The Counter-Revolution’s Long March: The American Right’s Shift from Primitive to Advanced Leninism

Introduction

The former Chief Strategist of the White House, Steve Bannon, shocked Americans by his alleged reference to Lenin. The infuriated mainstream quickly reminded its audiences of Lenin’s brutalities, especially repression of the free press (Applebaum, 2017; Sebestyen, 2017). Yet, unbeknownst to those rushing to bemoan the Trump administration’s parallels to the Cold War’s bête noir, the US was already in the grips of (what one of its initiators called) a “Leninist strategy.” Bannon did not invent right-wing Leninism, but only appropriated it in a way the original right-Leninists would not approve.

Even though factions that extend from the John Birch Society to the neo-conservatives mimicked Leninism in superficial ways, we see much deeper learning in others. Most notably, libertarians have extensively drawn on Lenin’s “post-sectarian politicking” and cadre-cultivation. Paleoconservatives took interest in academic Marxism rather than Bolshevism. ¹ Anti-tax conservatives replicated many Leninist strategies introduced to the Right by libertarians, but also developed techniques of coalition-building and institution-crippling. Ultimately, the alt-right combined the content of paleoconservatism with the strategies of right-Leninism.

Lenin in Context, Gramsci’s Bolshevism, and the Right

Scholars note the contemporary Right’s fascination with Lenin outside of the US too, only to point out that the Right has forsaken liberty. Yet, this is the wrong beginning point to make sense of Lenin’s allure, as there are many thinkers the Right could utilize to further a simply anti-liberal agenda. Actually, a widely referenced 20th century figure, whom the Right already has at its disposal, ² makes many convincing anti-parliamentarian points: Carl Schmitt. The latter’s argument that liberal institutions no longer function and should be sidelined by an iron will fits perfectly well with the contemporary Right’s agenda. Why would right-wing strategists resort to a Marxist to frame their authoritarian motivations, when Schmitt has already theorized anti-liberalism in a quite sophisticated way? This is simply because Schmitt can’t provide the Western Right with the tools radicals need in an advanced democracy. Such tools, this section shows, were furnished by Bolshevism.

Leninism is Machiavellianism for the Russian socialists of the early 20th century: just like it was extremely unlikely for a late-feudal Prince to unify the most fragmented geography of Europe, it was apparently a wild dream to build socialism in an autocratic and late-industrializing country. Leninism is, in addition, the embedding of such a strategy in the art of politics tout court: as Gramsci (1971: 134–36) underlines, Machiavelli did not concoct political machinations from scratch, but “revealed” them to “those not in the know.” In other words, certain unpleasant techniques are necessary in politics, but their knowledge is denied to non-politicians.

The fundamental postulates of Leninism are the following. The (proletarian) grassroots have the potential to build a new society, but only interaction with “cadres” can actualize this potential. These cadres themselves need to be disciplined – especially to avoid premature leaps into the future society (“infantile” sectarianism) and too much compromise to realize immediate goals (“opportunism”). Together, this interactively formed core (advanced workers + cadres) constitutes the vanguard. Given the multiplicity of social problems, a new society based solely on the vanguard’s activities would not appeal to the majority. Therefore, the cadres should develop techniques of linking the proletarian to other struggles of “the people.” (In this regard, Lenin focused on the concerns of peasants and colonized nationalities.) Coalitions and engagement with existing institutions are necessary, but should be carried out without compromising the ultimate goal.

A Leninist strategy is indispensable for radical rightists, who not only inhabit a world of entrenched liberal-conservatism, but are weakened by disorganization and “infantile” sectarianism. Nevertheless, one strong qualification is necessary. Throughout the Cold War, Leninism has come to mean reliance on the hyperactivity of small revolutionary cells. Such “cell hyperactivism” has blurred the meaning of Leninism not only for the Left, but also for the Right. Hence, it is not always clear when American right-wingers are drawing on the “historical Lenin” and when they are modelling themselves after the Cold War caricature. Murray Rothbard’s texts constitute an instance of lucid engagement with the historical Lenin; and the John Birch Society is at the other end of the spectrum. Still, enough of the historical Lenin’s tendencies have seeped into the Right to transform it into an effective direction.

