Populism & Hegemony (series)

The broad political Left in the United States has been plagued for decades now with a culture of reaction, fragmentation, issue silo-ing, and a chasm between insiders and outsiders.  Can the concepts of populism and hegemony help to explain these challenges?  What insights might we gain through an exploration of these ideas?

A series on populism and hegemony may sound nerdy, esoteric, and less-than-fully-practical for on-the-ground organizers, campaigners, and advocates for social justice (my intended audience), but I believe that understanding the patterns and processes of these two related concepts is key to effective long-term political struggle.  

In this series I’m digging in and attempting to work out some useful frameworks. I’m a student, not an expert, on these subjects &#151 and I’d love for other folks to weigh in on these ideas.

This is the landing page for the series.  You can bookmark it and check back for new posts, which I’ll be linking to from this page.

1. Anatomy of Political Identity
2. Marx’s error
3. Bonding & Bridging
4. Long lefty laundry lists
5. Wisconsin: How Populism Works

Understanding Anti-Immigrant America: Mobilizing the Tea Party

A little more than a week ago, The New York Times published an article about John Tanton, the modern architect of the anti-immigrant movement in the US. Highly concerned with the environmental degradation that he was seeing around him, Tanton eventually pegged the problem on immigration. The Times writes,

From the resort town of Petoskey, Mich., Dr. Tanton helped start all three major national groups fighting to reduce immigration, legal and illegal, and molded one of the most powerful grass-roots forces in politics. The immigration-control movement surged to new influence in last fall’s elections and now holds near veto power over efforts to legalize any of the 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States.

The article goes on to document power and influence of the Tanton Network.  

One group that Dr. Tanton nurtured, Numbers USA, doomed President George W. Bush’s legalization plan four years ago by overwhelming Congress with protest calls. Another, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, helped draft the Arizona law last year to give the police new power to identify and detain illegal immigrants.

A third organization, the Center for Immigration Studies, joined the others in December in defeating the Dream Act, which sought to legalize some people brought to the United States illegally as children.

Collectively, these organizations are today known as the Tanton Network. Both

Southern Poverty Law Center and the Center for New Community have done extensive research revealing the racist and eugenicist foundations of Tanton’s ideas and goals. Moreover, CNC has shown the broad reach of the Tanton Network by mapping out all its various organizations (some of which misleadingly portray themselves as independent and neutral), its sources of financial support and the various institutions with which it partners.

The Tanton Network constitutes a web of organizations in civil society. Moreover, for the purposes of this essay, I will make the claim that they are the organic intellectuals of the capitalist class. Gramsci argued that advanced capitalism spawned intra-class specialization-a division of labor between “mental” and “manual” tasks. The contemporary capitalist class is composed not just of people directly involved in profit making, but also their organic intellectuals, whose function it is to organize the ideas of the class and represent them as in the interest of the general public. In so doing, the capitalist class can build popular support for their class-specific cause, and attract others to their hegemonic project, including other classes’ organic intellectuals.  

This of course begs the following question: why should we assume that this anti-immigrant network constitutes a section of the organic intellectuals of the capitalist class? After all, isn’t their ultimate aim to turn off the spigot of cheap labor by stopping undocumented immigration, deporting undocumented individuals who are already here, and in fact, returning legal immigration rates to the pre-1965 levels? Aren’t these goals in fact against the interests of capital because they reduce the supply of cheap labor?

I will argue that the Tanton Network, despite its racist goal to stop immigration and return to an imagined “Europeanized” past, is ultimately engaged in a project of criminalizing im/migrant workers. Criminalization of im/migrant workers, in the last instance, does serve the interests of capital. In other words, the Network’s “success” should not be judged on the basis of whether or not they ultimately create a US cleansed of brown people. This scenario is both economically unsustainable and politically unrealistic.

Rather the Network’s “success” should be measured by the extent to which they do their job building the ideological buffer around the capitalist class. For example, how widespread is the idea that im/migrants are undeserving and morally suspect? Or, how often does the tacit assumption about the acceptability of the movement of capital across borders and the unacceptability of a similar movement of labor appear in the media, in policy debates highest levels of government and in everyday conversations at the dinner table? These types of commonsensical ideas are the ideological basis for the continued criminalization of im/migrant workers. Those ideas serve as the justification of heightened immigration enforcement both at the border and, more importantly, within the US. How this criminalization of im/migrant workers ultimately serves capitalist interests is the subject of a future post. For the purposes of the current argument, what matters, then, is that we think of the Tanton Network as constituting a section of the organic intellectuals of the capitalist class.

What has the Tanton Network done?

Many on the political left have vigilantly documented the intentional efforts of the John Tanton Network to solicit the support of liberal groups for anti-immigrant causes. Whether it was by “the greening of hate”–exemplified by FAIR’s report that immigration is responsible for the environmental degradation of the Chesapeake Bay–or the promotion of a black-brown divide–by blaming structural poverty and unemployment in black communities to job competition created by immigrants–the Tanton Network is trying to build a wider coalition that includes groups historically associated with the left. But what the left tends to overlook is how the organized anti-immigrant movement is pursuing similar hegemonic projects with the political right–particularly among tea partiers.

This is not surprising. A 2010 New York Times poll showed that tea party supporters were more likely than other Americans to find undocumented immigration “a very serious threat.”  Images of tea party supporters waving signs supporting SB1070 dotted the news media last summer. In the minds of most leftists, the tea party movement was automatically associated with the various agenda items that define the exclusionary politics of the right, including support for anti-immigrant causes.  

However, receptivity to these ideas is not the same as actively mobilizing on behalf of these ideas. Given finite resources and capacity, local tea party organizations (just like progressive groups) have to choose from an array of topics on which to focus their energies. Indeed, in a climate where “Obamacare” has received a lot of the attention from tea partiers, why would “illegal immigration” and “the out-of-control border” solicit any organized anxiety?  

The answer to that question lies with the Tanton Network. (For the purposes of this article, the Tantonites also include local politicians who regularly draw on resources from the Network.) The signing of SB 1070 was a signal to the rest of the nation that Arizona was potential recruiting grounds for a revitalized anti-immigrant movement. But this was going to be a process. The Tea Party Patriots provide a case in point.

The Tea Party Patriots (TPP) is arguably the most grassroots of the six national factions that compose the tea party movement.  While the National Leadership Council of the TPP voted to have members wave signs supporting SB 1070, cofounder Jenny Beth Martin maintained that the organization does not take any official stances on the issue of immigration and the border.

But it was symbolically significant that the annual conference was held in Phoenix, AZ this year. And while the conference was dedicated to many other issues outside of immigration, it did provide a testing ground for ways in which the issue of immigration could be turned into a “tea party issue.”

A Musical Performance at Tea Party Conference, February 2011

Using commonplace tea party rhetoric, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer thanked the conference attendees for choosing Phoenix to host their event: “You didn’t have to choose our home, you could have gone somewhere else…I know you are here because we share a common cause in taking back our country. We want our borders secured. We want the federal government out of our daily lives. We want liberty returned to the people, to the states…”

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer’s Welcome Message, February 2011

Joe Arpaio, Maricopa’s infamous sheriff and State Senator Russell Pearce, a sponsor of SB1070, were the conference’s first speakers. Both cast themselves as upholding the law and their oaths to office. For them, DC was a different story. Pearce, feigning to speak to the Obama Administration, exclaimed

You wanna remove that disdain that we have, maybe you oughta keep your oath of office[…] Maybe you oughta secure the border. Maybe when you say you’re going to enforce the law, you enforce it. […]It’s all about cheap labor, cheap votes, while they invade and damage this country. I for one do not apologize for defending the principles of this Republic.

