Ron Radosh:

The late Italian Communist and Marxist intellectual Antonio Gramsci was correct. Before any major social change can take place — such as the revolution he favored — those who seek it have to wage a fight for what he called cultural hegemony, via a war of position in which the intellectual and cultural issues that will decide the nation’s future are adopted by the people who desire a new path.
When he was a Marxist, the great historian Eugene D. Genovese, now a rock-ribbed conservative, wrote against what he called the “cult of perpetual adolescence,” in which would-be revolutionaries rebelled against society for its own sake, and did not want to “face the necessity of waging a long, hard struggle to reshape our national culture as well as our national politics.” That is what is meant by waging the war over culture — and just as Tea Party members and other conservatives have now adopted Alinsky’s tactics as a rule-book for organizing, so must conservatives adopt Gramsci’s insight and wage a war over cultural issues before they can be successful in changing our country’s politics.
Fortunately, there are a few major conservative intellectuals who understand this vital task. I wrote months ago about the journal National Affairs, which is carrying on this vital work. Today, I want to single out the equally important Claremont Review of Books, which is the preeminent intellectual journal of conservative ideas and books. It does for conservatism what the New York Review of Books has done for liberalism and leftism, and which has had a major impact on the mindset of the majority of academia.
The new issue arrived in my mail last weeks, and I urge all PJM readers to subscribe. The issue is filled with many gems — there are simply too many important articles in this one issue to cover them all.
The most outstanding article, to my mind, is by Denis Boyles, an author who lives and teaches in France. Called “Spineless Intellectuals,” [unfortunately not online] it deals with the vital arguments made by Paul Berman and Theodore Dalrymple against the capitulation of today’s liberals to Jihad and terrorism, one author coming from the left side of the spectrum and the other from the right, but both agreeing on the “failure of the culture…to synthesize and make useful the episodic insanity of our times.”