Liberal scholars who draw attention to the parallels between Leninism and contemporary right-wing radicalism focus exclusively on the anti-democratic aspects of both (Mudde, 2010). They neglect not only Lenin’s strategic wisdom, but also his shifting confluence of populism, authoritarianism, quasi-anarchistic autonomism, and democracy. Left-wing scholars tend to enrich this liberal analysis through pointing out that the Left has moved away from Bolshevism by embracing Gramsci, which has naturally left Lenin to the Right. Gramscian leftists find it irrational to temper with the economy, so they focus on culture and civil society instead. Political scientist David Ost (2017: 516–17, 519) expresses this line of thinking cogently:

Few left parties or papers are treating the [Bolshevik Revolution] centenary as a moment to take stock of the Revolution’s accomplishments … But wait, look a little closer. It turns out that Lenin is in the news after all … But … [t]oday Lenin is often appropriated by the right. … The right can deploy Lenin today because the left long ago turned to Gramsci. Once there was the opportunity, the left began a long march through the institutions of civil society. That it enjoyed considerable success is, indeed, why the right now appreciates Lenin. It seeks to smash … institutions and launch a (counter)revolutionary breakthrough, to reverse gains the left has made since the 1930s. … Gramsci … advocate[d] a move away from Leninism with its focus on state power, proposing instead the need to capture ideological hegemony of key nodes of civil society.

This surprising over-estimation of the Left’s accomplishments finds strong echo in rightist circles. Such exaggeration amounts to hubris on the Left and paranoia on the Right. I would instead argue that the Right’s adaptation of Lenin is significant because the Left’s retreat from Bolshevism was not a sign of maturity, but a strategic devolution.

Even though the academic understanding of Gramsci as an anti-Leninist is well-established, his roots in Bolshevism cannot be ignored (Burawoy, 2003; Lih, 2008: 22). Revising his earlier council communist position, Gramsci had reinterpreted Lenin as a theorist of “hegemony”: the proletarian party’s organization of force and consent to lead subaltern strata. Gramsci also emphasized that since the bourgeoisie had already consolidated its power through consent and civil society in Western Europe, the struggle against it would have to involve long stretches of institution-building. Gramsci’s emphasis on consent and voluntary associations also opened up a possibility of absorbing Leninism’s “substitutionist” (see Conclusion), authoritarian tendencies within a democratic process.

During the post-Civil Rights years, there was an (initially) unplanned convergence between American right-wing mentality and a “war of position”-focused reading of Gramsci: the expanding welfare state had allowed the center-left and the center-right to become hegemonic and only a “long march” through the institutions (rather than “frontal attack” with an explicitly anti-egalitarian agenda) could turn the tables on liberal-conservatism. Local frustrations with the disturbances of the 1960s provided the opportunity to use “the race card” and initiate a multipronged assault. The futility of a frontal attack had become more painfully obvious after Barry Goldwater’s (straightforwardly anti-welfare) presidential run, and also George Wallace’s run in the Democratic primaries, as well as a third party candidate. These attempts were huge electoral losses, but they also showed the grassroots mobilizing power of an anti-elitist appeal to explicit racism (Zeskind, 2009). However, for the race card to have an impact on the mainstream, the hard right had to take a more convoluted path than either Goldwater or Wallace. The Wallace campaigns, in their upheaval against integrated schools, were strong premonitions, but the Right increasingly mobilized to take over local governments, party organizations, and school boards, ³ since it was not yet powerful enough to reverse integration through the nationwide ballot. ⁴ Local “fundamentalist” movements sprouted all over the US to stymie teachers’ unionization and help Christian schools resist integration (Lienesch, 1982: 409–14).

Concomitant with these developments, more and more rightists seem to have discovered Gramsci’s writings on the war of position. ⁵ The turn to Gramsci was further fueled by an interpretation of what the Left had been doing (i.e., a cultural conquest of America, see next section). As Francis’ and Gottfried’s incorporation of Marxism shows, some right-wingers preferred a non-Leninist, “culturalist” reading of Gramsci. ⁶ As in some left-wing writing, Gramsci entered the picture as an anti-Leninist, who even broke away from Marxism by emphasizing the centrality of ideology; and shifting strategy to the conquest of cultural institutions – rather than of the state or economic organizations (Gottfried, 2005: 60–65). But these particular right-wingers got badly stuck. I show here that a non-Leninist application of Gramsci would not take the Right very far. It was only through integrating the “war of position” tactics listed above with a cadre-led drive to infiltrate Washington DC (and cadre-controlled coalition building) that the Right triumphed, as the sections below (on Rothbard, Koch-led organizations, and Norquist) show.

Bolsheviks-in-Reverse

Even though a defining feature of the American Right is a rabid anti-Marxism, conservatives have a history of infatuation with communism. ⁷ During the Cold War, while McCarthy was weeding out any perceived leftists from (mostly cultural) institutions, radical rightists believed communists were already in control of America (Lipset and Raab, 1970: 250–57). Today’s rightists are more imaginative. They argue that “Cultural Marxists” have taken a “long march through the institutions of culture before trying to wield political or economic power” and thereby established “hegemony” (Francis, 2006: 217). They attribute this culturalist strategy to Gramsci and, especially in the case of Andrew Breitbart, to the Frankfurt School.

