The Sincerest Form of Flattery

Antonio Gramsci 

For more than half a century America has been arguably a conservative-majority country. Yet liberals have controlled what and how the country talks about through their capture of academia, entertainment, and mass media. Conservatives have studied leftist political thinkers and begun employing their methods with some success. One such writer was Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937):

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 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,” [conservative Christopher] Rufo believes...

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!

Conservatives couldn't make much headway in steering the national discussion until the rise of alternate media (podcasts, blogs, social media). Once they gained a foothold, conservatives could wage counterattacks more successfully by focusing on the Gramscian cultural priority and using leftist tactics, e.g., Saul Alinsky's Rule 5 "Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon".

Leftist institutions, now that their biases have been exposed, are fighting for their lives, because public funding is no longer automatic. In the immediate future American politics will be more competitive, more vicious, and more personal. Your humble blogger will not disengage but will avoid audio and visual content, which tends to rouse emotions at the expense of rational thinking.