State Senator Russell Pearce Speaking at a Conference Session, February 2011

Speakers aligned popular tea party images and concepts-such as constitutionality, lawfulness, and American exceptionalism-with a nativist framing of immigration and the border. Thus, ICE-police collaboration was construed as simply enforcing the existing laws in service of protecting “the greatest country in the world.” Participants also had opportunities to articulate similar conceptual alignments in other parts of the summit.  During a panel entitled Immigration and Border Security, a middle aged man from Scottsdale, AZ put it very concisely: “1070, like Obamacare, is really a states’ rights battle more than anything else. We apparently don’t have a right to protect citizens of the state of Arizona.” Immigration was also a tea party issue, because it too involved the federal government’s encroachment on state’s rights.

Later, I overheard him telling a woman seated next to him that NumbersUSA was a trustworthy resource if she wanted to learn more.

But this was not an uncontested process. While Pearce spoke, energetic Ron Paul supporters distributed leaflets arguing against SB1070 and measures changing birthright citizenship.

Ron Paul speaking, Feburary 2011

“Internal enforcement is suboptimal and creates costs and regulatory burden for American citizens…contrary to ‘Reagan Republicanism’ which intended to REDUCE government costs and burdens.”  The rest of the leaflet enumerated how the measures would expand intrusion of the Department of Homeland Security, a federal agency, into people’s lives. “Real conservatives don’t yield state powers and put them into the hands of the federal executive.” In a conversation with a representative from the Ayn Rand Institute, I was told that “free markets require that there are no borders.” Later, while waiting in line to purchase a mid-afternoon coffee, a well-dressed man from New York standing next to me confided his discomfort with Pearce’s heavy presence at the conference. For him, scapegoating immigrants was “stupid.” “I wish they’d just focus on the economic issues,” he concluded.  

Chip Berlet asked the left to “[take] the tea partiers seriously.” “With no one appearing to champion their cause, they line up with the anti-Obama crowd, and they stir in some of their social worries about gay marriage and abortion, dark-skinned immigrants, and a black man in the White House.”  The Tantonites are indeed drawing the battle lines. But we have to remember that the pursuit of hegemony is a contested, multivalent process–both on the left and the right.

Tune into future posts that continue to explore the Tantonites, the Tea Party, and hegemonic projects. (This is part three of a series. You can read part one here, and part two here.)

Long lefty laundry lists | Populism & Hegemony pt.4

This is the fourth post in a series.

Let’s say that I care a lot about the war in Iraq, and I start planning with some other folks in my town to put together a public rally to call for an end to the war and occupation. Well, what if we made the rally about the economy too? Everyone cares about the economy, right? Surely more people will come out if we link these two issues. Hey, while we’re at it, immigration is a big issue for a lot of people in our community, and I think we can get this one local immigrant rights organization onboard for our rally. We should at least be able to get someone to speak. And that makes sense. Immigrants are impacted by both the war and the economy. Also, there have been some folks working locally to stop a proposed waste incinerator. We should definitely have someone from that group speak at the rally. Wow, if we list all of these issues on one flyer, then we can attract a lot more people than the folks who would come out just because of the war or any one of the issues on its own.

There are several important flaws to this kind of explicit connect-the-dots approach. It’s not that we shouldn’t be connecting the dots. And it’s not that we shouldn’t have strong moral narratives that can help people make sense of a platform of issues. But a strong moral narrative is different than just throwing a bunch of seemingly disparate issues onto the same flyer and assuming that we’ll be able to connect with anything other than an already highly politicized&#151and particularly politicized&#151audience (aka “the usual suspects”). What this kind of approach tends to do is to attract self-selecting individuals who come to the event as individuals. They may come as individuals from many different social backgrounds, with relationships to different social blocs. But these social blocs are not bought in, which means small numbers and few resources for the effort. Rallies are supposed to be demonstrations of grassroots organization and power (in order to leverage pressure to affect political change). But they can all too easily accomplish the opposite of this intention; they can be demonstrations of disorganization, powerlessness, and even incoherence (i.e. disconnection from any organized social base).

It’s fully understandable why activists might tend toward some version of this flawed approach. Activists are very political people. They tend to have much more developed political ideologies than that of the average person, because they tend to focus more of their attention toward political issues. They see the connections, and they want others to see the connections too &#151 and to take action!

Unfortunately, the more issues you name explicitly, the less your appeal tends to resonate with any of the constituencies you’re hoping to attract. The more we spell out how each issue is explicitly connected, the less it becomes about a particular issue (i.e. entry/identity point) that any particular person, group, or social bloc is concerned about.

I started this series lamenting how the political Left in the United States is plagued with a culture of fragmentation and issue silo-ing. Am I now also lamenting when activists make connections between issues? No… at least not inherently. The question is not whether or not we should burst out of our “issue silos”. The answer to that question is unequivocally yes, we should. Our question, rather, is about how. How do we do so in a way that will work? Our purpose in “connecting the dots” is not just to get an insufficient fringe of radicals to understand the connections. Our purpose is to break whole constituencies out of self-segregating “silos” &#151 to facilitate a bridging process; to build a populist alignment.

A “long lefty laundry list” of issues is not going to get us to where we need to go. What, then, is the alternative? I’ve been leading up to it all week, and tomorrow I’ll borrow from Ernesto Laclau&#151and second-hand-borrow from Antonio Gramsci&#151to sloppily attempt to describe not a formula for how, but an observable pattern that can be found at the heart of every populist alignment, I believe.

If you’ve read this far, I hope you’ll stick with me for tomorrow’s post. Full disclosure: I’m trying to figure this shit out, and I would love to hear your thoughts about these ideas. Let’s banter in the comments section, how about it?

PolitiFacts’ Pants On Fire: Who Will Fact-Check The Fact-Checkers? Part 3: Aiding The Fraudsters

This is Part 3 in a diary series on ersatz “fact-checking”. Part One dealt with PolitiFact lying about Rachel Maddow about Wisconsin’s ginned-up “budget crisis”.  Part Two dealt with PolitiFact AND Columbia Journalism Review Online lying about the GOP’s attempt to end Medicare. This part recalls the decades-long backstory of fraudulent GOP politics which PolitiFact is now actively supporting.

Ersatz Fact-Checking Aids and Abets Fraudulent Politics

It’s genuinely bizarre.  It’s a time when polls show that a majority of GOP voters do not believe that the President is clearly an American citizen, despite his birth certificate having been posted online for almost three years.  A time when state legislatures across the land are in a panic over the non-existent threat of Sharia law being imposed on them.  A time when ALL of the 31 Republican on the House Energy And Commerce Committee refused to vote for a statement simply acknowledging that climate change exists. A time when fraudulent video “exposés” have become the hottest new technique for destroying progressive organizations and individuals.  A time when a nutcase charlatan is touted as a great historian by leading Republicans. In a word, a time when fraud and delusional fantasy has come to utterly dominate the conservative mindset, which in turn is largely driving the political agenda in America today.

And within this freakshow, we are living through the greatest period of economic suffering in over 70 years. Tens of millions of Americans are out of work; but conservatives have managed to hijack the political narrative, spreading panic about a federal debt that they themselves are primarily responsible for.  They have then promoted a radical “debt reduction” budget plan that does virtually nothing to reduce the debt, while transferring trillions of dollars to the wealthy from low and moderate income Americans over next ten years.  And when outrage about what’s going on finally starts to erupt, framed in terms of a simple, accurate, easily-understood narrative, self-appointed “fact-checkers” cry foul!

This is what the first two parts of this series have focused on–two glaring examples when progressive criticism has torn away the curtain, revealing what the Republicans are really up to, and the so-called “fact-checkers” have cried foul.  This isn’t just ineptitude on their part–it’s de facto collusion with the political fraudsters of the right. The pretense is that of trying to keep “both sides” honest, but the reality is nothing of the sort.  

