How Gramsci's Ideas Influenced the Political Right

He was somebody who was pretty skeptical of communist governments.

He was extremely skeptical of Cuba, uh, the Soviet Union, but he was a, a scholar of Gramsci.

Uh, a-and so like you said, Antonio Gramsci is a, a leftist Italian thinker.

He did most of his work in prison. Uh, Mussolini, the fascist dictator, locked him up, and he spent most of his life writing in these little notebooks in prison that eventually got smuggled out.

And what he wrote turned out to, it turned out to be pretty important.

Uh- Your father translated, uh- Uh, yeah, yeah ... the books, right?

He, he translated many of those notebooks. It went everywhere. It went everywhere.

And the really interesting thing is, most of the people in America right now who have put Gramsci's ideas into practice are on the right.

So, uh, you look at Breitbart, for example.

Breitbart was famously somebody who paid a lot of attention to Gramsci.

Now, this isn't just in the US. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán actually wrote his thesis on Gramsci.

Uh, in Italy right now, there's a, there's a minister in the Meloni government who wrote a whole book on Gramsci.

So even though Gramsci was a leftist, most of the people who have used his ideas recently have been on the right.

And as a leftist, I think my dad would probably be rolling over in his grave if he knew that it was really Trumpism that kinda beat the left to some of these insights.

For example, one of these sayings that's attributed to Breitbart, uh, "Politics is downstream from culture."

Uh, Steve Bannon says that, too. I forget which one of them said it first.

But it's the kind of thing that Gramsci talked a lot about, this idea of hegemony, that, that- I think the strategy is true.

Mm. But the end in mind was different