The strategy of guerillas is to heat things up to the point where the ruling power comes down so hard, that the locals feel compelled to join the guerrillas. Terror is also employed by the guerrillas against the local population to facilitate this. The local elites throw in with the guerrillas or perhaps with us or emigrate -- in any even they cease to be a major factor and our "Gramscian" strategy becomes useless. We aren't dealing with guerrillas, but the strategy of the terrorists could be the same.
Bear in mind, too, that the "Gramscian" strategy will also be employed against us. Maybe "Gramscian" isn't quite the right term for what North Vietnam did or didn't do, but they were more successful at winning over American elites than we were at winning over -- certainly North Vietnamese elites -- but in the end perhaps South Vietnamese elites as well. Colin Powell's argument for limited and winnable engagements is still wise.
If you are interested in strategy, you should see this.
No argument on that. In fact, I think of the Gramscian assault on the West beginning in the 1960's as a sort of philosophical Pearl Harbor. Our great institutions are still smouldering, buckling, and threatening collapse.
That said, I see encouraging signs. For one thing, the fall of the Soviet empire stripped the mask off of Communism forever. Even our elites can no longer deny that Stalin was a brutal mass murderer, that the Soviets exported bloody revolution, and that we were truly in a death struggle against an Evil Empire. Without a true Antipode to which to anchor the Gramscian assault, the strategy began to crumble. Today, I believe that we will recover.
And in a way, we may come out of it better for the experience. My theory is that we are partially innoculated against this strategy now. The Islamic world has never seen an assault like this before.