Right-Wing Gramscianism vs. Classical Liberalism

Chris Rufo’s Challenge to Classical Liberalism

*I know I had promised to return this week to my ongoing series on selfishness vs. selflessness, but sometimes breaking news on current events comes up fast and hard, which the issue discussed below did. I shall return to our previous programming in short order.

**The audio version of this essay is at the end.

There’s been an interesting conversation on X recently in response to an essay published in the Wall Street Journal titled “Meet MAGA’s Favorite Communist” by Kevin T. Dugan. The title of the essay is clearly provocative, but more on that anon.

The WSJ piece features Chris Rufo, who has built a successful career in recent years exposing, dissecting, and destroying the various “Progressive” ideological trends in America’s K-12 education system (government and private) and in the universities. He has done America a great service by helping to skewer Critical Race Theory, Critical Gender Theory, Critical Whatever Theory, DEI, etc. Mr. Rufo also led the charge in getting Claudine Gay fired as Harvard’s president for plagiarism. He is not a man to be messed with.

Mr. Rufo was described in the WSJ essay as a “conservative activist,” which is true in certain ways. I’m not entirely sure that he self-identifies as a conservative, but he’s certainly living in that world for the moment. He’s also clearly an activist as demonstrated by his ability to organize people and resources to achieve certain cultural and political ends (e.g., see the role he played in the takeover of New College of Florida). When push comes to shove, he’s a darn good ideological street fighter.

Rufo is, in my view, better understood as a revolutionist in the tradition of Thomas Paine, which means that he is fearless and is willing to speak truth to power. And like Paine, he’s a rhetorically powerful writer who knows how to go for the jugular. To change the metaphor, he knows how and is willing to take the “kill shot.” Pro tip: you do not want to be in Rufo’s crosshairs.

Rufo plays to win. That’s clear. He has a track record of crushing his enemies. And he doesn’t rest on his laurels. After each victory, he immediately goes to his next target. He’s picking them off one by one. Think of him as an ideological cyborg. He’s the RoboCop of the Right.

Mr. Rufo’s Gramscian Moment

In the end, though, Mr. Rufo is more than just an “activist” and a journalist. He’s also a strategic thinker about cultural and political change. Moreover, if I’m not mistaken, Mr. Rufo was once a man of Left, which means he knows the leading Marxist, post-Marxist, and neo-Marxist thinkers from his days fighting the Right. Specifically, Mr. Rufo has read and takes seriously the work of the early twentieth-century Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937).

Gramsci broke with the dialectical materialism of Marx’s scientific socialism and the latter’s claim that History was inevitably leading mankind toward a proletarian revolution that would usher in first socialism and then communism. Specifically, Marx and his descendants believed that the contradictions of late-stage capitalism would lead to a crisis that would spark the working class to rise up against their oppressors.

History, by which Marx meant the future, did not work out the way he predicted it would. By the 1920s, Gramsci realized that the so-called working class was the most conservative force in Western societies and could not be relied on to consecrate the revolution. Gramsci therefore replaced economics with culture as the necessary force to liberate the working class from their “false consciousness” and reactionary devotion to traditional religious, moral, political, and cultural folkways. The proletariat could not be, in other words, liberated from their economic exploitation until they had been freed from the “cultural hegemony” of the ruling class.

In his Prison Notebooks (written between 1929 and 1935 whilst in prison under Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime), Gramsci was the first Marxist to urge socialists and communists to begin what would later be called the “long march through the institutions,” by which was meant any given society’s cultural or opinion-forming institutions. In the same way that Marx turned Hegel on his head, so Gramsci flipped Marxism right side up so that the ideological superstructure was the first cause and the driving force in society.

Put differently, Gramsci understood, ironically, that “ideas have consequences” and that the ideas come principally first from the universities where they then trickle down through other opinion-forming institutions. I say ironically because this approach to thinking about social change has deep connections to the beginnings of the post-WWII conservative intellectual movement. It was after all the southern traditionalist conservative, Richard Weaver, who coined the phrase “ideas have consequences” in an influential book by that title.

Mr. Rufo and the Gramscian Method

Rufo has explicitly recognized his debt to Gramsci’s theory of social change, and his journalism and activism have in turn had an influence on Trump II and the broader MAGA movement. Ergo, the curious title of the WSJ essay. So yes, it’s deeply ironic that one of the biggest influences on the Trump administration and the MAGA movement is a Gramscian social theorist! (For what it’s worth, Rufo has also identified his theory of social change with “Machiavellianism,” which means, among other things, a willingness to deceive or even lie about ones means and ends.)

