Steven Alan Samson

Ph.D. in Political Science, researcher and publicist

Capturing the Commanding Heights

Half a century ago the German sociologist Helmut Schelsky succinctly dissected the political strategy of left-wing radicals in West Germany and the West generally. His essay, “The New Strategy of Revolution,” remains one of the best summaries of a remarkably successful ongoing strategy of cultural subversion by way of a “long march through the institutions.” As a consequence, our present day is dominated by what Michael Polanyi called moral inversion – and Roger Scruton called a culture of repudiation – which redefine the common ethos and the rules of public discourse. Scruton argued that the West is characterized by “a political process generating corporate agency, collective responsibility, and moral personality in the state.”[1] Citizens of the West live in what he calls a Personal State, which protects their rights wherever they go. The question today is whether the new strategy of revolution is converting the Personal State into something akin to a reeducation camp and turning citizens into subjects. More

Early Christendom: Chrysalis of the West

Steven Alan Samson

So powerfully did the transformational grammar of the new religion, Christianity, change the western world that Arnold Toynbee has described the church as “the chrysalis out of which our Western society emerged.”[1] Historians have both praised the church for preserving the artifacts of the pagan cultures it converted and faulted it for absorbing too many of their elements into its life’s blood. While Pitirim Sorokin regarded the resulting fusion as a genuine synthesis, others have just as firmly maintained that Christianity created an unstable syncretism, pointing to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment as evidence of cultural disintegration and growing secularization.[2] But this has always been a source of disagreement, even among Christians themselves, and the debate continues unabated. More

A Walking Encyclopedia: Revisiting Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

Steven Alan Samson

Erik Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, an Austrian aristocrat who lived in the United States with his family for a decade after the Anschluss, was a journalist, linguist, novelist, encyclopedist, political scientist, theologian, and student of the human character who reported – on site – and bore even-handed witness to many of the great events of the mid-twentieth century, including the Ukraine famine, the Nazi revolution, the Spanish civil war, and Congolese independence. The first part of this retrospective appreciation is drawn from the first part of a review of Leftism Revisited published as “Yes, but…,” Modern Age, 34 (Spring 1992): 241-45.[1] More

Edward Rozek: Bearing Witness

Steven Alan Samson

How do we develop the eyes to see and the ears to hear? The best teachers equip us to resist temptation and recognize deception. They enable us to develop the vision to discern truth and the voice to tell it. “Take everything with a grain of salt,” my father advised me more than once. As I went off to college in 1966, he urged me to get under the wing of Edward J. Rozek, a Polish emigré who fought first for Poland at the outset of the Second World War, then escaped his imprisoned country to serve as a reconnaissance officer under British command. Blinded in a tank explosion, he underwent several surgeries to remove shrapnel and restore his eyesight. More

The Rich Dynamic of Faith in Action

Steven Alan Samson

One of the most incisive analyses of the secular transformation of America’s – indeed the West’s – ruling ideology was published a century ago in 1923 by a Presbyterian theologian, J. Gresham Machen. James Kurth would later describe its evolution as “the Protestant Deformation.”[2]During the so-called Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy which began before the First World War, Machen was the most articulate critic of a theological movement known as Modernism or Liberalism: a secular religion of sentiment poached from Christianity. His critique begins as follows: “The type of religion which rejoices in the pious sound of traditional phrases, regardless of their meaning, will never stand amid the shocks of life. In the sphere of religion, as in other spheres, the things about which we are agreed are apt to be the things that are least worth holding; the really important things are the things about which men will fight. More

Technology’s Dominion: An Ever-Tightening Web of Dependency

Steven Alan Samson

Although some degree of indeterminacy circumscribes perception and communication, it does not follow that the information which filters through our perceptual screens must be false or illusory. Norbert Wiener characterized it as “the devil of confusion, not of willful malice.” His concern was with the loss or distortion of information – analogous to entropy – in the process itself. It is a problem which bedevils our best efforts to find a common ground for understanding. More

