What The Hell America!

In order to grasp how the right has appropriated Gramsci, one must examine a pivotal if elusive figure: the French writer Alain de Benoist. As the leading architect of France’s Nouvelle Droite (New Right) in the 1970s and 1980s, de Benoist pioneered the selective, culturalist reading of Gramsci’s writings that made him attractive and usable for generations of right-wing activists.

By highlighting only the cultural and ideological aspects of Gramsci’s concepts of “hegemony” and “war of position” — while neglecting their foundation in antagonistic class relations under capitalism — de Benoist’s interpretation stripped Gramscian thought of its Marxist framework. By the same token, it pioneered what may be termed “Right Gramscianism” — a distinct formula and strategy for engaging in cultural politics from the right. Relying on a small sample of Gramsci’s ideas while obscuring their foundation in Marxism, the Right Gramscianists contort his thought and politics so much that it would be wrong to call them “Gramscians.”

In the mid-1960s, de Benoist — then in his early twenties — was an activist on the radical right fringes of Parisian student politics, first in the Federation of Nationalist Students and later in a group called Europe-Action. This was a period of defeat and demoralization for his political camp. Stigmatized by its collaboration with the Nazi occupiers, the French far right lived on the margins of electoral life in the Fourth Republic (1946–1958) and during the presidency of General Charles de Gaulle (1958–1969).

Though de Gaulle himself hailed from the prewar traditionalist right, he was reviled by the far right for having agreed to Algeria’s independence in 1962. The countercultural political storm of the May 1968 protests, led by millions of left-wing students and striking workers, constituted a further injury, putting in sharp relief the cultural irrelevancy and political marginalization of the far right in postwar France.

Attempting to come to terms with the unfavorable circumstances in which the French far right found itself, de Benoist and his associates created the Research and Study Group for European Civilization (GRECE) in 1968. GRECE was intended not as a political party but as an intellectual club, whose mission was to engage in what de Benoist called “metapolitics”: shaping the intellectual and cultural climate of society rather than engaging in direct political action.

GRECE claimed to stand for the traditions of “Indo-European civilization,” identifying its many adversaries as Marxism, socialism, communism, egalitarianism, universalism, liberalism, Christianity, and “Americanism.” By the 1980s, it had about 2,500 members and its annual conferences could attract over a thousand participants.

In the 1970s, de Benoist began citing Gramsci as a major influence, describing him as the foremost theorist of “cultural power.” “In certain ways,” de Benoist writes in his collection Les idées à l’endroit (1979), “and limiting ourselves to the purely methodological aspects of the theory of ‘cultural power’, some of Gramsci’s views have proved prophetic.” He further asserted, “All the great revolutions in history concretized at the political level evolutions that had already happened inside people’s minds. . . . This is what the Italian Antonio Gramsci had understood well.”

According to de Benoist, Gramsci had grasped that, in an advanced society, the “transition to socialism” occurs “neither via a coup, nor via a direct confrontation, but through the transformation of general ideas that amounts to a slow remolding of minds. What is at stake in this war of positions is culture, which in turn is understood as the command center for values and for ideas.” By 1981, GRECE had fully embraced this perspective, organizing its annual conference around the theme “For a ‘Right-Wing Gramscianism’” — a moment that crowned de Benoist’s intellectual takeover of the Italian communist’s ideas.

GRECE, however, never achieved its professed ambition of seizing the commanding heights of French cultural life and of redefining the common sense and moral values of the population. At its most influential, in the mid-1980s, members of GRECE were regular contributors to the daily newspaper Le Figaro’s weekend edition — an important media platform but hardly enough to win the “war of position.”

