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?
The Right’s Gramscian Turn
One voice lately raised to the contrary is that of Christopher Rufo, right-wing activist and architect of the current administration’s attack on progressive doctrines of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI). Arguing that the radical left has hijacked America’s universities, corporations, and government, contaminating them with anti-American ideas that put group identity and grievance over individual rights, he identifies and exploits a widening gulf between the population at large and the country’s dominant cultural institutions. Specifically, he sees an irreducible divide between the American credo and the supposedly radical ideology that his enemies are seeking to institutionalize. If America is no longer hegemonically (classically) liberal, Rufo seeks to make it so again by purging its progressive (identitarian, “woke,” and allegedly anti-American) impurities.
Rufo sees himself as leading a right-wing counter-revolution in the American cultural superstructure, focusing particularly on higher education. And his preferred guide in this effort is Gramsci, who, as he told the Wall Street Journal, “provides the diagram of how politics works and the relationship between all of the various component parts: intellectuals, institutions, laws, culture, folklore.”44xKevin T. Dugan, “Meet MAGA’s Favorite Communist,” Wall Street Journal, April 17, 2025; https://www.wsj.com/politics/meet-magas-favorite-communist-5a1132ad?st=kPW32h. Fresh off a run of successes with the Trump administration’s campaign against DEI and elite universities, guided by his writing and activity, Rufo is now working on a book on Gramsci.
Antonio Gramsci has long been a totemic figure on the left—first in Italy, where he was a martyr and intellectual lodestar for the Italian Communist Party (PCI), and then across the world, after translations of his work circulated widely in the 1970s. Gramsci left deep marks on disparate strands of the New Left in Britain, America, and beyond, but there has been frequent disagreement over the central thrust of his thought and its practical implications for left-wing politics, with some claiming Gramsci as a firm materialist and others as a post-Marxist culturalist. One popular version among twentieth-century European left-wing intellectuals saw Gramsci as providing a simple explanation for socialism’s defeat in the developed world: Bourgeois control over media and education brainwashed the masses. Others rejected that idea as a comforting simplification. But where most agree is that Gramsci gave to Marxism something it had not previously possessed: a theory of culture and politics that was adapted to the circumstances of Western parliamentary democracy.
A fragmentary work, like Blaise Pascal’s Pensées or Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet, the Prison Notebooks has presented a challenge to scholars who seek to build a system out of this series of reflections, some only a few lines long, some contradicting ideas expressed elsewhere. Gramsci wrote under the watchful eye of Fascist censors, adding a furtive element to his prose and causing him to trade explicit references to the theorists of the Third International that formed much of his intellectual background for non-Marxist Italian thinkers like Benedetto Croce and Machiavelli. This has made it easy for some later readers to de-emphasize his Marxism.
And all these factors have also facilitated a right-wing appropriation of the thinker. Rufo is far from the first figure on the right to see Gramsci both as the mastermind of a left-wing cultural takeover and as the maker of a secret key to a right-wing counteroffensive. The idea of a “cultural Gramsci” goes back at least to Alain de Benoist and the European Nouvelle Droite of the 1970s and ’80s.55xNathan Sperber and George Hoare, “How the Right Hijacked Antonio Gramsci,” Jacobin, March 15, 2025; https://jacobin.com/2025/03/right-gramsci-de-benoist-trump. The far-right American writer Sam Francis cited Gramsci in 1993, insisting that the American right needed to wage “a revolutionary conflict” to obtain “the overthrow of the dominant authorities that threaten our culture.”66xSam Francis, “Winning the Culture War,” Chronicles, December 1, 1993; https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/winning-the-culture-war-2/.
What substance is there to this appeal to Gramsci? As a conservative friend of mine recently remarked, if the right reads Gramsci principally as telling them that “culture matters,” then they hardly need him at all: The American right has been repeating that dictum since the days of William F. Buckley Jr.’s God and Man at Yale. But this renewed Gramscian appropriation on the American right comes at a moment when the conservative movement’s long-standing penchant for cultural pugilism seems to have cracked the long-standing reluctance, in Republican administrations since Nixon’s, to target enemies via the executive branch.
