Bard College President Leon Botstein conducts The American Symphony Orchestra in a performance of “Intolerance.” Carnegie Hall, May, 2018. Photo Credit: Steven Pisano (no changes). Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.
In a well-conducted city, each member flies with joy to the assemblies; under a bad government, no one is disposed to bend his way thither…
–Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, XV
Liberal Post-Politics and Counter-Hegemonic Practice
Among the clear casualties of the Trump era, one must add to the list the entire edifice of what might be called the domestic American experience of liberal post-politics. Here I am referring to the longstanding Panglossian conviction of American liberals that there is no need to “do politics” because, well, we already live in the best of all possible socio-political worlds.
It’s the belief that the existence of democratic values, embedded in the norms and practices of our institutions of government, present an impenetrable bulwark against out and out illiberalism. It is the willingness to allow a withered political party and its elected representatives, who remain the captive of special interests, to make deals with similar on the other side, so that the work of administration can go on under perennially divided government, until the next election. It’s also the comfortable reliance on proxy professional advocacy organizations, armed with our charitable contributions, to lobby, litigate, and/or do PR in conjunction with, or working against, business organizations, PACS, think tanks, and foundations.
For the purposes of this multi-part post, I am intentionally putting aside the more all-encompassing and more familiar variant of the end of post-politics, which could be placed under the slogan “the end of the end of history” since it concerns the status of the USA as global hegemon—here one finds consideration of the solidity of international norms and institutions, approaches to international political and economic governance, and the status of common international security arrangements.
My interest here is centered upon our uniquely American (and so far, very unsatisfactory) center-left debate about how to gather our collective resources in the interest of establishing something counter-hegemonic to the new species of fractured neoliberal hegemony that is presently emerging. By fractured hegemony, I mean the experience of a class of semi-elite beneficiaries of a prior hegemonic political consensus, whose cultural and political identity has rested upon a false consciousness about the extent to which they are, in fact, hegemonic elites.
If the end of liberal post-politics creates a possible opening for the emergence of a counter-hegemony, then it makes sense that civil society should now return to front and center of our concern.
Typically, when one thinks about hegemony and counter-hegemony, following Antonio Gramsci, one also thinks of civil society as a “war of position marked by a reciprocal siege between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic actors.” By means of hegemony, Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato have explained, “members of dominated classes are ideologically blinded to their subordinate position in the social structure.” Hegemony in the first instance, therefore, speaks to the manner in which dominated classes are guided, via various forms of cultural mass manipulation, to promote their interests in a manner that does not threaten the existing order.
It is my belief that before we can arrive at an effective coalition politics and counter-hegemonic strategy, it needs to be recognized not just that dominated classes are subject to hegemonic false consciousness, but that under neoliberal hegemony, the liberal wing of the dominant class has also been systematically misled–not about its subordination, but rather about its class dominance. This, after all, has been the genius of the corporate Democrats since Jimmy Carter first hired Paul Volcker to head the Federal Reserve.
What now has changed to unsettle this longstanding set of hegemonic practices? Simply put, it is the dominance of a new class of elites, the swollen ranks of the super-rich in our new gilded age, who have decided that the prior neoliberal consensus–with its (admittedly highly blinkered) republican, universalist, and cosmopolitan scruples–is an inconvenience that no longer has to be tolerated. The classical, dominant class hegemony has previously been all about effectively snowing the underclasses per se. Now it’s also about a polarization strategy (one that I am here calling fractured hegemony) that encourages the white working class and the shrinking white middle class to turn against semi-elite liberals–along with vulnerable minorities, immigrants and the poor–in a manner that buttresses the existing order of neoliberal elite class domination.
If the end of liberal post-politics creates a possible opening for the emergence of a counter-hegemony, then it makes sense that the question of civil society should now return to front and center of our concern. In an everyday sense, this is happening in two ways, reflecting the different instincts of liberal centrists and social movement activists about the relative fertility of pre-political (civic) soil. On the one hand, there is the desire to harness the resources of the civil society in some way, in order to reassert a sense of common cause among working class and middle class that will depolarize the American electorate. On the other, there is the imperative to bring together and radicalize the constituents of various social movements in a unified front, in order to then engage in effective political struggle.
It’s interesting to note at this point that whether one wants to depolarize, or to radicalize, either way, figuring out how to go about doing so involves some level of recourse to Gramsci’s (methodological) differentiation of civil society from both the economy and the state.
