Elon Musk Sent Me Down One Hell of a Rabbit Hole
My brother-in-law brought something to my attention this weekend that sent me down one hell of a rabbit hole. He showed me a remarkable X thread about Antonio Gramsci, an Italian communist who died in 1937 and whose ideas about culture and political power are suddenly worth another look. So I started digging. Polish writer Krzysztof Szczawinski called Gramsci “The Most Dangerous Intellectual of the Twentieth Century” and argued that Gramsci figured out why communist revolution wasn’t succeeding in the West and what Marxists should do differently. Then I noticed Elon Musk had responded to the thread with three simple words: “He was right.” That’s quite a statement, so instead of simply taking Musk’s or Szczawinski’s word for it, I kept digging. What I found is more complicated than an X thread—but frankly, parts of it are also more disturbing. Gramsci’s writings are real. His ideas about cultural “hegemony,” civil society, intellectuals and a “war of position” are real. And nearly a century later, Americans—especially younger Americans—are becoming increasingly comfortable with the very word socialism.
Elon Musk’s response on X:
He was right https://t.co/osCE3Hv15u
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 5, 2026
And here is the original thread that started the discussion:
Antonio Gramsci – The Most Dangerous Intellectual of the Twentieth Century.
Not the most famous. Not the most read. The most dangerous and the most consequential – because he was the one who figured out why the revolution kept failing, and what to do instead. The man who… https://t.co/jvd7MHKRDo pic.twitter.com/EB0fbaeyEL
— Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 (@Kristof_Poland) September 5, 2026
Meet Antonio Gramsci — The Communist Most Americans Have Never Heard Of
Antonio Gramsci wasn’t some modern conservative’s imaginary boogeyman. He was born in Italy in 1891, became a socialist activist and journalist, helped lead the Italian Communist Party and was imprisoned by Benito Mussolini’s Fascist government in 1926. While imprisoned, he filled notebooks with his thinking about politics, Marxism, education, intellectuals, the state and something called civil society. Those writings became known as the Prison Notebooks, written principally between 1929 and 1935, and they became enormously influential in later Marxist and political thought. His work explored intellectuals, education, the state, civil society, philosophy and Marxism. This wasn’t a guy doodling recipes for prison lasagna. Gramsci was wrestling with a problem that Marxists couldn’t ignore: Why hadn’t workers in developed Western countries overthrown capitalism the way revolutionary theory suggested they would? His answer is where this story gets uncomfortable.
Go Deeper: Explore Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks from Columbia University Press
The Revolution Didn’t Have to Begin With Guns
Gramsci recognized that Western governments were surrounded by something stronger than government itself: civil society. Families, churches, schools, newspapers, civic organizations, intellectuals and cultural institutions helped create the values and assumptions ordinary people accepted as normal. Political power, in other words, wasn’t maintained by police and laws alone. It was also maintained through consent. This is the foundation of Gramsci’s famous concept of cultural hegemony. If you’re trying to replace the existing social order, storming the palace isn’t enough when millions of people still believe in the civilization behind it. Gramsci therefore distinguished a direct revolutionary “war of manoeuvre” from a longer “war of position” fought across the terrain of civil society. Put that in plain English and the idea becomes remarkably easy to understand: before you can permanently change the government, you have to change what the people governed by it believe is normal.
Read More: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s in-depth examination of Antonio Gramsci
The “Long March” Needs One Important Fact Check
This is where I need to correct something in the viral thread, because if we’re going to expose this history, we should get the history right. Szczawinski says Gramsci “invented the long march through the institutions.” Not exactly. The famous phrase “long march through the institutions” came decades after Gramsci. What Gramsci unquestionably wrote about was a “war of position”—a prolonged political struggle in which hegemony, civil society, organization and the battle over ideas assumed enormous importance. His notebooks contrast that strategy with the “war of manoeuvre,” or frontal attack. That’s not some minor distinction I’m trying to hide; it’s precisely why this subject deserves more than memes and slogans. Gramsci did not leave behind a secret checklist reading Step 1: capture Harvard; Step 2: capture Hollywood; Step 3: take over corporate HR. What he left behind was an intellectual framework for understanding how political power and cultural power interact—and how changing civil society could precede more fundamental political change. That’s disturbing enough without making things up.
