Paul Rosenberg’s repeated efforts to use the term “hegemony” in defense of his nitwit criticism of President Obama and the real democratic movement in the United States merits a short rebuttal. Like many pseudo-scientific terms from the Marxist literature, “hegemony” allows the speaker to describe something obvious in an esoteric “experts language” designed to intimidate the rabble and to convey the impression of specialized knowledge.
“Cultural hegemony” just means that people come to accept the social order as “natural” or common sense. Tom Paine said:
a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom. But tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.
Injustices that are customary are hard to break: women who wanted equal pay, African-Americans who took offense at being called “boy”, Gay men and women who didn’t accept police raids as part of the natural order of things – were all considered crazy. And the recent ludicrous teabagging episode in which people protested lower taxes for themselves, shows that the ideas of trickle-down economics can be so ingrained and customary that they can mobilize (an ever smaller) fraction of people to defend the rich.
Ok, so big deal. Everyone knows this: “think outside the box” is a cliche. If you want smart explication of how it works in recent politics read Lakoff. In fact, one of the most admirable and powerful aspects of the Obama campaign and administration is its comprehensive effort to break Republican framing – something that Paul Rosenberg has never come close to understanding or even discussing. Because Paul’s fundamental political premise is that he is in receipt of specialized knowledge and that those who dissent are stooges of the powers that be.
I want to step through an example, not because the argument the Rosenberg is interesting, but the way he tries to use jargon to frame the debate is absolutely familiar to any of us who have seen “the old left” destroy any number of popular movements. Here’s Paul attacking a commentator who dissented from the party line:
Long story short [Rootless: as if !!] , the essence of hegemony, as originally explicated by Antonio Gramsci, is that ideology conditions the parameters of common sense through a wide range of cultural institutions, … [ blah blah]
Via a wide range of such institutions–particularly over the past 30-40 years–conservatives have routinized their double-standard logic, by which anything they say about liberals, however outlandish, is accepted as truth, […]Now we find ourselves, as a result of this situation, with yet another spineless Democratic “leader”, who rather than challenge things, simply accepts going along with the flow of conservative hegemony, and so he parrots the Nurember Nazi defense lawyers in explaining why he will turn a blind eye to the systematic war crimes of the Bush Era, upon which dutiful footsoldiers such as NeonBlack attack anyone who is so rude as to stand up and object. Unless, of course, they do so in an apologetic, shamefaced manner. In which case, a whole different said of dutiful footsoldiers will then attack in NeonBlack’s stead.
The end result of all this, of course, is to make effective principled opposition impossible to mount. Such is, in fact, always the aim of hegemony. “Resistence is futile” as the Borg would say.
So for Paul, “hegemony” is a concept that explains the intellectual limitations of people who object to his explication. It is not that they are wrong on logical or evidence based grounds, but they are wrong because they are trapped inside the box of hegemonic thinking which leaves them unable to understand what is obvious. And what is obvious? Why that Obama is a traitor who has not delivered the change he promised (even though Paul derided his promises during the campaign), people who defend him or even object to Paul’s characterization are “dutiful footsoldiers” and that what Paul is doing is “effective principled opposition”. Paul is not explicating how things work, he is labeling his opponent as a stooge.
This is all sadly familiar. How many times in the last 50 years have popular political movements been dragged to the ground by the “ideologists” with their jargon, their blindness, and their absolute need to be the “vanguard” of the struggle?
Footnote
— Marx himself had a simpler explanation of “hegemony” than did Gramsci. I think he was wrong about separation of powers, but …
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch. For instance, in an age and in a country where royal power, aristocracy, and bourgeoisie are contending for mastery and where, therefore, mastery is shared, the doctrine of the separation of powers proves to be the dominant idea and is expressed as an “eternal law.”
