Damon Linker, Gramsci, and How Both-Sides Centrists Help the Right
We are in a "Gramscian Moment," but the "war of position" is one-sided and is about to become a "war of maneuver"
Conspiracists like rabbit holes. Obsessive, neuro-weird geeks do, too. Welcome to one of mine.
I’m kind of politically, dispositionally, and personally irritated by a guy named Damon Linker. He’s my age, a political theorist / intellectual historian, a big Aimee Mann fan. He writes a Substack called “Notes from the Middleground” to which I subscribe, teaches at Penn, and is pretty damn smart. He used to work at a journal called First Things, which I used to read seriously, and, to his credit, he quit out of principle, marking his departure from the theocratic Right. Then he wrote a book about it, called The Theocons. Like me, he can’t quite get Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man out of his head. You should read him.
Given, maybe, the narcissism of small differences, I often want to fight him in a Waffle House parking lot.
That’s only half serious. I do wish I could audit his classes and argue with him constantly, but I can’t do that, so I’ll kinda-sorta do it here.
The impetus (impeti? impetuses?) for all this are a piece he wrote back in January, and another by Jerry Harris at Portside that popped up via a friend yesterday. 1
Both of them reference a dead guy most have never heard about, but whom I really admire, one Antonio Gramsci.
The Dirty Little Commie Who Was Onto Something
Gramsci was a dirty little commie, kinda literally, in that he was little (owing to health problems that made him hunchbacked and limited his growth to, like, 5 feet), an OG communist who hung out with Lenin and Trotsky and those dudes, and presumably dirty for at least the last eleven years of his life when he was imprisoned by the fascists in Mussolini’s Italy where he suffered stoically and horribly with pretty much no medical care and compounding health problems.
Gramsci was also pretty brilliant. Normal old Marxism famously claimed that everything was about material conditions: when shit got bad enough, money-wise, inequality-wise, the poor sods at the bottom would inevitably rise up to overthrow capitalism and create a glorious classless society. If things like ideas and philosophy and propaganda mattered at all, they were secondary, just the byproducts of the economics of a particular society. Everything was really just about the benjamins, the lack thereof, and the unequal distribution of them along class lines (okay, I simplify).
But reality wasn’t cooperating. Communist revolutions weren’t spreading across the globe like wildfire, despite inequality and downtrodden masses, so what was the deal? Gramsci, in his agonies, from his prison cell, started to think about the role ideas played in this phenomenon. And since I’m an ideas guy who doesn’t care nearly enough about money as he should, I have a soft spot for Antonio.
He came up with the notion of cultural hegemony. The idea was that institutions developed and saturated society with ideologies that normalize and reinforce the way things are and delegitimize any radical proposals for change. These ideologies become so widespread that they transmute into what we’d call common sense, resulting in rejection out of hand of anything that questions the world we live in. They aren’t “political” in the sense of “Lower taxes!” but subtler, the pervasive sense that the world we live in is just a given, that there’s no changing it, that it’s “natural” and immovable, that it’s the only really possible world, so any radical changes to it are, on their face, utopian, ridiculous, absurd.
Gramsci argued that, instead of or before arming the cadres and comrades to violently overthrow the capitalistic state or just plain seizing power—what he called a war of movement or maneuver—you had to first wage a war of position: you had to counter the cultural hegemony that reigned supreme, fight a war of ideas to get people questioning the way things are, get them seeing that the complacent acceptance of the gruel the system served up wasn’t the only thing that could be on the menu, get them dreaming of possibilities and writing and speaking and thinking about how they were in fact possible. Questioning and undermining the orthodoxy first, because if everybody’s under its spell, no revolution can get off the ground.
You had to prepare the soil. You had to win hearts and minds. You had to cultivate what he called a counter-hegemony among the people. The frontal attacks on the system, the war of maneuver or movement, couldn’t be successful unless and until you’ve done the cultural hearts-and-minds work, the war of position.