In the days after the publication of the WSJ essay, Mr. Rufo posted the following comment on X with a link to the WSJ essay: “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.”

The comment was both suggestive and provocative, and it raises lots of important questions. What are the “new political tactics” that the Right is learning? More importantly, what new “ideas” are to be entrenched in the regime? Implicit in Mr. Rufo’s comment was the suggestion that the time had come for the Right to abandon the politics of losing for the politics of winning.

It’s not entirely clear why Mr. Rufo chose to call out and sideline “classical liberals” (a relatively small group) instead of Establishment conservatives and libertarians who wield much more authority, power, money and influence on the political Right, but his post caught the attention of several smart people who objected to his characterization of classical liberalism. Rufo’s most thoughtful and respectful interlocutors (e.g., Jonah Goldberg and Phil Magness) asked several questions of him, which can be reduced to three: first, what did he mean by classical liberalism; second, what are the “fantasies” of classical liberals; and third, how have they “forfeited” all of the institutions?

In his response to Phil Magness, he claimed that “classical liberals were still at the helm in the 1960s and later in many universities.” Were that so! One gets the impression from Mr. Rufo’s comment that he’s equating classical liberalism with post-WWII, proceduralist, civil libertarians and the politics of someone like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., which no classical liberal would accept. Not to get too far down in the weeds, but the one example of a “classical liberal” used by Mr. Rufo is Robert P. George from Princeton University, but Robby self-identifies as a conservative rather than as a classical liberal. In the end, I’m not persuaded by Mr. Rufo’s understanding of classical liberalism.

The truth is that classical liberalism was dead politically by the 1930s and was kept on life support intellectually in the post-WWII era by a few of the Saving Remnant. Classical liberals have not been at the helm of anything for a century, and true classical liberals have never believed in the “fantasy” that America’s universities should be neutral, autonomous, or a free-market, smorgasbord place of ideas.

I’m also uncertain as to what Mr. Rufo is claiming when he says that classical liberals have “forfeited all of the institutions.” Rufo’s meaning depends, of course, upon what he means by “forfeited” and “institutions.” There is a sense in which classical liberals have not forfeited the institutions because, as I’ve already noted, they were never in control of them to begin with.

But if by “forfeited” Mr. Rufo means that classical liberals do not support using institutions (e.g., the Department of Education or the NEA) to forge social change, then he’s at least partially correct. Classical liberals want to restore the founders’ vision of government and abolish many of the post-Civil War institutions that have been slowly added to our federal Leviathan over the course of the last 150 years.

By contrast, Mr. Rufo—if I understand his position correctly—wants conservatives to fight for and eventually take over America’s cultural and political institutions. I have no reason to think that Rufo would abolish NPR or PBS. Instead, he would (I’m presuming) fill those institutions with “his” people pursuing his ends, but what are those “ends”? That is the $64,000 question.

The Rise of the Fight Club Right

Before we go too far down this rabbit hole, however, I’d like to return to Mr. Rufo’s critique of classical liberals. There is a sense in which I’m sympathetic to his argument, at least if he’s willing to expand it more broadly to Conservatism-Libertarianism Inc.

Whereas Mr. Rufo thinks that classical liberals (and presumably all Establishment conservatives and libertarians) have forfeited certain institutions, I would argue that Conservatism and Libertarianism Inc. abandoned and forfeited not institutions so much as certain people, namely, the tail-end of the Millennial Generation and Gen Xers. The truth of the matter is that the Conservative-Libertarian-Classical Liberal Establishment gave away and lost an entire generation of young people because they refused to defend them or to take up the issues that mattered most to them, and in doing so the Establishment lost America’s young people to the rising Reactionary or Dissident Right, by which I primarily mean groups such as the so-called TradCaths or Catholic Integralists and the followers of the Bronze Age Pervert. (See my essay on the reactionary Right, “The Pajama-Boy Nietzscheans.”)

I do not think Mr. Rufo would disagree with me on this point, but he has not quite made it himself either (at least not as far as I know), so I will make it in my own name.

The betrayal, abandonment, desertion, and loss of America’s young people by conservative and libertarian Establishmentarians can be understood with the following hypothetical.