Over the course of the 2010s, Rufo went from being a documentary filmmaker without a partisan portfolio to a conservative activist and central figure in the campaign against DEI—an established term for a bundle of progressive, identity-oriented bureaucratic practices that Rufo transformed into a lightning rod for critique. Explicit about the need both to curate narratives and to target the weak points in the network he opposes, Rufo describes his program as a return to colorblindness and merit through the hounding out of malefactors. Hailing Trump’s executive order in January banning DEI in the federal government, Rufo wrote that “we held firm and made the case that public institutions should judge individuals based on their accomplishments, rather than their ancestry.”77xChristopher F. Rufo, “Trump’s DEI Move Is One to Celebrate,” City Journal, January 21, 2025; https://www.city-journal.org/article/donald-trump-dei-executive-order.
Rufo is properly understood less as an independent thinker than as an ideological impresario of a right-wing cultural offensive. His “message discipline,” in the current parlance, reflects his own attempt to build coalitions in a fashion reminiscent of Gramsci’s remarks on European party politics. Like his rivals, he must do two things at once: hold together the narrower, disparate groups of “organic intellectuals” that support him—disaffected centrists, tech tycoons, respectable Wall Street Journal–reading financiers, online racists—and come up with something sufficiently unifying and marketable as the latest entry in an old American genre.
On one level at least, Rufo has a more direct relationship to Gramsci than many other figures on the right who have sought to appropriate him over the decades. Rufo is an Italian-American of recent vintage, a son of immigrants who counts many “dedicated Marxist-Leninist, unreformed communist” relatives back in Italy. As he wrote for his Substack,
I come from the Left. I was a radical leftist. My political formation was from my father’s side, my Italian relatives, who were all unreconstructed Gramscian communists. That was my political upbringing. I remember, as a child, going to visit my favorite aunt and seeing the books on her shelf, and seeing a beautiful collection of bound books. I ask [sic] my aunt, “Zia, what is this book?” She said, “This is the collected works of Lenin.”88xChristopher F. Rufo, “From Left to Right,” Christopher F. Rufo, March 15, 2024; https://christopherrufo.com/p/from-left-to-right.
Rufo’s political journey and his knack for combining a measure of intellectual sophistication (or its appearance) with political hardball is reminiscent of the old country, with its political culture known as much for tough-mindedness as for trasformismo, the process by which radical movements are gradually integrated into the establishment. His rhetorical and practical grasp of the ways and means of politics, from how to hit people and institutions where it hurts to how to present a campaign for maximum effectiveness, has a certain Machiavellian practicality, unlike the American moralizing style that is present at least as much on the “anti-woke” right as on the “woke” left, as Rufo is quick to point out. Like Francis and Benoist, Rufo emphasizes the idea of left-wing “cultural hegemony” in his reading of Gramsci—the notion that left-wing ideas have taken over all the dominant institutions of American society, from the media to the universities and schools to local, state, and federal government.
But this purely cultural reading of Gramsci omits the central element of the latter’s concept of hegemony: the connection it draws between culture and the social domination of one group by another. In elaborating this idea, Gramsci drew on his time as a labor organizer in Turin and the leader of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) from 1924 to 1926, enduring the defeat of revolutionary movements in Italy after World War I and the rise of Fascism, which eventually claimed his life. One of the lessons he derived from the failure of the workers to achieve power during what seemed like an opportune moment was the role of civil society in preserving the capitalist order. “The State,” a famous line in the Notebooks has it, “was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks”—namely, a civil society that backstopped capitalism as a social and economic order.99xGramsci, Selections From the Prison Notebooks, 238. For Gramsci, the battle lines were clearly drawn—on one side, the workers striving for a world after capitalism; on the other, the guardians of the political, economic, and social status quo, in the state and in civil society. The battle for prestige in civil society, one could almost say, was class struggle undertaken by other means.
In other words, Gramsci’s thinking runs in the precise opposite direction from Rufo’s reading when he claims, “A century ago, Gramsci made clear that all politics is elite politics.”1010xChristopher F. Rufo, “Harvard and Hegemony,” Christopher F. Rufo, December 14, 2023; https://christopherrufo.com/p/harvard-and-hegemony. It’s not surprising that conservatives like Rufo would want to avoid thinking in the explicitly Marxist terms of Gramsci, which in any case come from a society on the brink of social revolution, so unlike America today. Yet a glaring flaw in their reading is that cultural struggle seems to float completely free of social and economic reality and the brute material interests of class.
