by Mises Institute
June 21, 2024
In his 1949 book “The Road Ahead: America’s Creeping Revolution,” John T. Flynn warns of the “great tides of thought and appetite that run invisibly deep beneath the surface of society.” These invisible tides are political waves that shape law and institutional policy, but because they are not seen, there is no widespread awareness of the danger they pose. They are hardly discussed in academic or political circles. They are treated as an incontrovertible aspect of political ‘consensus’, and their implementation is largely unchallenged.
Flynn deals with the surreptitious methods by which socialism takes over society. Socialists do not openly promote socialist values; On the contrary, they often deny being socialists. They proceed with stealth, pretending to care about the values closest to people’s hearts, offering them “fairness” and “justice”, a great plan for the good of society and a safety net that protects them from the vicissitudes of life. Flynn observes:
You never hear our planners proclaim the wonders of socialism. However, they are taking over the country. They understand that people are largely dominated by personal and group interests, that this is a natural phenomenon and that personal and group interests exert at all times a more immediate and powerful stimulus on their thinking than the great ideological principles.
Gramsci’s long march
A good example of how this stealth revolution has developed is the strategy often called “a long march through institutions,” often attributed to Antonio Gramsci, although Gramsci himself did not use this phrase. In his review of Patrick Buchanan’s The Death of the West, David Gordon highlights how the Gramscian approach has destroyed traditional Western values from within.
Thomas Sowell articulates a similar idea in what he calls the silent reversal of the American Revolution:
“The final chapter of The Quest for Cosmic Justice is titled “The Quiet Reversal of the American Revolution,” because that is what fanatics dedicated to their own particular applications of cosmic justice are slowly doing.
They are not trying to destroy the rule of law. They are not trying to undermine the American republic. They simply try to produce “gender equity,” institutions that “look like America,” or a thousand other objectives.”
What Sowell means is that the repeal of the American Revolution is carried out quietly, without causing excessive alarm, precisely because those who subvert it claim to be defending it. There is no grand announcement that the Constitution will henceforth be interpreted antithetical to its original meaning. This explains why there are now justices on the United States Supreme Court who claim that they do not know what a woman is and who declare that racial preferences are not contrary to the Constitution, positions that many people find so outrageously wrong that They hardly seem worth taking seriously. These positions are dismissed with no more than a casual “but that’s unconstitutional!”
In the opinion of judges who are sympathetic to critical race theories, the Constitution does not prohibit diversity, so there is nothing wrong, according to them, in reserving opportunities exclusively for “people of color” because, in their opinion, that will promote diversity. For example, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in the Supreme Court affirmative action cases argued that “nothing in the Constitution or Title VI prohibits institutions from taking race into account to ensure the racial diversity of those admitted to education.” superior”.
In this way, a body of jurisprudence gradually emerges in which ideas that subvert the Constitution, emanating mainly from civil rights instruments, end up constituting the basic law by which the country is governed. The danger lies not only in the possibility that the Supreme Court’s minority opinion will one day become a majority opinion, but above all in the credence it gives to these ideas at the highest level. Incorporating socialist propaganda into Supreme Court opinions ends up creating a culture in which such propaganda is considered respectable and true.
These examples illustrate how the wave of socialist propaganda that Flynn warned of has managed to transform Western institutions almost beyond recognition. The principles of this culture are propagated daily through diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) training sessions, which are mandatory at many institutions. Tom Woods summarizes some of the basic principles of DEI training:
“You are promoting “white supremacy” if you believe in meritocracy, if you compliment a “POC” for their oratory skills, if you insist that race doesn’t matter to you, if you reject the concept of “white privilege,” if you “fetishize” “BIPOC” (so you better really like them, but try not to like them too much or you’ll be fetishizing them), if you are committed to color blindness, or if you call the police on black people (can you stop bothering the poor guy while he tries to murder you?).
And if you try too hard, they’ll accuse you of having a ‘white savior complex.’”
Misguided optimism
The quiet nature of this revolution means that great optimism surrounds the banning of schemes and programs like DEI, with many failing to realize that such bans do not capture the relentless “great tides of thought and appetite that rush unseen deep beneath the surface” that Flynn was referring to. Thus, we see how DEI offices are closed and DEI staff are reassigned to other offices to continue their work although without referring to it as DEI.
For example, the New York Times reported in January 2024 that, despite very public attacks on DEI in 2023, more than twenty states banned or severely restricted DEI programs,
“Only 1% of 320 C-suite leaders said they have significantly reduced their DEI commitments in the past year, and 57% said they have expanded those efforts.
In a survey of 194 hiring managers published by the Conference Board last month, none of the respondents said they planned to reduce DEI initiatives.”
However, some have reported that they have rebranded their programs to avoid using the toxic DEI label. The NYT quotes a human resources manager: “When it comes to DEI, some professionals don’t mind rebranding, as long as the work continues. “The ultimate goals of these diversity initiatives and programs will not change.” For example, “manager training that was previously framed within DEI efforts can instead be framed as a course to help managers conduct performance reviews more effectively.”
The lesson from Flynn is that citizens unaware of a developing revolution are easily “snuck into socialism.” Conservatives now rejoice in having “won” their battle to end DEI programs, while DEI implementers simply slap a new label on their plans and move on. Unaware of the magnitude of the threat, citizens do not take effective measures and end up “trapped in a socialist system.” A good example of how a country can become trapped is when decades of jurisprudence and legal precedents become difficult to reverse. Over time, constitutional concepts take on the meaning assigned to them by the courts, which are then entrenched in law schools and courts as the “correct” meaning. In this situation, the people’s optimism becomes their weakness.
In the UK, it was while feminists were rejoicing in their “historic victory” in winning protection for the “philosophical belief” that sex determines who is a woman, that new hate crime laws were enacted to classify as “ hate crime» gender errors. Speaking of the need for America to learn the lessons of the rise of socialism in Europe, Flynn observes that this kind of misguided optimism can itself be a danger:
“As a people, we have no talent for pessimism. In prosperity we convinced ourselves that it would last forever. . . . We are being dragged towards socialism on the British gradualist model. We are well on our way, much further than our people suspect. And if we do not clearly recognize that fact and abandon that fatal route, we will inevitably arrive, perhaps in less than a decade, at that state of socialization which we now have before us in England. Not until we recognize this fact and all its implications will we be able to recognize ‘where we are and where we are heading’. Not until then will we be able to judge ‘what to do and how to do it’.”
This article was initially published at the Mises Institute .
Wanjiru Njoya is a resident scholar at the Mises Institute. She is the author of Economic Freedom and Social Justice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).
Newsessentials Blog 
Posted on June 21, 2024
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