Biden Exits; Whither 'Hegemony'; What is 'Isolationism?'

The Time of Monsters?

You may have noticed that your regular “Reading, Watching” newsletter didn’t come yesterday. Rather than doing that this week, I’m going to try to write my thoughts about a few current events and connect them with interesting readings, hopefully weaving it all together somewhat.

Here’s what I’m gonna try to get to this morning:

• The Biden denouement and the consequent conspiracy thinking

• Thinking about Gramsci’s concept of hegemonic crisis and the state of politics

• Tim Barker on the misuse of the term “isolationism” and Vance’s foreign policy

Coming later this week I’m going to try to make sense of the apparent contradiction between the Silicon Valley defection and Vance’s openness to anti-trust. Thiel, of course, is an open advocate of monopoly capitalism and Lina Khan is not the favorite person of too many people at the highest rungs of the capitalist class. But more on that later.

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Well, it finally happened. He’s dropping out of the race. What now? Although the idea of an open convention with delegates duking it out on the floor sounds fun and old school, it’s looks like the Democratic party will arrange the swift delivery of the nomination to Kamala Harris. There are good reasons for this: she has the most small-d democratic legitimacy. She was understood to be Biden’s VP pick when he won whatever passed for a primary this past year and as part of a national ticket, she has received millions of votes of Americans who evidently thought it would be okay if she had to become president someday. Her selection would tamp down some of the criticism of Biden’s ouster, namely that it was a kind of conspiracy orchestrated by the party elite, the media, Hollywood, and big donors. AOC added to this chorus with talk of a “business coup” in her infamous Instagram live appearance, which I took to be a forgivable piece of mild demagoguery.

What were AOC and Bernie up to? I’m not sure it was that stupid as people think. I believe they realized Biden badly needed friends and they could step in at the right time and get what they wanted. They are not leaders of a well-funded caucus. They represent a dissident strain in American politics. And they have to pick their spots. Backing a leader in a crisis situation and then coming away with a lot of what you want is the kind of move they need to jump on opportunistically. What did they have to lose? I think they reckoned very little, but we’ll see what happens. I imagine they understood there was a strong possibility there was a Biden-less future and gamed out what would happen then. They may be in a good position now in regard to whomever comes next. They can say, “Joe promised all this, what are you gonna for us?” They also may have miscalculated, but I doubt they risked much more than egg on their face among people who pay too much attention to politics and understand it too little. Politics is all about judgment calls, there are no sure things, which brings us back to the “coup” business.

You would think that the evidence of the senses would be enough to convince people that Biden was not up to the task. But in politics truth holds very little sway: the political domain is ruled by opinion. Adopted for any number of reasons, a new current of opinion can unify and divide sections of the population, creating new constituencies. Anti-Biden Democrats cut across the far left to the center-right. It just seemed like commonsense. But there is a contingent that disagrees, that sees in the anti-Biden push the panicky behavior of politically inept elites, or even worse, a deliberate attempt to sideline a candidate for nefarious reason: the pro-business side of the party going after a proven defender of labor and scourge of monopolists. They view this move as “undemocratic.” They view the anti-Biden wing as succumbing to or encouraging a media-driven “narrative.” I do not find this opinion or set of opinions to be well-founded. First of all, most polling showed that both Democratic and independent voters had concerns about Biden’s age and then the elite only responded to public opinion with the debates. Second, the party brass put their finger on the scale for Biden in the first place, judging (correctly it turned out) he had the best chance to win. Third, if you want to talk about unrepresentative conspiracies, look at the pathetic little camarilla around Biden that was apparently feeding him false information. Fourth, the determinative function of the primary process is relatively new, the parties once picked candidates and the “democratization” of the parties has been a mixed blessing.