Fraud Is Vital To The Attack On The Welfare State

With this sort of ersatz fact-checking, the advantage clearly shifts away from truth-telling and in favor of ever-more outrageous deception: not just exaggeration, or lying, but the construction of elaborate frauds.  That is, after all, what Republicans have been involved in for a very, very long time.  This is, in fact, key to their long-term war against the American welfare state, which is not only popular with the American people as a whole, but even with their own voter base, as I’ve pointed out repeatedly over the past five or six years, blogging at various different sites.  In a June 2008 diary at Open Left, for example–“Center-Left America–Vast Support For the Welfare State”–I wrote that since 1984, the first year when the General Social Survey asked the full range of seven questions I refer to,

[a] majority of extreme conservatives (self-identified 7 on a 1-7 scale) said we were spending too little on a combined measure (call it NatWelfComp) of whether people think we’re spending too little, too much or about right on seven different areas-Social Security, welfare, “improving [the] nation’s education system,” “improving & protecting [the] environment,” “improving & protecting [the] nations health,” “improving the conditions of blacks,” and “solving problems of big cities.” The number of extreme conservatives who thought we were spending too little on one or more programs (net: i.e. “too little” on two, but “too much” on one is a net of “too little” on one) was nearly twice the number of extreme conservatives who thought we were spending too much: 59.3% to 30.7%. This can be seen in the last column of the chart below:

Faced with this reality, Ronald Reagan originally promised a fantasy–that taxes could be slashed dramatically while balancing the budget–and then resorted to a fraud–continuing to pretend that he “really” wanted a balanced budget, even though he never submitted a budget to Congress that actually balanced the budget.  The impossibility of his promise became clear within months of passing his massive tax cuts, as made clear in this November 16,  1981 piece from Time magazine. In it, Reagan is quoted casually dismissing his balanced-budget promise:

“I didn’t come here to balance the budget. I was elected to reduce Government intrusion in the economy.”

But, of course, running unheard-of deficits also lead to massive government intrusion in the economy as well-a phenomenon economists call “crowding out”, which makes it harder for businesses to borrow money they need for productive investments.  So his excuse for busting the budget was as bogus as his broken promise. While it’s popular for Reagan apologists to blame Congressional Democrats for Reagan’s broken balanced-budget promise, Brad DeLong recently blog-published a 1993 memo he wrote which squarely lays the blame where it belongs.  The summary reads as follows:

The overwhelming proportion of the deficits of the last decade [i.e., the 1980s] were already proposed in President Reagan’s and President Bush’s original budget submission. There was no explosion of federal spending over and above what the presidents had asked for. More than four-fifths of the 1980s deficits were “presidential.” Less than one-fifth were “congressional.”

DeLong’s memo contained two charts which made this point abundantly clear:

and:

Throughout the 1980s, it finally began to dawn on some that the whole purpose of the massive Reagan deficits was to eventually force even the Democrats to agree to slashing the welfare state-a plan the was eventually dubbed “starving the beast” and identified with conservative activist Grover Norquist.  Thus, Reagan’s fantasy was transformed into a fraud. And, indeed, when Bill Clinton took over in 1993, he immediately began the process of reducing the federal debt as a percentage of GDP, even before the Republicans took over Congress and tried to force a much more drastic approach to slashing government spending.  Clinton actually achieved a balanced budget before he left office, but once Bush took over in 2001, the debt-to-GDP ratio started heading up, up, up once again.  Vice President Cheney even chortled “Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter,” and Republicans in Congress repeatedly voted to raise the debt ceiling without the slightest complaint.

The record of what’s happened with the debt since Reagan’s election in 1980 is particularly striking, and easy to grasp when shown in terms of the debt-to-GDP ratio, which measures the amount of the debt in terms of the nation’s ability to pay.  Here is what that chart shows–a record of continued success from the end of WWII, until Reagan took over, and sharply reversed course, until Clinton restored fiscal responsibility, only to have Bush Junior return to Reagan’s profligate ways:

This is, of course, the exact opposite of the dominant narrative built around the ultimate lie of “fiscal conservatism”.  Why don’t the “fact-checkers” ever check that?

Fraud At The Heart Of  Reagan’s Orgy Of American Military Spending

But the underlying fraud of Reagan’s politics was not just limited to tax cuts–which even to this day Republicans continue to claim will magically pay for themselves.  There was also the fraud of needing a massive military buildup-a fraud based on a carefully-manipulated neo-con attack on the CIA’s remarkably solid assessment of Soviet power, carried out under then-CIA chief George H.W. Bush in 1976.  The CIA accurately portrayed the Soviets as well behind the US militarily, struggling with an increasingly failing economy.  The neo-cons who attacked them had no new information at all, only a paranoid worldview that put a wildly impossible spin on intelligence.  The story of what happened was concisely told by Anne Hessing Cahn in “Team B: The trillion-dollar experiment”, a 1993 article in  the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and was later expanded into the 1998 book, Killing Detente: The Right Attacks the CIA.

But long before this inside story was fully known, journalist Robert Scheer found a remarkable number of Reagan Administration figures seemingly eager to fight a nuclear war, as documented in his 1982 book, “With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush, and Nuclear War”.  This gung-ho war-fighting attitude naturally proved deeply unpopular, giving rise to a massive wave of successful state-level initiatives calling for a nuclear freeze in November 2002. It was shortly after this that Reagan turned to yet another fraud–the impossible dream of the Star Wars “missile defense”, a plan so crazy that thousands of physicists signed petitions refusing to work on it. But, of course, Star Wars was never intended to protect the US from Soviet missiles-it was intended to protect Ronald Reagan from a crushing defeat at the polls as a warmongering lunatic, and in that it was enormously successful.

Nowadays, almost no one even remembers that Reagan military buildup was not sold to the American people as a supremely clever to bankrupt the Soviet Union and end the Cold War, but as a desperately-needed measure to catch up with a dangerously dominant “Evil Empire”, and possibly even go to war with it, loosing tens or hundreds of millions of American lives in the process.  And that profound ignorance about our own not-so-distant history is due in large part to the so-called “liberal media”, whose mostly-tacit support for massive conservative political frauds has become increasingly overt of late.  

These are far from being the only frauds perpetrated under the Reagan Administration.  But they’ll do fine for establishing the dominant pattern and the sheer scale of the impact they had.  With such massive frauds driving the big picture of federal tax and spending priorities, their spill-over impacts on the rest of public life were inevitably profound.  We helped to create Al Qaeda, for example, as part of the spillover from the “Team B” fraud.  So it’s not enough that these frauds are massive beyond imagining in and of themselves.  They are frauds that perpetuate incredible new forms of damage, which in turn create new opportunities for promoting an ever-widening arrays of other frauds.

Fighting Back

The outright lies of PolitiFact discussed in detail above can only be understood as the tip of the iceberg, and can only be effectively combated in the long run by creating an equally massive iceberg of truth.  This will not be easily done, but the impressive explosion of the progressive blogosphere from 2003 onwards shows that it’s not impossible.  That earlier growth, however, had very little centralized guidance. What’s needed now is something that can provide enough structure to fulfill an important coherence-enhancing function of centralized guidance, with no central authority imposing that guidance on others.  In short: something mimicking what scientific disciplines do, simply by uncovering fruitful approaches to understanding their subject matter.  

We have very little in the way of hegemonic structure to counter the vast resources of the right.  And we are further hindered by a purported center-left establishment that is indifferent at best and usually openly hostile to even thinking about hegemonic warfare.  So it’s especially important for us to try and focus on building what we can build through self-organizing from below.  A good place to start would be to build up alternative truth-centers of our own.  

