Can the Right Challenge Cultural Hegemony?

by Andrea Falco Profili

Andrea Falco Profili argues that the Right confuses elections with power, while Trump and MAGA reveal that only a Gramscian strategy of cultural hegemony can secure lasting influence.

There is a long tradition in the Western Right: that of winning elections and losing everything else. Taking government but leaving power untouched. Occupying seats without occupying academic chairs, think tanks, unions or newsrooms. It’s a deluded Right, narcissistically clinging to the idea that politics is a matter of arithmetic majorities and not historical and cultural sedimentation. A Right which, as the philosopher Alain de Benoist would put it, hasn’t read Gramsci.

The word “hegemony” has become one of those trending words in contemporary political vocabulary that everyone wants to use, but few know its full implications. The Right has tried to seize it with little success in the many years since the sovereigntist wave has been sweeping and organizing in Europe. But hegemony, for Gramsci, is neither an appendix of power nor its consequence. It is power in its purest form: the ability to determine what is “normal”, “right” or even simply “acceptable”. You can distinguish the hegemons from the subjects by noticing which cultural stances sound politically charged and which sound neutral. Exempli gratia, among the youth it would certainly be the ones advocating for borders and identity to be perceived as political; meanwhile a more mainstream position or a — clearly politically charged — assertion such as “nations are a thing of the past” would be perceived as neutral, common sense, an expected stance to hold — and it should be those who don’t hold it to be subjects of scrutiny and suspicion.

Hegemony is the power to define the vocabulary of reality. Those who hold cultural hegemony don’t need to impose, because their ideas become persuasive in their own right. They do not need to repress or employ heavy systems of censorship, as the cultural consensus and peer pressure naturally shape society in the path they wish for it to take.

The Right, used to thinking in quantitative terms, confused hegemony with propaganda. It believed that winning elections was enough to change common sense. But culture is not conquered in a single round of voting. It is made in schools, universities, the cinema, newspapers, novels, bureaucracy, administration. In the hands of those “intermediate classes” where real and unshakable power resides. The Left has always known that true power is exercised before and beyond politics. To demonstrate this, let us look at the two terms of Donald Trump.

When Donald J. Trump won the 2016 presidential election, he did so against everything and everyone: against the GOP establishment, against the mainstream media, against the federal bureaucratic apparatus, against Silicon Valley, Hollywood and Wall Street. It was an unprecedented political victory, yet from the start it appeared devoid of real power. The system reacted with unmatched unity: it carried out investigations, sabotaged the administration internally, turned its algorithms against Republican media; the cultural and academic world was roused in total mobilization. The White House, in conservative hands, was like an enemy outpost in occupied territory. Trump, even as Commander-in-Chief, couldn’t steer the country: he was ostracized by every agency, every talk show, every tech company board. The Right was in government, but not in power. A living demonstration of the asymmetry between government and hegemony. News media, cultural products such as TV Series, even medical and teachers’ associations — every part of the progressive professional class pantheon rowed stubbornly against him. Trump was a foreign body, an intruder that had accidentally entered the apparatus and needed to be expelled as the human body treats an infection: by isolating it, inflaming its surroundings and pushing it out.

Yet something has changed. On the eve of his second term, the tone was different. The major digital platforms, once visceral anti-Trump militants, had quieted down. Hollywood became more cautious, the media no longer spoke of a “fascist threat”, and Silicon Valley CEOs no longer took public stances with the same fervor. No one was truly obliged to do so: Trump, despite being reelected, will only be there for four years. The risk of him imposing a lasting hegemony is minimal. Yet, the system trembled. Why?

Because the MAGA movement hadn’t merely sought consensus this time; it had identified the interstices, those opaque zones where power accumulates without revealing itself. They understood that the professional managerial class — a coagulated bloc of bureaucrats, academics, technocrats, journalists and consultants — held real power. The Deep State isn’t made of spies and Freemasons, or at the very least, they aren’t the frontline infantry: it is made of school board members, New York Times columnists, Google managers, editorial staff, public administrators and diversity officers. MAGA’s response wasn’t an ideological crusade. The alliance with Elon Musk and the emergence of the DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) project marked the turning point. DOGE presented itself as a weapon aimed at the heart of the parasitic bureaucracy that has been the real anti-MAGA resistance bloc. The idea of reforming it was abandoned in favour of dismantling it. When a power centre is inaccessible, the only winning strategy is to annihilate it. With Musk, communication has been privatized and progressive censorship defused. With DOGE, the attack targets became the administrative nerves of the State. The Deep State has been attacked with a scalpel: layoffs, audits, aggressive digitalization, outsourcing, de-bureaucratization.

But it’s not enough to hit power in its interstices: a new power must be built. Hence the 2024 MAGA campaign proposed a new machine: the American Academy. It was supposed to be a parallel, patriotic school system, accessible to the working class with no tuition fees. Meant to challenge the hegemony of the universities as factories of future managers, executives, publishers and judges. It is regrettable that the proposal hasn’t found application and has been forgotten in the old electoral program. It is crucial that a new hegemony is built. Regardless of Donald Trump’s turnaround after the Epstein List scandal, his movement’s actions prove that it is perhaps the first time the American Right — and by extension, the Western one — has stopped accepting its condition as a permanent cultural minority.

The lesson for Europe’s dissident Right is clear: political power is useless if it doesn’t turn into cultural power. When the French New Right first theorized the idea of coopting Gramsci — which the Left has always skillfully applied — they were at best ostracized, at worst calumniated. It is not enough to govern, it’s all about deciding what is thinkable, sayable or imaginable. MAGA has been the first mass rightist movement to apply this and, by extension, the first to lead a counterattack. Is DOGE an exportable model? Maybe. But only for those movements brave enough to admit they’ve never really won anything. Who will understand that the real opposition isn’t in the parties, but within their own ministries? If the concept of hegemony is understood and properly harnessed, it could signal the end of this phenomenon in which a right-wing movement reaches the government and then spends its entire term speaking as if it is in the opposition. Being under constant scrutiny, somehow isolated in the palaces of power, while the progressive cultural agenda still seems the real hegemon.

Reading Gramsci from the Right, as de Benoist suggested, is no longer an intellectual exercise. It is the first concrete chance for the cultural counterattack. It’s a lesson for every Right that wants to stop losing even when it wins.