Although the rise of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s is a common touchstone these days, it is also important to pay attention to the final years of the Cold War and the “New World Order” – as American President George H. W. Bush famously described it – that followed in its wake.
That’s when the reactionary neoliberalism of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan was reimagined as a new kind of culture war.
I want to revisit one battle which, though largely forgotten these days, proves illuminating in retrospect.
It was December 1993. I was in an airport with an hour to kill before my next flight, so I drifted into the sort of glorified newsstand where a few popular fiction and non-fiction books are sold alongside magazines and newspapers.
That’s where I saw Rush Limbaugh smirking at me from multiple copies of his brand-new book See, I Told You So.
Although the American talk radio sensation’s name was popping up all over the place in those days, I had never listened to his immensely successful talk-radio show.
My only experience of the shock jock had been indirect: news stories about his influence, ads for him on the radio, copies of his first book The Way Things Ought to Be prominently displayed in chain bookstores.
Instead of finding something I would enjoy reading, I decided to spend the time better acquainting myself with one of my ideological enemies. Just when I was growing too weary of the book’s smarmy prose to continue, a name caught my eye: Antonio Gramsci.
At first I thought I was mistaken. I couldn’t believe that Rush Limbaugh, who was regarded as an anti-intellectual charlatan in my overeducated circles, had even heard of the Italian thinker, much less found a reason to write about him.
My interest was piqued. As it turned out, the book didn’t just mention Gramsci’s name in passing, but devoted pages to discussing his importance for the contemporary left.
This struck me as deeply strange.
Although students in my graduate-school courses back then were always name-dropping French literary and cultural theorists – Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Lyotard – Antonio Gramsci had barely been mentioned.
I had begun reading Gramsci because Renate Holub, one of my intellectual mentors, was teaching him. As a German immigrant whose work focused on contemporary Europe, Holub reflected the keen interest in Gramsci’s work there.
Gramsci had been a hero of the Italian left since the end of World War II. So called “Eurocommunists” held him in high esteem. And British Marxists rebelling against their homegrown intellectual traditions had been developing his ideas since the 1970s.
In the United States, however, Gramsci was a comparatively minor figure.
In a 1971 Playboy interview, conservative movie star John Wayne railed against the influence of Herbert Marcuse instead.
So-called Third World Marxists also attracted plenty of right-wing ire. And the post-structuralist thinkers favoured by my peers were regularly mocked for being incomprehensible.
What in the world could have led Rush Limbaugh, a self-proclaimed man of the people, hostile to what was happening at American universities, to devote so much attention to Gramsci’s influence?
Despite the fact that every page in See, I Told You So drove me into a rage, I decided to take the book seriously in hope of answering this question.
It was a frustrating process. Although the internet began to make research easier in the early 1990s, finding anything concrete about a trade press book without a scholarly apparatus was hard.
I suspected that somebody at one of the right-wing think tanks springing up back then had directed Limbaugh’s attention to Gramsci. But there wasn’t enough evidence to determine who that might have been.
That’s why, instead of reconstructing the intellectual genealogy of this reference to Gramsci, I instead decided to compose a piece in which I would compare Limbaugh’s arguments with ones Gramsci himself makes in the posthumously published notebooks he kept while living under house arrest in Benito Mussolini’s Italy.
“Throughout See, I Told You So Rush binds together arguments familiar from his radio and TV shows and The Way Things Ought To Be into a comprehensive strategy for the American right,” I wrote in Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life, the DIY magazine I had co-founded in 1992.
“He tries to alarm his readers by arguing that America is moving ‘toward socialism and statism’ because conservatives ‘have lost control of. . .cultural institutions.’ He goes on to note that ‘the left has been very successful because it understands the importance of culture — of framing the debate and influencing the way people think about problems.’”
From Limbaugh’s perspective, this “obscure Italian communist” had responded to the left’s failure to achieve sustainable political power, by advocating that it pursue a “long march through the institutions” to secure cultural power instead.
This created a problem for conservatives since their political victories were being consistently undercut by their cultural defeats.
Limbaugh “goes on to note that ‘the left has been very successful because it Rush wants his readers to know that ‘the Culture War is a bilateral conflict’ in which conservatives can take part: ‘Why don’t we simply get in the game and start competing for control of these key cultural institutions? In other words, why not fight back?’”
From our vantage point over three decades later, it is easy to see how the retaliation Limbaugh proposed in See, I Told You So would go on to become a crucial component of authoritarian populist movements around the world.
By drawing attention to button-pushing examples of the left’s victories in this “war of position” – such as cancel culture and the belief that gender should be a personal choice – and promoting popular culture that exemplifies traditional values in response, reactionaries have been able to turn the tables on progressives.
The flurry of executive orders that American President Donald Trump has issued since beginning his second term in the White House shows how fighting the culture war in the way Limbaugh proposed ultimately translated into more political power than could be attained simply by winning elections.
Perhaps the biggest difference between the reactionary politics of the early 1990s and the authoritarian populism of today is that the right has become more self-consciously international. Parochial concerns have been increasingly set aside by global ones.
The far right today confronts us with the ironic mirror image of the Marxist Internationals from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Fascist Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin, France’s ethno-nationalist Les Identitaires, and the technocratic libertarianism advocated by Elon Musk are all part of the same movement, despite sometimes vehement disagreement within their ranks.
The goal of that movement is to destroy each and every institution that the left “infected” along the lines suggested by Antonio Gramsci.
What the example of Rush Limbaugh’s See, I Told You So demonstrates is the sustained continuity underlying this movement and the self-consciously international aspirations that were already shaping it in the immediate wake of the Cold War.
Even in the case of someone like Limbaugh, who seemingly had little use for deep thinking, the influence of a long-marginalised reactionary tradition can now be discerned, one which began its own version of the long march through the institutions decades ago.
Although it strikes me as highly unlikely that Limbaugh himself was aware of the influence that Antonio Gramsci’s work had already begun to exert on the European New Right during the Cold War, there’s a good chance that someone he knew did.
The conservative Hoover Institute at Stanford University may seem as American as apple pie. But in the early 1990s it was already facilitating connections between young conservatives like Peter Thiel and the literary scholar Russell Berman, who would play a key role in transforming the journal Telos, once a bastion of the intellectual New Left, into an enthusiastic advocate for far right thinkers like Carl Schmitt and Alain de Benoist, who was already conceptualising his projects in explicitly Gramscian terms in the late 1960s.
As we struggle to get our bearings in this time of extreme political instability, it will be vital to remember that indirect influences of the sort that See, I Told You So appears to demonstrate might be every bit as important as the sort we can prove without a shadow of a doubt.
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Photograph courtesy of Riccardo Cuppini. Published under a Creative Commons license.