NYU’s Jeffrey Rosen, at Press Think, has described the progress of one such approach, that of “explainers” that are devoted to providing robust contextual understanding.  This is an excellent concept, and one that I hope really catches on.  I’d like to propose another:  A centralized website for debunking rightwing lies.  It’s an idea I’ve had for a very long, which I recently tossed out on a discussion list I’m part of.  There are already plenty of resources out there we could draw upon, so it’s a far cry from trying to do everything from scratch.  Plus, there’s actually a chance that it could get the institutional backing it needs to get off the ground.  But the crucial step now is to convene a small group to draft an initial model/proposal.  If this is something you’d be interested in doing, please let me know in comments.

Understanding Anti-Immigrant America: Developing a Gramscian Framework, part II

part two in a 3-part series. Click here to read part one.

Gramsci opened up the Marxist framework to consider the role of civil society in stabilizing advanced capitalism. The presence of a civil society, he argued, complicates the process of social change. An economic crisis is not enough to shake up a social system. Civil society, as the terrain in which hegemony is exercised, serves as a veritable “earthworks” that prevents such structural opportunities from automatically dissolving into massive social change.

But who are the important characters in this story?

For Marx, a class was the important unit of analysis. A class was determined by its relation to the means of production. So under capitalism, do you work for wages? That is, do you only make enough to take care of yourself and your children? OR do you own a factory? Do you make profit that you could reinvest in your factory and eventually open up a second one? In the classical Marxist framework, social change happens through class struggle between the haves and the have-nots as the disparity in wealth inequality becomes more and more acute.  

Gramsci also thought class and class struggle were important. But, just as the superstructure had become more complex under advanced capitalism, so too had the composition of classes. The modern capitalist class is made up of both the factory owners and the group that organizes their ideas.  

Every social group, coming into existence on the original terrain of an essential function in the world of economic production, creates together with itself, organically, one or more strata of intellectuals which give it homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only in the economic but also in the social and political fields. The capitalist entrepreneur creates alongside himself the industrial technician, the specialist in political economy, the organizers of a new culture, of a new legal system, etc (5).

Arguably, for example, the Heritage Foundation houses the organic intellectuals of the capitalist class. As a public policy think tank started under the Nixon Administration, they promote neoliberal ideas about the importance of deregulation and the free market as well as a strong emphasis on national security in the realm of international relations. They regularly publish their research, lobby politicians and work to mold the next generation of conservative thinkers through internship programs. Squarely rooted in civil society, these organic intellectuals articulate the interests of the American capitalist class. But they represent capital’s interests as a general interest, by for example, appealing to vague but powerful concepts such as “freedom, opportunity, [and] prosperity.”

Organic intellectuals aren’t the only intellectuals out there. There are also what Gramsci called the traditional intellectuals, a group that imagines itself to be autonomous and separate from the class struggle driving the historical process. While traditional intellectuals do not see themselves as directly linked to a class, they are in fact allied with the ruling class and its ideas. Examples of traditional intellectuals may include professors, the clergy, artists, and others who think of themselves as “endowed with a character of their own” (8). Organic intellectuals, by contrast, recognize their relationship to the dominant group, and orient their activity to disseminating the ruling class’s ideology.

For Gramsci, then, these intellectuals positioned in the various institutions of civil society, are key to the process of social stability and social change. Marx imagined that the development of capitalism would spawn a certain societal simplicity: people would polarize into one of two classes-the proletariat or the capitalist. Eventually, that disparity would create the momentum for political mobilization and struggle. But Gramsci saw advanced capitalism as creating societal complexity. Rather than class polarization, each class experienced massive specialization within itself. Intellectuals were the product of that intra-class specialization.

Social change, therefore, has to involve these intellectuals.  In Gramsci’s own words,

One of the most important characteristics of any group that is developing towards dominance is its struggle to assimilate and to conquer ‘ideologically’ the traditional intellectuals, but this assimilation and conquest is made quicker and more efficacious the more the group in question succeeds in simultaneously elaborating its own organic intellectuals (10).

Both maintaining social stability and fomenting social change requires the pursuit of hegemony in the institutions of civil society. Organic intellectuals of the dominant group are always in the process of trying to bring traditional intellectuals into their circle as well as the organic intellectuals of non-dominant groups. It is an ideological battle, or what Gramsci called a war of position.

At the same time, subordinate groups try to create their own organic intellectuals to push an alternative narrative or set of ideas about what society is and can be. That war of position–the work of building an alternative hegemony through class consciousness-raising and an evaluation of society and history through a revolutionary theoretical lens–has to precede a war of movement, or armed insurrection. Agents of social change need popular backing from the sectors of civil society first. But so do the agents of social stability.

Given Gramsci’s theoretical framework, how can we start to analyze contemporary anti-immigrant sentiment in US? The next post will combine preliminary bits of ethnographic insight with this theoretical framework to begin to understand how anti-immigrant sentiment is perpetuated today.  

Bonding & Bridging | Populism & Hegemony pt.3

This is the third post in a series.

Strong group identity is something of a double-edged sword for social justice movements. On the one hand&#151as discussed in part one of this series&#151it is absolutely essential. There can be no serious social movement&#151the kind that challenges the powerful and privileged&#151without a correspondingly serious group identity that encourages a strong core of members to contribute an exceptional level of commitment, sacrifice and heroics over the course of prolonged struggle.

On the other hand, a group’s identity tends to grow stronger and more cohesive at a cost of becoming more distinct from other group identities. The cost is the barrier that results from the distinction of said group from other groups. While this is true of all groups to some extent, it tends to have particular consequences for political/politicized groups. Take, for example, a sports team that defines its group identity partly in distinction from rival teams. The team is likely to play all the harder against their rivals as a result of the distinction. No problem there. A group engaged in political struggle, on the other hand, has not only to foster a strong within-group identity; it also has to win allies beyond the bounds of that identity &#151 if it is to orchestrate and leverage the power it needs to accomplish its political goals. Add to this that oppositional struggle tends to trigger an oppositional psychology, which can inject “with steroids” the natural tendency of groups to differentiate themselves from outsiders.

I have called this tension (or double-bind) the Political Identity Paradox. Good leaders have to perform an extraordinary balancing act between the conflicting imperatives of building a strong within-group identity and connecting with allies and potential allies beyond the group.

In his remarkable examination of patterns of declining civic engagement in US society in the last third of the 20th Century&#151in his book, Bowling Alone&#151Robert Putnam provides some useful language for thinking about this tension. He talks in terms of bonding and bridging. Bonding involves the kind of within-group identity formation and emphasis I have discussed, which typically includes some degree of differentiation between group members and outsiders. Bridging is about connections among and between groups. Here’s Putnam:

Of all the dimensions along which forms of social capital vary, perhaps the most important is the distinction between bridging (or inclusive) and bonding (or exclusive). Some forms of social capital are, by choice or necessity, inward looking and tend to reinforce exclusive identities and homogeneous groups. Examples of bonding social capital include ethnic fraternal organizations, church-based women’s reading groups, and fashionable country clubs. Other networks are outward looking and encompass people across diverse social cleavages. Examples of bridging social capital include the civil rights movement, many youth service groups, and ecumenical religious organizations.

Bonding social capital is good for undergirding specific reciprocity and mobilizing solidarity. Dense networks in ethnic enclaves, for example, provide crucial social and psychological support for less fortunate members of the community, while furnishing start-up financing, markets, and reliable labor for local entrepreneurs. Bridging networks, by contrast, are better for linkage to external assets and for information diffusion.

I suggested in part one of this series that:

…a primary function of identity is for group members to signal belonging and commitment to the group, thereby contributing to the health and well-being of the group, while also securing one’s individual place (and therefore survival) in the group.

