And so to my initial point...
We now live in a nation where policies and politics of the 'progressive', Gramscian Left have been formulated expressly to promulgate class and gender warfare, ignorance, passivity, racial division, poverty, envy, and hatred of the good for being good. It is the prerequisite for the acquisition and exercise of unlimited authority and power. It is, in fact, precisely the outcome desired by Gramscian Marxists who now comprise our cultural elite.
I couldn't agree more and I would suggest that you give a short description similar to that which you used previously for Freud, Marx, etc. explaining Gramsci at that point. There are still people who have no idea who you're talking about.
Then resume with...TheyGramscian Marxists are the heirs of those who had had...
Vital resistance and resentment are the two main responses to the events of 1989. Vital resistance: the mind realizes its mistake - it admits, for example, that nationalization of the means of production does not produce a happy society, but rather laziness and constant shortages; it refuses, however, to let go of the idea because of its passionate attachment to it. Existence - adventures, friendships, successes - is nourished and permeated by this belief to such an extent that the belief becomes an identity; the individual cannot renounce it without committing a kind of symbolic suicide. No one can admit... that his existence reflects the echo of a failure.
In other words, no one wants to admit that the premises upon which one has constructed their entire raison dêtre is an empty, shrieking fraud. This goes a long way towards explaining why we still see excuses made for the monstrous crimes of the monsters on the Left.
Getting back to Killers Without Conscisnce, the path I've taken with the book so far is that there are two streams of thought, two memes, really that converged with disastrous results in the last two hundred years (a period of time that Delsol also happen sto agree with).
First of all, we have what I characterize as the dehumanization of humanity: Marx. Freud, B.F. Skinner and Nietzsche. We find examples of their contemporaries in the likes of Emanuel Ezekiel, John Holdren and Cass Sunstein. The main recurrent theme in their works is that humans are nothing more than things, animals or machines. We can all understand the downside of that particular view.
Then we have the uniquely destructive meme associated with the undermining of culture in order to weaken it, destroy it, and replace it with a totalitarian system. All as proposed by Antonio Gramsci in his call for the 'long march through the institutions.' This idea has been echoed, amplified and modified over the decades by Herbert Marcuse (repressive tolerance), Saul Alinsky, and the Cloward-Piven duo. the aims of this particular set of monsters is best eexemplified by a banner I saw at an leftist-anarchist demonstration - Burn the old world to reveal the new. Eerily echoed in a line from The Dark Knight: "Some men just want to watch the world burn..."
Crossing those streams, as Dr. Spengler said to Dr. Venkman, would be very bad. And so it has been. Trouble is, what's coming as a result of that convergence has the potential to make the worst excesses of the last century look like a Girl Scout picnic by comparison. That's the thrust of my book. No one has to like it. But odds are we will have to live it.