In a 1991 essay titled “Winning the Culture War: The American Cause,” radical conservative thinker Sam Francis summoned up the ghost of the late Italian communist Antonio Gramsci in order to offer the American far right a strategic path forward. Railing against the US establishment for doing “nothing to conserve what most of us regard as our traditional way of life,” Francis called for nothing less than “the overthrow of the dominant authorities that threaten our culture.” But as for the political methods required to enact such an overthrow, he admitted that “we will find little in conservative theory to instruct us in the strategy and tactics of challenging dominant authorities.”
Instead, he argued, his camp had to “look to the left” and, specifically, to the ideas of Gramsci on “cultural power” and “counterhegemony.” Gramsci, he wrote, had stressed the necessity of constructing “a countervailing cultural establishment” that would be “independent of the dominant cultural apparatus” and be “able to generate its own system of beliefs.” Francis ominously concluded: “The strategy by which this new American revolution can take place may well come from what was cooked up in the brain of a dying communist theoretician in a Fascist jail cell 60 years ago.”
Francis’s reliance on Gramsci — one of the most essential and inspiring figures of twentieth-century Marxism — was a daring, if shameless, act of ideological acrobatics for someone later dismissed from his position as editor at the conservative Washington Times for racist statements and remembered today as a white supremacist. Yet his case was neither the first nor the most significant example of the far-right attempting to appropriate Gramsci’s…
Auteur: George Hoare