Breitbart (1969–2012) warned the American public that students of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse had spread throughout the United States. They first shaped higher education, but a community organizer (Saul Alinsky) was able to transform both common people and politicians. The Frankfurt School’s disciples used political correctness and multiculturalism as a cover to weaken American values (to prepare the ground for a transition to socialism). Breitbart (2012: 114) claims that he initially fell under the spell of critical theory. Once he broke the curse thanks to conservative radio (2012: 33–35), however, he moved on to imitate the methods he attributed to his enemies (2012: 132, 158). Breitbart hoped his website would restore American values. Steve Bannon took over his website after Breitbart’s death and transformed it into an even more radical direction: he used it as a “platform” to coalesce the dispersed voices of the alt-right. The struggle against “Cultural Marxists,” the putative puppet masters behind the establishment, became their unifying cause.

Such superficial obsession with (and imitation of) Marxists suffused the Right long before Breitbart. Both the classical conservatives of the 1950s and the founders of neoconservatism counted several prominent former Communists and Trotskyists among them (Hawley, 2016: Chapter 1). ⁸ Samuel Huntington and Seymour Martin Lipset, two major neoconservatives, are exemplars. Huntington was always solidly on the right, but extensively quoted Lenin (Huntington, 1968) and advised American allies to adapt Leninist strategies. Lipset started out as a Trotskyist high schooler, shifted to democratic socialism during his college and doctoral studies, and was a (staunchly anti-Marxist) liberal-conservative by the time he came to be the doyen of sociology. To their right, the John Birch Society modeled its strategies on communist cell-organizing. It also combined, like many “official” communist parties, grassroots activism and hierarchical command. Especially libertarians flirted with revolutionary Marxists in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They struck up coalitions with Maoists and infiltrated the left-wing Peace and Freedom Party. Abolitionist, a short-lived magazine, featured “attempts to recast Lenin and Mao as libertarian heroes.” Yet, one of the magazine’s key participants later hinted that such salvos were “college pranks” more than sustained strategies (Doherty, 2007: 343, 375). There were others, however, who took the exchange of cadres, organizational structure, and strategies to another level.

“Strictly Confidential” Leninism

The definitively Leninist right-winger was the libertarian Murray Rothbard, who had rebelled against his Marxist upbringing (Bessner, 2014). ⁹ One of his central contributions was a “strictly confidential” memo titled “What is to be Done,” which was initially circulated only among a restricted number of libertarians (Rothbard, 2010). In this 1961 memo, the author called libertarians to model themselves after Lenin, who developed an art of combatting “opportunism” and “sectarianism.”

The libertarian movement had lost too much by just focusing on influencing the mainstream, and had to shift emphasis to cadre-building. Despite the difference of ultimate goals, Rothbard (2010: 8–9) said:

[F]rom one aspect of Lenin’s theory of strategy we can learn much: the setting forth of what “revolutionaries” can do to advance their principles, as opposed to the contrasting “deviations from the correct line,” which the Leninists have called “left-wing sectarianism” and “right-wing opportunism.” … The sectarian strategists [are] the current Trotskyite sects. … The opposite “deviation” is “opportunism”: the willingness to collaborate with any halfway measures [and] to abandon the true principles in the name of gradualist advance [and] “realism.” … These are the real sellers-out of the revolution, and they almost always … end by turning “reformist” … If we were forced to choose, surely self-respect would demand the “sectarian” course; the “opportunist” is, by his nature, “liquidationist” of true principle. But I believe that there is a third, “centrist” course—certainly hard to find in practice, but the broad outlines of which can be sketched, and then perhaps used as a guide for our future activities. This … may, for convenience, be dubbed “centrist” or “Leninist.”

Rothbard further specified that a non-sectarian approach frequently involves working in mass and/or civic organizations that are not completely in line with one’s principles. This, Rothbard (2010: 10) calls a “United Front”:

In the course of this work, the hardcore libertarian should try to advance the knowledge of both the masses and his fellow [United Front] members, toward fuller libertarian ideals. In short, to “push” his colleagues and others toward the direction of hardcore libertarian thought itself.

Such strategizing, explains Rothbard, accomplishes two distinct goals: it secures reforms within the existing system; it enlightens the cadres’ allies regarding the necessity of a totally new system. Rothbard (2010: 10) adds: “This is the essence of the much-misunderstood Leninist theory of ‘infiltration’.”

We will, however, see that Rothbard’s Bolshevism remained “primitive” and not sufficiently adjusted to the late 20th century. Others appropriated his insights, but refined them for the United States. Moreover, for a few decades, this under-the-radar Leninism of the Right was overshadowed by regular conservatism. The Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) of William Buckley were unsurprisingly pro-free trade, pro-war, and pro-immigration (Klatch, 1999). YAF activists, however, shared many sensibilities with libertarians. Rothbard therefore hoped he could convince some of them that the war in Vietnam was just another authoritarian imposition, not distinguishable in principle from the New Deal. Starting with the late 1960s, Rothbard attempted to ally libertarians and conservatives with the anti-war New Left (Raimondo, 2000).