On behalf of what social groups are these supposed left-wing enemies of American liberty operating? James Burnham’s managerial elite? Barbara and John Ehrenreich’s professional-managerial class (the dreaded PMC)? Where do they come from, and in defense of what alternative social order is their hegemony constructed? Is there any way of understanding or contextualizing their ideas except as an evil perversion derived from the earlier evil communist perversions of the New Left (as Rufo contends in his 2023 book, America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything)? How could these ideas have caught on to such an extent, beyond liberal elites’ bad moral character and hatred of America? Unlike some other conservative activists, Rufo is not so deluded as to suggest that communism is the endgame of his enemies: He contents himself, and trusts his readers will be likewise contented, with the idea that progressives are bent on overthrowing true American values and subjugating the country to the rule of an elite dedicated to principles of collective grievance.
Reading America Through Gramsci
In fairness to Rufo, it is difficult to relate the intellectual sphere to developments at the social and economic level, even when one is not trying to construct a theory that doubles as a culture-war battering ram. Gramsci’s renown derives in part from the remarkable progress he made in that effort, provisional and sometimes cryptic as his insights were.
But it was easier to grasp the social and political stakes of “culture war” in Gramsci’s time of working-class militancy. For him, a politics characterized by an apparent clash over values, such as was the case in the Prussian Kulturkampf of the nineteenth century, reflected a social battle between a declining clergy and a rising secular bourgeois society—a prologue to full-spectrum confrontation between workers and capital. How to make sense of the salience of political conflict over education and values in a mature capitalist society? Religion has played a prominent role in past American culture-war skirmishes over education, but with no European-style clergy in the mix—and now, the terms of conflict are almost entirely secular.
The clash over the values of America’s cultural institutions is only one of many theaters of political discourse here, many of which have more obvious connections to social reality: immigration, for example, or trade policy. But it would clearly be wrong to imagine that this particular confrontation has no real stakes. Sweeping pullbacks of federal funds for research have already impaired many universities’ finances while threats of endowment taxes loom menacingly. And if you strip out the ideological baggage here, from “political correctness” to “critical race theory,” the direct target is a material one: a system of affirmative action and “diversity” preferences in hiring across swaths of the private and public sectors that has developed since the 1960s.
As the administration’s blows against higher education grow heavier, some see inklings of something more like class rage than mere cultural correction. In his column for Compact in May, Princeton professor Greg Conti wrote that there was no longer any doubt over whether “the Trump administration wanted to reform Harvard—and by extension, higher education—or destroy it.”1111xGreg Conti, “A Dangerous Turn in Trump’s War on Universities,” Compact, May 23, 2025; https://www.compactmag.com/article/trumps-dangerous-war-on-universities/. Instead of a calibrated bid to encourage pro-American “counter-hegemony” in American cultural institutions, as Rufo would have it, could this be a purely malicious effort by a president who, though an Ivy Leaguer himself, has chosen to punish the knowledge class on behalf of his non-college-educated supporters?
It might be worth returning to the question of American encumbrances: Are we still as free from historically sedimented institutional layers as Gramsci’s analysis suggests? Unlike in Europe, with its state-funded culture sectors, intellectual and cultural life in this country depends more on the market, private donors, and nonprofits. But it’s not true that we have no state-funded culture in America—ours just flies under the radar.
The nonprofit sector itself receives a tacit state subsidy in the form of its tax-exempt status. And one type of intellectual institution in particular receives tremendous amounts of public funding: the university. The states fund the public universities that educate three-fourths of college students, and the federal government funds research at public and private universities. Furthermore, the student loans that today underwrite practically all American universities’ bottom lines come directly from the federal government.
That is, of course, the state of affairs that has made possible the current confrontation between the Trump administration and American universities. Complaints over universities’ handling of student protests against the war in Gaza have been added to long-simmering grievances about the liberal tilt in higher education. Grants have been pulled back, threats issued, and universities’ finances imperiled as a Republican administration begins to do what several past administrations have stopped short of doing: turning off the taps of federal funds to a knowledge sector that is dominated by adherents of the other party.