Now Look Around You
Here is where I’m going to get a little angry, because this stuff is hidden in plain sight. I’m not claiming every liberal professor, Hollywood producer, government employee or corporate diversity officer has a dog-eared copy of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks sitting on the nightstand. That would be ridiculous. I’m asking something simpler: Does modern America increasingly resemble the battlefield Gramsci believed actually mattered? Think about the enormous influence exercised by universities, K-12 education, entertainment, news media, corporate bureaucracies, professional organizations and the people who continually redefine which opinions are respectable and which are beyond the pale. Gramsci believed culture and institutions were terrain on which political power was contested. His writings devote considerable attention to hegemony, intellectuals, education, ideology, civil society and the state, and those ideas remain subjects of university study today. Whether every modern progressive institution is “Gramscian” is an argument. That Gramsci developed these ideas and that they became influential is history.
For the Serious Reader: Read Stanford’s analysis of Gramsci’s prison writings, hegemony, civil society and intellectuals
And Young Americans Are Falling for the Sales Pitch
If you’re wondering why any of this matters in 2026, look at what’s happening around us. Socialism is no longer a word that automatically sends younger Americans running in the opposite direction. Ideas that previous generations associated with failed communist regimes are increasingly presented using much friendlier language: fairness, equity, economic justice, free college, government-provided benefits and the promise that somebody else—usually “the rich”—will pick up the tab. That doesn’t mean every young person who supports one of those policies is a Marxist, and pretending otherwise would be intellectually lazy. But it should bother the hell out of us that so many young Americans can hear the word socialism without first thinking about the history that came with it. Some older Americans seem willing to fall for the sales pitch too, provided nobody actually calls the product sitting in the box what it is. That’s why Gramsci matters. The most effective political transformation may be the one people don’t recognize as a transformation at all.
Maybe Gramsci Won — But Something Is Breaking
Here’s the twist Szczawinski raises that I think conservatives should pay very close attention to: the old distribution monopoly is cracking. For generations, a relatively small collection of television networks, newspapers, universities, publishing companies and entertainment corporations exercised tremendous power over which ideas reached millions of Americans. Not anymore. X, YouTube, podcasts, independent websites, Substack and now artificial intelligence have blown holes through those gates. Think about the irony of the article you’re reading right now. Thirty years ago, Jimmy Parker would have needed an editor at a newspaper or magazine to decide these ideas were worthy of reaching you. Today I can investigate Gramsci myself, link you directly to serious scholarship about his writings, show you Musk’s post, show you the argument that started this whole thing and let you decide. Conservatives shouldn’t respond to cultural gatekeeping by creating another gatekeeper. The answer is more information, more debate and more Americans willing to read the damn source material instead of letting somebody else tell them what they’re allowed to think.
Jimmy’s Take
The part that bothers me isn’t that Antonio Gramsci existed. History is filled with Marxists, communists, fascists, dictators, revolutionaries and intellectuals with terrible ideas. What bothers me is how few Americans know this history while political ideas that would have horrified their grandparents are being repackaged as compassionate, modern and enlightened. Gramsci understood something profound: politics doesn’t begin on Election Day. It begins much earlier, with the ideas a society teaches its children, the values its institutions reinforce and eventually the assumptions people stop questioning because everybody around them considers them normal. I don’t need to believe in some secret 100-year conspiracy to look around America and recognize why that insight matters. And perhaps that’s why Musk’s three-word response hit me so hard: “He was right.” Maybe not about everything, and certainly not every sweeping claim being made about his legacy. But Gramsci was right that culture matters, institutions matter and whoever shapes a society’s common sense possesses enormous political power. The encouraging part is that the information monopoly those institutions once enjoyed is disappearing. So read Gramsci. Read his critics. Read Szczawinski’s thread. Look at the history. Then talk to your kids and grandkids about what these words actually mean. Because if we’re going to lose the argument over socialism in America, we shouldn’t lose it because an entire generation never knew there was an argument in the first place.
WE’D LOVE TO HEAR YOUR THOUGHTS! PLEASE COMMENT BELOW.
JIMMY
h/t: Steadfast and Loyal
