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This seems to be a common framing, but I generally disagree, as I think it elides the actual dynamics at play.
Perhaps your description is somewhat exaggerated or simplified for effect, but describing the process as one where socialist leaders are masterminding a strategy to take over universities and then society implies a very high degree of coordination that I just don't see. Who are these leaders? Where do they meet? What's their organisational structure? How do they retain such cohesion over decades?
You can certainly find examples of academics talking about this idea, and I'm sure everyone is familiar by now with the infamous "Long march through the institutions" quote, but that's not how culture works. Culture changes institutions, but there's a huge gap between recognising this obvious fact and having a small group of people able to push coherent and sustained radical cultural change over long time scales.
I view the cause and effect as almost completed reverse. Culture changes first, driven in my view by structural changes in society, which prompts people to jump on board. This doesn't happen all at once or in the same way for all segments of society, as there are different structural forces at play depending on your demographics.
I suspect you may be drawing this view from the United States, where there has been a lot more judicial activism on these issues, but is simply inaccurate for most countries that have enacted the changes you're talking about. Gay marriage is a recent example - in every European country I can think of, it was legislated following public debate (sometimes following explicit election commitments), and often with concessions such as the use of conscious votes not typically allowed by political parties. The only exceptions are places like Ireland, where they enacted it via a referendum.
There's no need for current leaders to meet and mastermind a strategy, because that work has already been done. They met in Moscow in 1919 at the Third International, where they agreed on the basic strategy- only the radical left is allowed (no moderates), constant revolution, cooperate internationally, and use whatever force is necessary to win. This was the end result of a long process starting with the First International in 1864 London, and other groups before that.
College students come in at age 18 and get exposed to this stuff for the first time. They think "wow, what fresh new ideas! I want to be a revolutionary leader too!" But they're not leaders at all, they're just the latest foot soldier for a very old movement where the leaders are long since dead. Nonetheless, it continues because it works. It's like "terrorism" or "guerilla warfare"- you don't need a living general to teach those strategies. But you do need sergeants and lieutenants to teach the new recruits in the basics.
Gay marriage might be an exception since it is broadly popular, at least since after the US enacted it. But what about other woke/leftist cultural programs? Immigration for example seems extremely unpopular, and yet all the European governments keep increasing it anyway.
I suppose the main way I view this differently is that I don't see the masterminding of a strategy / the Third International etc. as being necessary at all. If I imagine two possible worlds:
I really don't see much difference in outcome (in which case scenario two would win as it involves less complexity). Part of the reason I think this is because it has been quite a gradual development, happening over multiple decades, which seems more plausible to me as driven bottom-up rather than top-down.
I guess what I'm saying is, what makes you say that what we see today is the result of masterminding by socialist leaders, rather than the result of an emergent shift in the culture? There was certainly a fair amount of propaganda coming from the USSR, as well as Western apologists, but is the idea that there was more than this? The idea of a counter-culture forming in academia seems fairly unremarkable to me, as does the idea that it would attach onto socialist ideas given the existence of the USSR, but I am open to being shown clearer links between the two.
If I had to speculate, I'd put the changes down to the institutionalisation of science and academia post WWII. A model of government funding by committee allows for the emergence of fields that are uncorrelated with either reality or the broader community, and if there's funding to be had academics will be drawn there.
I wanted to point out that not all cultural programs arise from the same source, and gay marriage seemed like a good example of that. From my experience the debate generally came before the dominance of 'wokeness', and the more radical leftists were not supportive - in my experience the Marxists and socialists regarded marriage as a patriarchal, heteronormative and capitalist institution that perpetuated the status quo, while queerness offered a way of destabilising that. The argument for gay marriage was driven by liberal (in the John Stuart Mill sense) and even to some degree conservative concerns, which I think accounts for its general acceptance.