That was a big shift in Marxism, because Marxism up to that point tended to write off ideas and culture as just the outgrowth of material conditions, second-order fluff that could be waved away. Gramsci took ideas and culture (and so, sociology and psychology) seriously, if only to figure out why the “inevitable” communist revolutions weren’t manifesting.
If you hear conservatives blather about “cultural Marxism,” and the conservatives aren’t just echolaliating twits, then this sort of analysis might be what they are kinda-sorta referring to: the idea that we have to question the assumptions we’ve always taken for granted, in order to make and get to a better world. Gramsci shows it did have roots in Marxist analysis, but it applies to just about any tired, unexamined “conventional wisdom” reigning unchallenged out in the world. I mean, de Tocqueville kinda said the same thing about the basic nature of democracies a hundred years earlier:
In America the majority raises very formidable barriers to the liberty of opinion: within these barriers an author may write whatever he pleases, but he will repent it if he ever step beyond them. Not that he is exposed to the terrors of an auto-da-fe, but he is tormented by the slights and persecutions of daily obloquy. His political career is closed forever, since he has offended the only authority which is able to promote his success. Every sort of compensation, even that of celebrity, is refused to him. Before he published his opinions he imagined that he held them in common with many others; but no sooner has he declared them openly than he is loudly censured by his overbearing opponents, whilst those who think without having the courage to speak, like him, abandon him in silence. He yields at length, oppressed by the daily efforts he has been making, and he subsides into silence, as if he was tormented by remorse for having spoken the truth.
Hell, all the fools who thought they were “doing their own research” on vaccines were trying to buck the “cultural hegemony” of, like science and reality, in the name of…shortening their own and everybody else’s lifespans.
Linker’s Both-Sides Take on “Our Gramscian Moment”
So that’s Gramsci: We’re not going to get Communist utopia in really developed nations because they have all these social institutions that help promulgate the “common sense” that shrugs and tells us “it is what it is” and rolls its eyes at all the proposals for doing things differently on the grounds that they’re naive and don’t stand a chance, or that they’re against the “natural order” or “God’s plan” or whatever. To have a shot at changing the world, you have to do the ideological work, the ideas work, the messaging work, to build up a counter-hegemony that rivals the dominant cultural hegemony. Get a critical mass of people who no longer buy into the myths of the reigning system, no longer believe they live in the “best of all possible worlds.” Who are ready for something new and different.
Back to Damon Linker. Linker’s a centrist, proudly so. He views himself in the tradition of the liberal consensus that reigned after WWII that sees liberal democracy consisting of managing and balancing competing ends people seek within a framework that preserves rights and social order, avoiding violence. Accordingly, he looks askance at any extreme of Left or Right that he views as becoming too strident or making too much headway in society, as it threatens, in his view, the valid perspectives, worldviews, and rights of those who think differently and have just as much right to do so.
But as a guy who holds this view, in a country that was built to be small-C conservative and cautious and slow to change, Linker tends to bend over backward to find peril on the Left and see normalcy on the Right. Insofar as we’ve always been a right-leaning country in a lot of ways, moving slowly and fitfully away from essentialized hierarchies, saying that right-wing tendencies are “normal” for us is actually somewhat accurate, but it tends to condition a centrist to a baseline bias against the Left, such that he will always magnify Left overtures as more extreme than they necessarily are, thus opening up greater sympathy for the concerns of the Right and placing thumbs on the scale.
Linker’s been excitedly walking his readers through parts of an undergrad course he got thrown into teaching, called “Contemporary Political Theory,” and the syllabus for his class bears this centrist tendency out for me. The reason I was incensed back in January when he wrote “Our Gramscian Moment: What an interwar Italian Marxist grasped about the nature of populist politics,” was the apparent, blind bothsidesism of his argument.
