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THE RIGHT READS GRAMSCI: PROJECT 2025 AND NEO-FASCISM  
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Jerry Harris
April 24, 2024
Convergence
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_ “We need to understand fascism as a dynamic and revolutionary
movement. It is not a conservative political force safely embedded in
US institutional power. It has a radical vision of power and
reconstruction that Project 2025 gives voice to.” _

, Convergence

 

It may come as a surprise, but the Right has been studying the work of
Antonio Gramsci for years—and his ideas on the importance of culture
and ideology have made a big impact on them. They concluded the Left
has been following Gramsci’s lead ever since the cultural revolution
of the 1960s, and captured the press, the universities, civil society,
and most government institutions. To counter that, they have built
their own media and think tanks, cultivated an institutional base in
Christian churches, and developed a narrative focused on attacking
abortion rights, LGBTQ+ rights, immigrants, and the civil rights
advances since the 1960s.

This “war for the soul of America” is central to Project 2025’s
“Mandate For Leadership
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report, which presents a blueprint for MAGA and a strategic plan for
the use of power should Trump win in 2024. According to its logic,
left-leaning elites who promote human rights, racial justice, gender
equality, and environmental protection are enemies of the
people—that is, the hardworking (white) Americans for whom the
ruling elites show contempt.

Referencing Gramsci, the report states: “The long march of cultural
Marxism through our institutions has come to pass. The federal
government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and
conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never
before.” Anyone who adheres to leftist ideology is a member of this
elite, dominating most major institutions of American life: the media,
big tech, education—and “nothing less than a counter-revolution
will save the nation.”

Understanding how the ruling class rules
Gramsci explained how leading elements of the capitalist class build
hegemonic blocs to create a ruling consensus. The bloc establishes
commonly accepted forms of accumulation and political rule, as well as
cultural and ideological domination, or ideas that become accepted as
“common sense.”  The main components are accepted by both major
political parties, although there may be policy differences that exist
within the scope of the broad consensus. The bloc, essentially a
coalition of ruling class factions, forms a mass base by both
repressing the opposition and creating political support among other
sections of the population. They build that support mainly by using
the tools of culture and ideology to support their political and
economic project, but economic success and stability also play an
important role. 

From about 1932 to today there have been two major hegemonic blocs in
the US. The first was the Keynesian bloc developed during the
Roosevelt administration, which lasted into the late 1970s. It
included social welfare, the acceptance of unions and civil rights
reforms for women and people of color, measures to raise living
standards, an economically active state sector, nation-centric
economics, repression of the Left, building the military-industrial
base, and imperialism abroad. It was replaced in the 1980s by
neo-liberalism, which included the globalization of production, vast
cross-border financial flows, broad-scale attacks on unions,
precarity, deindustrialization, undermining the social contract,
free-market ideology, expanding the military-industrial complex and
imperialism, while militarizing policing and promoting the carceral
state.

Ruling class splits

The deep economic crisis of 2008 began to unravel the neoliberal
hegemonic bloc. A rapidly growing crisis of legitimacy disrupted
politics, with social movements developing to the left and right. 
Significant sectors of the ruling class concluded they needed to form
a new consensus to stabilize capitalism and reestablish political
support for the system. Two different power blocs have formed,
although neither has yet achieved hegemony.

The neo-fascist bloc seeks stability through repression, and creating
a mass base through religious fundamentalism, patriarchy, and white
supremacy. The neo-Keynesian bloc seeks stability and renewed
political legitimacy through neo-Keynesian reformism, and economic
expansion through the green modernization of the means of production.
Both still pursue imperialism and maintaining military dominance.

This is a deep split within the ruling class over internal policies,
different from the McCarthy era in which the ruling class and both
political parties were united in purging the Left and expanding the US
empire. The current splits may be beneficial to the Left in forming a
common project to defend and expand democracy and protect civil
society. That would entail aiming our main blow against the
neo-fascist bloc, building the socialist core, working closely with
progressives, and pushing the center to the left.