That, in a nutshell, is what Putnam describes as bonding. I continue:

Group members can signal this [bonding/belonging] by expressing commonality or distinction:

• Commonality: I am like others in this group.  I share values with this group.  I belong in this group.
• Distinction . . . from other groups: I belong in this group because I am different from members of other groups &#151 especially groups that my group views as a threat or that the group identifies itself in opposition to…

So, the “double edged sword” of group identity that I described above&#151the Political Identity Paradox&#151speaks to the need for groups engaged in political struggle to develop both strong bonding and strong bridging. Without strong bonding, group members will lack the level of commitment required for serious struggles. But without strong bridging, the group will become too insular and isolated to be able to forge the broad alliances that are even more necessary for achieving big structural changes.

We can talk in terms of within-group vs. between groups, distinction vs. commonality, differentiation vs. universality, or bonding vs. bridging. However we phrase it, what we’re talking about is the tension between the imperative for groups to cultivate internal solidarity and the imperative to connect beyond the boundaries of the group. Understanding this tension is crucial for understanding the emergence of&#151and the obstacles to&#151populist alignments.

Marx’s error | Populism & Hegemony pt.2

This is the second post in a series.

As discussed briefly in part one, in modern society our identities are complex. Our lives tend to be fragmented. In different spheres of our lives, we play different roles, hold different loyalties, perform different identities, and cultivate different aspects of our identities. Take a minute to think of some of the many ways you identify or have identified throughout your life. What are some key aspects of your identity?

Seriously, take a minute. If you want, grab a piece of paper and a pen and write them down.

Below is a partial list of aspects of my identity; things that have meant something to me personally at different times in my life&#151many of them simultaneously&#151that I came up with in about a minute:

boy	man	Caucasian
American Indian	American	Pennsylvanian
Minnesotan	rural	working class
Christian	Mennonite	pacifist
feminist	antiracist	pagan
heterosexual	musician	punk
revolutionary	progressive	student
worker	electrician	activist
environmentalist	organizer	trainer

What did you come up with?

Our individual identities today tend to be multifaceted and fragmented. We live in a highly heterogeneous society, where individuals tend to have much greater agency over which features of their identities they will invest in and cultivate, and which they will divest from. In some important senses, we are consumers of our identities. I could start out a conservative farm kid and end up a bohemian artist in the big city. And in the process of this transition, as I invest in one set of identities and divest from another set of identities, I am simultaneously investing in new clusters of people and divesting from others.

This is not quite the world that Karl Marx imagined when he was hunkered down writing up a manifesto. Then, capitalist industrialization was making more and more people seem more and more alike. Industrialization was producing a relatively homogenous industrial working class; meaning that a critical mass of folks worked in similar exploitative arrangements, made similar wages, lived in similar conditions of squalor, packed into the same urban areas, wore similar clothing, and on and on. All of these similarities acted as signifiers of an emerging “group” &#151 the industrial working class.

This is precisely how working class “consciousness” developed simultaneously in industrializing countries all around the world within such a relatively short time span &#151 causing a political polarization that was favorable (in terms of numbers that could be mobilized) to working class interests. I put the word consciousness in quotations because I believe this emergence was only possible because of how signifiers of similarity triggered primal, preconscious group-oriented instincts in people’s heads (per my discussion in part one).

Today, working people are still being screwed. Capitalism has further consolidated wealth and power, but the kind of solidarity and class consciousness that was common a hundred years ago is rarer today. There’s no longer any one coherent, organized working class identity that’s big enough to shake up the status quo. To be clear, the emergence of class identity was never an automatic process. Nor was it even close to a fully homogenizing process. There have always existed important heterogeneous layers within any broad class identity. But the signifiers of class similarity, more abundant a hundred years ago than today, probably made the constructive process of working class identity significantly easier.  So much so that many Marxists believed that a radical redistribution of capital and political power was a foregone conclusion; an inevitable, automatic historical process… right around the corner.

But today we are a very self-expressive bunch. As individuals, we express ourselves in dramatically different fashion, and thereby signify to each other&#151i.e. constantly remind each other of&#151our differences. These expressions of difference, as discussed in part one, are at their root signifiers of belonging with the groups that each of us identifies with the most.  The bonding is happening within these groups, but we’re increasingly disinterested in crossing bridges between groups.

This is what a fragmented society looks like.

To be clear, I am not making a value judgment about this fragmentation. This is not a nostalgic rant longing for the era of a more homogenous-seeming working class. Rather, I am attempting to accurately assess our contemporary terrain, for the purpose of working toward a strategy that makes sense for our context; ideally, a winning strategy for progressives. I believe that the fragmented, heterogeneous composition of our society makes populist alignments absolutely indispensable, if we want to build the kind of collective power that can rein in the very rich and powerful and bring about meaningful progressive change.

Fortunately for this discussion, we have some very powerful, very contemporary examples of such populist alignments, which I’m leading up to…

(For a deeper discussion of how advanced industrialized societies became so fragmented, read anything by Ronald Inglehart, or check out Bill Bishop’s book The Big Sort, or read my review of it.)

PolitiFacts’ Pants On Fire: Who Will Fact-Check The Fact-Checkers? Part 2: Dogs Are Cats

“According to Politifact if I kill my Grandmother’s cat named ‘Boots’ and then give her a dog named ‘Boots’; I have never killed the cat.” — Commentator Grump Demo @ Talking Points Memo

This is Part 2 in a diary series on ersatz “fact-checking”. Part One dealt with PolitiFact lying about Rachel Maddow about Wisconsin’s ginned-up “budget crisis”.  This part deals with PolitiFact AND Columbia Journalism Review Online lying about the GOP’s attempt to end Medicare. Part 3 will discuss the backstory of fraudulent GOP politics which PolitiFact is now actively supporting.

In Part 1, I dealt with an incident in which PolitiFact blatantly lied about what Rachel Maddow said about GOP Governor Scott Walker’s “budget crisis” charade.  The heart of Maddow’s argument-which PolitiFact’s attack on her completely buried–was that the entire “budget crisis” narrative was bogus.  It was not–as PolitiFact falsely alleged–that Walker had created the very crisis he was then trying to fix, as these applied to two different budget cycles.  But it was that the crisis was not about the budget, since Walker’s first actions were to cut almost the same amount of taxes in January that he then turned around screamed about being a catastrophic shortfall in February.  

This sort of double-dealing does not have to apply to the exact same budget cycle in order to be patently hypocritical and dishonest.  It only needs to be touted as imperative, to the exclusion of all other considerations–one time with one end in mind, the other time with a directly contradictory end in mind.  This sort of politics is blatantly fraudulent.  It represents an attempt to ram through unpopular policies based on denying the existence of more popular and more rational alternatives.  When a so-called “fact-checker” steps in to protect a political fraudster from being exposed for what they are up to, then the ersatz “fact-checker” becomes an accomplice to fraud.  That is what PolitiFact has now become.  The attack on Rachel Maddow was the first such example, but now we have another, much broader one, in which PolitiFact has become an accomplice the GOP’s latest attempt to dismantle America’s most popular and important welfare state programs.  

Specifically, PolitiFact attacked this rare example of a Democratic ad that aggressively attacks the GOP’s assault on the American middle class:

In their pseudo-debunking, PolitiFact spins the question exactly as Paul Ryan would want them to:

“So do grandparents have to go back to work because of a Republican vote? Not really.”

