What if Donald Trump was inspired by Antonio Gramsci? Yes, let’s imagine that this question may have made you jump from the chair. However, more than a provocation, it could be a curious truth. And, to understand it, we must look at the ongoing clash between the tenant of the White House and the best known US University, Harvard.
It all started in April, when the Trump administration sent a letter to the University, asking for the abolition of directives on diversity and inclusion, as well as a hard line of contrasting anti -Semitism. After a few days, the White House began to announce the freezing of funds in Harvard: according to the Guardian, in mid -May, the American administration had come to block a total of 2.65 billion dollars in subsidies to the University. Not only that. The American president also ordered federal agencies to cancel all existing contracts with the university.
Harvard, for his part, started a legal battle, accusing the White House of violating his autonomy. In short, the clash was significantly tightened. And it does not seem destined to subside so soon. Without a doubt, we have seen it, Trump believes that the university has not done enough to stem anti -Semitism and the spread of Woke ideology. In addition, the freezing of funding at the university could also be included in the strategy, carried out by the White House, aimed at reducing public spending. Now, all these elements certainly constitute an important part of the reasons that are moving the American president against the University. However, digging more deeply, it is perhaps possible to find a structural cause.
What we are witnessing is, in other words, a struggle for cultural hegemony. “What happens in military art takes place in political art: the war of movement becomes more and more war of position and it can be said that a state wins a war as it prepares it minutely and technically in peacetime. The massive structure of modern democracies, both as state organizations and as a complex of associations in civil life, constitute for political art the trenches and permanent fortifications of the front in the war of position “, wrote Gramsci about the” civil hegemony “. «In the East the state was everything, primordial and gelatinous civil society; In the West between the State and Civil Society there was a fair relationship and in the tremor of the state there was immediately a robust structure of civil society. The state was only an advanced trench, behind which a robust chain of fortresses and casematies was, “added Gramsci. In other words, the revolution is not possible with a direct assault on the state, but it is necessary to gradually occupy the “houses” of civil society: only in this way is it possible to prepare and subsequently implement the political change.
Here, we can say that, in the eyes of Trump, Harvard – as well as the other universities of the so -called Ivy League – represents the “Casamatta” par excellence: The temple of that liberal-planning thought that, in the decades, has forged a large part of the US ruling class, starting right from the state apparatus. Those apparatuses that the current president plans to reform radically. A battle, his, full of “Jacksonian” political culture: on the other hand, he was precisely President Andrew Jackson, who has always been explicitly admired by Trump, who invented the Spoil System and to introduce in the United States a political culture of an anti -Sestablishment and populist. With this in mind, Harvard, in Trump’s eyes, represents the forge of those elites who have the high bureaucracy ganglia, as well as the powerful circles related to economy and national security. But there is also a socio -economic knot. As Patrick Deneen highlighted in his essay of 2023 Change regime, American higher education has now become a closed world, co -option, aimed at strengthening class differences. Here the words of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden echo which defined the “miserable” and “garbage” Trump voters respectively.
Yet be careful: if we stopped at the populist revolt of the “forgotten” we would remain entirely anchored to the Trumpism of the origins, that of 2016. In reality, this time, a further piece emerges, which allows us to speak of a “gramscian moment” of the Trumpism itself. Cultural hegemony does not just want to break down, but to replace. And it is then interesting to take a look at the intellectual pantheon of some figures very close to the tenant of the White House. It is not a mystery that JD Vance is an admirer of Deneen and René Girard: Catholic intellectual, whose thought contributed to the conversion to Catholicism of the current American vice president in 2019. It is among other things interesting to underline how Vance has landed in Girard through his great sponsor, as well as Paypal founder, Peter Thiel.
And precisely Thiel, already in an old article entitled The Straussian Moment, expressed clearly critical positions towards the Enlightenment legacy connected to American political culture, referring to authors rather far away not only from progressively but also from classical liberalism: Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss and Girard himself.
On the other hand, we must be careful: the controversy against the United States universities was not born with Trump or with Deneen or with Thiel. What happens today is simply the outcome of a long wave that starts even since 1987, when Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind: an essay in which, among other things, the author targeted the elite universities, denouncing liberal education and the progressive abandonment of western culture. It is interesting to note that Bloom was a pupil of Leo Strauss who, for several years, has been (mostly erroneously) considered a sort of father of American neo -corporateness and who instead now, as we have seen, is (in a apparently paradoxical way) one of the intellectual reference points of Thiel. A Thiel who, among other things, sometimes loves to mention Tommaso d’Aquino, while Vance is a great admirer of the De Civitate dei di Agostino d’Appona. It is also useful to emphasize the title of the essay by Deneen, Change regime: let’s not forget that Gramsci studied Niccolò Machiavelli in depth for his acute reflections on political change.
In short, if in the first term he did not give great importance to the question of cultural hegemony, it would seem that this time Trump changed his mind. It is clear that various elements come to converge in his crusade against Harvard: from the attempt to renew the formation of the American ruling class to the desire to unhinge an increasingly elitist co -option system. However, various figures very close to the tenant of the White House, such as Vance and Thiel, push for the promotion of a philosophical thought in clear contrast with the liberal-planning of Enlightenment derivation typical of the Ivy League. It is in this sense that it is not entirely out of place to speak of a “gramscian moment” of the Trump administration. The fight for forgotten by globalization and that to reform the government systems take on ideological connotations of considerable distance from liberalism, both in its classical and progressive form.
Which also brings out controversial aspects, there is no doubt. On the other hand, two factors must be kept in mind. First: the intellectual front we are talking about is articulated. And, especially through the Heritage Foundation, it presents grafts of classic liberalism (especially as regards the defense of the first amendment). Secondly, we must be clear that we are in a phase of change of the paradigm from a geopolitical, economic and ideological point of view: in other words, we are crossing the crisis of globalization on a systemic level. It is therefore in this context that the struggle for cultural hegemony must be inserted, carried out by the Trump administration. Which, if we want, also explains the climate of growing polarization that is recorded in the USA and, more generally, in the West. Between the old and the new paradigm, by definition, there can be no harmony. Either the one or the other prevails.
Perhaps when Trump, during the settlement, spoke of a “new golden age” for America was not only using a rhetorical expression. The greatest revolutions in history have been made, for better or for worse, preaching the restoration of an idealized past. The perception, today, of progressive elites speaks volumes. Their historical failure is now conclated. And now, in front of the concrete perspective of a sunset of their power, they are increasingly afraid.
