Note: This is not a candidate diary. It is a critical article--one that engages in critical analysis. It uses a key narrative of the Obama campaign as a jumping-off point, but that is merely a point of departure for illuminating what none of the campaigns are really facing up to. I have not endorsed anyone. None seem to grasp what is really going on here. Obama simply provides the most promising opening to begin the discussion. He misunderstands it--or at least appears to--in the most deep and fundamental way.
It's the grand premise of the Obama campaign that he can bring us together, slay the dragon of partisan divisiveness and end the culture wars which he lays at the feet of the Baby Boom generation. It's a nice, appealing narrative, in a way, it all turns on the question of what you mean by "culture war." The commonsense meaning of "culture war" over the past few decades is a war over social mores between hierarchical "traditional values" and the post-1950s emergence of egalitarian values, especially with respect to race and gender, more closely aligned with the traditional values at the core of our Constitution.
But there's a deeper meaning, which is clearly understood by rightwing culture warriors, and virtually unknown to everyone else. This meaning comes, ironically, from a leading Marxist theorist, the highly independent Italian leader, Antonio Gramsci, who described culture war as a struggle for ideological control of the broad range of institutions in society. And in this deeper sense, Obama's analysis is completely upside-down--the problem is not that both sides are equally to blame, but that only the right is actually fighting a coordinated culture war as Gramsci defined it. It's not a case of bringing a knife to a gunfight, it's a case of brining a plastic yogurt spoon to a nuclear war.
Gramsci was grappling with the question of why Marxist predictions had not come to pass, why the rise of working class power had not lead to a communist revolution, or even the dominance of socialist political parties. The reason, he believed, was that workers aspired to become their class enemy--they wanted to join the bourgeoisie, not destroy it, and the reason for that was the hegemony of bourgeois ideology, expressed through a whole range of political institutions.
Gramsci's argument is based on an analysis that can clearly be transposed onto other forms of ideological struggle, such as the one that grips America today. Whether or not Gramsci was entirely right in his specific analysis (not being a communist, I obviously think he wasn't), he clearly was onto something, and America's post-1960s New Right has followed his prescription quite faithfully, even if they did not cite him specifically until Rush Limbaugh did so in the 1990s. By engaging in a Gramscian culture war, the right has positioned itself to define the terms of the "culture war" as commonly understood. While there may be hopes of diminishing, if not ending the "culture war" in the latter sense it is not clear how this is possible, except temporarily, without countering the rightwing's Gramscian culture war. And countering that culture war is not possible without first grasping the full nature and extent of it.
This diary represents a small beginning, a thumbnail sketch overview of what that would entail. I intend to follow it up with some diaries that look at how the right has moved in on various different cultural institutions-possible examples include think tanks, the media, K-12 and higher education, churches, state governments, the courts and civil society institutions such as the Boy Scouts. I have one about the intrusion of "homeland security" on academia that's ready to go. I plan to do one or two others this weekend or next. Two other forms of follow-up are planned-first, more scrutiny of Barack Obama in light of this analysis and his failure to grasp what's going on, and second, a step back to discuss what the two sides are all about. Broadly conceived, I will characterize them as hierarchy, authority and coercion on the right, versus equality, autonomy, and voluntary cooperation on the left. These encompass a wide range of specific forms and culture expressions on both sides that have their differences with one another, but that all express similar fundamentals.
The analysis of hegemony (or "rule") was formulated by Antonio Gramsci to explain why predicted communist revolutions had not occurred where they were most expected, in industrialized Europe. Marx and his followers had advanced the theory that the rise of industrial capitalism would create a huge working class and cyclical economic recessions. These recessions and other contradictions of capitalism would lead the overwhelming masses of people, the workers, to develop organizations for self-defense, including labor unions and political parties. Further recessions and contradictions would then spark the working class to overthrow capitalism in a revolution, restructure the economic, political, and social institutions on rational socialist models, and begin the transition towards an eventual communist society. In Marxian terms, the dialectically changing economic base of society would determine the cultural and political superstructure. Although Marx and Engels had famously predicted this eschatological scenario in 1848, many decades later the workers of the industrialized core still had not carried out the mission.
Looking backwards, there is an obvious flaw in Marx's thinking, and that is the capacity of capitalism to adapt, including its adaptation to the class challenge. This was perhaps most starkly demonstrated by the arch conservative Otto von Bismark seizing on the institution of universal health care in 1880 as a grand cooptation of the Social Democratic Party's powerful appeal to the German working class. But cooptation is only one strategy. Gramsci developed a more comprehensive analysis of the full range of measures involved, many of which were much less direct, but instead went to fundamental underlying attitudes.
Wikipedia continues:
Gramsci argued that the failure of the workers to make an anti-capitalist revolution was due to the successful capture of the workers' ideology, self-understanding, and organizations by the hegemonic (ruling) culture. In other words, the perspective of the ruling class had been absorbed by the masses of workers. In "advanced" industrial societies hegemonic cultural innovations such as compulsory schooling, mass media, and popular culture had indoctrinated workers to a false consciousness. Instead of working towards a revolution that would truly serve their collective needs, workers in "advanced" societies were listening to the rhetoric of nationalist leaders, seeking consumer opportunities and middle-class status, embracing an individualist ethos of success through competition, and/or accepting the guidance of bourgeois religious leaders.