Opponents of the Vietnam War broke with the YAF, a feat that led to the founding of the Libertarian Party in 1972. (Today, few are aware that a “Leninist” has laid the groundwork for this American institution.) This was only a pyrrhic victory, however, in that the larger numbers stuck to the YAF. In short, Rothbard’s first attempt to thoroughly transform the established Right resulted in a partial failure. Since they were both market-friendly and much less distrustful of governmental institutions, key YAF militants ultimately coalesced around Reagan and had a more direct impact on America’s path.

The “Anti-globalist” Precursors of Trumpism

Post-Nixon conservatism is usually associated with globalization. Yet, in the 1990s and 2000s, a part of the activist base shifted away from what they disparagingly called “globalism.” The rise of the militias, minutemen, and Patriots; and two populist presidential candidacies heralded the coming of a non-traditional Right.

Ever since the early 1990s, the militias built immense networks, but never a regional (let alone national) organization (Neiwert, 2017). They were mostly men of action, and drew unsystematically on contradictory neoliberal, (anti-free trade) “paleoconservative,” and white supremacist themes. Despite their shared allergy to “globalism,” they had no coherent alternative. That alternative seemed to emerge with the presidential bid of Pat Buchanan in 1992. Buchanan was a precursor to Trump, but with no Leninist (organizational + strategic) infrastructure. He was no insurrectionist either. He did not heed a prominent paleoconservative intellectual’s calls to run on a “revolutionary” platform. This close friend, Samuel Francis (1996: 16), warned Buchanan:

[In 1991,] I told [Buchanan] privately that he would be better off without … the … “Conservative Movement” … “These people are defunct,” I told him. “… [C]all yourself a patriot, a nationalist, an America Firster, but don’t … use the word ‘conservative.’ …” Pat [did not take] my advice. By making his bed with the Republicans, … he … dilutes and deflects the radicalism of the message … he and his Middle American Revolution have to offer.

Only Trump would ultimately adapt this “Middle American Revolution.” If the Right’s anti-globalization message had no cadres to execute it (yet), it did have content. Francis (1947–2005), the core ideologue of Buchanan’s campaign, provided that radical message – though the broader ideology was also shaped by others such as Thomas Fleming and Paul Gottfried (Brooks, 2017; Kiely and Saull, 2017).

A Washington Times columnist and co-founder of the Council of Conservative Citizens (a paleoconservative organization), Francis defended a “revolution” of the non-elite against corporations and bureaucrats, ¹⁰ and against both parties. (Buchanan would stop short of this open call for revolution, and also tone down the anti-business attitude.) Rothbard was rather murky regarding the base that would be the carrier of his message. In that regard, he failed to inherit the more sociological component of Lenin’s thought (who extensively studied Russian lower and middle classes to appraise their revolutionary potentials). By contrast, Francis focused much of his thinking on sociological categories (drawing on sociologist Donald Warren’s ¹¹ analysis of Wallace voters). He directed his gaze at middle-income Whites, though what interested him was how they perceived themselves (as “sandwiched” between elites on the one hand and an “underclass” of minorities and deviants on the other) rather than just objective indicators (Francis, 2006: Chapter 13). These middle-income radicals would eventually revolt against big business and government, starting with three central issues: blocking immigrants; averting gun control; and abolishing free trade.

Francis paved the way for the content of Trump’s nationalism. Is it possible that, through his overt emphasis on “revolution,” he also foreshadowed Bannon’s “Leninism”? Not really. Francis publicly used Leninist vocabulary only once, calling Southern secessionism “an infantile disorder,” despite sharing with it the yearning for racial hierarchies (Francis, 1998). Yet, his open discussion of Lenin differed little from the American Right’s public posturing. Content-wise even more differentiated from “the establishment” when compared with the libertarian thinker, Francis did not have Rothbard’s strategic genius. He did not understand that the far right can only win, not by breaking paths with conservatives, but by harnessing them to its cause. Leninism would have to find another vehicle to enchant the radicals.

From Primitive Leninism to a Stranglehold on the Congress

The flexibility and pragmatism of the radical right has prompted recent sociology to focus on its effectiveness (Skocpol and Williamson, 2012) more than its irrationality (the major theme of earlier scholarship, e.g., Bell, 1964; Hofstadter, 1965). The Tea Party is usually taken as the prime exemplar. Some commentators present this movement as a case of astroturfing due to the centrality of Koch money, think tanks, and framing by Fox News (Berlet, 2011), while still acknowledging it turned into a mass movement later on. Seen this way, the movement has a very clear political agenda. Others, by contrast, emphasize how inchoate it is, and point out its lack of political commitment (Courser, 2012). Langman and Lundskow (2012: 589, 597) are among the few scholars who emphasize the movement’s both vanguardist and populist dimensions. Here, I analyze the (Leninist) roots of this combination, and its longer term consequences.

