Meet MAGA’s Favorite Communist

Gramsci died in 1937, but he can be seen as the godfather of today’s culture wars. A dedicated opponent of Italy’s fascist dictator   Benito Mussolini, he spent most of his last decade in prison, where he developed a highly influential new way of thinking about politics that put culture, rather than economics, at the center of the class struggle.

In his “Prison Notebooks,” Gramsci reckoned with why so much of the Italian working class supported Mussolini’s far-right Fascist party, exactly the opposite of what Marxist economic theory predicted. He found the answer in what he called “cultural hegemony,” a form of power that convinced ordinary people to embrace ideas and policies they otherwise wouldn’t support.

Gramsci “offers a way to think about how intellectual and moral legitimacy are maintained and enforced through cultural practices, which is useful,” said Jonathan Keeperman, the founder and managing editor of Passage Press, which publishes books by writers on the far right.

In particular, Gramsci stressed the importance of universities in shaping culture. That makes him a model for American conservatives in their “fight against critical race theory, against trans ideology, against captured higher education institutions, against DEI,” Rufo believes.

The right’s struggle against what it sees as left-wing cultural hegemony has become increasingly central to President Trump’s education policy. During the first Trump administration, Secretary of Education   Betsy DeVos   focused on less ideological issues such as supporting charter schools and dialing back investigations into for-profit colleges.

Now her successor Linda McMahon is gutting the Education Department, laying off half its employees and ordering its closure. Universities have scrubbed DEI initiatives from their websites, for fear of having their government funding choked off. Columbia University, the epicenter of pro-Palestinian protests, was denied $400 million in federal funds and has agreed to put its Middle Eastern Studies department under academic receivership. Some 60 other schools are now facing similar threats.

The White House’s agenda isn’t limited to universities. It has also asked Congress to rescind funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds PBS and NPR, news outlets the administration views as too liberal. Similarly, Gramsci attacked the Italian journalists of his day as mouthpieces for the powers that be, which in his case meant Mussolini and the Roman Catholic Church.

There are clear similarities between Gramsci’s political world and our own. When he was writing in the 1920s and ‘30s, massive technological, political and cultural changes were destabilizing governments all over the world, leaving the global power balance in flux. “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born,” Gramsci wrote of his period, which he called the “interregnum.”

Today, the world struggling to be born looks like a mirror image of what Gramsci had in mind. “Few figures seem less amenable to appropriation by the Right than Antonio Gramsci,” wrote a group of scholars in “World of the Right: Radical Conservatism and Global Order,” a book published last year by Cambridge University Press. Yet right-wing figures such as Italy’s   Giorgia Meloni, France’s   Marine Le Pen   and Brazil’s   Jair Bolsonaro   have all cited his influence.

Javier Milei , the right-wing, libertarian president of Argentina, told   Tucker Carlson   in a 2023 interview that he had to “wage a culture war every single day” because his left-wing opponents “have no problem with getting inside the state and employing Gramsci’s techniques: seducing the artists, seducing the culture, seducing the media or meddling in educational content.”

In the U.S., the Italian thinker’s influence grew more slowly. Gramsci’s name appears in the writing of paleoconservative thinkers Paul Gottfried, Thomas Fleming and Sam Francis, who influenced Pat Buchanan’s Republican presidential bids in the 1990s. One of Gramsci’s biggest proponents in the pre-Trump era was Andrew Breitbart, the founder of Breitbart News, who quoted his axiom that “politics is downstream of culture.”

More recently, far-right writers like Curtis Yarvin, who’s influenced Vice President   JD Vance , have talked about how to capture power through a culture war. “This war is not fought with bombs and bullets, or even laws and judges,” Yarvin wrote in 2022. “This war is fought with books and films and plays and poems. It is still a savage war!”

For Rufo, who in March won the Bradley Prize for his writing and influence in conservative ideas, this strategy has already yielded a handful of successes, and he plans to continue it. “I think that the work that I’ve done over the last five years vindicates the general approach and has become the dominant approach of the political right and the Trump administration itself,” he said.

“The right needs a Gramsci,” Rufo added, “and my own ambition is to serve in a similar capacity, an architect of the new right politics.”