Immigration is an interesting one, and there are quite a few facets to it. I follow the UK more closely than the rest of Europe, and it's worth noting that there have been very high rates of immigration under both the conservative and now the labour governments. It's known to be a major issue for the electorate, and governments have repeatedly promised to reduce the intake, so as you say why do they keep increasing it anyway? Here the answer is almost certainly economics - since the Global Financial Crisis in 2008, most European countries (and Australia) have had essentially flat GDP per capita growth (see e.g. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations=US-AU-GB-FR), so the only way to keep the economy growing is to import more people. This is not a good long term strategy, but a sharp cut to the immigration intake would result in recession, which are infamously unkind to the electoral prospects of governments. (A Home Secretary in the previous conservative government in the UK, Suella Braverman, has talked about this, and recounted being shut down by Treasury in Cabinet when trying to discuss reducing the immigration intake consistent with the government's election promises).
The US of course has different drivers, as the economic situation is quite different (though there would still be a strong demand amongst certain groups for low-wage workers). Media and the general attitudes of people in the PMC will have different drivers again, and here cultural explanations make more sense. I won't expound on these as I think the discussion of them is fairly widespread.
I took a while to respond to this because I needed time to think it over. You raise some good points, and I don't have all the answers.
There was probably a good mix of both of those sorts as academics in the 1960s. As well as normal people who just liked the job- it was a lot easier to become a professor back then. The universities were massively expanding with all the baby boomers, especially in America.
what I think happened was that, over time, some tactics just worked better than others. Nobody really pays attention to a professor writing papers about socialism. Even if it's very persuasive, we just ignore it. But it's hard to ignore a group of activists chanting slogans at you, and even harder when it's your boss ordering you to follow new policies to be more woke.
I don't think it's just a funding issue, because academia is famously low-paying. And many of the activist groups don't pay at all. In fact, many universities outright ignore areas that could be well funded (like military history or psychometrics) because it goes against their leftist ideology. You see the same thing in movie and game studios- they push for woke stuff despite it completely tanking their profits, over and over again.
It's also worth noting that the left was significantly more violent in the past, especially in the late 60s and 70s. This was a time of things like the Weather Underground planting bombs, environmental groups destroying bulldozers, and "the Troubles" in Northern Ireland. (edit- and the Black Panthers/Black Liberation Army- probably the best example since they were explicitly Marxist while also committing many acts of violence) None of those groups were related, but they seem to follow the same playback of student discussion group -> unreasonable political demands -> resort to force to get what you want. I think nowadays those groups have realized that other forms of force work better than naked violence, but the same playbook is there, looking awfully similar to the Russian Revolution.
It's sort of a joke by now that the environmental groups are usually also socialist. "The watermelon party, green on the outside and red inside" and such. They talk about environmentalism mostly, but if you ask them their economic views they will usually admit to being socialist, at least in their ideal world. And I feel like pretty much all the leftist groups are the same- regardless of their pet policy, they're also mostly socialists or communists.
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I've read documents from/describing the Communist Party of Finland in the 1960s, when a lot of academics entered it (for the first time in basically, well, ever), and the general feeling was that while they welcomed the influx they were also quite suspicious of the new recruits and constantly worried that this would eventually draw the party away from the working-class base (the fears were correct, as it turns out to be). The specific strategy of orthodox Marxism has always been based specifically organizing the working class as working class.
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Thanks for the examples, you're right that I shouldn't have been quite so strong in my assertion to imply there were no counterexamples. I would maintain though that the very small number of them (two highlighted out of I think forty? countries in Europe) does demonstrate that is has mostly been via public debate.
Sorry if I'm being obtuse, but I don't understand this argument - legislation is the way in a democratic society for the will of the masses to be implemented, as it's instituted by parliaments comprised of elected representatives. The criticism of human rights frameworks is that they subvert the will of the populous by superseding the legislation enacted by their representatives (e.g. courts such as the European Court of Human Rights overturning legislation enacted by the government).
I feel like we're wandering a bit here into the issue of the legitimacy of government regulation, which my post wasn't addressing - my intent was to point out a pretty clear counterexample to the idea that all the cultural changes in the past few decades have been implemented without being subject to votes.
Briefly, though, whether one approves of it or not, marriage has been regulated by government for centuries (the earliest marriage act in England going back to the 1750s). It's a well defined legal instrument, which is tied in with other well defined legal instruments (such as inheritance, powers of attorney, etc.) As such, the rights (and obligations) of marriage cannot be granted by arbitrary institutions.
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