The Tea Party was indeed a strange mixture. At one level, it appeared to stand for everything the Republicans defended, but in a more boisterous way (Hawley, 2016). Yet, it was much more populist than Reaganite conservative-populism, and harbored some of the anti-immigration and racist elements of the alt-right. As importantly, militias used it as a cover to organize further (Neiwert, 2017). This intermingling of conservatism and radicalism also characterizes the alleged master-astroturfer behind the movement: Charles Koch. Koch’s biography attests to another right-wing appropriation of Lenin. According to Nancy MacLean, the encounter between Rothbard and Koch would change America. Rothbard was among the first intellectuals that Koch funded in his struggle for “liberty” (entrepreneurial freedom untouched by government and corporate structures). Although Koch had championed this vision for a while, there was a missing strategic piece. That piece would be garnered by Rothbard. In 1976, Rothbard personally convinced Koch to take a close look at Lenin in order to build a conspiratorial cadre (MacLean, 2017: xxvi, 138). Much later than that conversation, Koch listed Marx and Lenin as two of the primary influences on him (Koch, 2015, p. 13).

After allying with Koch in the founding of the Cato Institute at the end of the 1970s, Rothbard grew weary of his emphasis on policy, and insisted their primary mission was to cultivate “vanguard” “cadres” (Bessner, 2014: 448). Even though the Institute’s dismissal of Rothbard in 1981 has been interpreted as a farewell to revolutionary strategy (Bessner, 2014: 449), the Cato Institute has instead further “Americanized” Rothbard’s Leninism.

Baffling any observer who sticks to the image of Lenin as a diehard romantic incognizant of institutional politics (Flowers, 1983), a Cato Institute paper laid out a strategy the Right would follow in dismantling the New Deal (Butler and Germanis, 1983). The title of the paper was “Achieving a Leninist Strategy.” Since destroying Social Security in a single blow was unfathomable (as proved by an initial attempt of the Reagan administration), the paper suggested creating a deluge of private retirement investment schemes (including 401k and IRAs), so as to gradually convince the middle class that welfare “handouts” were not essential to their well-being. However, this mental transformation could not ensue only from pointing out what is wrong with social security and laying out an alternative. It also required 1) gathering together a coalition of diverse interests; 2) a simultaneous division, weakening, and isolation of the coalition of interests behind social security; and 3) the step-by-step creation of a diversified parallel insurance universe to secure these two political goals (by giving both the winners and the losers of the New Deal novel stakes in the future libertarian society).

To put it in generalizable “libertarian-right Leninist” terms: despite their belief in markets, most citizens would not want to leave their retirement to the play of chance factors. So, it would take an innovative vanguard to win them over to privatization. Possibly as a retort to pro-Rothbard libertarians who accused the Cato Institute of being traitors to the cause, the paper ended with the sentence: “[A]s Lenin well knew, to be a successful revolutionary, one must also … consistently plan for real reform.” ¹² Rothbard’s Leninism now appeared primitive in light of this bold revision.

Unlike liberal dismissers of Bolshevism, the authors were well aware that Leninism in an advanced country did not entail an overnight seizure of power and merciless imposition of utopia. It meant a technical plan to implement one’s goals. Still, unlike that of the culturalist-Gramscians, the Cato Institute’s “long march” was not confined to ideology. Their wars would simultaneously target policy, economy, Washington DC, civil society, and culture (and therefore avoid the tired binaries between ideology and economy, reform and revolution, society and state, and Gramsci and Lenin).

Analysts concur that the above-quoted Cato Institute paper’s propositions have shaped anti-welfare strategy in the following decades (Hacker, 2004; Teles, 2007). Beyond that, Koch and the Cato Institute became even more central with the rise of the Tea Party. The Tea Party’s combination of cadre-leadership and grassroots activism made the GOP frequently subservient to far right goals. Even though the Tea Party could not realize all of its professed goals and ultimately waned (Langman, 2012), for the purposes of this article I emphasize the longer-term strategy it was embedded in (and its broader consequences for American institutions).

Historical Leninism involved the demolition of parliament. Even though liberals and conservatives find in this further “evidence” for the irremediable authoritarianism of Marxism, the abnegation of parliamentarianism was more appropriate (if not totally justifiable) in Russia, where pro-parliamentary parties turned either ineffective or counter-revolutionary. It would be foolish to transfer this reasoning to countries where such institutions are not only effective, but also legitimate. These institutions have to be rendered ineffective, illegitimate to one extent; and conquered in part. This lays bare the essential difference between Rothbardian and Kochian Leninism. Whereas the former behaved as if no Washington DC existed, the latter set its eyes on Capitol Hill, which was besieged in all directions ever since the publication of the “Leninist” Cato Institute paper.

The Tea Party came in as a final assault on institutions which had become mere shadows of themselves. By the end of the 2000s, whenever Congress did not serve libertarian goals, it was mired in deadlock. America was now ungovernable. But it took an additional shot of Leninism, from a quite different creature, to render the 2010–2012 rebellion so powerful.

