Long march to nowhere

How a misguided strategy remade Western society and destroyed the left

In 1967, as America remained entangled in Vietnam and the Cultural Revolution was raging in China, the killing of a student by the West Berlin police would provide the impetus for the development of a concept that would change the world just as much as the two events dominating news broadcasts at the time. After police intervention during a demonstration against a state visit by Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, shots were fired, striking down a student of Romance and German studies named Benno Ohnesorg. Believing this event revealed the deep-seated fascism of the security forces of the divided city, it would eventually inspire a friend of the deceased sociology student, Rudi Dutschke, to name a new method of leftist advancement: the long march through the institutions (Langer Marsch durch die Institutionen). Inspired by Mao, this concept supposedly offered a path of advancement for the many politically engaged students frustrated by the dashing of their utopian notions and the perpetuation of the conflict they so opposed. Using their educated status, the activists would work overtime to penetrate rather than destroy the structures of the bourgeois state. As the well-educated and, due to the baby boom, extremely numerous radicals of today would form the elite of tomorrow, they would be able to reshape society to their vision, their Fabian strategy bringing down the power structure of Western society, just as it had brought down the armies of Carthage.

Fifty-eight years later, the long march through the institutions can be said to have been completed, but something hasn’t quite gone according to plan. The infiltration succeeded, but the desired results did not follow. Just as Mao’s long march and Cultural Revolution ultimately resulted in a state once more deeply wedded, after a severe course correction through Deng Xiaoping, to Confucianism and the market economy the Great Chairman sought to eradicate, so did the more metaphorical long march fail in reaching its grand ideological goal. For just as much as those committed ideologues sought to change institutions, the institutions also changed them.

Think different

The world of today is, in large part, one created by the long march through the institutions. As former radicals increasingly acquired socioeconomic status, the cultural makeup of Western society began to change. Despite conservatives dominating politics for the first decades after the beginning of this new strategy, they would never again regain the hold over the culture as they had in the 1950s, with “Conservatives taking over Washington, while Liberals took over Hollywood.” As the decades progressed, counterculture became culture, the values and ideals of this generation becoming ingrained in the public consciousness through some of the most iconic popular culture of all time. Even as pop replaced rock and New Hollywood gave way to another era dominated by blockbuster commercialism, the broad cultural outlook remained the same. The Beatles retained their near-mythical status, and the blockbusters replacing the gritty and dire filmmaking of the seventies still paid lip service to vague notions of “Rebellion.” The new businesses becoming global hegemons in the 1980s would also cloak themselves in the rebellious values of the previous generation, with Apple, led by Steve Jobs, being perhaps the most iconic example.

But the influence of the institutions on those marching through them would become ever more clear, nowhere more so than in the former student activists who would finally attain political power in the 1990s. After decades of conservative dominance, the baby boomer generation would finally be able to translate their dreams into reality. The brand of politics which swept the world after the end of the Cold War was inherently cautious and reactionary, prioritizing triangulation and centrism over grand ideological ambition. But this did not dissuade strategists from those former leftist parties from believing themselves well-positioned for the future. Their institutional dominance would assure their ability to continue shaping society going forward.

Despite their political cautiousness, their long-term dominance of media and academia shifted the social values and foundational mythology of Western society. The society depicted in the first season of Mad Men would slowly but surely give way to one defined by progressive individualism, countercultural values coinciding with materialism and instinctive individualism, which had become so established during the Reagan Revolution. The victory of leftists and liberals in the social sphere, combined with the rightward shift in economic policy, created an atomized and uncohesive society, lacking the social contract and trust which had defined the society against which the baby boomers rebelled. But the radicals had made their peace with the shifts in the economic sphere, largely due to their own relatively high status within this new economic system. Politics after the nineties settled into a familiar pattern, with the right being able to dominate economics unchallenged, and go on their foreign adventurist crusades, while liberals dominated culture and advanced institutions.

The counter-counter culture

But at some point, this equilibrium was destroyed, as voters on the right began to rebel against this arrangement. Led by another baby boomer, although one fundamentally uninterested in any utopian societal transformation, a nationalist revolt would sweep the Western world and challenge the fundamental tenets of the society created by the long march. The former radicals had, at this point, taken on a deeply conservative stance, seeking to uphold the system in which they had, by then, grown so comfortable. At the same time as a challenge occurred from the populist right, a resurgent left began to gain ground as well. Largely appealing to millennials, a generation similarly discontent with the society left to them by their parents, and reminiscent of those who set out on the long march, this movement was often met with derision and ridicule by their elders. One cannot help but see a certain level of projection in a younger generation derided for their excessive radicalism by an older generation enamored with Maoism in their youth and regarding legalizing pedophilia as a means of liberating society from bourgeois morality.

The baby boomers ultimately succeeded in blocking their radical millennial successors from power, but they would not have similar luck with the nationalist right they so fundamentally despised. By this point, they had become the face of the establishment they once despised, so intent on defending the institutions they had infiltrated over the preceding decades that they became deeply alienated from an electorate increasingly distrustful of said institutions. Donald Trump, likely the last individual of his generation to occupy the presidency, is intent on wielding state power to root out the institutional influence that any now-aged former utopians possess. What is striking is how fundamentally conservative the actual legacy left by those metaphorically stepping in the Great Chairman's footsteps was. If the generations of their parents had left them the New Deal, the Social Democratic welfare state, the end of racial segregation, and decolonization, then this supposedly radical generation left their children NAFTA, the Iraq War, austerity, and an economy fundamentally rigged against the interests of the young. Not even the lessons from the event that provided the original impetus for the long march were heeded. If in 1968, a man with little regard for the United States Constitution had come to power because of the inability of the political establishment to extricate itself from an unpopular war, the same thing happened in 2024, except this time, the president who unceremoniously left the race that same year couldn’t point to any of the transformative social legislation of Lyndon Johnson. One can only hope that the generation following them has learned the lesson: that in order to change society, it isn’t enough to infiltrate institutions; one has to tear them down and create new ones.