We are in a battle today in America. The battle is active at several interpenetrating levels: cultural, moral, political, and spiritual. On the political front, the Democrat party has become unrecognizable. It once stood for the “liberal ideas” of a free market, and for rewarding individual merit. These were never enough, by themselves, to instill the religious vision and moral constraint needed (according to Washington and Adams) to make our form of government really work for what is good; but now the Democrat party has lost even these. It now stands for a command-and-control market, controlled by a ruling administrative elite, that rewards group identities, and picks economic winners and losers regardless of individual merit. Against this stands a Republican party that is, somewhat falteringly at times, trying to recover the founder’s vision of a government “of, by, and for the people,” which rejects the dangerous notion of a ruling elite who know better than the people themselves (under God and conscience) what they ought to have, do, and want.

The actions of the Democrat party today clearly embody the stages of cultural revolution as described by Yuri Bezmenov, a former KGB agent and Russian journalist who defected to Canada in the 1970s. The first stage is to demoralize. This has taken place in our society for several decades now by, among other things, normalizing pornography in our media and online, promoting abortion, castigating the Judeo-Christian tradition with charges of Nazism and fascism (against known historical facts), undermining traditional marriage and the family, normalizing LGBTQ ideology, and embracing an inverted moral code that celebrates as “affirming care” the surgical removal of the reproductive organs of children. These widely known and Democrat supported actions will most certainly demoralize a people and a culture, especially if the people stand by and watch it happen without raising their voices in protest.

The second stage of cultural revolution, according to Bezmenov, is to destabilize. This has taken place in our culture  in more recent times by defunding the police, refusing to accept or to follow the duly authorized bipartisan laws of immigration, demonizing those charged with upholding the laws of the land, ignoring an open border for four years, allowing some twelve million migrants at least to enter the country unvetted, refusing to transfer criminal migrants for deportation, promoting cashless bail, refusing to investigate theft up to $1,000, ignoring the Supremacy clause of the Constitution, dismissing brutal crimes of violence by illegal migrants, and characterizing the riots of 2020 (which killed dozens of people and destroyed billions of dollars of property) as “mostly peaceful,” while arranging (with misapplied statutes later rejected by the Supreme Court) to charge and incarcerate hundreds of real protestors who never entered the Capitol building or engaged in violence of any kind on January 6. These actions will most certainly destabilize the legitimate authority of the government and the rule of law in the eyes of people, especially if the people stand by and watch it happen without raising their voices in protest.

The final two stages of the cultural revolution, according to Bezmenov, are to incite a crisis such as rioting in the streets or rampant civil disobedience that brings the country to a point of emergency, and then, with a declaration of emergency powers, to install the new revolutionary regime. The new regime, with its captured elites, would then have command and control of all that has already been demoralized and destabilized including the state itself and its laws, the border, private property, religion, the church, the family, media, education, and all the other corporate, professional, and cultural institutions of society that have quietly gone along for advantage or fear of reprisal. This is also the pattern of the Chinese Communist Party’s stated plans for what they call the “United Front,” and “Unrestricted Warfare.” You win the political and spiritual war without ever firing a shot. You win it culturally and spiritually from the inside.

In America, we sailed dangerously close to these final stages in the riots of 2020. Now, in the build up to the 2026 midterm elections, we find the democrat party with its captured elites, pressing hard and perhaps desperately, to reconsolidate its currently rather tattered vision of the administrative state. Donald Trump’s first year in his second term has, of course, already struck a debilitating blow against practically every one of the demoralizing and destabilizing actions of the lost and wayward Democrat party that we have just described.

To put a little more flesh on the bones of this brief outline, we should go on to inquire who specifically are the captured elites who are working hand in glove with party leaders to make this deep-state vision come about? They are, in the first place, cultural leaders like Roger Goodell of the NFL, and the actors and actresses of the Academy Awards and the musical artists of the Grammys, and other celebrities in our sports and entertainment industries who promote the demoralizing and destabilizing actions as described above and then follow through with the ancient pattern that Jesus described of the Pharisees—the Pharisees who “love to be seen in public places” (Matthew 6, 12, 23) receiving honor from their associates for actions of inverted morality (that claim to help while really harming others)–actions that did not cost them anything other than a few carefully scripted words in front of a microphone. These are the captured elites whose moral inversion is symbiotic with the unelected administrative state. These are the captured elites who, in the name of “democracy,” would ignore and abolish the majority electoral will of the American people to determine the shape of their own moral, spiritual, and cultural future.

The identification of the captured elites does not, however, stop there. They are also the political figures like Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Tim Walz, whose hands are covered with the grime of their own demoralizing and destabilizing actions over the last four years and more—to undermine the family with policies of transgender ideology, to destabilize the nation state with policies of open border and sanctuary cities and states, and to demean the faith that stands as the moral foundation for both the family and the nation by spinning false tales of “Christian Nationalism” in which Adolf Hitler is supposed to be the model. Hitler was neither a Christian, nor a nationalist; not as our founders conceived these worthy aims. Just ask Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was hanged by one of Hitler’s final orders for being both a Christan, and for hating what Hitler had done to the nation of Germany.    