He claims that the ‘60s Left dabbled in Gramscian counter-hegemony efforts as it pitted the “counterculture” against the “Establishment.” Fair cop, I guess, especially given how many Boomers still look back on those days so fondly as a time of visionary revolution in conceiving the world. I mean, the hippies were pretty grandiose at times.
Also fair that this effort was co-opted and squelched and delegitimized post-‘60s, not least because the Right began to fight back. Linker writes:
Interestingly, during the decade when that backlash and retrenchment fully emerged (the 1970s), neoconservative intellectuals began to engage in their own partial war of position against the liberal establishment (media, universities, foundations, think tanks), which it accused of giving too much ground to leftist revolutionaries. This war of position took the form of the self-conscious founding of an intellectual counter-establishment as an alternative to the supposedly compromised one that dominated American culture and institutions.
Over the following decades, a long list of right-leaning media outlets, think tanks, and other institutions were either founded or captured by an ascendent Reaganite New Right. But since most of those committed to this agenda considered themselves right-liberals seeking to offset what they believed to be a left-liberal skew in establishment institutions, their efforts first took the form of a correction to news coverage and policy analysis in the name of fairness and balance. This was therefore an internal reform of the system using competition to provoke change rather than an attempted overthrow of the system by a revolutionary successor. [emphases mine]
Linker seems to think his last lines here mean a lot. He’s saying that, since the New Right thought of themselves as “right-liberals” and meant only to “correct” the “left-liberal skew,” they were reformers, not revolutionaries out to overthrow the system.
This strikes me as extremely credulous and signals Linker’s dispositionally centrist sympathies for the Right. Yes, Linker was embedded in the religious right in the late 1980s and early 1990s, so he has more claim to know the intentions of some of its major players than I do.
But he also seems to be eliding a whole lot of the C-word debate, as I’ve referred to it, the question of Continuity or Crackup, that is, “Does the Trumpian turn among ‘conservatives’ signal that authoritarian theocrats is who they’ve always been, deep down, or has something fundamentally changed?” I come down on the Continuity side, at least insofar as authoritarian theocrats who can’t get past essentialized hierarchies of types of human beings is always present in “conservative” DNA, ready to shift from latent to expressed.
The conservative backlash against the ‘60s counterculture was just “reformist.” Trying to reorient the ship of state to its “normal” position of capitalist, militarist, interventionism. But then it went to deregulation, dogwhistling racism, dismantling the welfare state, busting unions, trickle-down economics which reversed decades worth of “liberal consensus,” and so on. To counter and win back the White House, Democrats ran to the right, triangulating and capitulating in the form of embracing neoliberalism, which only further alienated their former working class base, now courted by the GOP in racialized code.
But this massive ideological shift, fueled by billionaire dollars to create from nothing networks of parallel institutions of policy shops and media and lobbies—was just reformist. A corrective against a perceived leftward lean in establishment institutions.
I could go dig up a lot of big numbers, the dates of founding for the Heritage Foundation and a zillion other think-tanks, both religious and allegedly secular, state-based and national, their funding, their influence, the media empires charted and established, the reach of said networks in audio and video. But Heather Cox Richardson’s April 30, 2024 dispatch does a decent job. She puts it in the proper context as well, that of the recent Time Magazine double-interview with Trump and various campaign advisors who confirm that a second term for TFG will follow the outlines of the hundred or so conservative groups who collaborated with Heritage in producing Project 2025, a blueprint for American, well, authoritarianism if not capital-F fascism should we wish to avoid hurting the tender sensitivities of nitpicky academics who debate the nuances of such things.
Just look at Michael Podhorzer’s scouring and chart-filled breakdown of the power of the Federalist Society, founded in 1982, yes, in academe, but quickly adopted and subsidized by powerful right-wingers and their checkbooks with a very clear idea of how it could be used.
Against this multi-decade juggernaut, what did Linker’s identitarian “New New Left” do, in all its alleged Gramscian deviltry, to further its counter-hegemonic aims? To wage its “war of position”?
