clipped from www.freerepublic.com

WSJ writer, "[Fonte] defines the ideological split in America as a contest between present-day Tocquevillians and disciples of the 20th-century Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci, who drew on the ideas of Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx. The Tocquevillians incline toward individualism, religious belief and patriotism. The Gramscians see any society, including America, as an arena where the "marginalized" are necessarily at war with the privileged classes.

As we know, political events do not happen in a vacuum. There are always causes. Ideas that were deemed a failure decades ago can be successfully implemented today. In the world of ideas, decades are often only an incubation period and today Gramsci s ideas are very much alive in the political arena.

Gramsci wrote his 33 books. They contain very shrewd insights on how a "capitalist, bourgeois society" works and how it can be taken over peacefully and dominated through a systematic change of its ideas.