Yet even on ruthlessly economic grounds, it would not be fair to say that American universities today have become examples of the sort of useless “sedimentation” that Gramsci criticized in the Old World. The most advanced and competitive sectors of the American economy, such as the technology and financial sectors, are closely linked with universities. And the parts of the academy that are not connected to highly profitable industries—the humanities—and that therefore could be accused of parasitism are in grave crisis, as a shrinking student population and vocational drift strip them of students and jobs. But this very crisis, distancing academics from the economic cutting edge, makes them into something closer to Gramsci’s traditional intellectuals.
If the market stands ready to eradicate whatever institutions begin to put down roots in American society, a Gramscian look at the America of 2025 nonetheless might detect political patterns more closely resembling those of the Old World than those of the 1930s. The view that Rufo shares with others, such as tech-right blogger Curtis Yarvin—that liberal-leaning institutional forces such as journalism and academia are linked to each other and to party politics, that they have allies that respond to their promptings at the activist grassroots and within sympathetic sections of local, state, and federal governance and bureaucracy, plus a few deep-pocketed, fellow-traveling donors—is not pure fiction. Rufo is right that the rise and lateral spread of a new strain of cultural progressivism throughout the 2010s could be described in terms of a Gramscian bargain between traditional intellectuals and organic intellectuals: on the one hand, academics, administrators, bureaucrats, nonprofit workers, teachers (the infamous “professional-managerial class”) and two disparate groups on the other: the party’s wealthy corporate donors and its grassroots community organizers and activists.
But Rufo and his confreres greatly exaggerate the radicalism and ambition of this coalition. Rufo considers it to have derived from the New Left’s decision, after the disintegration of the radical movement in the seventies, to opt for a “long march through the institutions.” The comparison to Mao’s Long March is as convenient for Rufo’s argument now—that American institutions have been taken over by the radical left—as it was soothing to the battered ego of the defeated New Left then. But it is absurd on its face: Winning tenured positions and bureaucratic sinecures in a country whose liberal-democratic political institutions remained essentially unaltered was in no way comparable to the assumption of power in China by actual Communists.
The New Left’s journey into the universities was more of an instinctive retreat than a conscious plan, and it was consolidated as the country turned markedly to the right and the material achievements of the Great Society were reversed over decades of welfare cuts, union decline, and deindustrialization. The very salience of cultural issues in American politics since the 1960s is, among other things, a symptom of the crushing historical defeat of the left—at least, of the economically and socially oriented Old Left that Gramsci would recognize.
What the right now confronts on cultural terrain, in other words, is a long-domesticated radicalism. But that isn’t to say there’s nothing to see here. As the radical anti-capitalism of the sixties and seventies New Left gave way to academic critique of the social immorality of divisions of race and gender, the latter strand proved more capable of broad diffusion into other parts of the coalition, through diversity initiatives and anti-racist trainings in the bureaucracy and the workplace or nonprofit activity inspired by similar lines of thinking and funded by local government in blue states and cities. The ideas Rufo deplores indeed held wide sway, for a time, in liberal sectors of American society and, as applied to hiring practices and habits of speech, seemed to herald significant change in the demographic makeup and rhetorical environment of considerable swaths of public and private bureaucracy. But in the absence of any sustained mobilization from below—unions fading, protests fleeting, electoral populist left squashed—no sweeping social transformation that a Gramscian would recognize as such was ever pursued or even seriously envisaged.
Contrary to Rufo’s hysterical reading, Gramscian hegemony describes a radically more totalizing ideological dominance than these social-moral narratives held at their 2020 peak. The preponderance of the new liberalism across civil society and the state could never have been as suffocating as Rufo makes out—otherwise, how could he himself have been elevated to such a privileged position in the American landscape of media and politics? There were always large parts of American society—the parts not closely connected to the universities, the high corporate world, traditional liberal media outlets—that lay totally outside the reach of these ideas, to say nothing of their practical consequences. A few years ago, a detailed awareness of the tenets of DEI would have been foreign to many Republican voters, a fact that made Rufo, so recently active in liberal circles, an ideal anatomist and critic.
An American Passive Revolution?
The concept in Gramsci’s thought to which this phenomenon bears the closest resemblance might not be hegemony but, rather, passive revolution: the process by which elites gradually adjust political and cultural institutions to respond to social developments, without providing a permanent resolution to the deeper underlying contradictions. The Italian Risorgimento, a project of national formation led not by radicals but by moderates and the conservative Piedmontese monarchy, was Gramsci’s model for this kind of process, characterized by “molecular changes which in fact progressively modify the preexisting composition of forces, and hence become the matrix of new changes.”1212xGramsci, Selections From the Prison Notebooks, 109.