On the post-’60s left, meanwhile, social-justice progressives have taken a different approach to advancing their goals—one involving the infiltration of elite institutions with an eye to bringing about their moral and social (though, crucially, not usually economic) transformation from the inside. This has sometimes been brought about by (often younger) employees within organizations demanding change. At other times, it emerges via the imposition of new regulations and expectations by human-resource departments.
This is where Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs come in, with administrative bureaucracies mandating conformity to ideas ultimately derived from various left-wing ideologies, including critical race theory, gender theory, and theories of intersectionality. (Claudine Gay was a strong champion of these ideas and approaches to improving Harvard as an institution and, through its influence, the wider world.)
Oh. My. God. They’ve seized the HR department at Harvard! The Koch brothers are utterly unmanned. Fox News has no counter. CPAC will soon be overrun.
Those crafty leftists read their Gramsci and said, "We need to develop a counter-hegemony against whiteness, against the gender binary and patriarchy, against imperialism and colonialism and militarism, and we shall do it…via The Academe!
"Yes, our devious plan is to teach courses only a fraction of students will encounter as electives in some majors that won't even be majors, in some cases, for decades, whilst we write papers in paywalled journals and publish books at university presses that cost $35-60. This, surely, shall be the path to winning over the hearts and minds of the masses!"
"We shall utilize accessible terminology like critical race theory and critical legal studies and intersectionality and drop familiar references to events and people every red-blooded American knows from childhood, like the Combahee River Collective!
“Thus shall we build a groundswell of proletarian support which shall empower us to seize the State!"
What rot. What absolute blindness to sheer power differentials.
Judging Both Sides
I see only one way to salvage Linker’s bothsidesism here, and that’s to conceive of the Left’s efforts to forge a counter-hegemony as focused on elites, while the Right’s efforts were focused on the masses. That is, the Left’s vision of revolution was to seed elite institutions with a vanguard of Party apparatchiks (those powerful HR managers) who would then force all those beneath them to conform to the new orthodoxy, while the Right seeded its ideas outward into the hearts and minds of the Heartland.
First, if this was the plan, it was stupid, though perhaps born of a lack of resources. But there aren’t a lot of billionaire Lefties willing to donate to causes that aren’t fascistic in one way or another, so maybe a handful of folks getting tenure was the only way forward.
But Linker’s argument here also dodges the question of which side is more correct. The identity Left he singles out (Judith Butler, Kimberle Crenshaw, Daniel Bell, okay—Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri…I still can’t really make sense of those guys)…are they wrong? Are they baseless cranks? Did they make their shit up out of whole cloth? Did they promulgate an economic theory that reigned from Reagan to Biden without ever proving out on its promises in reality? Did they lie about WMDs or stolen elections or “welfare queens?” Did they settle with Dominion Voting Systems for three quarters of a billion dollars?
Or did the lefty thinkers contribute at least valid social critiques we’re still wrestling with, if we haven’t pretty much solidly documented them in case after case?
Because if it even tilts toward the latter, then I’d say the Lefties were more like scholars and social critics than Gramscian fifth columnists with extraordinarily bad strategies for how to make revolution.
What’s more, look at the content of the two alleged Gramscian attempts to forge a counter-hegemony. For the Left to be all about the Party vanguard apparatchiks in key positions to enforce orthodoxy, they’d have to be anti-democratic. But which side’s counter-hegemonic efforts are actually, materially translating into anti-democratic laws, policies, lines of rhetoric and nascent ideas in the discourse? Which side’s slow, steady, decades-long trench warfare has gutted the Voting Rights Act, thrown open the doors to unlimited dark money in campaigns, declared money to be speech, protected the wealthy and corporate while decimating rights for the lowly schlubs, the accused, the pregnant, the “deviant”? Which side’s network of allied, amply funded institutions has produced a blueprint for American authoritarianism for the next presidential administration?
