In 2018, Steve Bannon sat for an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and, without a hint of irony, explained the far right’s long-term political project by quoting Antonio Gramsci. “The Gramscian model,” Bannon said, “is that you capture the cultural institutions first, then you capture the political institutions.” The former White House strategist, architect of a nationalist-populist insurgency, had internalized a concept most Marxists treat as an academic curiosity: hegemony. The far right learned to wage a war of position. The left, by and large, is still writing footnotes about it.
Bannon Read Gramsci Better Than Most Marxists
Gramsci developed the concept of hegemony in the Prison Notebooks to explain why revolution had failed in the West. In Tsarist Russia, the state was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous—a war of maneuver could topple it. In the advanced capitalist societies of Western Europe, the state was merely the outer ditch; behind it lay a formidable chain of fortresses and earthworks: schools, churches, media, universities, unions, cultural institutions. These were the trenches of civil society where the bourgeoisie maintained consent, not just through coercion, but by making its worldview appear as the natural order of things—common sense.
Bannon understood this with a clarity that should embarrass academic Marxist circles. He recognized that the far right could not win durable political power by simply winning elections. Elections are ephemeral. Hegemony requires reshaping the terrain in which elections take place. The Heritage Foundation’s annual budget now exceeds $100 million. The Koch network has spent cumulative political sums exceeding the GDP of small nations. These resources do not buy votes directly; they buy the capacity to define what questions are permissible, what assumptions are natural, and who counts as an expert.
“The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.” — Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto
Yet this is not simply a matter of the ruling class imposing ideas on a passive working class. Gramsci’s insight is more dialectical: hegemony is a process of continuous negotiation, a battlefield where consent is won and lost. The far right has grasped this process as a practical project. While Marxist intellectuals debate whether base determines superstructure mechanically, the right has built think tanks that produce policy, media ecosystems that produce narratives, and legal foundations that produce litigation. They do not wait for the economic base to produce consciousness automatically; they intervene in the superstructure as a material force.
The Right Builds Organic Intellectuals While the Left Writes Papers
Gramsci distinguished between traditional intellectuals—academics, clergy, artists who see themselves as autonomous from class—and organic intellectuals, who arise from and articulate the worldview of a specific class. Every class that seeks hegemonic leadership must produce its own organic intellectuals who give coherence and direction to its political project.
The far right has built a pipeline of organic intellectuals with staggering efficiency. From campus Turning Point chapters to the Heritage Foundation’s Young Leaders Program to Fox News’s on-air talent farm system, right-wing institutions systematically train, credential, and deploy individuals who can articulate a reactionary worldview as common sense. The result is visible across the institutional landscape: a judiciary staffed by Federalist Society alumni, a media ecosystem where the most-watched cable news network functions as a propaganda arm, state legislatures where model bills from the American Legislative Exchange Council become law within months.
The left, meanwhile, has produced organic intellectuals in abundance—teachers, union organizers, tenant advocates, climate activists—but lacks the infrastructure to connect them into a coherent hegemonic project. The DSA’s membership trajectory rose dramatically from roughly 6,000 members in 2016 to over 95,000 by 2024, yet this organizational growth has not translated into proportional influence on the cultural terrain. Left intellectuals remain fragmented across academic disciplines, publishing in journals that working-class organizers do not read, while right-wing intellectuals produce cable television segments that millions consume daily with their dinner.
This asymmetry is not accidental. The capitalist class has an inherent advantage in the production of organic intellectuals because its think tanks are funded by capital concentration, while left institutions depend on membership dues, foundation grants, and the precarious labor of adjunct professors. But this material constraint does not explain why the left has so thoroughly abandoned the cultural terrain. A deeper explanation lies in the economism that has long dominated Marxist theory—the assumption that the base automatically produces its own superstructure, that economic crisis will generate revolutionary consciousness without strategic intervention in the ideological realm.
Cultural Institutions Are Terrain, Not Decoration
The economistic fallacy holds that when capitalism enters crisis, workers will spontaneously develop class consciousness. History refutes this. The 2008 financial crisis produced the Tea Party, not a left insurgency. The COVID-19 pandemic produced vaccine nationalism and conspiracy theories, not proletarian internationalism. Economic crisis does not generate consciousness mechanically; it generates confusion, anxiety, and a search for explanations. The question is which political forces provide those explanations, through which institutions, and with what narrative coherence.
