The thinker who crafted designs for societal culture change

About Antonio Gramsci

Excerpt: "Christopher Rufo is perhaps the most potent conservative activist in the U.S. Last year, he led the campaign that pressured Harvard University into replacing Claudine Gay as its president. His crusades against critical race theory and DEI in higher education have shaped President Trump’s aggressive policies toward elite universities like Harvard, which the administration targeted this week with a $2.26 billion funding freeze.

For the past year, Rufo has been working on a book called “How the Regime Rules,” which he describes as a “manifesto for the New Right.” At its core is a surprising inspiration: the Italian Communist thinker Antonio Gramsci, a longtime boogeyman of American conservatives. “Gramsci, in a sense, provides the diagram of how politics works and the relationship between all of the various component parts: intellectuals, institutions, laws, culture, folklore,” said Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

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."