Furthermore, the captured elites are also the educational leaders in teachers’ unions across the land, and in colleges and universities, who ignore basic studies in history, science, and literature to instill a politically correct regimen of racial, sexual, and economic ideology. And they are professionals (captured elites) in fields like law, medicine, and counseling, who have gone along with the ideology rather than risk their secure careers in organizations that have demanded uniformity. And they are corporate and financial elites who have invested in companies and supply chains that underwrite China’s PLA (People’s Liberation Army) and its active plan of Unrestricted Warfare against the United States, all while undermining our own national security in order to make their fortunes in China and the global marketplace. 

The historical sources and the pattern of this cultural revolution, as has already been intimated, are not difficult to discern, nor have they always been especially concealed by the cultural elites who promote them. The Black Lives Matter (BLM) riots of 2020, for example, were run by an organization whose financial corruption is now well known, and whose affinity for a Marxist analysis of society, the family, religion, and economics was openly broadcast from the beginning of their rapacious assault. In keeping with the worldview of BLM, the 1619 Project of Hannah Nicole Jones was pushed into our public schools by our own Department of Education as basic civics curriculum; yet also filled with historical falsehoods and articles transparently promoting a Marxist evaluation of America. Both of these actions were widely supported by the Democrat party, its compliant media, and many corporations that hoped to align themselves with the “arc of history.”

Furthermore, the use of politically correct ideas in Joe Biden’s and Kamala Harris’s programs of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and Critical Race Theory (CRT) have an unmistakable pedigree in the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory (1920s-1930s). This destructive pattern leads in one direction straight back to Karl Marx himself and his Manifesto (1848) by way of the intervening transmissions of Antonio Gramsci’s Notebooks From Prison (1926). And, in the other direction, it leads forward to the translation of these ideas in American Universities in the 1960s by works like Herbert Marcuse’s Repressive Tolerance (1965), which explores how America’s middle class had (unfortunately in Marcuse’s view) dampened a more thorough and rapid explosion of Marxism in American culture. Today, these demoralizing and destabilizing ideas are still being pushed by the Democrat party in its assaults on our constitutional order, our civil rights, and the rule of law, such as the recent organized assaults on Immigration officials, and the militant disruption of a church worship service, in Minneapolis.  

All of these historical, political, and cultural patterns echo clearly, moreover, with the four abolitions that Marx himself set forth in the second part of his Communist Manifesto. Here are the four primary structures that must be abolished, according to Marx, if the utopian vision of communism is ever to thrive: 1. Private property (individual rights), 2. Religion, 3. The family, and 4. The nation state. Sound familiar? The Marxists and the cultural Marxists (and the Maoists with their own “four olds”) have always been able to see that they could not install their alternate system of state-run culture so long as these basic principles and rights were operating with vigor and energy. Only by demoralizing them and destabilizing them would it be possible to test the veracity of their own utopian fantasies—fantasies that echo numbingly in the rhetoric of Kamala Harris–“I can imagine what can be, unburdened by the past”—and Klaus Schwab–“You will own nothing, and you will be happy.”

The facts of history, of course, do not support such vacuous fantasies—fantasies that ignore the sober realities set forth in the Judeo-Christian tradition regarding the fallen, yet redeemable, nature of man. Redeemable, yes; but not by government mandate, nor by the dictates of a ruling elite, nor by calling for violence in the streets as the Democrat party has been doing. The way ahead is not to repeat the mistakes of the cultural revolution with its enlightenment over-estimation of man’s reason and virtue.

Our way ahead is to return to the spiritual and religious sources of our national, legal, and moral heritage—with Scripture, prayer, and the commitment to elect leaders who keep the government within its appointed boundaries—responding to the will of the people, led by their conscience under God. Such a path for the way ahead rings true, moreover, with the Apostle Paul’s commission to the Christians at Rome (Romans 12:1-2): “Therefore, in view of the mercies of God (made known and visible in Christ), present your bodies as a living sacrifice, and be no longer conformed to the pattern of this world; but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is the good, acceptable, and perfect will of God.” This is the way of “a religious and a moral people” for which George Washington and John Adams hoped and called. It is a way of courage and sober realism. It is the way to fight the good fight.

Addendum

I want to thank my friends and former students, Joey Duke, Matt Hampton, and Brad Sartor, for looking at the content of this post, and for helping me to consider the issues involved. Thanks are due to Brad, in particular, who reminded me of something of which I was already aware: namely, that the last paragraph was far too brief to give anything like a hearty indication of the spiritual practices that are needed to sustain the kind of “fight” in question. For that discussion, I plan to write more in future posts on the nature of these spiritual practices at the levels of the individual, the family, and the congregation; and I look forward to further discussions on these matters with Brad, Joey, and Matt as well, for the practice of Christian conversation is itself one of the strengthening practices that is needed.