> [!quote] "This wasn't about fighting economic oppression anymore. It wasn't about the proletariat. It was about cultural revolution. The new Marxists decided economics wasn't destiny after all. Culture is. And they aimed to transform American culture." > — Josh Hawley, "Conservatives at a Crossroads," Heritage Foundation Leadership Summit, 2023-04-20 ## Context Sitting U.S. Senator [[Josh Hawley]] delivered this in a keynote to the Heritage Foundation, describing what he called "the Great Awokening." The speech's spine is the [[Cultural Marxism]] narrative: Marxism, having lost the economic argument, migrated into "the English departments at American universities, and in the law schools," then "spread like a disease" and "infected our elite class, our media, our biggest businesses" before the "cultural Marxists" took power in the Democratic Party. ## Why this matters This is a boundary case for [[Cultural Revolution Rhetoric]], and the distinction is the point. Hawley uses the exact phrase "cultural revolution," but **not** as an invocation of [[Mao Zedong]]'s China — the speech contains no Mao, no struggle sessions, no Red Guards, and treats China only as a trade-and-security adversary. He means "cultural revolution" in the Gramscian sense: a revolution relocated *from* economics *to* culture, the [[Cultural Marxism]] / [[Long March Through the Institutions]] frame. It shows the phrase doing double duty on the right — sometimes the Maoist-China analogy (see [[The American Cultural Revolution]]), sometimes this Western-Marxist, infiltration-of-institutions story. Same two words, two distinct genealogies. ## Verification - Primary source: Hawley's own byline at The American Conservative, published April 21, 2023 ("Remarks as prepared for the Heritage Foundation Leadership Summit on April 20, 2023") — https://www.theamericanconservative.com/conservatives-at-a-crossroads/ (full text read; passage confirmed verbatim 2026-06-20). - Corroborating: his official Senate office page links to the same remarks — https://www.hawley.senate.gov/hawley-delivers-speech-heritage-foundation-leadership-summit-conservatives-crossroads/ (the on-page excerpt elides this passage with "[…]"; the full authored text is the TAC version). ## Related quotes - [[Christopher Rufo - reeducation camp for white males]] — the Maoist-analogy sense, for contrast - The Maoist-analogy collection: [[The American Cultural Revolution]]