We’ve heard a lot over the years about a possible secession of red states from America, and the idea is back in vogue with Marjorie Taylor Greene calling for a “national divorce.”  It’s a drastic measure that appeals to those who believe we’ve passed the last checkpoint for stemming the decline of the American Empire.

Their view is that the relativist barbarians have already won and there is no way to repair the damage they have inflicted on America.  It’s a pretty grim outlook, because if they’re right, our children, grandchildren, and generations beyond are doomed to live under tyranny unless red and blue states go their separate ways.

Generally speaking, it takes 25 to 75 years for a freedom movement to blossom.  A classic example of this is Russia, where the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution resulted in 75 years of communist control.  The Chinese, on the other hand, have not been so lucky.  Mao’s revolution will be 75 years old in 2024 and there is no sign that the CCP will be overthrown anytime soon.

Many believe that woke tyranny is nothing more than a passing fad, much like the hippie movement of the sixties and seventies, but the truth is that it is much more widespread and much more firmly entrenched than the countercultural movement that swept the country at that time.  The major difference between the two is that today’s wokeness is not restricted to low-information kids smoking weed and engaging in “free love.”  On the contrary, woke tyranny is now promoted and practiced by the media, academia, professional sports leagues, the arts, and even multinational corporations.

As a result, tens of millions of adults have chosen to live in a make-believe world where men can have babies, roads are racist, merit is evil, and the world is about to end because the climate is changing (as it has done continuously for more than 4 billion years).  Obviously, no halfway rational adult actually believes such nonsense, so what’s the driving force behind these faux beliefs?

I think Viktor Frankl zeroed in on the answer to this question clear back in the 1950s when he opined that meaninglessness is “the mass neurosis of our time” and predicted a dramatic increase in the problem.  Let’s face it, when young people spend more than seven hours a day staring at their smartphones, it doesn’t leave much time to think about having a worthwhile purpose in life.

Even so, I suspect that today’s younger generation knows that drag shows cannot be a reason for living.  Robbing and looting cannot be a reason for living.  And stamping out white supremacy when there is no such thing cannot be a reason for living.  We live in an age of fabricated causes, and a fabricated cause can never fulfill a person who is searching for meaning in his life.

It has been a hundred years since “the godfather of cultural Marxism,” Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci, made the case for playing the long game — gradual, stealth revolution over a long period of time — to bring about communism.  He believed this could be accomplished through communist infiltration of a country’s institutions, and history has proven him right.  His strategy came to be known as “the long march through the institutions.”

Which raises the question, if Gramsci’s strategy worked so well for the radical left, which deals in nonstop lies, shouldn’t it work for conservatives as well so long as they adhere to truth?  It seems self-evident that the most certain way to reverse the damage done by the left’s long march through the institutions is for conservatives to implement their own long march.

Short-term fixes like elections are superficial, because they don’t address the root cause of the problem — meaninglessness.  It’s time for conservatives to begin their own long march through our institutions and inspire future generations to discover a worthwhile meaning to their lives.

One word of caution, regardless of what happens in the 2024 election, don’t expect woke totalitarians to slip quietly away into the night.  They won’t.  Their hatred is too deep, their anger too raw, their ignorance too great.

Even in a best-case scenario, where Republicans win the presidency, the House, and the Senate, it would be naïve to expect the totalitarian left to have a come-to-Jesus moment and change course.  They are much more likely to become a modern version of the Weather Underground movement of the sixties and seventies and engage in terrorist attacks like the recent invasion of “Cop City” in Atlanta.

The long-march strategy will take many generations to bear fruit, because our institutions are infested with radicals who are willing to go to the wall to maintain their grip on power and continue to move the United States toward a totalitarian dystopia where Western culture is reviled.  That being the case, we would be wise to heed an old Chinese proverb that says, “a journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step.”  It’s time to get started.