National cultures become burdensome over time, or so claimed the Sardinian Communist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) in the famous notebooks he filled while slowly dying in a Fascist prison.
“[T]he more historic a nation, the more numerous and burdensome are these sedimentations of idle and useless masses living on ‘their ancestral patrimony,’ pensioners of economic history,” Gramsci wrote. European “civilization” was characterized by the “fossilization of civil-service personnel and intellectuals, of clergy and landowners, piratical commerce and the professional…army.”11xAntonio Gramsci, Selections From the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York, NY: International Publishers, 1971), 281.
Italy—along with all the states of Old Europe, plus India and China—was like a peasant overburdened with all the picturesque souvenirs of its long history heaped on its back, struggling to march forward in the modern world.
The United States, on the other hand, walked light. “America does not have ‘great historical and cultural traditions’; but neither does it have this leaden burden to support,” Gramsci declared. Because America was free of the feudal holdovers and encumbrances of Europe, its productive forces could charge forward uninhibited: “The non-existence of viscous parasitic sedimentations left behind by past phases of history has allowed industry, and commerce in particular, to develop on a sound basis.”22xIbid., 281–285.
That also meant that politics, and its relation to intellectual life, had a different character. In Europe, Gramsci believed, party politics involved the attempt to stitch together a workable coalition between “organic intellectuals”—people whose thought consciously bears the stamp of the emerging industries to which they are connected—and “traditional intellectuals,” thinkers attached to long-standing institutions, like the clergy, the professoriate, or the media, who see themselves as unattached to any social class. This effort echoed the broader attempt—beyond the scope of any particular political party—to construct hegemony, Gramsci’s famous notion of a kind of totalizing prestige, diffused through cultural institutions, that supported the dominant social group’s rule without coercion.
But in America, there were very few traditional intellectuals. The goal of party politics, instead, was to “fuse together in a single national crucible with a unitary culture the different forms of culture imported by immigrants of differing national origins.” That was why, compared to Europe, America had so few political parties—just two, which “could in fact easily be reduced to one only.”33xIbid., 20. And if intellectual and political life in America looked different, it might be suspected that hegemony should look different, too.
Gramsci is not the only one to have made such observations. Harvard political scientist Louis Hartz, in his 1955 book, The Liberal Tradition in America, argued that the lack of a feudal past made Lockean liberalism the hegemonic ideology of the United States. Both national parties were liberal at heart, differing only over the details. Historian Richard Hofstadter struck a similar note when, in 1948, he described the “American political tradition” as a laissez-faire straitjacket out of which no major political leader had managed to wriggle.
We might accept, as an artifact of 1930 or 1948 or 1955, this sketch of a country short on cultural-institutional baggage and long on economic dynamism, with a party system whose factional conflicts obscured a deeper unity, grouped around the tenets of classical liberalism. But is the America of 2025 still institutionally unencumbered, hegemonically liberal?