Imagine the plight of, let us say, a 23-year-old young man in the year 2016. Imagine that he’s been told every single day from kindergarten through the end of college that he’s racist, sexist, and homophobic by virtue of being white, male, and heterosexual. Further imagine that he was falsely diagnosed by his teachers in grade school with ADD/ADHD and put on Ritalin because, well, he’s an active boy. And then his teachers tell him when he’s 12 that he might not actually be a boy, but rather that he might be a girl trapped in boy’s body. And let us also not forget that he’s also been told by his teachers and professors that the country his parents taught him to love was actually founded in sin and is therefore evil. To top it all off: he didn’t get into the college and then the law school of his choice despite having test scores well above those who did.

In other words, what this oppressed and depressed young man has experienced his whole life is a cultural Zeitgeist defined by postmodern nihilism and egalitarianism. These are the forces that are ruining his life and making him miserable.

Let’s also assume that said young man is also temperamentally some kind of conservative, libertarian, or classical liberal, and he interns at the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, or the Institute for Humane Studies hoping to find solace, allies, and support to give relief to his existential maladies.

And how does Conservatism-Libertarianism Inc. respond to what are clearly the dominant cultural issues of our time?

Well, the Establishment publishes yet another white paper on free-market transportation or energy policy. The Heritage Foundation doubles down on more white papers on deficits and taxation policy. The Cato Institute churns out more white papers on legalizing pot and same-sex marriage. The Institute for Humane Studies goes all in to sit at the cool kids’ lunch table by ramping up its videos on spontaneous order featuring transgender 20-somethings.

Is it any wonder that today’s young people who have suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune are stepping outside the arc of history yelling, “stop”? At a certain point, these young people let out a collective primal scream, shouting “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.” And when the “youf” (as they refer to themselves online) realized that Establishment conservatives and libertarians did not hear them and lacked the vocabulary, principles, power, and courage to defend them from their Maoist persecutors, they went underground to places like 4chan, 8chan, and various other online discussion boards, where they found a Samizdat community of the oppressed.

Having effectively abandoned late-stage Millennials and Gen Z, Conservatism and Libertarianism Inc. should not be surprised, then, that today’s young people who might be otherwise sympathetic to their policies have left that world and become radicalized. News flash: Gen Z is attracted to people who are willing to defend them and attack social nihilism and egalitarianism in all their forms.

Hence the rise of what I call the “Fight Club Right,” which calls for a new kind of American politics. Gen Z rightism is done with what they call the Boomer’s “fake and ghey” attachment to the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the institutions of the Constitution. In fact, many young people who have migrated to the reactionary Right have openly and repeatedly rejected the principles of the American founding as irrelevant in the modern world.

More to the point, this younger generation is done with the philosophy of losing. They’re certainly done with the Establishment. They also seem to be done with classical liberalism and the American founding. (This is a more complicated topic.) Instead, what they want is political power to punish their enemies and to take over the “regime.” They want to use the coercive force of the State to create their new America.

Abandoned by the Establishment

My sources tell me that many young people who joined wither the alt-Right or the reactionary Right in the years between 2010 and 2020 were young interns and employees at organizations such as the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, and the Institute for Humane Studies. They left those institutions because said organizations failed to address the cultural issues that most affected first late-stage Millennials and then Gen Z.

These young people saw their lives and their prospects being eaten alive by the “progressive, cultural Left,” while the organizations they worked for did nothing to defend them. Thus began the rapid transformation of these young men and women (particularly the young men) who wanted to fight the Left on the territory claimed by the postmodern Left, whereas as the conservo-libertarian-classical liberal Establishment wanted to continue fighting the economic battles of the 1970s and 1980s. In other words, the Old Right wanted to fight the Old Left (which no longer existed), whereas the New-New Right wanted to fight the New-New Left, which has claimed total hegemonic power over America’s opinion-forming institutions.

Conservatism and Libertarianism Inc. seemed utterly oblivious to the fact that the Left had pivoted and changed tactics after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. By the 1990s, the Left had abandoned economic issues and the working class and was doubling down on cultural issues. Rather than trying to take over the trade-union movement, for instance, the postmodern Left went for MTV and the Boy Scouts, while the major DC think tanks on the Right went for issues too distant from the lives of young people such as the deficit, taxation, and regulatory policy.