GRECE also suffered from internal strife, particularly as de Benoist’s positions occasionally lurched to the left. In the 1980s, to widespread consternation on the Right, GRECE declared a preference for the USSR over the United States in the Cold War — justifying this stance by arguing that the Soviet Union was less favorable than the United States to “universalism, egalitarianism and cosmopolitanism.” Meanwhile, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front (FN), achieved its first electoral breakthroughs. Unlike GRECE, with its intellectual pretentions and interest in pre-Christian “Indo-European civilization,” the FN presented a more conventional nationalist agenda. As some GRECE members defected to the FN, its “metapolitical” approach lost momentum. De Benoist, for his part, never joined Le Pen’s movement. In a 2017 interview with Buzzfeed in his Paris apartment, he claimed to see himself as “more left than right” and said that, if he had been American, he would have supported Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary.

Despite de Benoist’s ideological ambiguities, his selective reading and repurposing of Gramsci’s ideas in the 1970s left a lasting mark on radical right-wing movements across the world. In the wake of GRECE, “New Right” intellectual circles emerged in neighboring countries. In Germany, one of the chief theorists of the Neue Rechte was Armin Mohler — an influential far-right philosopher of Swiss origin and former Nazi sympathizer — who helped publish de Benoist’s writings in German. In Italy, the Nuova Destra took shape in the 1970s and 1980s within Pino Rauti’s wing of MSI, blending references to Gramsci with the philosophy of self-declared “superfascist” thinker Julius Evola. Historian Andrea Mammone has called this synthesis an “Evolianization” of Gramsci.

In the United States, de Benoist’s Gramscianism is discernible in Sam Francis’s passages on Gramsci featured above. Francis comments directly, in the same 1991 text, on how “the European New Right explicitly invokes Gramsci as a source of its ideas and strategy.”

Closer to our own time, in the run-up to Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory, a long Breitbart piece authored by Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos lists Oswald Spengler, H. L. Mencken, Julius Evola, Sam Francis, the US paleoconservative movement, and the French New Right as the main sources of intellectual inspiration for the US “alt-right” of the 2010s. Andrew Breitbart himself — the founder of Breitbart News, deceased in 2012 — is remembered for the dictum, also referred to as the “Breitbart Doctrine,” that “all politics is downstream of culture,” a phrase that closely echoes de Benoist’s interpretation of Gramsci.

A common pattern is identifiable across the spectrum of Right Gramscianism: its adoption is often catalyzed by a sense of defeat — real or perceived — at the hands of the Left. In postwar Western Europe, the New Right in France, Germany, and Italy turned to Gramsci at the very time when the far right appeared most marginalized by an ascendant left, both politically and culturally. In the 1990s, Francis saw American traditional culture as being under threat of destruction.

More recently, advocates of the global radical right, from Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil to Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, have stressed the supposed ravages of “cultural Marxism” within the media, the academy, and popular culture. Javier Milei, Argentina’s right-libertarian president since 2023, once called for “fighting the culture wars every day” in response to the Left “applying Gramsci’s techniques.”

In the United States, pro-Trump activist Christopher Rufo has stated, in a 2023 book evocatively titled America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything, that “critical race theorists” draw on Gramsci to “achieve cultural hegemony over the bureaucracy” and to “use this power to reshape the structures of American society.” Whether in 1960s Paris or in 2020s America, Right Gramscianism frames itself as a defensive project, aggrandizing the power of its left opponents in order to adopt a posture of rightful resistance against the annihilation of its values. Notably, the Left that today’s Right Gramscianists claim to resist is more culturally liberal than materially leftist — a distinction that has only sharpened in recent decades as neoliberal governance has coexisted with progressive cultural shifts.

In terms of political strategy, Right Gramscianism has committed far-right energies to the terrains of ideology, theory, and culture. This has entailed setting up intellectual associations, think tanks, and educational institutions — such as GRECE, the German New Right’s Thule Seminar, or, more recently, Jared Taylor’s New Century Foundation in the United States and Marion Maréchal’s Institute for Social, Economic, and Political Sciences (ISSEP) in France. Publishing has also been central to this strategy, from GRECE’s review Éléments to Germany’s Criticón to the US paleoconservative Chronicles, where Sam Francis published his Gramscianist arguments.