One need not swallow the notion of "false consciousness" whole. It's quite possible, for example, to see some of what attracted workers as realistic and possible for them individually, even if it were not possible for all workers, and even if everything promised did not really serve their interests. The Marxist insistence on seeing things "objectively" from the point of view of class interests is not necessary to agree with the broader point that the whole package being sold to workers was at least partially, if not wholly, illusory. Furthermore, two other points need noting here. First, the benefits being offered were partly, if not largely, a result of the political pressures being brought to bear (as with Bismark's offer of universal health care). Second, the logic of capitalism would eventually entail enormous unsuspected costs, as almost entire generations of men would be sacrificed on the battlefields of World War I. Thus, while the pure Marxist viewpoint might overstate how much people were being fooled, other considerations would preserve the sense in which the bargain being offered to workers was not quite the deal it might superficial seem to be--a point that workers might grasp decisively if supported by an array of critical counter-institutions:
Gramsci therefore argued for a strategic distinction between a "war of position" and a "war of manoeuvre". The war of position is a culture war in which anti-capitalist elements seek to gain a dominant voice in mass media, mass organizations, and educational institutions to heighten class consciousness, teach revolutionary analysis and theory, and inspire revolutionary organization. Following the success of the war of position, communist leaders would be empowered to begin the war of manoeuvre, the actual insurrection against capitalism, with mass support.
Whether or not such a revolution would ever be possible, or desirable, it's much harder to deny the potential benefits of a much stronger set of counter-institutions that could have tempered the capitalist/imperialist influences dominating Europe from Marx's time to the end of WWII, a period in which European imperialism reached its peak, and then turned fratricidally destructive in two World Wars, costing tens of millions of lives, with a worldwide depression sandwiched in between.
More to the point for our immediate purposes, however, is the more general applicability of Gramsci's ideas, as Wikipedia goes on to note:
Although the analysis of cultural domination was first advanced in terms of economic classes, it can be applied more broadly. Gramsci's analysis suggested that prevailing cultural norms should not be viewed as "natural" or "inevitable". Rather, cultural norms - including institutions, practices, beliefs - should be investigated for their roots in domination and their implications for liberation.
It is precisely these more general categories--domination vs. liberation--that I submit still have applicability for us, and this is reflected in strong correlations between conservatism and authoritarianism on the one hand, and liberalism and liberation on the other. In particular, one can think of conservatism as being fundamentally concerned to maintain and preserve the general structure of hierarchical society, as described by Social Dominance Theory (SDT), encapsulated in the following diagram:
SDT recognizes the existence of countervailing, "hierarchy attenuating" forces, including the legitimating myths listed, at the same time as it posits the general predominance of hierarchy enhancing forces.
Continuing:
Gramsci did not contend that hegemony was either monolithic or unified. Instead, hegemony was portrayed as a complex layering of social structures. Each of these structures have their own "mission" and internal logic that allows its members to behave in a way that is different from those in different structures. Yet, as with an army, each of these structures assumes the existence of other structures and by virtue of their differing missions, is able to coalesce and produce a larger structure that has a larger overall mission.
Thus, the diagram above is misleading to the extent that it suggests a single monolithic structure, when in fact different legitimating myths hold sway in different institutional settings. Clearly the diagram is meant to describe the social system as a whole, but we should not, therefore, take it to deny the great diversity that actually exists, and that Gramsci's theory highlights. .
Continuing:
This larger mission usually is not exactly the same as the mission for each smaller structure, but it assumes and subsumes them. Hegemony works in the same manner. Each person lives their life in a way that is meaningful in their immediate setting, and, to this person the different parts of society may seem to have little in common with him. Yet taken as a whole, each person's life also contributes to the larger hegemony of the society. Diversity, variation, and free will seem to exist since most people see what they believe to be a plethora of different circumstances, but they miss the larger pattern of hegemony created by the coalescing of these circumstances. Through the existence of small and different circumstances, a larger and layered hegemony is maintained yet not fully recognized by many of the people who live within it. (See Prison Notebooks, pp. 233-38.)
In such a layered hegemony, individual common sense, which is fragmented, is effective in helping people deal with small, everyday activities. But common sense also inhibits their ability to grasp the larger systemic nature of exploitation and hegemony. People focus on immediate concerns and problems rather than focusing upon more fundamental sources of social oppression.[1]
The sort of hegemonic struggle we need to engage in means first of all recognizing how hegemony works, how micro-level common sense can thwart a larger understanding, and thus cannot simply be accepted as the foundation for all else. Indeed, analyzing and understanding the micro-level "common-sense" assumptions people bring to the table is one of the most fundamental things we can do. A simplistic failure to do this can be fatal to the larger enterprise. A forthcoming diary will provide an example from Obama's MLK Day speech. But the next diary will look at an example of hegemony in action--the ongoing "homeland security" takeover of academia.
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