What’s Really Going On
Now Linker might simply say, “Well, the Left just sucks at counter-hegemony.” And he could be right. Or he could maybe drop the effort to paint both sides of our political divide with the same methodological brush and admit what I think is pretty obvious: that the Right has been playing a Gramscian game for a very long time, and it’s coming to fruition, and very much in straight-up Gramscian terms.
Remember that Gramsci said there was the war of position (winning the hearts and minds, shifting the cultural “vibes” away from accepting the system the way it is toward questioning and then opposing that system), and then there was the war of movement or maneuver, the “actual” war stuff, attacking, seizing power. January 6 looked a lot like a war of movement but that’s optics, not actual warfare, although, crucially, the insurrection demonstrated visually, symbolically, and viscerally what Trumpism believes is possible and desirable, which is culturally significant. In terms of seizing power and wielding it, Project 2025 sure looks like the real thing.
We can debate about whether Project 2025 entails capturing the state from within, an “infiltration,” or a takeover from some version of “outside,” but whether you come from the Left or the good old normie middleground consensus of what Gen Xers like me and Linker were raised to believe from civics class, it ain’t America, and it calls to mind Podhorzer’s excellent closing from the piece linked above:
A long standing philosophical question was most famously posed as a thought experiment about the Ship of Theseus. In Greek mythology, Theseus rescued the children of Athens from King Minos after slaying the Minotaur. It was such a momentous achievement that for hundreds of years, Athenians would sail the ship to Delos to commemorate the achievement. But since the ship was used for so long, they had to keep replacing planks in the ship – until, eventually, not a single piece of wood from the original ship was still there. Was it still Theseus’ ship? At what point was it no longer Theseus’ ship? More recently philosophers have broadened the thought experiment to the replacement of planks generally, rotting or not.
This is a question we must pose to the media (and ourselves), as the Federalist Society justices that have hijacked the Supreme Court replace plank after plank out of our basic social contract:
The rich and corporations can spend as much as they want to influence our elections. Is it still America? Politicians can draw the districts that insure their re-election. Is it still America? Women do not have reproductive freedom. Is it still America? A president can order up a coup and not go to trial for it until years later (if at all). Is it still America?
We had over three decades of Rush Limbaugh demonizing liberals into the receptive ears of countless millions. We got Fox News hammering the same themes and tropes in red, white, and blue dynamic video for 28 years. Politics has been nationalized such that state and local electeds just pitch everything in the same bullshit partisan templates they get from cable TV. We now have CPAC unabashedly fan-girling authoritarians as role models for how America should be governed, and the intellectuals on the Right are scrambling to make a new National Conservatism fusion that can’t help tripping and falling into fascisms and racisms.
The Right Created “the Leftist Conspiracy”
Who gives a shit about my annoyance with some Penn professor over some dead Italian communist?
Well, probably no one, but here’s why I think it matters.
First, I think the whole thing shows, yet again, how centrists will go out of their way to find both-sides framings to paint the Left as just as guilty as the Right when it comes to any tactic, excess, problem, extreme, issue, what-have-you.2
In Linker’s case, he went for a methodology—this Gramscian strategy of waging a war of position to develop a counter-hegemonic cultural groundswell, to prepare the soil for a seizure of power. And he tried to claim that both the Left and the Right are engaging in it.
It had some surface plausibility. Gramsci was of the Left. You’d think that Leftists read other Leftists. You’d think that trendy Left-things in the culture today would be the result of Lefties promoting them in some kind of organized cultural push.
But the Right reads Lefties, too. A lot of the Right’s leading lights, historically, were Lefties to begin with, and they didn’t abandon Leftist strategies and tactics when they converted. The Right is much better organized thanks to the power of money, connections, ambition, influence, and the promise of power. And all the evidence of right-wing advances and successes in institutional capture and mass influence—be it through sheer obstruction or just plain short-circuiting old common sense things we used to take for granted in this country (like, oh, what it takes to self-immolate a presidential candidacy, one shouldn’t mock POWs or the disabled, vaccines save lives, etc.)—kinda-sorta suggests that the Right is the Gramscian mastermind here, and that the war of position is ready to switch to the war of movement/maneuver.