The far right understands that cultural institutions are not decorative superstructure. They are the trenches where the war of position is fought. School boards determine how history is taught—whether as a story of class struggle or as a nationalist epic. Public libraries decide whose literature collects dust and whose is prominently displayed. Local news outlets shape what residents consider common sense about crime, immigration, and taxation. Museums, film studios, publishing houses, and streaming platforms all function as organic ideological apparatuses, whether their managers are conscious of it or not.
Gramsci’s war of position is a slow, patient, and unglamorous struggle to occupy these trenches. It requires decades, not election cycles. The right has been waging this war since the Powell Memorandum in 1971, which explicitly called for business to capture the universities, media, and courts. Fifty years of consistent investment in the cultural terrain has shifted the center of political gravity so far right that positions considered fringe in the 1990s—privatizing Social Security, dismantling public education, criminalizing homelessness—are now mainstream Republican policy.
Counter-Hegemonic Strategy Requires Material Infrastructure
A steel-manned counter-argument insists that this emphasis on cultural strategy overstates the autonomy of the superstructure. The real driver of politics, a Marxist might say, is the contradiction between the forces and relations of production. As capitalism’s crises deepen—falling rate of profit, ecological catastrophe, immiseration of the global working class—consciousness will shift toward the left regardless of what right-wing cultural institutions do. The war of position is a distraction from the real war of maneuver that economic collapse makes possible.
This argument contains a kernel of truth: material conditions set the ultimate limits of politics. A series of devastating recessions cannot be explained away by cultural messaging. But the argument mistakes necessary conditions for sufficient ones. The working class does not develop socialist consciousness from economic crisis alone; it develops consciousness through struggle, organization, and the availability of an alternative worldview that explains its experience. The far right provides exactly such a worldview—a false but coherent explanation that identifies immigrants, minorities, and leftists as the cause of working-class suffering, while leaving capitalism itself untouched.
The left requires material infrastructure for counter-hegemonic work: independent media that working-class people actually consume, union education programs that teach political economy alongside grievance procedures, community organizations that build relationships of solidarity that can survive electoral defeats, training programs for organic intellectuals who can articulate a Marxist worldview in the idioms of their communities. These are not luxuries to be attended to after the revolution; they are the revolution, or at least its precondition. The Bolsheviks had Pravda, the Industrial Workers of the World had its songbook and soapboxes, the CIO had its labor colleges and worker education programs. The contemporary left has Twitter arguments and journal articles behind paywalls.
The War of Position Has Already Begun — the Question Is Who Wins
Hegemony is not a static state of domination. It is a contested process, a battlefield that shifts with every strike, every curriculum battle, every union campaign, every media framing. The far right has not won hegemony; it has simply recognized that the struggle is real and committed resources accordingly. But the trenches of civil society are never fully occupied. Spaces of resistance persist: the immigrant defense committees that beat back deportation raids, the tenant unions that halt evictions through direct action, the teachers who teach critical history despite administrative suppression, the rank-and-file workers who caucus within their unions for a class-struggle program.
The challenge is not to abandon these concrete struggles for the abstraction of cultural strategy, but to recognize that every struggle is also a hegemonic contest. A rent strike wins material relief but also demonstrates that collective working-class action can prevail over landlord power—a lesson that transforms common sense. A successful unionization drive at an Amazon warehouse raises wages but also disrupts the narrative that workers are powerless before capital—a shift in the cultural terrain. The war of position and the war of maneuver are not alternatives; they are dialectically intertwined.
Bannon understood this when he cited Gramsci. He understood that capturing the state without capturing civil society produces a brittle victory, one that can be reversed by the next election. The far right has spent fifty years building the infrastructure of civil society: the think tanks, the media networks, the legal advocacy groups, the youth pipelines, the publishing houses, the donor networks that sustain them year after year regardless of electoral outcomes. The left has, for the most part, imagined that correct ideas and economic necessity would suffice.
Imagine a union local whose meeting space doubles as a community literacy center, where workers read the Grundrisse beside their children doing homework. Imagine a tenant union that produces its own radio program broadcast from the same building where eviction defense is organized. Imagine a political formation that treats every strike as a pedagogical event, every boycott as a cultural intervention, every election as a moment of hegemonic contest rather than a transaction for representation. These are not fantasies. They are the concrete form a counter-hegemonic project would take—a war of position fought organically, from within the institutions working-class people already inhabit, by organic intellectuals who speak the language of their class.
The far right understood the stakes before the left did. That asymmetry is not destiny. It is a condition to be overcome, trench by trench, institution by institution, generation by generation. The war of position has already begun. The only question is whether the left will show up armed with more than footnotes.
