Old European societies contain sedimented relics that check rapid historical progress

Evidence

The Anglo-Saxon immigrants are themselves an intellectual, but more especially a moral, elite . I am talking, naturally, of the first immigrants, the pioneers, protagonists of the political and religious struggles in England, defeated but not humiliated or laid low in their country of origin. They import into America, together with themselves, apart from moral energy and energy of the will, a certain level of civilisation, a certain stage of European historical evolution, which, when transplanted by such men into the virgin soil of America, continues to develop the forces implicit in its nature but with an incomparably more rapid rhythm than in Old Europe, where there exists a whole series of checks (moral, intellectual, political, economic, incorporated in specific sections of the population, relics of past regimes which refuse to die out) which generate opposition to speedy progress and give to every initiative the equilibrium of mediocrity, diluting it in time and in space. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 311

Categorization

• XREF: Gramsci’s contrast between virgin-soil America and check-ridden Old Europe parallels his own earlier distinction in this book between East and West (the ‘war of position’ reformulation); also foreshadows later settler-colonial and ‘Americanness’ critiques in Islamophobia literature about the US founding myth.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that inherited sediment — ‘relics of past regimes which refuse to die out’ — ‘dilute’ every initiative into ‘the equilibrium of mediocrity’ is a rich hypothesis about why radical transformation succeeds in new societies and stalls in old ones.