately favourable circumstances, they manage to enjoy popularity of a kind; whereas constructions which respond to the demands of a complex organic period of history always impose themselves and prevail in the end, even though they may pass through several intermediary phases during which they manage to affirm themselves only in more or less bizarre and heterogeneous combinations.SPN, 323-43 (Q11§12), 1932

Push revisionist history, revisionist law, revisionist relativism as morality and these will be accepted.