The Purgatory Pledge

The Kochs were not alone in preparing the ground for the Tea Party. While they contributed mostly to the making of cadres, another “Leninist” – Grover Norquist – did the heavy-lifting on coalition-building; rendering old coalitions ungovernable; and weeding out non-radicals from leading positions. Bannon’s declaration (that he wanted to “destroy” the state “like Lenin”) did not come out of nowhere. The radical right had been musing about the destruction of the state for a while. Norquist said “I’m not in favor of abolishing the government. I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” In other words, a behemoth like the American government cannot be killed overnight. Its enemies would need to make it severely sick before strangling it. This enfeeblement and crippling of institutions (if not exactly “shrinking”) is exactly what the Tea Party accomplished.

Even though indirect, there is plenty indication that Norquist was inspired by Lenin. Jonathan Alter (2013), a journalist who worked with Norquist at the Harvard Crimson in the mid-1970s, claims that Norquist absorbed Lenin’s tracts during this decade. He then travelled to Angola to aid anti-communist paramilitaries and consciously imitated guerillas (to beat them with their own weapons). Bruce Bartlett, a former senior policy analyst in the Reagan White House, reported Norquist saying “that he saw himself as the Lenin of the conservative revolution and that Ralph Reed was his Trotsky and Jack Abramoff was his Stalin” (Depaul, 2011). One of his former comrades, ex-conservative David Brock (2002: 64–67), claims that not only did Norquist have a “majestic portrait” of Lenin in his living room, he frequently quoted the latter (along with Gramsci). However, Norquist denied any links to Lenin when the issue was brought up on the mass media.

In the mid-1990s, Norquist became an advisor to Speaker of the House Gingrich and helped initiate the so-called “Gingrich Revolution.” Starting around the same time, Norquist held weekly meetings to cultivate cadres. The famous “Wednesday Meeting,” held at his NGO (Americans for Tax Reform), has been called the “Grand Central Station of the Conservative movement” (Edsall, 1995). ¹³ The goal of the Wednesday Meeting was pushing DC and state capitols to “bitter nastiness and partisanship” (Alter, 2013, pp. 47–48). To paraphrase Lenin: politics is, after all, really about “drawing a dividing-line.”

The Nation credits Norquist with having George W. Bush elected by aligning business, the far right, and religious right constituencies (Dreyfuss, 2001). His imagery of the correct way to build a revolutionary coalition out of non-revolutionaries also shows traces of Leninist-Gramscian thinking. In 2005, the New Yorker profiled him as the “ringleader” of an otherwise untenably broad coalition (which purports to include free market Muslims, gays, immigrants, etc.). In the words of the magazine, Norquist painted a visual image of how he fulfilled his role (Cassidy, 2005):

“If you want the votes of people who are good on guns, good on taxes, and good on faith issues, that is a very small intersection of voters,” [Norquist] said. “But if you say, Give me the votes of anybody who agrees with you on any of these issues, that’s a much bigger section of the population.” To illustrate what he meant, Norquist drew three intersecting circles on a piece of paper. In the first one he wrote “guns,” in the second he wrote “taxes,” in the third he wrote “faith.” There was a small area where the three circles intersected. “With that group, you can take over the country, if you start with the airports and the radio stations,” he said. “But with all of the three circles that’s sixty per cent of the population, and you can win politically. And if you add more things, like property rights and home-schooling, you can do even better.”

There couldn’t be a better 101-level explanation of how the Bolshevik Revolution can be transposed to democratic contexts. Only those in the “small area” were admitted to the Wednesday Meeting. ¹⁴ These constituted the vanguard. But to hit the target, the entirety of the three circles (plus others) was mobilized. This was the vanguard’s “hegemonic bloc.” In essence, Norquist mobilized the biggest number possible while relying on the unwavering commitment of narrower cadres.

Norquist’s other contribution was the Taxpayer Protection Pledge: congress (wo)men and senators had to sign this promise not to increase taxes. Perhaps erroneously, many Republicans attributed George Bush Senior’s loss of the 1992 election to his reneging on the pledge, which elevated it to a myth: Norquist and others persistently warned Republicans that if they did not sign (and remain loyal), they would not get elected (or re-elected). The pledge (originally penned in 1986) still weighed heavily on the GOP during the Tea Party rebellion. While another specifically Tea Party-produced pledge delivered mixed results for the hard right (Vasi et al., 2014), the Norquist pledge became the “glue” that made the GOP stick to anti-tax principles (Alter, 2013: 50–51, 55–56). Even though Norquist is not the “secret” organizer of the Tea Party, ¹⁵ his decades of boundary-policing prepared the ground for it. Until the rise of Trumpism, Norquist’s threats and purges dominated Washington DC.

