Project 2025’s Quiet Power Play

Pete Buttigieg’s warning that conservatives mastered long-game cultural power—while progressives blinked—lands because key parts are backed by the right’s own playbooks.

Story Highlights

Conservative strategists built durable networks across media, courts, and government over decades.
The Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership (Project 2025) outlines a broad governance agenda.
Donor consortia on both right and left shaped think tanks and advocacy hubs, not just elections.
Heritage critiques Antonio Gramsci’s ideas even as the movement contests cultural power.

What Buttigieg’s Claim Actually Says

Pete Buttigieg argues that conservatives applied a patient, Gramsci-like strategy to shape culture and institutions. That means building influence in media, universities, courts, and executive agencies, not only winning elections. Evidence for long-run planning exists. The Lewis Powell memorandum in 1971 urged business leaders to organize across media, government, courts, higher education, and corporate structures. It pressed for a “multifaceted strategy” beyond campaigns, which many later linked to modern conservative infrastructure.

Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership, branded as Project 2025, captures how that approach looks in policy form. Catalog listings and coverage describe a nearly thousand-page volume to guide a conservative president’s personnel and policy agenda across agencies. It reflects a drive to align administration staffing, regulatory priorities, and messaging with movement goals, showing the same breadth Powell described, updated for current fights over the “administrative state”.

How Networks, Not Just Parties, Move Policy

Political scientists find that donor alliances on both right and left built webs of think tanks, legal shops, and media outlets that cue lawmakers and shape what counts as “serious” policy. Studies of the Koch network and the Democracy Alliance show how wealthy donors on each side fund idea factories and advocacy groups that set agendas between elections. These networks seed personnel, talking points, and bill text that later surface in Congress and agencies.

Research also shows think tanks sit inside party networks and carry interest group influence into daily policymaking. That helps explain why plans like Project 2025 can ripple into executive orders and agency rules when aligned officials take office. The bridge from white papers to action comes from staffing pipelines and shared playbooks, not only from campaign wins. That “infrastructure first” approach is a core lesson from the past fifty years.

Where Gramsci Fits—and Where He Does Not

Buttigieg frames the right’s success as “using Gramsci against the left.” Heritage authors discuss Antonio Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony, but they present it critically, not as their official roadmap. They describe his idea of replacing a reigning narrative with a counter-narrative as a warning about progressive capture, not an instruction manual. Still, the modern right plainly contests cultural power in education, media, and civic life, echoing the domains Gramsci flagged.

The strongest neutral read is narrower than “the right used Gramsci and won.” Both sides built durable ecosystems that outlast elections. Conservatives appear to have sustained a more unified policy-to-personnel pipeline during key periods, while liberals built parallel alliances with different focal points. The clear through line is institutional capacity: the side that invests early in ideas, talent, and legal strategy often shapes the options leaders see later.

Why This Matters Now—Across the Spectrum

Americans across parties worry that elites run Washington for themselves. This history helps explain why. When donor-funded networks and think tanks set the menu, voters can feel boxed in by choices they never made. Project 2025’s scope shows how far such plans can reach once a friendly White House and Congress arrive. Supporters call it governing with purpose. Critics see private agendas steering public power without broad consent.

Yes, none of this is true. The Frankfurt School was quite conservative, Horkheimer wrote the pope to congratulate him that he tried to oppose the contraceptive pill, and Adorno mostly talked about how Jazz sucks and that bourgeois art died. "Cultural Marxism" is if anything…

— Octavian 🇪🇺🦉 (@posta_octavian) November 6, 2026

For readers left and right, the takeaway is simple. If you want policy that serves people, watch the pipelines that feed it. Ask who writes the memos, staffs the agencies, and trains future judges. Demand sunlight on donors, draft bills, and personnel lists. Long-game strategies thrive when no one is looking. The fix is steady civic attention to the institutions that quietly decide what becomes possible.