Is Chris Rufo "MAGA's Favorite Communist?"

Liberal and illiberal ways to oppose cultural hegemony

(Audio version here)

“Meet MAGA’s Favorite Communist” reads the provocative title of a piece published yesterday in The Wall Street Journal. That alleged communist, we go on to learn from its author, Kevin T. Dugan, is conservative activist, Christopher Rufo.

Dugan writes,

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.

He goes on to explain,

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.

He concludes,

“The right needs a Gramsci,” Rufo added, “and my own ambition is to serve in a similar capacity, an architect of the new right politics.”

That Mr. Rufo believes this piece presented his aims accurately is indicated by his posting of screencaps of it on X, saying,

The Right is learning new political tactics. We are not going to indulge the fantasies of the "classical liberals" who forfeited all of the institutions. We're going to fight tooth and nail to recapture the regime and entrench our ideas in the public sphere. Get ready.

Social media is now flooded with people arguing about whether or not Rufo is, indeed, a communist. This entirely misses the point.

What is Cultural Hegemony?

At its most simplified, the Marxian concept of ‘cultural hegemony’ and activism based on it is comprised of an observation, a critique and a plan of action.

The observation is that, in various times and places, certain sets of ideas and beliefs gain prominence within a society, a consensus forms around them and they are widely accepted as true and/or good. This is culture.

The critique is about the way in which this process takes place. It holds that the people in power impose the ideas and beliefs that serve their own interests on everybody using cultural institutions like education, religion and media. This is hegemony and because it works, not by brute force, but by influencing people’s minds and assumptions to just accept these ideas and beliefs as true and/or good, it is cultural hegemony.

The plan of action is to break down the false consciousness produced by the institutionalisation of ideas and beliefs that serve the interests of the ruling classes by developing within the working classes a ‘critical consciousness’ of the ways in which they are being exploited and colluding in their own exploitation and inspire them to revolution.

Underlying the original Marxist concept of this was the assumption that if the working class could rid themselves of their false consciousness, they would naturally see that what was in their best interests was to seize the means of production for communal ownership and for each person to contribute according to their ability and receive resources according to their need. This was never very likely. It is much more probable that people, no matter what their class, will always be politically and ideologically diverse and have a range of political and economic views that they believe will best uphold their own principles of fairness and serve their own interests and that of society more broadly.

However, when the focus shifts from the economic to the cultural, conceptions of the hegemonic ideas and beliefs about what is true and what is good that need to be overthrown and replaced with other ideas that really are true and good vary according to the ideas and beliefs of those proposing any such overthrow. So too do the methods for replacing bad ideas with better ones.

Chris Rufo is absolutely correct when he says that there is a conflict between his approach to doing this and that of “classical liberals” (more simply ‘liberals’) - and that his tactics are akin to those of the radical activists inspired by the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. Of course, Rufo is not a communist. His end goal is not communism. It is simply that the tactics of radical left-wing activists to capture cultural institutions and impose their ideas on everybody else are authoritarian and so are his radical right-wing tactics.

There are two ways to address the problem of cultural hegemony in which institutions become ideologically captured by one set of ideas. One is liberal and one is authoritarian.

The liberal approach to this has always been to set up systems to prevent institutions from being captured by any set of ideas. While governing systems rooted in ethical frameworks typically have a great number of “You musts” and “You must nots,” in relation to what people must believe and must not believe, liberalism is the ‘minimal force’ system that has only one “You must not.” That one thing you must not do is impose your beliefs and values on other people. The role of a legitimate government in this system is to protect citizens from such imposition.

The United States of America is the only country to have been founded explicitly on this liberal principle. Its culture of freedom of belief was, after all, hugely influenced by people fleeing the cultural hegemony of the Church in England which persecuted minority groups of dissident Christians. The goal of the Founding Fathers in preventing the capture of cultural institutions by of any one set of ideas could not have been made clearer than in the very first Amendment to the constitution.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Adherence to the liberal principle underlying the First Amendment facilitates the defeating of bad ideas by better ones by disallowing the capture of institutions by any one set of ideas, protecting freedom of belief and speech, facilitating viewpoint diversity and enabling a marketplace of ideas to thrive. Some people living in liberal democracies speak as though this is a naive and idealistic belief rather how they came to be living in a society where we no longer consider slavery, torture, child labour, child marriage, the subordination of women and the persecution of religious and sexual minorities to be morally tenable.

It is unlikely that Mr. Rufo believes that what enabled the capture of institutions by the Critical Social Justice movement was its commitment to not imposing its own ideas on anybody else, upholding freedom of belief and speech for everybody and encouraging diverse viewpoints and robust debate. Therefore, his claim that liberalism is responsible for this is false. Liberals are the people, like me, who have been objecting to having this one set of ideas institutionalised as illiberal and who will object likewise to having any set of ideas institutionalised as illiberal.

The authoritarian approach to defeating bad ideas with better ones is to knock aside the sets of ideas it considers bad and replace them with the set it considers good. This has been the default approach to governance and cultural hegemony throughout history and still is in much of the world today. One warlord, dynasty, monarchy, theocracy, totalitarian political ideology would take power and impose its worldview on everybody else with both state and cultural power and silence subversives and dissidents with terms like ‘treason’ ‘heresy’ and blasphemy. In premodern times, this was largely enforced by religious institutions which demanded the attendance of every citizen and secular leaders were also legitimised in this way under concepts like ‘The divine right of kings.’ In modern times, the regime was also able to control culture by controlling cultural institutions like education and publishing and prohibiting the formation of dissident groups. It was precisely this that liberalism arose to fight and what the American Constitution based on those liberal principles was created to protect against.

It is on these grounds that radical leftist movements inspired by the Frankfurt School and Antonio Gramsci have been criticised. They did not simply acknowledge that culture existed and that it could be manipulated in the interests of the powerful by the capture of cultural institutions and encourage people to think critically about the ideas they were being presented with and challenge them. Liberals have been doing that forever and this is what has produced so much positive reform. Radical leftists sought to take that power for themselves and use it to capture institutions and manipulate culture by ensuring that their own ideas were the ones imposed on everybody. This was also the approach of the Critical Social Justice movement and it is also the approach advocated by Mr. Rufo. It is to his credit that he is open about this and explicitly states it by saying things like, “We're going to fight tooth and nail to recapture the regime and entrench our ideas in the public sphere. Get ready.”

Liberals are indeed ready, Mr. Rufo. We’ve been ready for centuries. The ‘new’ political tactics you claim ‘the Right’ to be learning are far from new. They are as old as civilisation and they are precisely why liberalism - defined by the drive for individual liberty against state and cultural coercion - emerged in the first place. I think you are wrong in your implication that ‘the right’ is with you on this, if that is indeed what you intended to convey, because ‘right-wing’ is not synonymous with ‘illiberal’. American conservatives, in particular, tend to be quite keen to conserve the founding principles of their country and are highly resistant to having their institutions captured and having any ideas ‘entrenched’ in the public sphere rather than taking their place alongside others for the evaluation of everybody. People, generally, do not wish to have their ideas and beliefs manipulated by whichever political faction gains control of cultural institutions at any time, even when it happens to be one they agree with. It offends their sense of pride, dignity and individual autonomy. Freedom of thought and resistance to the cultural hegemony of any political ideology is not a ‘fantasy of classical liberals.’ It is the defining feature of liberal democracies and thus of modern Western civilisation. It is in the interests of all of us to defend against the ‘tyranny of prevailing opinion’ whencesoever it comes and whatever form it takes - including cultural hegemony.

Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant—society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it—its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.

(John Stuart Mill - On Liberty)