The cultural world doesn’t hold back when describing its predicament, which it calls brutal and destructive as well as stressful. The talk is of an existential threat, a plan to remake civilisation, democracy in peril.

It’s true that culture is under sustained attack, in terms of its funding and its freedom: in France, politicians are deprogramming events and public bodies cutting budgets. The culture ministry has part-frozen funding for 28 of the country’s top cultural institutions. The growing concentration of ownership in book publishing, the press and broadcast media has provoked outcries. There are calls to ‘switch off Bolloré’ (a major media owner) to avoid the danger of a ‘fascist takeover of the collective imagination’. While the growing influence of private patronage arouses less concern, cuts in the publicly funded arts, which are gradually becoming the new normal in the name of the need for realism, are seen as evidence of democratic backsliding.

Clearly, those employed in the cultural sector are afraid, not only for their working conditions but also, inseparably, as citizens. A new kind of coalition is forming, bringing together the whole spectrum of ‘leftwing sympathies’, to use an appealingly vague term. The culture war era is here.

The expression ‘culture war’ is now ubiquitous and has largely replaced the once-common notion of ‘hegemony’, borrowed from the philosopher and co-founder of the Italian Communist Party, Antonio Gramsci. The far right took up that concept in the early 1980s – notably influenced by the efforts of theorist Alain de Benoist – calmly reappropriating it for their own needs.

Power in the realm of ideas

Rightwing Gramscism, as de Benoist called it, was a kind of political marketing that depended on an oxymoron. Power is won first in the realm of ideas. Nothing to argue with there. But with Gramsci, things are a bit more complicated. As he wrote in his Prison Notebooks, (…)

Full article: 1 832 words.

(1) IG Metall, ‘Friedensgutachten 2025: Frieden retten – Demokratie stärken’ (2025 peace report: save peace, strengthen democracy), 15 September 2025.

(2) Ulrike Eifler, ‘Arrêtez le délire du surearmement, seule la paix peut sauver nos industries’ (End the arms race madness, only peace can save industry), L’Humanité, Paris, 15 April 2025.

(4) Name changed.