Penetrating the Fog of Culture War

Steven Alan Samson

Protracted conflict is a historical phenomenon. It attends upon every systemic breakdown and the ensuing quest for a new equilibrium. Every revolutionary movement issues from a position of physical inferiority vis‑a‑vis the defender of the status quo. The revolutionary movement, to assure its final victory, must perforce rely more upon the breadth of its vision than the strength of its arms. Its strategy derives from a superior understanding of the total historic situation; the spectrum of revolutionary conflict techniques is as wide as the entire scale of social change. Within that spectrum, a central intelligence organizes and phases the instruments of conflict ‑‑ political, economic, psychological, technological and military. That central intelligence discerns potential weapons where the defender of the status quo sees only the tools of peace; in short, it turns plowshares into swords.[1] More

Transatlantic Exchange: Introducing Francis Lieber

Steven Alan Samson

It is remarkable how quickly America was transformed from an isolated agrarian republic in 1800 into a hegemonic industrial power by 1900. Intellectual and cultural changes that began taking root in the early half of the century yielded a cornucopia of new fruits in the latter half, including tax-supported public libraries, the rise of the scientific professions, and German-style graduate education. The impact of democracy, nationalism, industrialization, the reform crusades, sectionalism, urbanization, commerce, and immigration together gave new urgency to Crevecoeur’s old question: “What is this new man, the American?” More

Binding Leviathan: The Case for Institutional Liberty

Steven Alan Samson

In political theory, as in any inquiry, a question must begin with a perception or a premise. The question is this: How can the identity and integrity of a self-governing institution – whether a church, business, school, even a family – be maintained independently of the public agenda of a pervasively secular modern state? The perception that frames the question is that the American system of constitutional government, in particular, originated with specific reference to – and derived its essential character from – the covenant tradition of the Bible.[1] More

The Power of Vague Things: A Cautionary Tale

Steven Alan Samson

Paul Valery contends that power is founded on belief (a “vague thing”). Harold J. Berman believes the rule of law relies more on moral force than a police force. Yet the modern positivist worldview emphasizes the practical rather than the moral dimension of power. What are some consequences of this positivist belief? More

A Strategy of Subversion

Steven Alan Samson

Half a century ago the German sociologist Helmut Schelsky succinctly dissected the political strategy of left-wing radicals in West Germany and the West generally. His essay, “The New Strategy of Revolution,” remains one of the best summaries of an ongoing strategy of cultural subversion.Directed towards the “conquest of the system,” the revolutionary strategy depicted by Schelsky, which was inspired by the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci and implemented by Rudi Dutschke, is premised on destroying the most significant features of political democracy. It bids to root out the fundamental political and social ideals and the corresponding patterns of life of the major groups within the system by discrediting the values, intellectual outlook, and institutional foundations of these groups, their ideals, and even the most ordinary interactions of their members. A useful comparison may be drawn with what Thomas Farr calls “China’s Second Cultural Revolution,” where Xi Jinping’s government controls the commanding heights and is endeavoring to introduce a utilitarian, soft-power “social credit” system to fine-tune its control. More

Engines of Liberty: American Experiment in Self-Government

Steven Alan Samson

Brague’s Challenge. In an American Spectator blog post, “Sin No More,” dated May 1, 2008, Rémi Brague stated a thesis worth exploring: “What cultures that were influenced by the Jewish and Christian religions made of the ideal of liberty that I have been finding in both Testaments is a task for historians. Impartial historians will observe how miserably the ideal and its realization often jarred with one another. On the other hand, they will have to acknowledge that free institutions hardly ever developed in places that were not influenced by Jewish and Christian ideas. Outside the Judeo-Christian tradition, it has been rare for thinkers to suppose that God endowed us with a nature of our own, that freedom is part of that nature, and that it is through the exercise of freedom, and the errors that inevitably stem from it, that we fulfill God’s plan… And when Lord Acton tells us that ‘liberty is not a means to a higher political end; it is the highest political end’, he is echoing voices that can be heard in all the sacred books of our tradition, from the Torah to the epistles of St. Paul”. What follows is a lightly edited excerpt from this writer’s Crossed Swords: Entanglements Between Church and State in America (1984), chapter 5, “The American Commonwealth”. It illustrates the practical ways the ideal and its realization have been imaginatively developed even as they “jarred” with each other. More