Our democracy is a representative one, it is a democratic republic: the broad public delegates power to a smaller body of responsible leaders. A situation where the party, in the widest sense of term, of its senior elected officials, intellectuals, media figures, and magnates deciding to change course in the face of new information does not seem to me like a bad thing. It seems rational: they have a stake in the party winning and they do not want to concede the election. Donors may have their own purses at heart in the final analysis but they are also ideological liberals who want the Democrats to win: the democratic coalition has already made ample room for their interests in its preexisting compromise between its factions. As Gramsci wrote, always looking for hidden, economic motives often leads to serious errors in political judgment. The “hysteria” or “panic” some condemn looks to me like the process of democratic will formation and consensus. It seems like an instance of collective decision-making that’s in principle not so different from having elected officials in the first place. Arguments were made in public. Not everything that doesn’t go to an instant plebiscite is a conspiracy. And some parts of any deliberation are inherently “conspiratorial” because they take place behind closed doors. It seems more like some measure of intra-party democracy took place, unlike in the GOP, where Trump rules absolutely.

It’s interesting to note that the Democratic Party, which is more traditional in having a stronger internal leadership is more small-d democratic than the Republicans, whose primary system elevated an outsider to the dominant figure in the party, but one who to this point can’t win a national majority. Instead he tried to initiate a coup to make up for that weakness. Again, our system is, by necessity, a mixture of representation and the plebiscite: They balance one another. If your concern is democracy as such, it’s very clear which party has more fidelity to that ideal. One party says, in the face of a loss, “We’ll try a better candidate;” the other party says, “The vote itself is fraudulent and we reject it.”

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Speaking of parties as expressions of collective will, in his Chartbook newsletter,

Adam Tooze

wrote a very interesting critique of the application of Gramsci’s theory of the “crisis of hegemony” and the idea that we are in “an interregnum [where] a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” I suggest you read it. But I think it is a ultimately misinterpretation of what Gramsci’s talking about. I have some personal stake in this as well. Although I’m sure Professor Tooze is unaware of the fact, I use the concept of the crisis of hegemony and the interregnum in my own book to frame the emergence of figures like David Duke, Pat Buchanan, and Ross Perot, and ultimately, Trump.

Here’s what Tooze writes:

"The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

For many commentators, this is the phrase that sums up the current crisis of world politics and world power. In a truly surprising twist of the world spirit, lines from Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci have become one of the soundbites of the early 21st-century.

In #2 of the Notes on Hegemony I want to put this conceptualization of our current crisis in question. Gramsci’s notion of interregnum may have served him to illuminate his immediate context. But, it transmits to our era a philosophy of history that actually obscures how we got from his moment of writing to our present day. It thus stands in the way of thinking hard about the challenges and opportunities of our current moment.

The currency of Gramsci’s lines today today should give us pause. After all, if we take Antonio Gramsci seriously as a historical thinker, as we absolutely must, we should also acknowledge the huge gulf that separates him from the present. He was a Communist who paid with his life for his commitment to the cause of world revolution. His lines on interregnum, now the stock in trade of after dinner speeches and think tank meetings, were composed in November 1930 in a fascist jail. Gramsci was thirty-nine. He would die at 46, his fragile health irrevocably broken by harsh imprisonment.

With morbid symptoms Gramsci may have been referring to fascism. Alternatively, he may have been criticizing the turn to the ultraleft of the Italian Communist party under pressure from Moscow. His medical language evokes Lenin’s famous denunciation of left communism as an “infantile disorder”.

The point about historical context is well taken. But we should also look right at the direct context, or rather, the text surrounding that famous phrase and give it a close reading. Here’s the section of the Prison Notebooks where it appears.

That aspect of the modern crisis which is bemoaned as a "wave of materialism" is related to what is called the "crisis of authority". If the ruling class has lost its consensus, i.e. is no longer "leading" but only "dominant", exercising coercive force alone, this means precisely that the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies, and no longer believe what they used to believe previously, etc. The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. N.B. this paragraph should be completed by some observations which I made on the so-called "problem of the younger generation"81-a problem caused by the "crisis of authority" of the old generations in power, and by the mechanical impediment that has been imposed on those who could exercise hegemony, which prevents them from carrying out their mission.

