Weak parties produce cultural squalor and apolitical elites

Evidence

Hence, scarcity of State and government personnel; squalor of parliamentary life; ease with which the parties can be disintegrated, by corruption and absorption of the few individuals who are indispensable. Hence, squalor of cultural life and wretched inadequacy of high culture. Instead of political history, bloodless erudition; instead of religion, superstitition; instead of books and great reviews, daily papers and broadsheets; instead of serious politics, ephemeral quarrels and personal clashes. The universities, and all the institutions which develop intellectual and technical abilities, since they were not permeated by the life of the parties, by the living realities of national life, produced apolitical national cadres, with a purely rhetorical and non-national mental formation. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 873

Categorization

• XREF: This causal chain from party weakness to cultural degeneration mirrors the mechanism later Islamophobia readings trace between fragile civil society and scapegoating.