So I am in a mood. One of those moods where I need something big and chewy for my brain to work over for a bit. And when I’m in the big chewy brain moods, I tend to lose the snarky.
So instead I thought I would write about one of my favorite political theories- Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony or Gramscian Hegemony.
Gramsci was an Italian socialist (I have a thing for Italian socialists, I also love Pasolini films). He had some awesome ideas about how everyone is an intellectual in that we all use intellect and reason to survive, but not all of us work as intellectuals. For a brilliant man, he was way more of the people than your average high minded intellectual revolutionary.
But back to cultural hegemony, which is the idea that the working class will adopt beliefs that benefit the upper class as “common sense”. We see this all the time here in the way that poor white southerners will vote against their own best interest by voting for the Republican party. We see it in the way that people bitch over paying taxes and refuse to acknowledge the good that taxes actually provide. We see it in the way people who wait months for a check up with their primary care doc in an HMO freak out that universal health care will mean long waits for doctors appointments. We see it in the way that people complain about funding schools in their neighborhoods when they don’t have school aged children (even though better schools directly effect their property value whether they have children or not).
And with this new election, we will see it in the supporters of McCain. We all ready know what a McCain economy will look like. We will see hundreds of thousands of foreclosed homeowners blamed for their misfortunes (when failures that large are ones of the system and not the individual) and the homeowners will believe that it was their own fault they they lost their homes. We will see medical costs skyrocket to the point where health care is 20 percent of GDP, while the number of people who actually have insurance continues to decline. Layoffs will be standard while unemployment will run out (but we don’t count people who have been unemployed so long that they’ve used all their benefits up as unemployed. Officially they are no longer looking for work). The rich will become much richer and the poor will join the military because the only job they can get is as fodder for the 100 year Iraq war. Gas and food and heating costs will continue to skyrocket and oil companies will drill in Alaska and North Dakota and anywhere else they want because we will be so desperate for some kind of relief form high prices. And we will think all these things make sense. And the things that create cognitive dissonance we will dismiss because it doesn’t fit with the “common sense” narrative.
So when you hear things that are supposed to be common sense you need to ask yourself who benefits from this bit of common sense. And it doesn’t just apply to economics. Common sense says that women shouldn’t walk alone at night or they will get raped (less than 30 percent of all rapes are committed by strangers, btw). The only people that benefit by this logic are rapists, because they have an excuse for raping women who don’t use common sense. How about- it’s common sense that women are more nurturing than men. Who benefits from that? Men mostly, it means they don’t have to do as much care work as women because common sense says that women are better at it.
Common sense is rarely common or sensible.