In this reading, neither side of the American culture war is seeking to gain hegemony to create a new social order—both are angling to shape the one we have in more incremental ways. Decades from the waning of a civil rights moment, whose bureaucratic, legal, and political structures did not generate material equality among racial groups, the liberal impulse, in the absence of any political majority, responded to lingering social dissatisfaction with a renewed language of moral condemnation, “virtual” representation for minorities in elite institutions, and patronage more generally within the sympathetic bureaucracy. All this played out on a far more microscopic level than in Gramsci’s Risorgimento nation-building model, with moves being conducted at the bureaucratic level in a language of carefully coded euphemism (after the 1978 Bakke decision outlawed racial quotas in university admissions but left the door open to achieving the same results under the banner of “pursuing” the institutional “value” of “diversity”). It was precisely because of the circumscribed ambitions of the progressive coalition that its associated watchwords and practices could be embraced or at least tolerated by a wide range of groups with different interests, from CEOs to activists. When discontent flared up more sharply during the protests that followed the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, the response was a quickening of the pace of these efforts, an escalation that in turn activated the latent resistance from conservatives into a full-fledged political revolt, now led from the White House.
A different blend of ideological forces, more skewed toward organic intellectuals, nourished this revolt. Social media itself, Rufo’s native environment, lay largely outside the control of the old gatekeepers. To the familiar conservative-movement organs were added tech tycoons and their pet scribblers, the former rich enough to amplify voices like Rufo’s and familiar enough with liberal circles to be well-versed in what he was opposing. Here was a rival alliance of money and a means of diffusion.
But the right-wing response has even firmer limits than what it opposes. Rufo’s blindness to social forces that lie beyond his narrow cultural parameters, it turns out, is not merely a weakness of interpretation but an indicator of the shallowness of the cultural “counter-hegemony” that, as Rufo himself all but admits, is essentially negative rather than creative. As he works to stop the progressive passive revolution in its tracks, Rufo has no interest in the situation that created it.
His message, aimed at rooting out an ideology Rufo brands un-American, is carefully crafted for maximum appeal and at least the semblance of a nationally unifying cultural narrative, of a piece with the “colorblind” post-1960s incarnation of Louis Hartz’s American liberal tradition. Any more specific substantive positive replacement—Christian, “post-liberal,” etc.—would be sure to narrow his support. He endorses the norms and laws against racial discrimination by private actors that are the legacy of the civil rights era, suggesting they be wielded against a left that has now itself become racist against whites and Asians. Banal as it may sound, this itself is controversial on the intellectual right, where figures like Christopher Caldwell and Richard Hanania believe (in different formulas) that cultural liberalism’s “woke” turn was an inevitable outgrowth of the bureaucratic intrusions and legal sanctions created by civil rights legislation. The rebuke that Rufo has received, on the other hand, from the openly racist online right—which scoffs at his defense of the old credo of colorblindness—is a particularly grotesque response to his calculated silence on substantive social questions.
The Right and Education
By design, Rufo-ism is an expression, not uncontested, of what American culture shouldn’t be far more than what it should be. True, Rufo is involved with turning the New College of Florida into a broadly right-of-center institution of higher education, a possible model to accompany other new startups such as the University of Austin and proven successes like Hillsdale College. But these are tiny blips in a higher-education landscape dominated by massive public systems staffed and administered mostly by liberals. A declaration titled “The Manhattan Statement on Higher Education,” promoted by Rufo in July and signed by a few dozen conservative academics and pundits, is mostly dedicated to criticizing higher education’s ideological drift and describes its proper mission only briefly, in the broadest terms possible: “to pursue knowledge, to educate the citizen, and to uphold the law.”1313xChristopher F. Rufo, “How to Save Higher Ed—and End the Serial Abuse of American Taxpayers,” Free Press, July 14, 2025; https://www.thefp.com/p/the-president-wants-to-fix-higher-education-policy-reform-campus-university. Rather than modify the universities’ composition or offer alternative moral direction, the goal is to chasten universities as they are—a goal that appears within reach of fulfilment as (at the time of this writing) elite universities such as Columbia sign settlements with the administration to restore their rescinded research funds.