In sum, Norquist’s long revolution had a vast influence. The election of the first Bush and his fall from grace, Gingrich’s impact, and ultimately the Tea Party were all signposts on Norquist’s longer journey. Norquist deems Jack Abramoff worthy of the title “the Stalin of the conservative revolution” (Depaul, 2011). Yet, although he carries traces of Lenin and Gramsci, Norquist himself has strong parallels to the Great Purger: organizational acumen; an ascetic lifestyle and determination that impresses even liberal journalists; pragmatism; a fondness for intimidating and eliminating fellow travelers; and an increasingly loose connection to principle (see further below).

Even if the Tea Party was the epitome of the neoliberal revolution, it heralded its (pending) decline. ¹⁶ Without the Tea Party rebellion, “establishment conservatives” would not be so disorganized as to allow the storming of the 2016 primaries by an outsider. “Tea Party Leninism” had broken Washington DC’s ability to rule, but without being able to intervene in the “revolutionary situation” it helped create. The children of the capitalist counter-revolution, which Andrew Breitbart celebrated so prematurely, ended up devouring each other. The Kochs spent a fortune to stop Bannon and Trump, to no avail. Why did the Tea Party render the GOP open to a hostile takeover by alien forces?

Strategically brilliant as it is, right-libertarian/conservative Leninism has a major structural problem: no matter how creatively it is packaged, it still serves the interests of the very few. It has taken America in a neoliberal direction and further concentrated wealth at the top. This is its great achievement. However, it has alienated a key component of its coalition and surrendered it to another Leninism-in-the-making. Skocpol and Williamson (2012) had shown that the elite leadership of the Tea Party defended textbook neoliberalism, whereas the active supporters wanted welfarism for the deserving (aged, white) citizens. Moreover, Tea Party mobilization against illegal immigration also produced the unintended consequence of disrupting businesses (Davidson and Saull, 2017: 713), which caused the business community to grow disillusioned. These tensions between the leadership and the lower cadres (and between pro-business theory and anti-business practice) were containable … until another radical option emerged to exploit them. However, for their “sociological” maneuver (the conquest of the Tea Party base) to be successful, the non-libertarian radicals needed some “political” preparation.

Leninists in the White House?

This is where Steve Bannon came in. We cannot know whether Bannon has actually studied Lenin. It is quite possible that he invoked Lenin just for the shock effect. Yet, there is another possible scenario: the surreptitious talk of Lenin might be more institutionalized within the radical right than any outsider can be aware of, and Bannon might be drawing on conversations with co-conspirators over the decades. Due to gradual Leninization, bits and pieces of Bolshevism are “in the air” in right-wing circles, and Bannon is simply inhaling these. That would make Bannon, not simply a provocateur, but the Zinoviev ¹⁷ of the counter-revolution, with all his demagoguery, lack of consistency, but also a true “feel” for Middle America.

Coming from different corners of the Right (libertarianism and anti-tax conservatism), Rothbard, Koch, and Norquist inherited a range of Leninist dispositions, which others could also take up. Bannon and others are heirs of the strategic habits that Rothbard, Koch, and Norquist have fabricated, ¹⁸ rather than fully knowledgeable readers of Marxism. Regardless of Bannon’s actual grasp of Bolshevism, given his track record, we can see that he has combined two strands of the radical right: the paleoconservatism of Francis and the Leninism of Rothbard.

To the right of the Tea Party, scattered radicals were brewing for more than a decade. The three major actors were militias, bloggers, and campus activists (Neiwert, 2017). One could also count paleoconservative intellectuals (Hawley, 2016) in this universe, though these men of letters had little ties with activists. Even less influential than them were the remnants of white supremacist groups, which appeared to be destined to oblivion. Bannon combined these various currents into a party-movement-administration, even if fleetingly. The first leap forward was turning the relatively invisible Breitbart News Network website into a platform for the far right. But the decisive electrification of that whole population was through aiming for the presidency. Even though Bannon came late to Trump’s team, he revolutionized his message. Under Bannon’s influence, Trump’s speeches increasingly centered on working and middle classes devastated by globalization, immigrants, Islam, free trade, and an “establishment” that favored all of these evils.

This “populist” message also captured the imagination of not only the Tea Party’s foot soldiers (who disagreed with its textbook neoliberalism), but also of the Democratic Party’s Rust Belt-defectors who sealed the fate of the 2016 elections (McQuarrie, 2017). Up until August 2017, it seemed that Bannonism was in control of the White House. Yet, before he could shape much legislation, ¹⁹ Trump dismissed Bannon and (for now) sidelined alt-rightist Leninism.

