Even as pro-life voters celebrate what seems to be a clear electoral win at every level of government, we need to remember how quickly victories can be squandered, or politics’ worm can turn. In fact it behooves us at this very moment when we’re raising our hopes for change to learn from our enemies who snatched victory from defeat.

90 years ago today, a great idealist committed (in his own way) to justice for the vulnerable saw his dreams for change collapse before his eyes. He had struggled for years against an increasingly intolerant regime that perverted his country’s constitution, took innocent lives, and tried to crush the freedoms that citizens took for granted. He had worked inside the system, followed its laws, taken part in elections and run a newspaper. He had worked his way up the ranks of a major political party, only to see that party crushed in a single day. Now the regime of injustice that scoffed at human life appeared to be all powerful. There was no realistic prospect of peaceful change, and a revolution seemed utterly out of the question.

What We Can Learn from Antonio Gramsci

On November 9, 1926, Antonio Gramsci, Italian Marxist, went to prison. You might have thought that his story ended there — as just another one of Mussolini’s victims. The Fascist system had already begun beating down every labor union, church group, newspaper, or other institution that stood against its program of “Everything for the State, nothing against the State, nothing outside the State.” But that day in November the Fascists had gone even further: They’d enacted a wave of emergency laws that banned political parties and subjected even members of Parliament, such as Gramsci, to instant arrest.

In prison, battered by illness, denied proper medical care, Gramsci worked out a whole new way for Marxism to fight back against its opponents. Instead of organizing workers into councils so they could fight for a violent revolution, or running political candidates in elections they typically lost, Gramsci suggested that followers of Marx work on multiple fronts inside the culture, and gradually rise through the ranks of power centers — from churches and universities to magazine and movie studios. They would quietly gather influence and connect like-minded people, and by gaining control over the “cultural means of production,” they would teach the millions to reject the values of capitalism and private property, until the Marxist dream seemed less like some distant utopia than the logical next step, which few would bother resisting.

It is worth thinking back on Gramsci. While his goals were very different from ours, and quite incompatible with them, it’s hard to deny that his methods were brilliantly effective. Nor are they (like revolutionary murder) intrinsically evil, such that we can’t learn from them. In fact, Gramsci’s techniques took a cause that seemed completely lost and brought it back from the dead. As scholar Samuel Gregg has noted, Gramsci’s thought

effectively transcended its Marxist origins. His outlook is now blankly taken for granted by millions of teachers, writers, even churchmen, who have no idea that they are committed to cultural Marxism. So while the socialist paradises constructed by Lenin, Stalin and like-minded people imploded over 25 years ago, the Gramscian mindset is alive and flourishing at your local university and in more than a few liberal churches and synagogues.

Aware of how transitory electoral victories can prove, the above is precisely what the pro-life movement must do. Here’s a three-point Gramscian plan for making America prolife again:

Kiss Big Brother Goodbye

Our churches and other institutions must reclaim the social safety net from the hands of a government still committed to intrinsic evils, like abortion and euthanasia. We should not fool ourselves that a Trump administration can “fix” this deeply-dyed bias of the federal government. At least not forever. There is no more room for Christian charities to take federal money. Period.

And this is just as well. The vision of human dignity at the heart of the prolife movement was never really in sync with “charities” that derived most of their income from forcible taxation, and essentially served as federal contractors. Nor do such programs really serve the needs of America’s vulnerable — focused as they are on streaming a bare survival income to poor people the better to purchase their votes in the next election.

Federal social programs will serve the values that dominate the federal government, which will likely remain those of the anti-life secular left. You could best sum up the worldview taught by the U.S. Supreme Court, and all those institutions that follow its solemn teaching as: “The greatest number of happy moments for the greatest number of voters.” For them, human life is neither dignified nor sacred, and it’s not really important that charity programs try to transform the lives of people — to help them become free and independent, responsible and self-reliant. The key, instead, is to spend just the right amount of money to keep the ghettos quiet. Christians must do better. And we already know how. We see in the network of pro-life pregnancy centers that our movement created in the teeth of state resistance a model for every other social outreach or charitable agency run by our churches or non-profits: Reject the state’s distorted, anti-life values, and purchase your freedom from them by raising your own money.

Recapture the Institutions

Pour our energy, time, and effort into a “long march through the institutions” of academia, media, journalism, and philanthropy. Too often, we write off these crucial “means of cultural production” as hopeless — precisely because Gramsci’s disciples did their job so patiently and effectively over the decades. But in the long run, Gramsci was right when he observed that it’s more important to form the minds of the next generation than it is to win the next election.

Politics is downstream of culture. Roe v. Wade was not decided based on sound Constitutional reasoning, or even the brilliant arguments of attorneys with wicked, anti-human views. The judges’ minds were made up by the broad cultural consensus that sex is mostly for pleasure, and the carefully-fostered illusion of a population crisis.

Roe v. Wade was not decided based on sound Constitutional reasoning, or even the brilliant arguments of attorneys with wicked, anti-human views. The judges’ minds were made up by the broad cultural consensus that sex is mostly for pleasure, and the carefully-fostered illusion of a population crisis.

Who created that consensus, and fostered that illusion? The leaders and foot soldiers of cultural movements in all those institutions Gramsci had targeted. (For a documentary on how they succeeded inside the Catholic church, see the powerful documentary A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing.) If we would undo his work, we must patiently retrace their footsteps. It won’t be easy. But it’s absolutely crucial. That’s what organizations like Movie To Movement exist to advance.

Have a Back-Up Plan in Case the Supreme Court Can’t Be Fixed

We must hold President Trump accountable for his often repeated promise to appoint honest, pro-life judges to our higher courts, and if he honors it, get ready to fight like wildcats to help his appointees get confirmed.

But we can’t stop there. The closeness of this election and the narrow balance on the Supreme Court show us how risky a “courts-only” strategy really is. We must have a back-up plan. That means exploring every possible legal and Constitutional strategy for resisting the decisions of a runaway Supreme Court — which has already far exceeded its authority, and transformed itself into a perpetual, Constitutional convention — each year producing a new set of principles to suit the preferences of its politics.

We must look to ourselves, our states, and the tools bequeathed to us by the founders in the Constitution to protect our freedoms and the rights of the most vulnerable in our society. The Constitution grants us two significant means to achieve this. The first is in the framework of Article 10 and the second, in Article 5. Nullification pursuant to Article 10 has been used by the states in recent years to reject a myriad of federal intrusions. In fact, 2009 saw a wave of 10th Amendment resolutions passed or introduced by state legislatures across the country specifically aimed at restoring power to the states. Similarly, an Article 5 convention of the states provides for the people and their state legislators, rather than a self-serving Congress, to judiciously restore order to the republic through carefully considered amendments to our Constitution. The first one we should promote, of course, would restore the sanctity of life.

If Gramsci could spread what he didn’t realize was poison from the depth of a prison cell, we can work through our churches, non-profits, businesses and families to spread what St. John Paul II called the “gospel of life.” We have God’s promise that nothing, not even martyrdom, can finally silence us.