Christopher Rufo and MAGA Turn Gramsci’s Marxism Against the Left

Christo­pher Rufo is per­haps the most potent con­ser­v­a­tive activist in the U.S. Last year, he led the cam­paign that pres­sured Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty into replac­ing Clau­dine Gay as its pres­i­dent. His cru­sades against crit­i­cal race the­o­ry and DEI in high­er edu­ca­tion have shaped Pres­i­dent Trump’s aggres­sive poli­cies toward elite uni­ver­si­ties like Har­vard, which the admin­is­tra­tion tar­get­ed this week with a $2.26 bil­lion fund­ing freeze. For the past year, Rufo has been work­ing on a book called “How the Regime Rules,” which he describes as a “man­i­festo for the New Right.” At its core is a sur­pris­ing inspi­ra­tion: the Ital­ian Com­mu­nist thinker Anto­nio Gram­sci, a long­time boogey­man of Amer­i­can con­ser­v­a­tives. “Gram­sci, in a sense, pro­vides the dia­gram of how pol­i­tics works and the rela­tion­ship between all of the var­i­ous com­po­nent parts: intel­lec­tu­als, insti­tu­tions, laws, cul­ture, folk­lore,” said Rufo, a senior fel­low at the Man­hat­tan Institute.

Read more: https://www.wsj.com/politics/meet-magas-favorite-communist-5a1132ad [pay­wall]

Key Points

• Gram­sci devel­oped the­o­ries about “cul­tur­al hege­mo­ny” that placed cul­ture rather than eco­nom­ics at the cen­ter of polit­i­cal struggle.
• Trump’s admin­is­tra­tion has imple­ment­ed Gram­s­cian tac­tics by tar­get­ing uni­ver­si­ties with fund­ing freezes and gut­ting the Depart­ment of Education.
• Con­ser­v­a­tive fig­ures world­wide, includ­ing Italy’s Mel­oni, France’s Le Pen, and Brazil’s Bol­sonaro, have cit­ed Gram­sci’s influ­ence on their strategies.
• Rufo explic­it­ly aims to serve as “the right’s Gram­sci” and archi­tect of a new con­ser­v­a­tive pol­i­tics focused on cul­tur­al institutions.

Christopher Rufo, Gramsci Influence, and the MAGA Movement

Christo­pher Rufo has emerged as a key archi­tect in the US MAGA movement’s cul­ture war strat­e­gy, explic­it­ly draw­ing from Gram­s­cian con­cepts to reshape pub­lic dis­course and mobi­lize con­ser­v­a­tive activism. Rufo’s approach, as he pub­licly out­lined, was to inten­tion­al­ly con­flate a wide range of pro­gres­sive cul­tur­al ideas under the label of “crit­i­cal race the­o­ry,” aim­ing to make CRT a tox­ic brand and a polit­i­cal weapon that could ral­ly oppo­si­tion to diver­si­ty and inclu­sion ini­tia­tives; he stat­ed on social media that his goal was for the pub­lic to “read some­thing crazy in the news­pa­per and imme­di­ate­ly think ‘crit­i­cal race the­o­ry’,” a strat­e­gy that was wide­ly report­ed and adopt­ed by con­ser­v­a­tive groups. This delib­er­ate refram­ing was fur­ther ampli­fied by pow­er­ful net­works such as the Koch fam­i­ly, whose fund­ing of con­ser­v­a­tive dis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paigns tar­get­ing CRT helped insti­tu­tion­al­ize Rufo’s nar­ra­tive across media and pol­i­cy cir­cles. Inter­na­tion­al­ly, Rufo’s col­lab­o­ra­tion with Hun­gar­i­an Prime Min­is­ter Vik­tor Orbán’s allies, as doc­u­ment­ed in the deep­en­ing alliance between Orbán and the Amer­i­can right, and his engage­ment with insti­tu­tions like the Math­ias Corv­i­nus Col­legium, described in the inves­ti­ga­tion into US free speech advo­cates’ con­nec­tions to Orbán’s Hun­gary, reflect a broad­er strat­e­gy to export and rein­force illib­er­al, anti-glob­al­ist nar­ra­tives. These devel­op­ments under­score how Rufo’s Gram­s­cian-inspired tac­tics-turn­ing an aca­d­e­m­ic the­o­ry into a “per­fect villain”-have been instru­men­tal in shap­ing both domes­tic and transna­tion­al right-wing cam­paigns, a trend cor­rob­o­rat­ed by exter­nal analy­ses that detail his piv­otal role in politi­ciz­ing CRT, the delib­er­ate con­struc­tion of cul­ture war vil­lains, and the inter­na­tion­al­iza­tion of these influ­ence operations.

Exter­nal References:

1. How a Con­ser­v­a­tive Activist Invent­ed the Con­flict Over Crit­i­cal Race Theory

2. Crit­i­cal Race The­o­ry: Aca­d­e­m­ic Con­cept or Polit­i­cal Pawn

3. Mas­ter­mind of ‘crit­i­cal race the­o­ry’ uproar lives in Gig Har­bor. Who is he?

Disclaimer

The Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report (GIOR) employs AI through­out the post­ing process, includ­ing gen­er­at­ing sum­maries of news items, the intro­duc­tion, key points, and often the “con­text” sec­tion. We rec­om­mend ver­i­fy­ing all infor­ma­tion before use. Addi­tion­al­ly, images are AI-gen­er­at­ed and intend­ed sole­ly for illus­tra­tive pur­pos­es. While they rep­re­sent the events or indi­vid­u­als dis­cussed, they should not be inter­pret­ed as real-world photography.