It’s the kind of cultural jujitsu that Antonio Gramsci imagined — flipping power by seizing the symbols and frames of your opponent — and it’s the kind of thing Democrats have needed to do for years but haven’t successfully pulled off since the days of FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society.
Gramsci sat in one of Mussolini’s prison cells in the 1920s and 1930s, scribbling his Prison Notebooks and thinking about power. The Italian Marxist theorist recognized something most political leaders of his era missed: raw political control is never enough.
To truly rule with the broad consent of a nation’s citizens, he realized, you have to shape the culture. You have to convince people that your worldview is “common sense,” that your version of reality is the only normal, natural way to see the world.
He called this “cultural hegemony.” The churches, the schools, the newspapers, the songs people sang, the plays they watched and the stories they told all carried values. And those values shaped politics far more than any speech in parliament.
If you win the cultural battle, he argued, you will inevitably win the political one.
Gramsci’s ideas didn’t stay locked up with him. They passed through post-war European intellectuals, the British cultural theorists of the 1950s and 60s, and the American left in the academy. But conservatives were reading too, and by the 1990s a handful of right-wing thinkers had begun warning that liberals were using “cultural Marxism” to dominate universities and Hollywood.
Their solution was simple: steal Gramsci’s insight and use it to push back. Andrew Breitbart put the slogan on bumper stickers: “Politics is downstream from culture.” Steve Bannon made it into a strategy for the Trump White House.
Change the story the nation tells itself, control the cultural conversation, and politics will follow.
Republicans have taken that playbook and used it ruthlessly. Following Frank Luntz and other experts’ advice, they reduce every issue to a frame that touches the gut, not the head, and then repeat it until it becomes the background noise of American life.
Nixon gave us one of the earliest, ugliest examples. His “law and order” campaign wasn’t about crime in general; it was code for crushing the civil rights movement and suppressing Black political power.
His “war on drugs” wasn’t a moral crusade against addiction; as his aide John Ehrlichman later admitted, it was a way to criminalize Black people and anti-war activists. They couldn’t outlaw being Black or protesting the Vietnam War, but they could associate both with drugs and then use police and prisons to break movements and communities.
That was cultural framing at its most cynical and vicious. Nixon didn’t have to talk about race. He just had to say “law and order” and “drugs,” and racist white voters understood the code.
The pattern has repeated itself ever since.
When Republicans attack reproductive rights, they don’t say they want to outlaw abortion or strip women of autonomy; they say they’re defending “life.” That single word is a cultural sledgehammer. Democrats, for years, answered with “choice,” which at least carried some emotional punch, but over time they got pulled into defending Planned Parenthood against smears and explaining the economic dimensions of reproductive healthcare as a women’s “economic issue.” Important arguments, yes, but they don’t resonate at the same visceral level as “life.”
On healthcare, Republicans took the word “choice” and made it their own. “Choose your own doctor” became the mantra of those defending corporate-controlled healthcare and insurance. Democrats talked about “single payer” or “public options,” language that could have come out of an actuary’s report. “Choice” sounds American, even when it means choosing between bad insurance plans or facing bankruptcy.
When Republicans use Reagan’s favorite phrase “small government,” people picture a plucky individual freed from bureaucrats and taxes, a man out west on horseback making a life for himself and his family out of the wilderness. What they mean, though, is making government too weak to tax billionaires, regulate corporate pollution, or protect people from discrimination.
But Democrats never met this frame with one of their own. Instead of talking about “government that works for all,” as FDR and LBJ once did, Democrats let the conversation drift into debates over the Affordable Care Act’s exchanges or the technical structure of regulatory agencies.
FDR understood that people don’t want less government or more government; they want a government that works for them. That is a cultural message, not a policy paper, and Democrats have abandoned it ever since Jimmy Carter’s well-intentioned but wonk-driven presidency.
Republicans say “tax relief,” and suddenly taxes are a disease from which you need to be liberated. Democrats counter with discussions about marginal rates and progressive brackets instead of using FDR’s old line that, “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society. Too many individuals, however, want civilization at a discount.”
Republicans say “red tape,” and instantly every rule protecting you from being poisoned, cheated, or injured is recast as a useless nuisance. Democrats instead talk about the importance of “regulation,” something all of us would like less of in our lives.
Republicans say “freedom,” and people see flags and hear the national anthem. Instead Democrats, too often, talk about “programs” or “safety nets.”
The same dynamic plays out on guns. Republicans wrap the issue in the word “freedom” and the power to “fight tyranny.” Democrats come back with talk about universal background checks and assault weapons bans. Important, necessary measures, but they don’t touch the same cultural nerve.
