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Comment by datsci_est_2015 | Hacker News Reader

datsci_est_2015

It’s a pretty commonly repeated theory amongst far right / reactionary “thought leaders”. They call it the “Long March Through the Institutions”. I think the comment you were responding to was ironically referencing it.

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The phrase wasn't concocted by the right wing, it's was coined by a left-winger as an explicit plan of approach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_march_through_the_institu...

Yes, often one wing of political thought leaders will adopt terms and ideas from the other wing to serve as a foundation for their theories. I never suggested that the term itself was invented by someone on the right, merely that it’s a term widely used to describe the very specific idea of a calculated political effort to expel conservatives from academia. Ironically, Rudi’s ambitions were much more grand than simply transforming academia, he wanted to transform society.

Anyway, what you presented is not a “gotcha”, despite the fact that I’ve heard it a million times when engaging with right wing “intellectuals”. It’s still a conspiracy theory.

> To extend the base of the student movement, Rudi Dutschke has proposed the strategy of the long march through the institutions: working against the established institutions while working within them, but not simply by 'boring from within', rather by 'doing the job', learning (how to program and read computers, how to teach at all levels of education, how to use the mass media, how to organize production, how to recognize and eschew planned obsolescence, how to design, et cetera), and at the same time preserving one's own consciousness in working with others.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that a German student activist's definitionally anodyne proposal to engage with society and barely referenced in the decades since has probably been coopted more than a little to concoct a new boogeyman for the right wing.

It's not especially a "right wing theory" anymore than climate change is a "left wing theory"

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/05/conservati...

You misunderstand, the idea of the “Long March Through the Institutions” is that innocent conservative intellectuals are the victims of a central, coordinated campaign for them to be expelled from academia in order to transform academia into an institution that serves leftwing agendas. It’s an explicit rejection that such a transformation could occur naturally, and can fairly be considered a conspiracy theory by the mainstream specifically because it meets Barkun’s criteria for conspiracy theories:

  - nothing happens by accident
  - nothing is as it seems
  - everything is connected

as well as the lack of a smoking gun.

I don't really buy that idea, but like the one black guy at the Country Line Dance, you get the strong vibe you are not in the right place, and kind of just want to leave, regardless of how people are upfront treating you.

Yeah you may not believe it personally but there are definitely many in the reactionary right who do. It’s not difficult to find their forums.

The people you’re talking to don’t understand why you would ever want to have the Wrong Kind of Person around an institution as sacred as the university

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