Here as elsewhere, hegemony is associated with concepts like leadership, consensus, and persuasion rather than domination or coercion. The crisis of hegemony is when the old system of consensus or common sense breaks down and the ruling class’s position on top no longer appears rational or defensible from the point of view of broader interests. Note how this could be solved by new generation of leadership, but they are being stymied by the old leaders who want to retain power. Let’s look elsewhere where he talks about this “crisis of authority” to get a better sense of what Gramsci means:

At a certain point in their historical lives, social classes become detached from their traditional parties. In other words, the traditional parties in that particular organisational form, with the particular men who constitute, represent, and lead them, are no longer recognised by their class (or fraction of a class) as its expres­sion. When such crises occur, the immediate situation becomes delicate and dangerous, because the field is open for violent solu­tions, for the activities of unknown forces, represented by charismatic "men of destiny".

Sometimes the crisis finds an “organic solution,” which is the creation of a new party or the reconfiguration of an old one, a realignment: a new coalition under the leadership of a class or part of a class that has a convincing story about national direction and shared interests. When it doesn’t have an organic solution it can lead to what Gramsci calls “Caesarism” or “Bonapartism:”

When the crisis does not find this organic solution, but that of the charismatic leader, it means that a static equilibrium exists (whose factors may be disparate, but in which the decisive one is the immaturity of the progressive forces) ; it means that no group, neither the conservatives nor the progressives, has the strength for victory, and that even the conservative group needs a master.

Basically, an opportunistic adventurer can enter into the picture and take over. This is not a hegemonic political formation: it relies on force not consent. It’s a politics that tries to take advantage of and make up for the lack of a hegemonic solution. Clearly he is talking about Mussolini, but he views Mussolini in a sequence of “coup-making” figures like Napoleon III, General Boulanger, and the anti-Dreyfusards. Tooze charges Gramsci’s concept with having an organic conception that is overly reassuring: the pathological will pass and the normal will return. But the “morbid symptoms” and “birth” business is a metaphor; Tooze is taking it too literally by saying Gramsci imposes a natural schema on historical development. Taking account for the many contingencies of actual politics and history against a too deterministic Marxism is exactly what Gramsci was trying to do. What Gramsci is describing is the difference between “normal” party politics in a parliamentary democracy and the periodic emergence of these Caesarist figures under crisis conditions when the old party leaderships can’t meaningfully lead and instead looks like an out of touch, self-interested elite, vulnerable to populist rhetorical assaults.

The theory of hegemony is really a theory of domestic politics that seeks to explain political parties and how they come to rule, making necessary compromises, and subordinating and placating allies. But, following the work of Giovanni Arrighi, Tooze wants to apply this directly to the global economy and international relations. Without going on too long, I think this is just a misapplication of the theory. Something like Gramsci’s hegemony happens in the global context, because leading powers also can provide benefits to lesser ones, and do not merely exploit and dominate them, but it doesn’t work through the complex representation of different social interests through political parties and civil society, which is what Gramsci is very much interested in. So far, Trumpism is a Caesarist phenomenon and not capable of forming a “historic bloc,” like say, a New Deal-type coalition and order, but that may change. The coalition forming between Silicon Valley and the “populists” may be a sign of that—or not. I will try to address this in a future post.

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Check out Tim Barker’s piece on the misapplication of “isolationism” to Vance’s wing of the GOP, whose foreign policy should maybe be called “nationalist” rather than isolationist.

Thus, the “isolationist” label actually makes it impossible to understand the precise dangers of a certain kind of right-wing foreign policy. The scariest thing about someone like Robert Taft was not his reluctance to go to war, but the fact that once he supported a war, he was willing to consider extreme forms of intervention. Taft made a bit of a fuss over the lack of Congressional authorization for the Korean War. But he soon became more frustrated with the fact that the war was stalemated, a situation he likened to “a football game in which our team when it reaches the 50-yard line is always instructed to kick. Our team can never score.”

Taft wanted to score, and to do so he was willing to countenance major escalation: “using Chiang Kai-shek's troops in Korea or South China…the bombing of Chinese communications…perhaps imposing a blockade on the Chinese mainland…dismissing ‘any hesitation about the possibility that the Russians may come into the war.’”² People like Taft especially liked nuclear air power, which they saw as an economical, capital-intensive, private-sector-friendly alternative to standing armies. “The ability of our Air Force to deliver atom bombs on Russia should never be open to question,” said the nation’s leading isolationist.