There are at least three different forms of deception involved in how PolitiFact is spinning this.  The first follows Ryan’s plan exactly:  Republicans know damned well that older voters vote in much higher numbers than other voters, that they’re the only age group that’s reliably Republican recently, and that they pay attention to Social Security and Medicare.  So, naturally, they’ve designed their program not to kick in for current recipients, or those who will enter the program for the next 10 years.  This isn’t about deficit reduction (particularly since Ryan’s plan doesn’t reduce the deficit until far in the future): it’s about divide-and-conquer and political survival for the GOP.  If older voters can be convinced not think about anyone else, then the GOP may have a winner on its hands-and PolitiFact is out there giving the GOP all the help it can muster.

Here’s a direct quote from PolitiFact’s argument:

Still another problem with the ad involves who’s immediately affected by the Republican proposal. In one scene, the ad shows a senior citizen pushing a walker behind a lawn mower. A teenager looking on eats an apple and says, “You missed a spot.” In reality, people 55 and older won’t see changes under the Ryan plan. It’s actually that teenager — or anyone else 54 or younger — who would pay extra money when they are older.

The second deception is that there’s still going to be a program called “Medicare”, so Republicans and PolitiFact say that means that Medicare isn’t going to be ended.  

This reminds me of the question, “How many legs does a dog have, if you call its tail a leg?”  The answer is four: It doesn’t matter what you call its tail-it’s still not a leg.  

In this case, Medicare is guaranteed universal medical insurance for life.  The GOP plan will end that.  Ergo, it is ending Medicare.  It doesn’t matter what you call Ryan’s replacement plan-it’s still not Medicare.  It’s still a tail, not a leg.  But PolitiFact has a neat rhetorical trick to turn reality upside-down:

Democrats, including Obama, have said the plan would end Medicare “as we know it,” a critical qualifier. But the 30-second ad from the DCCC makes a sweeping claim without that important qualifier .

Presto-change-o!  Black is white!  Those who deceive consistently are rewarded, while those who are sometimes painstakingly specific are penalized whenever they revert to ordinary plain speaking.

But believe it or not, the third deception is even more ludicrous.  To wit: since the GOP House vote doesn’t immediately become law, the Republicans haven’t actually voted to end Medicare.  This is like saying that a jury finding someone guilty of murder and sentencing them to die hasn’t actually sentenced them to death, because the verdict can still be appealed,  and even if the appeal is lost, there is still a chance for clemency.  Plus, they could always die of natural causes, or be killed in a prison fight. Think I’m being silly?  Here’s what PolitiFact itself said:

And finally, the ad neglects another critical fact: The Republicans voted on a budget resolution that states policy preferences, but the vote did not actually change Medicare, much less end it. As we’ve noted before in previous fact-checks, budget resolutions are non-binding documents that cannot be viewed as the equivalent of legislation that establishes law. Deeply desiring something and accomplishing it are different.

We ran this by Richard Kaplan, an elder law expert at the University of Illinois, who agreed the Republicans have not voted to end Medicare.

“Nobody voted to end it,” he said. “They voted to hopefully change it one day, when they get a chance, but they would need a Republican-dominated Senate and a Republican president, neither of which they have.”

“It’s not as if this is of no consequence. But it doesn’t change Medicare,” he said.

Reporting for Talking Points Memo, Brian Bueler wrote:

If Democrats proposed to turn Medicare into a system that only provided free veterinary services to seniors, would Republicans be lying to say Dems wanted to “end Medicare,” without including the caveat “as we know it”?

Of course not. But that’s more or less the charge PolitiFact is leveling at Democrats over a new DCCC ad (below) which flatly charges Republicans with proposing to “end Medicare.” The House GOP budget, which passed with all but two GOP votes over unanimous Democratic opposition, would over time replace the single-payer, government-run Medicare program with a different system that subsidizes private insurance plans for beneficiaries. Those subsidies would work like vouchers — they would increase in value year-on-year at a much slower pace than the rate of the rise of health care costs, thus leaving seniors exposed to increasing costs as time goes on.

Republicans call this new health insurance system “Medicare.” But it’s a completely different program from today’s Medicare. PolitiFact doesn’t see it that way.

But commentator Grump Demo put it much more succinctly:

According to Politifact if I kill my Grandmother’s cat named “Boots” and then give her a dog named “Boots”; I have never killed the cat.

Exactly!

TPM editor/publisher Josh Marshall put it more diplomatically:

There’s always a bit of a problem with self-appointed media fact-checkers: what if they come to a topic with very little knowledge of the subject and are easily duped? Or what if they assume on its face that every dramatic sounding claim must be false just because, well, it sounds a little dramatic and people should agree to talk about things reasonably?

That’s what we see to have today with Politifact’s take on a Democratic party ad which claims that the Republican budget plan “ends Medicare.” Politifact’s argument is that since there will still be a program and that it will be labeled “Medicare” that, heck, it can’t have ended since it’s still there. That may sound too credulous. But it’s about that bad. If my memory serves — and perhaps someone can find the link for me — Politifact was similarly bamboozled by President Bush’s efforts to partially phase out Social Security.

This isn’t just bad fact-checking.  This is anti-fact-checking.  Unless, of course, you mean “checking” facts in the sense of “checking” in ice hockey or chess.

But it gets even worse.  Following up on PolitiFact, the usually excellent Columbia Journalism Review has decided to double down on this nonsense, as also commented on by Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo.  CJR online makes the same stupid arguments, to which Marshall ultimately responds:

CJR Online has followed up with an analysis of Politifact’s epic Medicare fail using all the he said/she said false equivalence and special pleading of the original. As I said in the first case, knowing how Medicare works, its history and how its replacement would work is really key to be being able to do this kind of analysis. And the establishment, disinterested mode of deprecating definitive statements and trying to split every difference is really a liability in these cases, not an advantage.

Now, the CJR piece makes a number of arguments, not just the one I’m going to excerpt. But it does give you a taste of the style of reasoning …

Did Republicans vote to ‘end Medicare’?

Err, not really. As already mentioned, Republicans did not, as the ad suggests, vote to end Medicare. Rather, they voted–in the lower house–for a plan that would change Medicare, were it to reach the president’s desk and be signed into law. Which it won’t. The ad mentions none of this, instead leaving its bold claim hanging like a piñata for PolitiFact’s batsmen.

….

By that standard, Bernie Sanders doesn’t really support single-payer because it’s never going to become law.

The root problem here is that American journalism hasn’t actually cared about the truth in a very, very long time–if ever.  (The sports page excluded, of course!  Just try any of this malarky with the daily box scores, and see how long you last.)  They care nothing about the substance of truth–only about a process that produces supposedly truth-like statements, such as quotes from “reputable sources” and the like.

In fact, as explained quite simply in Good News, Bad News: Journalism Ethics And The Public Interest, by Jeremy Iggers, journalistic “objectivity” came into vogue when advertising eclipsed subscriptions as the main source of income for publications, because advertisers wanted as large an audience as possible–and wanted them in a receptive mood for their advertising.  Disturbing and/or controversial facts were not wanted–not because they were false, but arguably for the exactly opposite reason: because their truth gets in the way of business as usual.  And that underlying “logic” is precisely what we see playing out here today.

In Part 3, I take a quick look back the last three decades in fraudulent rightwing politics, and how we got to our present sorry state.

Understanding Anti-Immigrant America: Developing a Gramscian Framework, part I

“For twenty years we must stop this brain from functioning.” These were the words of the prosecutor who presided at the trial of Antonio Gramsci in 1926. Mussolini had just finished consolidating fascist control over the government and police apparatus. Gramsci, rapidly rising in the socialist party ranks, was a thorn on fascist Italy’s side. An authoritarian solution to the problem was to silence him.

The irony of history was that imprisonment did anything but silence him. Despite his decade-long detention until right before his death, and despite his deteriorating health, Gramsci poured his creative intellect into the production of a dense collection of essays and reflections, heavily lined with coded language to evade the prison censor. Today they are referred to as “The Prison Notebooks.” This manuscript became an important contribution to the Marxist oeuvre in particular, and to the tools we have to understand and change society, in general.

