A Time of Monsters

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”

Dr. Heather Cox Richardson begins last night’s “Letter from an American,” which discusses the chaos of the last few days, with a quote from the Marxist philosopher and Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, who died as a prisoner of the fascist Benito Mussolini. The comment appears in Mr. Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks.

Mr. Gramsci is best known for his theory of cultural hegemony, which describes how the state and the ruling capitalist class — known to us as corporations — use cultural institutions to maintain power. The dominant or hegemonic culture propagates its values and norms so effectively (through education, the news media, and popular culture) that they become the “common sense” values of the majority — in our case, the White majority — which maintains the status quo of the ruling class.

Cultural hegemony is valuable to the ruling class because it minimizes the need for coercive force to maintain order. The ruling class doesn’t need coercion to control White Americans, because Whites subscribe to ruling class values. Black Americans, however, are different: the ruling class and White Americans generally view Black Americans with suspicion, so Black Americans have always been the subjects of coercive forces.

As Dr. Cornell West noted (and in so doing, identified the hegemonic culture of America):

“The system cannot reform itself. We’ve tried black faces in high places. Too often our black politicians, professional class, middle class become too accommodated to the capitalist economy, too accommodated to a militarized nation-state, too accommodated to the market-driven culture of celebrities, status, power, fame, all that superficial stuff that means so much to so many fellow citizens.”

Now White Americans have pushed and pushed and pushed and Black Americans are rising yet again (White culture never learns) to answer the poet Langston Hughes’ question in Harlem:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore —

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over —

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?