In line with a long-standing anti-statist tendency on the American right, Rufo seems eager for the current administration to get rid of its bureaucratic tools to influence education in America rather than wield them to conservative ends. In a recent New York Times interview, Rufo’s fellow conservative Ross Douthat took him to task for mounting a purely destructive campaign against the Department of Education, seeking mass firings and perhaps its effective closure.
“Why wouldn’t you want to just run the actual bureaucracy?” Douthat asks Rufo. “[W]hat is the gain to conservatism of doing away with this major tool for federal influence over education policy?”
Rufo’s answer is indicative: “It’s very difficult to change the culture of an institution and the permanent bureaucracy of that institution.”1414xRoss Douthat, “The Anti-D.E.I. Crusader Who Wants to Dismantle the Department of Education,” New York Times, March 7, 2025; https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/07/opinion/chris-rufo-trump-anti-dei-education.html.
It’s too hard—let’s break it instead. To those who fear a new fascism taking shape in America, it should be encouraging to hear a leading right-wing paladin say that it’s simply not worth the effort to take over the state. But to those on the right who believe the state is a powerful tool to improve society along conservative cultural lines—including Douthat and many writers for the journal American Affairs, set up in 2017 with this as its credo—it should be dispiriting indeed.
This wrench-throwing impulse, along with the administration’s slippage toward more broad-spectrum punishment of higher education, adds to a long list of flashes of rage from the right against the entire institutional landscape: Peter Thiel’s fellowships for college dropouts, DOGE’s government-filleting frenzy. Some of these anti-institutional gestures can be consequential on a mass scale, such as the conservative bid for school vouchers. But in the case of higher education, no such easy maneuver to shift the momentum seems available, nor any ready-made alternative cadre of more conservative educators. An apparent rise in applications to less liberal Southern universities is the only visible rightward trend at the mass level, and this is a modest shift. Rufo may be correct that the right simply does not have enough like-minded administrators and academics to replace liberals within the higher-education bureaucracy.
But the thinness of the right’s vision for the university also reflects conflicting impulses in the right’s thinking about education. On the one hand, there’s a desire to promote Western civilization and its values, while on the other there is an emphasis on vocational preparation and an opposition to “useless” humanistic disciplines corrupted by left-wing orthodoxy.
Gramsci dedicated a section of the Prison Notebooks to working out similar questions—of how to reconcile a traditional cultural education with the requirements of training a modern workforce. There, he shows himself to be a wonderfully hardheaded humanist. The classical tradition, he wrote, had no “intrinsically thaumaturgical qualities,” but there were few alternative subjects that could achieve similar formative results when taught to children. When a child studied Latin texts spanning the long centuries of Rome’s rise and fall, from the halting beginnings of the Twelve Tables to the spread of Christianity, Gramsci wrote, “he has plunged into history and acquired a historicizing understanding of the world and of life.”
The apparent irrelevance and rote aspect of classical learning accustomed children to patience and to the very physical rigors of sitting down and concentrating—a vital skill in all walks of modern life, yet one our schools today increasingly shrink from inculcating. And the reward was a shimmering understanding of humanity and history: a sense of Latin as a “corpse which returns continually to life.” Classical education, despite its elitist associations, seemed more compatible in its mode of learning with an egalitarian society than vocational schools, which Gramsci deplored. Despite being “advocated as being democratic,” these schools seemed in fact “destined not merely to perpetuate social differences but to crystallize them in Chinese complexities.”1515xGramsci, Selections From the Prison Notebooks, 38–39.
These passages put Gramsci’s sense of the burden of culture in a different light. On the one hand, his deep and well-founded cynicism targets the intellectual establishment as well as the cheap romanticism that so often pervades talk about cultural traditions. Yet on the other, his penetrating appreciation of what treasures lie there is overlaid by an ingenious instinct as to what uses they might be put to under the current conditions, what real benefits they may still promise for us.
Gramsci’s readers on the right, no doubt, would be glad to pull a similar conjuring trick, summoning new, living things from the repositories of American tradition. But too many illusions about the nature of that tradition, and insufficient resourcefulness in making constructive use of what tools are available, hazard the waste—destructive or merely dispiriting—of a political opening decades in the making.