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Bernie’s War of Maneuver
The 2020 primary and Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony
Joseph Buttigieg was America’s leading scholar on Antonio Gramsci and the translator of the authoritative English edition of the Italian Marxist’s influential Prison Notebooks. A professor of literature, he devoted much of his career to exploring Gramsci’s theories of cultural hegemony. It’s a shame that Buttigieg died before he could witness the 2020 primary and the role his son Pete played in it. The elder Buttigieg would have found it quite interesting as an object lesson in the very phenomena he spent his life studying.
Gramsci argued that the capitalist class does not rule by force alone. As capitalist societies mature, they rely less on naked coercion and more on ideological control through class dominance over institutions within civil society. He contrasted the two forms of control, labeling the former “dictatorship” and the latter “hegemony.”
His theories were an elaboration of Marx’s maxim that the “ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas.” Hegemony supplements coercion with manufactured consent, where the lower classes internalize the values, beliefs and attitudes of the dominant groups.
Writing in the 1930s before the advent of mass media, Gramsci was primarily concerned with the role of art, literature…