But here’s the big rub: the only reason anyone in Salina, Kansas, or Bumfuck, Nebraska, knows about “critical race theory” or “DEI” is thanks to the Right. Fox News especially pioneered the trick of selecting some weird bit of nonsense out in the interwebs, blowing it up in prime time, then excoriating it and insisting that it was all the fault and doing of the demonic liberals. That this is the crazy, upside-down world those liberals wanted. That this was what you would have to endure and salute at the flagpole every morning if the liberals ever took power.
Pick some obscure, wacky thing and blow it up as if it represents Leftism, then paint Leftism as pushing the wacky thing as a totalitarian stealth campaign that will enslave us all. Collect the rage clicks and repeat viewers and ad revenue and Republican primary victories for the looniest fuckers ever to draw breath. That’s the network’s damn business model.
The virulent campaigns against CRT and DEI were innovations only in the sense that they were obscure, fairly routine, actually pretty boring or bland concepts largely ensconced in academe, but since the right-wing rage machine had been targeting academe since Bill Buckley wrote God and Man at Yale in 1951, universities are always good for some rage-bait.
By zeroing in on these and claiming that they were the insidious ideologies the Left was using to corrupt the youth and indoctrinate us all into genderqueerness and not murdering Black people while they jog, the Right created this “Gramscian moment” that Linker claims is underway on the Left.
Kimberle Crenshaw can’t hold a candle to Christopher Rufo when it comes to spreading awareness of critical race theory, and Rufo did it solely to create the impression that CRT is a stealth cultural counter-hegemony project of the Left that the Right must combat in order to take the country back.
Linker bought it, apparently.3
Which is to say that centrists who think that the Left is trying (and failing) to wage Gramscian counter-hegemonic wars of position with things like “gender ideology,” CRT, and DEI have been suckered by the immensely successful Gramscian war of position waged by the Right all this time. But centrist insistence on never moving off the bubble of evenhandedness means they not only fail to see this but also they end up providing aid, comfort, and further ammunition for the Right’s project.
The Right invented the insidious conspiracy of some super-dangerous Left, snaking its tendrils into universities and what-have-you. It has done this because it doesn’t have global communism to use to unite its splintering, once-fused factions. Its most recently dominant faction, the neoconservatives, are either on the outs, or are retconning themselves into born-again Trumpists in hopes of regaining relevance.
The reigning coalition is revanchist, paleoconservative, authoritarian, proto-fascist, and believes itself just about ready to seize or consolidate power over enough key institutions in America to nail down pretty-much permanent minority rule.
To legitimize their takeover, they have demonize the Democrats by painting them all as “liberals,” which is to laugh, and then by painting liberals as “leftists,” which is just plain delusional. All these “Leftists” now have such immense, sneaky power that they infiltrate everything everywhere and the only way to stop them and save our country is by destroying it.
Every time both-sides narratives show up in this context, the Right cracks a smile.
Thanks to N.S. for that, by the way.
To be as fair as I can, Linker has been describing an undergrad course he’s teaching, and in such a course, you want to lay out, yes, both sides as much as you can, to get the kids to think and weigh and evaluate and compare and contrast. But in his Substack dedicated to Gramsci, the take is all about how the both-sides analysis holds water, that there’s a there there, something to it. It’s like his centrist instincts can’t help themselves. They just have to bleed out into his wider audience, stretching to make a point that just doesn’t hold up.
To be absolutely, crystal clear: Damon Linker is not a Trump supporter. He urges all of us to reject that horrid man and clear threat to democracy. Linker drives me batty because he is so often smart and right about certain things that I sense he would be even more fantastic if he were just a fierce ideologue of the Left, and I want to throttle him until he consents to join up. Or get dinner and debate for like, 12 hours.