While socialism continues to be the end of the Left, the means to the end is postmodern nihilism. That’s where the Left planted its flag and that’s the terrain that it has occupied without opposition, whereas conservative and libertarian organizations such as the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute were fighting for ideological hegemony in the economic realm. Between 2000 and 2025, cultural nihilism and its many forms and manifestations is where the action is and has been for a quarter century. So powerful has postmodern nihilism become that even some left-wing “libertarian” organizations have simply become left-wing.

More broadly, Conservatism-Libertarianism Inc. has become intellectually moribund & strategically/tactically feckless. And where there’s an intellectual vacuum, new ideas, new people, new movements—good or bad—will rush to fill the void and that is what happened over the course of the last decade or so. On this margin, then, rather than simply dismissing or condemning Rufo, classical liberals should view him as a challenge.

It’s time for classical liberals to learn how to apply the truths of their ideas to the 21st century and to develop strategically and tactically a philosophy for winning. In this sense, they should take Mr. Rufo very seriously and possibly even learn a thing or two from him. In the meantime, let us hope that Mr. Rufo and his generation are open to learning a thing or two about the history and true principles of the classical-liberal tradition.

Conclusion

I conclude with a few summary thoughts on the challenge posed by Mr. Rufo’s Gramscian theory of social change to the lumpen Conservative-Libertarian-Classical Liberal Establishment.

Let me begin with what I think Rufo gets right to which I will add my own criticisms of the Establishment. First, as Rufo suggests, it is a fact that the Establishment has no productive theory of social change for the twenty-first century. And to the extent that the Establishment has a philosophy of social change, it hasn’t worked. Second, the Establishment has been coming to the fight club of American politics using the Marquess of Queensberry Rules while the left comes to every fight with switch blades and guns. The Establishment has not been willing to play hardball. Third, the Establishment has not, at least not until recently, produced and mobilized a counter-elite that knows how to use ideas and their distribution to ordinary people.

Let me turn now to Mr. Rufo’s ideas, strategies, and tactics that give pause. First, I’m troubled by his explicit Machiavellianism, which seems to blur the distinction between ends and means. We all know that illiberal means often turn out to be a cover for illiberal ends, or that the means often have a way of corrupting the ends.

Mr. Rufo is clear in elucidating the means that he thinks the New-New Right should use to achieve its ends, but his discussion of what those ends are or should be is unclear. Sometimes he suggests that he is using Machiavellian-Gramscian means to achieve a revived classical liberalism as the end, which would presumably be the founders’ liberalism. But is it?

If we dig a little deeper, Mr. Rufo seems to reject the founders’ liberalism for what is now an outdated if not discredited view of the American founding, which claimed over 50 years ago that the founders were proponents of classical republicanism and a “Christian Sparta” that included State control of education, religion, and public values. This is not classical liberalism or the founders’ liberalism. (I discuss both the founders’ ends and means in America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration that Defined It.)

And speaking of ends (and I hate to go here), I wonder if Mr. Rufo is willing to publicly reject and condemn the ends or positive political vision set forth very clearly and explicitly by people or groups such as the Bronze Age Pervert and his followers (which I have identified here and here) or by the so-called TradCaths and Catholic Integralists (which I have identified here)?

This question is important—very important—because BAP and his toadies advocate “means” almost identical to those propounded by Mr. Rufo. His answer to this question is critical to allaying the concerns of many who fear that he is the buttoned-up, presentable version of a very bad philosophy, the ends and means of which are anathema to the founders’ liberalism.

And now we come to the core of my differences with Mr. Rufo.

If I have a major criticism of his approach, it is this: he doesn’t go far enough—not near far enough—in his critique of the Conservative-Libertarian-Classical Liberal Establishment and in his own policy prescriptions. The problem with Mr. Rufo’s position is that it’s too conservative, too Establishmentarian, and too much a product of the non-partisan Deep State Orthodoxy that he claims to hate so much. His position is not radical enough because he is too invested in reforming rather than abolishing the system or at least returning it to its original design. Consider one example. Mr. Rufo wants to reform America’s government school system with conservative ideas, whereas the classical liberal wants to abolish it altogether.

I am suggesting, in other words, that Mr. Rufo is a victim of what Friedrich Engels called “false consciousness”!

The audio version of “Right-Wing Gramscianism vs. Classical Liberalism: Chris Rufo’s Challenge to Classical Liberalism”