What did “this brain” bring to the table? This article and the next one will explain some of Gramsci’s main contributions. Using this theoretical framework, the third article in this series will use Gramsci’s concepts to analyze the anti-immigrant movement and specifically, its relationship to the tea party.  

As a European political revolutionary living in the first third of the twentieth century, Gramsci was puzzled by the following: why had massive social change occurred in Russia while similar events had failed to transpire in Western Europe? In the Prison Notebooks, he argued that the answer lay with civil society. In a word, the “west” had a developed civil society while the “east” did not. Civil society makes a society more resilient to revolutionary change.

Classical Marxism had not taken the concept of “civil society” very seriously. According to Marx, there is the state-the superstructure consisting of political and ideological practice-and then there is the economic base-the technical division of labor and the social relations people entered into in order to produce what is needed to live and reproduce. But for Gramsci, civil society needed to be conceptually distinguished from these two things. Civil society is, however, still part of the “superstructure” along with the state:

What we can do, for the moment, is to fix two major superstructural ‘levels’: the one that can be called ‘civil society,’ that is the ensemble of organisms commonly called ‘private,’ and that of ‘political society’ or ‘the State’ (12, , all page citations refer to Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. by Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith).

Within the superstructure, there is the state consisting of the police, the army and other instruments of violence, and there is civil society, composed of voluntary associations, the media, unions, private educational institutions, political parties, religious institutions and other private entities. The language of the state is coercion; the language of civil society is ideas. The presence of a civil society complicates a society and fortifies it against change. Gramsci’s own military metaphors illustrate this conceptualization best:  

In Russia the State was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relation between State and civil society, and when the State trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The State was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks (238).

What happens when there is a civil society–this “system of fortresses and earthworks”–and there is a crisis, such as an economic recession?

The superstructures of civil society are like the trench-systems of modern warfare. In war it would sometimes happen that a fierce artillery attack seemed to have destroyed the enemy’s entire defensive system, whereas in fact it had only destroyed the outer perimeter…the same thing happens in politics, during the great economic crisis. A crisis cannot give the attacking forces the ability to organize with lightening speed in time and space; still less can it endow them with fighting spirit. Similarly, the defenders are not demoralized, nor do they lose faith in their own strength or their own future (235)

A developed civil society makes a society more complicated and less vulnerable to the cycles of crisis inherent in capitalism. Moreover, such a society necessitates a particular type of political strategy of rule. The dominant class exercises power

[…] in two ways, as ‘domination’ and as ‘intellectual and moral leadership.’ A social group dominates antagonistic groups, which it tends to ‘liquidate’ or to subjugate perhaps even by armed force; it leads kindred and allied groups. A social group can, indeed, must already exercise ‘leadership’ before winning governmental power…it subsequently becomes dominant when it exercises power, but even if it holds it firmly in its grasp, it must continue to ‘lead’ as well (57-8).

According to Gramsci, intellectual and moral leadership is separate from but just as necessary for a social group to rule as coercion. He referred to this “leadership” as “hegemony,” and a group that exercised it as a “hegemonic” group. More concretely, hegemony is the ability to articulate a specific (class) interest as the interest of the whole, and in that way, win the consent of other groups.

For example, hospital workers who want to protest their workload could frame their message in many ways. They could simply say that they want reduced workloads or improved working conditions. Or they could make their message appeal to a broader audience outside of their particular workplace, and even their line of work. They may frame their message as wanting to improve the quality of patient care in order to create healthier communities. Such a message takes a specific purpose and generalizes it.

Examples of capital pursuing hegemony are more extensive. One important battle corporations constantly engage in is the fight against taxes. Their messages try to show that what’s good for the corporation is good for the community by arguing that the corporation is a job creator. From that claim, they may successfully make the case that tax breaks on corporations contribute to a community’s vibrancy by creating jobs and improving people’s standards of living.

But hegemony is not just about ideas. Dominant groups, to ensure consent to their class rule, must also grant economic and political concessions to subordinate groups.  A corporation that is draining a community of its resources may occasionally create scholarships or sponsor other community-targeted programs in order to improve relations with subordinate groups.

In sum, hegemony is a political strategy required by the presence of a civil society. Bourgeois class rule in contemporary capitalist society requires the exercise of repression (through the state) but also winning the consent of subordinate groups. Gramsci realized that western European societies, by contrast to Tsarist Russia, were not vulnerable to the same type of direct overthrow of government. That is, it wasn’t enough to disassemble the repressive apparatus of the state. Massive social change in the west would require a prolonged battle for hegemony in the institutions of civil society. It would require a dismantling of the existing intellectual-moral leadership, through the creation of an alternative one.

In the next two posts I will continue to sketch out the Gramscian framework and then use it to illuminate the methods of the contemporary anti-immigrant movement in the US.

PolitiFacts’ Pants On Fire: Who Will Fact-Check The Fact-Checkers? Part I: Rachel Maddow Calls Foul

In February, PolitiFact said that Rachel Maddow lied about Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. But in making their argument, PolitiFact itself lied about what Rachel Maddow actually said.  In fact, they completely misrepresented and distracted from her actual argument.  Thus, they materially helped support the GOP’s fraudulent narrative about what was going on in Wisconsin.  Now PolitiFact is at it again, supporting the GOP’s fraudulent narrative that they’re “saving” Medicare by doing away with it and replacing it with an inadequate private voucher-like system.  When Democrats ran an ad saying that Republicans in Congress voted to end Medicare, PolitiFact rated it “Pants on Fire.”  But PolitiFact itself is the one who’s lying.  It has now turned into the exact OPPOSITE of what it pretends to be. In this 3-part diary series, I look at these two examples, and then discuss the backstory of fraudulent GOP politics which PolitiFact is now actively supporting.

On Feb 17, during the first week of massive protests in Wisconsin, Rachel Maddow did a segment (transcript here) in which she fundamentally challenged the dominant narrative about what was going on in the state. “It’s Not About the Budget” was her theme in that segment, and it was a theme that she would return to again and again in subsequent programs-both about Wisconsin, and about GOP shenanigans elsewhere as well..  

Her logic behind her argument was fairly straightforward:  If the battle in Wisconsin was over a budget crisis, then at a minimum, (a) there ought to actually be a budget crisis and (b) the actions taken ought to be about resolving that crisis.  But both these propositions were false.  What was not in doubt is that public employee union’s political power would be severely undermined, and public employee unions were the only significant institutional power left supporting the Democratic Party in the post-Citizens United era.

In presenting her case, Maddow did make one broad claim that was mistaken, because it relied on data that needed more interpretation.  What’s more, that occurred at the very beginning of the segment. But that lead-in was not implicated in the central logic of her argument.  Indeed, there was other information she did not address that further supported her argument (more on that below), and the central thrust of her argument was not only substantially true, but also vitally important for an accurate understanding of what was actually happening in Wisconsin and elsewhere.  

The basic truth of Maddows’ analysis was clearly confirmed within a matter of days, when the public employee unions in question agreed to all the financial concessions being asked of them, but demanded that non-financial changes in state law be dropped from the “budget repair ” legislation-and the Republicans refused. From that point forward, it was no longer deniable that the Wisconsin “budget crisis” was not about the budget at all: it was about destroying the targeted public employee unions as political actors.

And yet, on February 18, the “fact-checking” organization PolitiFact ignored the main substance of Maddow’s argument-as well as her very own words and claimed that Maddow’s take was “false” because she lead off by saying, “Despite what you may have heard about Wisconsin’s finances, Wisconsin is on track to have a budget surplus this year.”  However, PolitiFact both ignored the main thrust of Maddow’s argument and ignored the fact that Maddow later said, ” Even though the state had started the year on track to have a budget surplus-now, there is, in fact, a $137 million budget shortfall.”  