Civil Society at the Center of our Common Concern
Gramsci’s various statements about hegemony, civil society, the economy, and the state are notoriously ambiguous. Cohen and Arato, for example, identify what they call three systematic antinomies in his analysis, which can be seen to arise out of a set of simultaneous but divergent imperatives—to account for the Russian revolution and soviet society, while also giving a satisfactory account of the persistence of Western capitalist societies. The resulting overall picture of civil society, as David Forgacs has written, is at once “the political terrain on which the dominant class organizes its hegemony, and the terrain on which opposition parties and movements organize, win allies, and build their social power.”
In her article called “Gramsci’s Trenches: Civil Society as Warfare” Dutch professor of International Relations Marlies Glasius points out that there are actually two different conceptions of civil society that have been derived from Gramsci’s account:
Thick Hegemony: First, there is the version (following the cultural anthropologist James Scott) which she calls thick hegemony: here civil society is seen primarily as the sphere or set of institutions in which hegemony is exercised and reproduced, the realm of Michel Foucault’s “relations of power” in which the state and the dominant class hegemonically maintain a culture of putative consent. One should understand thick hegemony as being all about the stubbornness and deep-seated inherence of the dominant cultural hegemony within the bottom-up complexity of the civil society.
This is the reason, per Gramsci, it doesn’t make sense for the forces of the Left, armed with an economistic theory about the inevitable collapse of capitalism, to try to fight a “war of maneuver,” of class against class. Per Gramsci, such an assault would confront the fact that the capitalist state “was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks.” Having destroyed the outer perimeter, Gramsci says, “the assailants would find themselves confronted by a line of defense which was still effective.”
Under the banner of thick hegemony, Glasius writes, “the emphasis is on the reproduction of the status quo in civil society, rather than challenges to it.” While the possibility of resistance is not excluded, as Cohen and Arato write, “hegemonic change requires “a radically pluralist conception that locates the forging of counter-hegemony in the multiplicity of antagonisms within civil society.”
Liberation Hegemony: Second, there is the thin version of hegemonic false consciousness, what Glasius calls the “counter hegemonic, or liberation” version. In this version, the organically complex, bottom-up network of trenches that comprise the civil society is seen as a natural bulwark against authoritarianism, one party rule, and the deployment of state coercion to enforce class dominance. Glasius says that the counter-hegemonic version provided the Latin American left with hope under right-wing dictatorships, “offering an arena for transformational political action “from under their very noses.” This view of Gramsci’s trenches also appears in Vaclav Havel’s account of the what he called the parallel polis–“Given the time and the means available, only a certain number of trenches can be eliminated, if at the same time, the parallel polis is able to produce more trenches than it loses, a situation that is mortally dangerous for the regime.”
Hannah Arendt Center Conference: Theda Skocpol & Chantal Mouffe
The tensions between these two versions of civil society, hegemony, and the state (springing forth from the head of Gramscian-Zeus like twin Athenas) were weighing on me when I sat down recently to watch the live webcast of the recent conference on civil disobedience held at the Bard College Hannah Arendt Center.
The Civil Disobedience conference events took place in early October, during some of the most uncertain final days before the 2018 midterm elections. Bard College President Leon Botstein, in the midst of having to watch the Central European University get kicked out of Budapest (Botstein is also Board Chairman of the Central European University) told the story with the sadness in his face, and with the probity of his short, informal remarks. Incidentally, while I agree with President Botstein’s remark that “the Internet is not a substitute for public space” I must confess that being able to “tune in” to The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard from the west coast–in order to hear him say it–blunted the edge just a little bit.
Two of the major speakers at the event were the Harvard sociologist-historian Theda Skocpol (pronounced “scotchpole”), who writes about our diminished democracy and the imperative to recover a renewed sense of American civic nationalism, and the London-based political theorist Chantal Mouffe, a leading advocate of what has been called “agonistic democracy.” For purposes of the posts to follow in this series, I’d like to make the case that Skocpol and Mouffe work quite well as stand-ins for my Gramscian-Zeus’s two fully-formed Athenas— what I like to call the “de-polarize Athena, Goddess of Wisdom,” and the “radicalize Athena, Goddess of War.”
By looking at their highly divergent work on “reinvigorating democracy” in this manner (as having a common rootedness in the problem of civil society and hegemony) I hope (in the end) to be able to suggest some ways that we might disarm the apparent “either/or” of the two versions, by more radically rethinking American civic nationalism.
In the next installment of this post, I look at aspects of Theda Skocpol’s Diminished Democracy (2003). After that, in the third part, I consider Chantal Mouffe’s recent paper, “Agonistic Democracy and Radical Politics.” Next, I introduce James C. Scott’s self-described “paper-thin” theory of hegemony in order to describe contexts of cultural resistance over and against thick hegemonic accounts of false consciousness. This will set the stage for the final installment that revisits the case for civic nationalism, while also reading Ira Katznelson’s take on civil society and hegemony in his book, City Trenches.
