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Learning from a Communist

Learning from a Communist

Last updated on: April 29, 2025 at 8:23 am by Gene Veith

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Learning from a Communist 2025-04-29T08:23:07-04:00 Gene Veith

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Is MAGA a communist plot? A working class revolution that overturns free market capitalism?

Is woke progressivism a capitalist plot, a way to defang the proletarian revolution by turning the left into harmless virtue-signaling by the bourgeois elite, then pushing it to such ridiculous extremes that no one will ever take the left seriously again?

Sorry, I didn’t mean to create new conspiracy theories. I’m kidding. Mostly.

But the role reversal between right and left is so complete that I can see veterans on both sides of the Cold War jumping to these kinds of conclusions.

How else could a Reaganite explain why the Republican Party is dismantling free trade and kowtowing to the world’s evil empires? How else could an old-school Marxist explain why all of the big capitalist corporations jumped on the DEI bandwagon?

There are indeed old-school Marxists–that is to say, believers in the class struggle between the working class and the wealthy and opposition to capitalism–who are pro-Trump. (See, for example, “I Used to Hate Trump. Now I’m a MAGA Lefty” and Leftists Should Relish Trump’s Revolution.)

Maybe this is just what a revolution looks like, everything revolving and becoming topsy-turvy.

But a key to this mystery is how both sides have embraced the ideas of a particular communist: Antonio Gramsci.

Keven T. Dugan of the Wall Street Journal has published an article entitled Meet MAGA’s Favorite Communist, with the deck, “Conservative activists like Christopher Rufo are taking inspiration from Antonio Gramsci, the 20th-century Marxist thinker who drew up a battle plan for winning culture wars.”

Gramsci was the one-time head of the Italian Communist Party who was imprisoned by Mussolini. During his imprisonment, he wrote some important contributions to Marxist theory. He grappled with the phenomenon that we are seeing here today: Why are so many actual members of the working class opposing the communist plan to empower them? Gramsci argued that political activism and an emphasis on economics is not enough. To be victorious, communists must take over the culture.

That means infiltrating the universities, the schools, the media, the arts, the churches, the family, and all other cultural institutions. Radicalize the culture, and the political and economic revolutions will take care of themselves. This is because “politics is downstream of culture.”

Recognize that line? I’ve heard it from countless Christian activists. I don’t think they knew they were quoting Antonio Gramsci.

Thoughtful conservatives have long identified Gramsci and his cultural strategy as the key to the Left’s dominance today.

Gramsci’s ideas took hold in the New Left of the 1960s and from there to today’s leftwing activists. In 1967, the German student radical Rudi Dutschke, alluding to Chairman Mao’s “Long March” of the Red Army, called for “the long march through the institutions.” Herbert Marcuse championed this strategy, and he played an important role in the Frankfurt School, the movement that gave us “post-Marxism,” “critical theory,” and the kind of cultural radicalism associated with woke progressivism today.

(Marcuse was also an important preacher of the sexual revolution. He is also the father of the tactic of “cancel culture.” “Liberating tolerance,” he said, “would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.”)

Today, universities, schools, the media, and the arts are indeed havens of the Left, just as Gramsci called for. So are many churches. And, increasingly, many professions, such as medical doctors pushing for transgenderism and now even corporate executives embracing the woke progressivism of the Frankfurt School. Meanwhile, the institution of the family has been upended by leftwing feminism and Marcuse’s sexual revolution.

But now the Right has also discovered Gramsci and his tactics, using them in an attempt to dislodge the Left’s stranglehold on the institutions of American culture.

According to Dugan in the Wall Street Journal, this is why the Trump administration and its brain trust are targeting universities by threatening to cut-off federal money unless they reverse their leftist policies, shutting down the department of education, exiling the established media from the White House briefing room, and the like.

Meanwhile, the right is starting its own long march through the institutions by starting its own universities, schools, news networks, publishing houses, film studios, plus cultivating its own presence in the new online media. And Christians are doing the same thing.

MAGA conservatism, unlike earlier forms, is not primarily about economics, any more than the Woke Left is about economics. Both are fixated on culture. Because Gramsci’s version of the Left focused on seizing control of the cultural institutions, it is necessarily elitist, whose vanguard is “intellectuals,” artists, and professionals. Ironically, MAGA has the support of the old Marxist base of the working class and in trying to overthrow the cultural establishment is more truly revolutionary like the old Marxists wanted to be. (It would be helpful, though, if someone attended to the economy.)

At any rate, even communists can sometimes be right about some things. Politics really is downstream of culture. So are many other things, such as economics and morality. I would add, though, another principle that Gramsci and many politicians of each side have tended to neglect: Downstream of culture is religion.

The religion may take a secular form–nihilism, utopianism, Marxist materialism, Romanticism, egoism–but cultures grow out of worldviews. Christianity, not in the sense of a ruling power but as the formative principle of human lives, can provide a way forward.

Photo: Antonio Gramsci by unknown photographer – http://eserver.org/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2002037

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