In fact, PolitiFact went out of its way to create a false narrative about what Maddow had said, conflating her reporting with “A volley of e-mails, blog posts and inquiries to reporters [that] followed a  Madison Capital Times editorial on Feb. 16, 2011, that said no state budget deficit exists for 2010-’11 — or if it does, it’s the fault of Walker and the Republicans in the Legislature.”

It’s important to note that I’m bending over backward to be fair to PolitiFact here, even though they showed no such consideration for Maddow.  At the root of whatever genuine controversy exists, there was a state-level CBO-like document stating that Wisconsin had a modest budget surplus at the beginning of the year-which was cited by the above-mentioned Capital Times editorial. However, this was only part of the analysis, which evidently is always less clear-cut than actual CBO documents are.  So PolitiFact had a point, if their only criticism of Maddow was that she had mistakenly taken part of the admittedly unclear document to represent the entire budget outlook.

However, that was not what PolitiFact actually argued–nor was it in any way central to Maddow’s actual argument. Instead, they made at least two demonstrably false claims: The first, implicit, that Maddow never acknowledged there was a budget shortfall, and the second, explicit, that Maddow blamed the 2010 shortfall on actions Walker initiated in January, which only impacted the 2011 budget.

Maddow’s executive produce, Bill Wolf, wrote to PolitiFact, seeking a correction on February 21, by which time the union’s wage and benefits concessions had already been rejected by Walker and the GOP, thus validating the main thrust of Maddow’s argument.  In part, Wolff said:

In your effort to challenge a Capital Times editorial you have mistakenly ascribed the argument therein to Rachel Maddow. In so doing, you have half-quoted her in one instance, misquoted her in another, and misrepresented her overall.

Ms. Maddow is well aware of the Wisconsin budget shortfall. She said so just a few sentences after the line you decided to single out for “truthometry”:

“Even though the state had started the year on track to have a budget surplus-now, there is, in fact, a $137 million budget shortfall.”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41669030/ns/msnbc_tv-rachel_maddow_show/

To suggest — as your headline does — that we somehow neglected to report on the state’s real budget shortfall is absolutely erroneous. 

We recognize the journalistic value in writing a “where did the budget shortfall come from” piece, but, if you need a bogeyman to deny the existence of the shortfall so you can make your case in the Politifact truth-o-meter gotcha format, you should pick someone who didn’t explicitly say, “there is, in fact, a … shortfall.”

Your piece concludes with this summary:

“There should be no debate on whether or not there is a shortfall … We rate Maddow’s take False”. 

There isn’t any debate on that.  To suggest that we stated otherwise — while simultaneously leaving out a key part of our report — is a mistake on your part that damages the reputation of Ms. Maddow and MSNBC and therefore warrants immediate remedy.  Ignoring that Maddow did state the facts correctly is irresponsible and inaccurate and must be corrected.

More egregious, however, is Politifact’s false assertion– stated as fact, over and over again– that our report blamed Governor Scott Walker and the Republican-led legislature for the current budget shortfall: 

“She added a kicker that is also making the rounds: Walker and fellow Republicans in the Legislature this year gave away $140 million in business tax breaks — so if there is a deficit projected of $137 million, they created it.”

That synopsis of our report is a complete fabrication. Maddow never stated — not once– that Governor Walker’s tax breaks were the direct cause of the budget deficit this year. 

To state unequivocally — as you do here — that Maddow blamed Governor Walker directly for the current budget shortfall is a complete and utter distortion.  And, yet, it’s an assertion that is made repeatedly throughout your post….

Later in that same email, Wolf went on to explain how completely PolitiFact had misunderstood the segment:

The point of that whole introduction to the show is that the budget isn’t the real issue.  That’s why Maddow says, “What’s happening in Wisconsin right now is not about a budget.” The point of the segment is not to correct the governor’s math because it’s not about the budget. She’s not trying to find blame for the budget shortfall because — again — it’s not about the budget.  Maddow’s argument is that one way we know it’s not about the budget is that the governor was willing to give away roughly the same amount as this year’s possible shortfall. So, regardless of what the Governor says, the shortfall must not be so dire…

PolitiFact never responded to The Rachel Maddow Show’s request for a correction-despite a second email from Wolf, after a response from the media outlet that posted PolitiFact’s “analysis”. As a result, The Rachel Maddow Show later devoted a segment to debunking PoltiFact’s false accusation-and it was a doozy.  But it’s not enough to leave such debunking up to the aggrieved party alone.  When so-called “fact-checkers” become part of the propaganda war they’re supposed to be refereeing, everyone has an interest in crying foul.

So, just to be perfectly clear, here is a direct quote from the transcript of Maddow’s Feb 17 program, which PolitiFact severely misrepresented:

The state is not bankrupt.  Even though the state had started the year on track to have a budget surplus-now, there is, in fact, a $137 million budget shortfall.  Republican Governor Scott Walker, coincidentally, has given away $140 million worth of business tax breaks since he came into office.

Hey, wait.  That’s about exactly the size of the shortfall.

What is happening in Wisconsin right now has absolutely nothing to do with public workers.  The headline here, the way this keeps getting shorthanded, is workers angry after state is forced by budget crisis to crack down.

That’s not what’s going on.  The state is not being forced to crack down.  A lot of states do have budget crises right now, but heading into this year, Wisconsin was not one of them.

As is perfectly clear from the above, (a) Maddow does say that there is shortfall-contrary to PolitiFact’s claim;  (b) she does not say that the $140 million in business tax cuts caused the $137 budget shortfall, only that the two are “about exactly” the same size.  Bill Wolf’s email is spot on.

Perhaps a bit less clear-but equally important for the big picture, Maddow is drawing a distinction between a $137 million shortfall, and a full-blown budget crisis.  This is a very sensible distinction for anyone familiar with the overall landscape of state budget problems. In fact, a November 2010 “State Budget Update” from the National Conference of State Legislators said there were no major crises looming for 2010 budgets, though further cuts were going to be required for 2011 and 2012.  Its only mention of Wisconsin involved higher-than-anticipated cigarette tax revenues, along with Ohio and Pennsylvania.  Not only that, Walker’s “budget repair” bill actually contained a single non-controversial item to restructure Wisconsin’s debt that all by itself would have closed the shortfall without requiring any labor concessions whatsoever.  Indeed, the press release for the “budget repair” bill clearly stated:

“The budget repair will also restructure the state debt, lowering the state’s interest rate, saving the state $165 million.”

Yet, somehow all the major media outlets managed to overlook this, an astounding failure of basic journalism that I pointed out in an email quoted at length by Sam Smith at Scholars and Rouges (“Journalism Accomplished: why aren’t news organizations telling the whole truth in Wisconsin and why aren’t the state’s conservatives demanding secession?”)

If a single non-controversial action can close a budget shortfall, there is clearly no sense in which the shortfall itself is a crisis.  The only crisis is a political one-and that is precisely the main thrust of Maddow’s reporting and analysis.  It’s bad enough that PolitiFact focused on a relatively inconsequential part of what Maddow said, and worse still that PolitiFact lied about what Maddow said on air in the heart of her argument.  But worst of all was the fact that PolitiFact completely obfuscated the most important thing that Maddow said-and that virtually everyone else in the commentariat had missed: That the “crisis” was political, not economic, and that it was manufactured by the Republicans.

Here’s Maddow’s on-air refutation of PolitiFact’s false accusation:

In Part II, I look at PolitiFact’s attack on Democrats for correctly charging that Congressional Republicans had voted to end Medicare.