Democrats could have framed gun control differently: freedom from being shot at school, freedom from being afraid in a grocery store, freedom from the constant terror that your child might not come home. That’s freedom that resonates with ordinary people. But by ceding the cultural word “freedom” to the GOP, Democrats let Republicans define what freedom means in America.
On immigration, Republicans talk about “secure borders” and “sovereignty.” Democrats talk about “pathways to citizenship.” Republicans make it about the survival of the nation, Democrats make it about paperwork. The Democratic Party is the party of the Statue of Liberty (that was installed during Democrat Grover Cleveland’s presidency), yet Republicans have stolen the cultural image of America and turned it into one of a fortress under siege.
Education has become another cultural battlefield. Republicans push “parents’ rights” and book bans “to protect our children.” Democrats respond with statistics about test scores and defenses of teachers’ unions. But the cultural high ground belongs to the idea that every child has the right to learn the truth, and every parent has the right to send their kid to school without censorship or fear. Republicans frame themselves as liberators of children, even as they chain them to ignorance. Democrats need to call that out for what it is, in cultural terms that are impossible to ignore.
The lesson is the same in every case. Republicans don’t win by having better policies: their policies are almost uniformly cruel, corrupt, and designed to serve the morbidly rich at the expense of everyone else. They win because they fight at the cultural level. They win because they tell a story, over and over, that makes people feel. Democrats, for decades, have responded with charts that only tickle the intellect.
It wasn’t always this way. During the New Deal and the Great Society, Democrats owned the culture wars. FDR didn’t talk about the Securities and Exchange Commission; he talked about “saving capitalism from itself,” about “restoring faith in America,” about “freedom from want and fear.”
Lyndon Johnson didn’t just present Medicare as a program; he said it was part of building a Great Society where people could live with dignity. He sold the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts with similar rhetoric. Those were cultural narratives, not policy briefs. They tied the Democratic party to the most powerful emotions and aspirations of the American people.
If Democrats want to win again, they have to stop ceding the cultural battlefield. Instead, they need to seize today’s opportunities to fully engage in the culture wars, from policy prescriptions to Gavin Newsom ridiculing Trump to JB Pritzker calling out the GOP’s embrace of fascism.
That means reframing every major issue not just in terms of policy mechanics, but in terms of the classic and compelling American values of freedom, fairness, safety, dignity, and opportunity.
- Taxes aren’t a burden; they are the way we all pay for the freedom and opportunity America makes possible.
- Regulations aren’t red tape; they are the rules that keep the game fair.
- Healthcare isn’t about exchanges; it’s about whether you have the right to live without fear of medical bankruptcy.
- Guns aren’t about background checks; they’re about whether your child comes home from school alive.
- Immigration isn’t about paperwork; it’s about whether America still stands for the promise on the Statue of Liberty.
Republicans learned from Gramsci and weaponized culture. They turned it into dog whistles, slogans, and memes that bypass reason and lodge themselves in the national gut. Democrats can learn from the same source without resorting to the GOP’s lying, cruelty, and thinly coded racism.
The closest Democrats have come in recent years was Barack Obama’s “Hope and Change” campaign in 2008, revisited in 2012. But those terms, while culturally potent, lost their impact as the Democratic Party continued to bow to the demands of the banks (not a single bankster went to prison for the 2008 crash they caused) and health insurance (Obamacare was written by the Heritage Foundation and gifted the industry with trillions after Obama dropped the public option) industries.
We can tell the story of freedom that is big enough to include everyone. We can tell the story of America not as a fortress for billionaires but as a community where everyone has a fair shot and nobody is left behind.
Like FDR and LBJ, Democrats can again talk about America realizing its potential as a “we society” instead of the selfish Ayn Rand “me society” that Republicans idolize with their “I got mine, screw the middle class” policies and memes.
The alternative is to keep losing ground to a Republican Party that has mastered the art of cultural hegemony in the worst sense of the term. Nixon showed how destructive that could be with his law and order rhetoric. Reagan perfected it with his “welfare queen” lies. Trump and Bannon have pushed it into the realm of authoritarian spectacle, where politics becomes theater and culture becomes a weapon to bludgeon democracy itself.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
The Democrats of the New Deal and Great Society eras knew how to speak to the heart as well as the head. They knew that politics is not just about what laws are passed but about what stories a nation tells itself about who it is. They knew that culture is not an afterthought; it is the riverbed through which politics flows.
Republicans now know it too, and they’ve been poisoning that river for half a century. If Democrats want to save democracy, they must reclaim the story of America, the cultural high ground, and the word freedom itself.