There are numerous important issues that unite a broad array of
political forces: defending abortion rights, defending the queer and
trans community, expanding voting rights, teaching about institutional
racism in our public schools, defending public libraries and access to
books, promoting more environmental legislation and regulations,
maintaining a pro-labor National Labor Relations Board, defending
Social Security and greater taxation on corporations. The list could
go on. These issues encompass questions of race, class, and gender as
well as democracy. Even within this common project socialists need to
maintain independence and initiative, particularly in opposing US
imperialism

The movement behind Trump is a coalition of reactionary and
conservative forces. Its major organized elements are Christian
Nationalists, reactionary Catholicism, laissez-faire capitalists like
the Koch network, tech libertarians such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk,
right-wing think tanks, and neo-fascist militias. It’s important to
see beyond Trump and understand the social/political movement which
has gathered around him. This movement desires to coalesce as a
long-term ruling hegemonic bloc, turning the US into an authoritarian
Christian country, end bourgeois democracy, and severely curtail civil
society. 

Project 2025: a fascist vision for the US

Project 2025 was initiated and published by the Heritage Foundation,
the most influential rightwing think tank, and the one closest to the
power centers of the Right and the Republican Party. It has united
much of the conservative movement, their think tanks, activists, and
lobbying groups with the goal of installing a much more effective,
more ruthless right-wing regime. It comes with tremendous funding and
the backing of much of the political Right and believes there is a
socialist plot in the highest echelons of American power. It sees a
vast conspiracy with enemies everywhere, and that un-American forces
have overtaken every institution.

Project 2025 is a major policy and ideological projection. It is a
fascist document and puts forward a strategic path to create an
authoritarian Christian dominated society through control of the
state. There are other statements from within the authoritarian bloc
with somewhat different formulations and viewpoints. Project 2025 is
the most developed, and has been signed by over 100 groups and
think-tanks. They want to be the ideological and policy brain behind
Trump, who is useful as a mass fascist leader, but lacks the
intellectual capacity to carry out a strategic project.

Donald Trump is not part of the “ruling class” (a term often used
by the right to describe the elite). Instead, Trump is characterized
as an outsider, a business maverick who disdains elite language and
the club of Washington insiders. 

China, globalists, political and academic elites, the left,
socialists, communists–for Project 2025 it is all just one enemy.
“Today, nearly every top-tier university president or Wall Street
hedge fund manager has more in common with a socialist, European head
of state than with the parents at a high school football game.”
Moreover, America’s corporate and political elites, are fully in
cahoots with the nation’s foreign enemies, and against the “real
America made up of humble, patriotic working families.”

“Every hour the Left directs federal policy and elite institutions,
our sovereignty, our Constitution, our families, and our freedom are a
step closer to disappearing. Conservatives have just one shot to get
this right. With enemies at home and abroad, there is no margin for
error. Time is running short. If we fail, the fight for the very idea
of America may be lost. This is the last opportunity to save our
republic.” The solution to all the above problems is not to tinker
with this or that government program, to replace this or that
bureaucrat. … “We solve them by ripping out the trees—root and
branch.”

We need to understand fascism as a dynamic and revolutionary movement.
It is not a conservative political force safely embedded in US
institutional power. It has a radical vision of power and
reconstruction that Project 2025 gives voice to. As Trump has stated,
he plans to rid the country of “left vermin.”

The Right’s unified plan and committed cadre

The Project outlines what the Right wants to do with the executive
branch and the state apparatus immediately upon returning to power,
department by department and agency by agency. Including purging
50,000 federal employees.  Following is an examination of the
Project’s nearly 900-page document, with much of the following
content based on quotes.

Executing a president’s agenda requires a well-conceived,
coordinated, unified plan and a trained and committed cadre of
personnel to implement it. “We need to assemble an army of aligned,
vetted, trained and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day 1 to
deconstruct the administrative state and to use the state as a tool
for concentrating power and entrenching ideology.” Interviews are
already being conducted. Accepted are only those who agree that the
2020 election was stolen.

The president’s “needs,” “goals” and “desires” are
always consistent with the law. And the president is the “personal
embodiment of popular will.” Mussolini and Hitler would be
particularly pleased with this section. 