As Rita Abrahamsen and her coauthors highlight in their book World of the Right, another “metapolitical” approach has been in the operation of right-wing publishing houses devoted to translating and disseminating key texts — exemplified today by the Hungary-based English-language publisher Arktos, which features over ten books by de Benoist in its catalogue.

Beyond the elaboration of its own doctrines, Right Gramscianism has sought to shape the broader ideological and cultural landscape, particularly through social media. As documented by Angela Nagle, pro-Trump activists of the US alt-right — whom she labels “Gramscians of the alt-light” — gleefully seized on the online space of the 2010s to spread their ideas at a pace and scale unimaginable to the original Parisian Right Gramscianists of the 1970s.

In a very different sphere, in present-day Italy, Giorgia Meloni’s government has appointed former MSI members to positions of cultural influence. Gennaro Sangiuliano, who was the Italian minister of culture from 2022 to 2024, vowed to overturn what he labeled “left-wing cultural hegemony.” To that end, he announced the creation of several new museums, including one devoted to the Italian language and another to italianità (“Italianness”) — though neither has materialized so far. Sangiuliano’s successor as minister for culture, Alessandro Giuli, is even more of a Gramsci admirer. Yet it remains uncertain whether Italy’s postfascist cultural policymakers can reshape the nation’s cultural dynamics.

What lessons can be drawn from the far right’s embrace of Gramsci over the past half century? From a left perspective, its pervasiveness among archconservatives and rabid anti-socialists across the world since the 1970s can feel like an act of political theft. Worse still, it has been argued that “inverting Gramsci” has played a significant role in the global radical right’s recent political successes — among which one may cite the electoral victories of Orbán, Narendra Modi, Trump, Bolsonaro, Meloni, and Milei.

However, the notion that strands of the present-day far right have become genuinely Gramscian is fanciful. As we contend elsewhere, Gramsci’s ideas were steeped in the fundamentals of Marxism, including the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat and the determining role of material configurations in the formation and reproduction of ideology. This core aspect of Gramscian thought was lost on de Benoist and the generations of rightists who inherited his distorted interpretation of Gramsci rather than engaging directly with the Prison Notebooks.

For Gramsci, in true Marxist fashion, hegemony was not merely cultural — it was always tied to class relations. It unfolds simultaneously across economic, political, and ideological spheres, making its reduction to “cultural hegemony” an oversimplification. In terms of political strategy, this right-wing distortion of Gramsci’s thought reduces the war of position to a mere “battle of ideas” or “culture war” — as if narrative contestation alone could transform a social order.

Distinguishing Right Gramscianism from Gramsci’s own conceptions is one thing; assessing its success on its own terms is another. The evidence here is perhaps not as straightforward as it seems, and there is a risk of reading the causality backwards.

Did Donald Trump’s victories in 2016 and 2024 result — as the Right Gramscianist formula would have it — from right-wing cultural activists successfully shifting the moral values and common sense of the US electorate and establishing “cultural hegemony” in American society before he descended his golden escalator? If this were the case, it would certainly flatter the right-wing Gramscianists’ egos, yet such a narrative feels distorted and simplistic. On some important social issues — including acceptance of LGBTQ rights and views on race relations — opinion surveys show US voters gradually moving away from conservative and reactionary positions over time, not toward them.

More plausibly, Trumpism as an electoral force and far-right cultural activism developed symbiotically, feeding on each other. Both were ultimately enabled by the political and ideological space created by popular discontent with the socioeconomic status quo — particularly in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and during the Barack Obama presidency.

Gramsci understood that politics and culture are closely intertwined and shape each other, rather than politics simply being “downstream” of culture. For him, the war of position was not just about exerting influence on the media, education, science, religion, high culture, and the arts — important as these institutions of “civil society” are. Crucially, it also meant constructing and steering mass organizations capable of sustaining political mobilization of the working class.

If anything, the Left would do better to draw inspiration from the example and thought of Gramsci himself, rather than attempt to emulate the Right Gramscianists.