Reality will not be denied and is always prepared to surprise us.

I have frequently noted the poisonous inheritance of Antonio Gramsci. When you know of his work, you see the modern world as the off-spring of his thinking. There is a case to be made that the promulgation of Gramsci's philosophy was the most effective weapon deployed by the Soviets against the Age of Enlightenment West. There is a plausible argument that this brood-parasitic version of zombie Marxist philosophy is finally delivering long after the death of the Soviet Union which deployed it.

It is a plausible argument but I suspect not fully accurate. I suspect it overweights planning and underplays random chance. But that it has been unchecked so far is undeniable.

A good brief primer on Gramsci's thought is found in Mayor Pete: Red Diaper Baby by Paul Kengor.

At the age of 35, in 1926, Antonio Gramsci was arrested in his native Italy by Mussolini and spent the last 11 years of his life in prison, where he would write, write, and write — compiling a master volume of 33 Prison Notebooks. Of these notebooks, compiled mainly between 1929 and 1935, two of them, Notebooks 16 and 26, deal explicitly with culture — that is, Gramsci’s Marxist thoughts applied to culture. Those two notebooks are titled, respectively, “Cultural Topics I” (completed in 1933–34) and “Cultural Topics II” (completed in 1935). Moreover, even as Notebooks 16 and 26 deal with “Cultural Topics” I and II, culture is a consistent theme throughout the Prison Notebooks.

Gramsci looked to culture, particularly through his theory of “cultural hegemony.” If the fundamental transformers of the radical Left truly wanted to win, then they needed to first seize the so-called “cultural means of production”; that is, culture-forming institutions such as the media and universities. Gramsci himself foresaw societal transformation coming about by what others have characterized as a Gramscian “long march through the institutions.” (There is debate over who first used the phrase, but most current sources credit West German Marxist writer and student activist of the 1960s named Rudi Dutschke.)

Not until leftists came to dominate these cultural institutions would they be able to convince enough people to support their Marxist revolution. “This part of [Gramsci’s] thesis was like manna from heaven for many left-wing Western intellectuals,” writes Samuel Gregg of the Acton Institute. “Instead of joining a factory collective or making bombs in basements, a leftist professor could help free society from capitalist exploitation by penning essays in his office or teaching students.”

The heirs of Gramsci, like the ideological progeny of Marx and Lenin and the Frankfurt School, insisted on the need to question everything, including moral absolutes and the Judeo-Christian basis of Western civilization. There was no traditional institution off limits to the cultural Left. In fact, so “critical” was the cultural-Marxist left of anything and everything that it would brand itself as “critical theory.”

Critical theory has become common in academic English departments in particular. It was this tendency to criticize everything, to tear down everything, that has made this particular brand of Marxism so dangerous. Accordingly, Gregg calls Gramsci perhaps “the most dangerous socialist in history.”

This much I knew already but Kengor expresses it well and succinctly. Entertainment, Academia, K-12, Mainstream Media, Administrative State bureaucrats - the Gramscian march through the institutional vectors of cultural transmission has been impressively comprehensive and thorough. Not everyone in those sectors is by any means a Marxist. But everyone is exposed to silkily repackaged Marxist philosophy which, if not examined closely, sounds moral.

I also have known that candidate Pete Buttigieg is much more of a radical candidate than is being presented in the media. Most the press are positioning him as a centrist along with Joe Biden and in opposition to socialist Sanders and socialist-in-all-but-name Warren. It has been a puzzle to me because when you read his positions and policies, there does not seem too much reason for why you would consider him a centrist. It is a little like the right's respect for Tulsi. Another candidate who, based on her actual political positions, is pretty radical.

In both cases I suspect people are being thrown off the trail by appearances. Both Buttigieg and Tulsi have served in the military, both are younger, both are good looking, and both are sufficient novelties not to carry the weight of baggage. I suspect responses right now are based on first appearances rather than examination of policies.

I have also heard people referring to Pete Buttigieg as a red-diaper baby, a phrase I know from the UK where the phenomenon is much more common. Adult politicians who were raised by avowed communists. It has the implication of being a dyed-in-the-wool leftist.

I had assumed that the phrase, used in the American context and against Buttigieg, was hyperbole.

Turns out, based on Kengor's reporting, he is in fact a red-diaper baby. And not just any red-diaper baby.

As for that red-diaper background, Charlie is referring to the work of Pete Buttigieg’s father, Joseph Buttigieg, who was the world’s foremost expert (certainly the English-speaking world) on the famous Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Joseph, who died in January 2019, was no less than the founder of the International Gramsci Society, a fact hardly a secret and acknowledged warmly on the website of the International Gramsci Society. It’s so unmissable that the first thing that displays when you open the website is Joseph’s photo with a memorial tribute. In fact, as someone who regularly checks that website, I can tell you that Joseph’s photo has been the lead on the screen for a full year and counting. He was very important to them.

Whoa. I feel like I have suddenly fallen into a reds-under-the-bed McCarthy Twilight Zone episode. His dad was a Gramsci expert?

Again, Gramsci’s massive paper trail, his primary body of work, was the Prison Notebooks. That brings us to Joseph Buttigieg, and even to Pete.

The definitive English translation of Gramsci’s work is Joseph Buttigieg’s translation of his vast Prison Notebooks (Quaderni del carcere), published by Columbia University Press. Joseph Buttigieg produced three thick volumes, each around 700 pages in length. In each of the volumes, Joseph begins with acknowledgments in his preface. And each time, he concludes by giving special thanks to his wife, Jennifer Anne Montgomery, and to his son Pete. Importantly, this seems a little more than the typical sentimental thanks a writer would give to a family member.

In the preface to Volume II, for instance, Joseph finishes, “The greatest debt of all I owe to J. Anne Montgomery and Peter Paul Buttigieg (who also helped with the compilation of the index of this volume) for the countless ways in which they have enabled me to realize this work.”

The rest of the article is more detail about the possible effects on Buttigieg of his red-diaper babyhood. Fair questions but perhaps a touch fevered. Past is not prolog. The father is not the son. But the price of liberty is eternal vigilance and all that.

It is astonishing enough that the narrowed DNC field of six candidates is fully one third shaped by extensive exposure to Marxist thought (Sanders and Buttigieg) and one half deeply compatible (Sanders, Buttigieg, and Warren).

But that one of the six candidates should be the living embodiment of what Marxist philosopher Gramsci was aspiring to, a candidate with a deep knowledge of Marxism, the son of a Marxist, and the son of a Marxist who stormed the Academic ramparts and helped reshape the higher education sector is astounding to me. The long march through the institutions towards which Gramsci aspired seems to have reached its apotheosis in Pete Buttigieg.

This is a script so improbable that I cannot imagine it coming to pass. But here we are. Reality will not be denied and is always prepared to surprise us.