Plans to transform the state

* PURGE LEFT ELITES IN MAJOR DEPARTMENTS. According to the Project,
large sections of the State Department’s work force are left-wing
and predisposed to disagree with a conservative president’s agenda
and vision. And the Department of Justice (which oversees the FBI)
“has been captured by an unaccountable bureaucratic managerial class
and radical left ideologues who have embedded themselves throughout
its offices and who are infatuated with the perpetuation of a radical
liberal agenda.”
* REVERSE GAINS IN GENDER JUSTICE. Women’s and gender rights are
targets that generate a particular degree of fear and hatred. Project
2025 advocates the abolishment of the Gender Policy Council, and it
wants to delete a host of terms such as: sexual orientation, gender
identity, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness,
gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights
and diversity, equity, and inclusion out of every federal rule,
internal agency regulation, contract, grant, public regulation, and
piece of legislation that exists. Every U.S. state should be required
to report exactly how many abortions take place, the gestational age
of the child, why the abortion took place, and the mother’s home
residency.
* END ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE AND PROTECTION PROJECTS. When it comes
to environmental science and regulations, the Project takes the same
extreme approach. It wants to abolish the Office of Domestic Climate
Policy, the Office of Environmental Justice and Civil Rights, and the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration because it
“constitutes one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm
industry.” It goes on to state that environmental extremism serves
to undermine the strength of the US. “It is not a political cause,
but a pseudo-religion meant to baptize liberals’ ruthless pursuit of
absolute power in the holy water of environmental virtue.”
* DISMANTLE DIVERSITY, EQUITY AND INCLUSION INITIATIVES. As for
confronting racial inequality and discrimination the Project wants
every department from the Department of Labor to the U.S. Agency for
International Developmentto be scrubbed clean of Diversity, Equity and
Inclusion (“DEI” is a policy adopted by many corporations,
universities and government agencies), and treat the “participation
in any critical race theory or Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
initiatives as grounds for termination of employment” as they
violate constitutional and moral principles. The government should
prohibit the collection of employment statistics based on race or
ethnicity. Illegal immigration should be ended, the border sealed.
Furthermore, bureaucrats at the Department of Education “inject
racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into classrooms.” And
“critical race theory and gender ideology should be excluded from
curriculum in every public school in the country, because they poison
our children.” This coincides with Trump calling immigrants
“animals” that “poisons the blood of our country.”
* RESTORE TRADITIONAL VALUES THROUGH STATE ACTION. All policies
should be guided by traditional values. According to Project 2025 the
pursuit of the good life is found primarily in family — marriage,
children, and above all, in religious devotion and spirituality.

This is serious

For those who say there is no difference between the Democrats and
Republicans, or that the US is not a democracy, or that we are already
living under an authoritarian government, please take Project 2025
seriously. We are facing a well-organized, very well financed, highly
motivated and an ideologically rigorous enemy. As leftists we exist in
civil society. We use the political tools of free speech, free press,
free association, and the right to assemble and protest to organize
for our ideas, our cause, and to create a working-class mass base.
There are always tensions, limitations and violence within bourgeois
democracy. But what we have today is qualitatively different from the
strategic plans of the neo-fascist movement.

There is an anti-fascist majority in the US, but it is unorganized and
centrist Democrats are incapable of giving it full expression or
leadership. I believe the role for socialists is to unite the many and
aim our main blow against the most reactionary and dangerous enemy we
currently face. We need to block MAGA as a national movement over a
broad front of combat, as we build the capacities of left forces to
move us toward a progressive future. It’s not just about a
presidential election, but that _is_ one aspect of the battle.

Jerry Harris is National Secretary of the Global Studies Association
of North America. He is the author of _Global Capitalism and the
Crisis of Democracy_ (Clarity Press, 2016). His articles have been
translated into Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Slovak and
Czech. 

Convergence is a magazine for radical insights. We produce articles,
videos, and podcasts to sharpen our collective practice, lift up
stories about organizing, and engage in strategic debate — all with
the goal of winning multi-racial democracy and a radically democratic
economy.

* 2024 Elections
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* Fascism
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* Antonio Gramsci
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