It is not only “establishment” Republicans, but rival “Leninists” who emerged victorious from this ouster. Norquist, whose influence seemed to be fading during Trump’s presidential campaign, could avoid insignificance only if he “sold his soul,” The Atlantic stated in April 2017 (Ball, 2017). However, when Bannon pushed for a hike on taxes on the rich in the summer of 2017, Norquist came back with a vengeance, calling Bannon’s action “particularly cruel” (Markay and Suebsaeng, 2017). Today, Norquist (married to a Muslim Palestinian and frequently the target of the hard right for being in cahoots with “Moslem terrorists”) ²⁰ is paradoxically more comfortable with a cruelly anti-immigrant administration than Bannon ever was. The media focused on the war of egos between the president and Bannon as the cause of the latter’s dismissal. However, that the purge came only a month after the proposed tax hike hints that the strife between two “Leninists,” Norquist and Bannon; and the latter’s blatant threat against business interests, were not inconsequential. Bannon’s post-dismissal efforts to stop the alt-right’s decline have not born fruit so far. It will indeed take much more than a Zinoviev to make the alt-right a definitive part of the mainstream.

Limits, Distortions, and Possibilities

In sum, what the Right takes from Lenin is much more than authoritarianism. Nevertheless, there are structural reasons why a right-wing appropriation of Lenin is bound to be authoritarian. The Bolsheviks’ role was “disciplining” working class militancy. Today’s right-Leninists do not have a comparable class base. The real counterpart of militant workers is a non-class: a patchwork of intellectuals, militias and internet activists. Lenin was the vanguard of a vanguard class. In the case of the Right, there are multiple classes that support the insurgency, but none of them is a vanguard subject. Francis and Bannon have highlighted “Middle America” as their base – a group that provides mostly passive support. Even though elements of Middle America (i.e., Midwestern active- or ex-industrial workers) appear to be similar to the Bolsheviks’ proletariat, their political place in today’s world economy (if not their social constitution) is more akin to the spot occupied by the early 20th century Russian peasantry (the romanticized folk, who might vote for the populist SRs, but cannot constitute a sustainable revolutionary force). The Right’s Middle America usually avoids collective actions such as strikes, sit-ins, and occupations. ²¹ It does not have the capacity to develop alternative forms of power (such as cooperatives, mutual aid societies, and soviets). This capacity was the distinguishing feature of the 19th–20th century working class. As was the case with fascism, the far right’s effective vanguard subject is the militias (and nowadays, internet trolls). The mid-20th century has shown that this alternative Subject has immense destructive potential, but ultimately caves into the state (Mann, 2004) and the bourgeoisie (Poulantzas, 1974). Trump’s immediate amplification of “the swamp” – the draining of which was presumably a sincere desire of revolutionary rightists – has once again demonstrated that Bolshevism-in-reverse is much faster than classical Leninism in bloating the state it promises to smash (or drown). ²²

The smashing of the state was no straightforward matter for the historical Lenin either. Even though Lenin was an innovative theorist of the relations between the party and the proletariat on the one hand, and the peasantry (and nations) on the other, he did not pay enough attention to the dangers of “substitutionism” when it came to the relations between the two elements that constitute the vanguard. These two elements are the professional revolutionaries and the militant working class.

As Trotsky pointed out, the Leninist organizational model harbors a perilous potential: the activity of the cadres tends to substitute itself for workers’ activism. This habit could in turn lead to “the Party organization ‘substituting’ itself for the Party, the Central Committee substituting itself for the Party organization, and finally the dictator substituting himself for the Central Committee” (Trotsky, 1999/1904: n.p.). Nevertheless, as Trotsky himself later discovered, some degree of central command is necessary to be effective. Here again, Gramsci is the key to updating Leninism. Even though he did not take up Trotsky’s charge of substitutionism, Gramsci dealt with the most proximate social scientific concept: “the iron law of oligarchy.” In his criticism of Michels, Gramsci (1992: 318–26) hints that the emergence of oligarchies within mass organizations is a tendency rather than a “law.” He argues that mutual education (as well as expanding and active participation in the organization) is indispensable for resolving this problem. ²³ Substituting the cadres for the Subject is in fact an ever-present risk for Leninists of the Left. They cannot completely avoid this risk, but can at least be actively on guard against it (if armed with a Gramscian sublation of Lenin). For Leninists of the Right, however, cadre and subject are identical from the get-go. ²⁴

In the first years of the Russian Revolution, there was a glimmer of hope that the robust tension between the Subject and the cadres would prevent the bureaucracy’s infinite expansion. That spark dwindled in the course of the 1920s. Such hope, however, would be utterly unrealistic in the case of right-wing Leninism. The promise that a reconstructed Bolshevism holds is the re-introduction of the dialectical relationship between the cadres and the Subject, ²⁵ who (in conjunction with their mobilization of subaltern strata) could veritably subordinate the state to the people. The only way to do that is to dismantle the misguided dichotomy between Lenin and Gramsci – and with that, the inimical division of intellectual labor between “orthodox Marxists” on the one hand and identity theorists, post-colonialists, and post-Marxists on the other. ²⁶