Notes on the 'Balance of Forces'

Civil Society as a Battlefield

Now that the Sturm und Drang of the Kimmel affair has abated a bit, we can start to think about the whole thing more critically and analytically. I don’t have an entire theory of the case yet, but there are a few important structural features to note, and we perhaps can get a sense of the “balance of forces.”

1. The role played by Sinclair and Nexstar Media Group. Even after Disney brought Kimmel back on the air, Sinclair and Nexstar, which together own around 30 percent of the ABC local affiliates, stood their ground and refused to bring him back on. Nexstar is looking to acquire its competitor, TESGEN, and expand its empire, a move that would require FCC approval, so it’s thought they want to signal cooperativeness with the administration. But these companies are also structurally and ideologically conservative. They are publicly traded but still dominated by the founding families. And despite their reach, they are not terribly big by the standards of American capitalism. The market capitalization of Sinclair is just over $1 billion, and that of Nexstar is $6.13 billion. For comparison, the market cap of Disney is $201 billion. I immediately thought of Melinda Cooper’s 2022 piece on Trump’s business coalition, “Family Capitalism and the Small Business Insurrection.” She characterized the pro-Trump and anti-Trump division between “the private, unincorporated, and family-based versus the corporate, publicly traded, and shareholder-owned” and that “[t]he family-based capitalism that stormed the White House along with Trump stretches from the smallest of family businesses to the most rambling of dynasties, and crucially depends on the alliance between the two.” And she goes on to say, “The infrastructural basis of today’s far-right resurgence is neither populist nor elitist in any straightforward sense: it is both.” The Trump coalition is strengthened by these provincial oligarchs.

2. It looks like public outcry pushed Disney to bring back Kimmel. Massive cancellations of its Disney+ streaming service. As G. Elliot Morris points out, searches for “Cancel Disney+” hit an all-time high over the weekend. Trump has a devoted base of support, but he remains disliked, even among people who are not political and do not vote. Americans did not particularly like cancel culture and wokeness—having opinions and mores dictated to them—and they seem to like the right-wing version even less. Kimmel’s ratings were pretty anemic; more people did not like the idea of him being pushed off the air than liked him

3. America is now fully “a talk show democracy.” In the period of my book, the early 1990s, there was a lot of talk about America becoming a “talk show democracy,” where all public discussion and deliberation, insofar as you can call it that, happened on TV and radio talk shows. Now, of course, the situation is exponentially larger and denser: just about anybody can have a talk show in the age of the podcast, and podcasters and YouTubers are some of the most important and influential figures in politics and culture. Kimmel, of course, represents the old guard; late-night talk is even older than the talk radio or daytime TV that proliferated in the 1990s, but it shows how the talk show is a major flashpoint for controversies.

4. Consolidation, Monopoly, Oligarchy. Part of the story here is fragmentation, the growth, almost cancerous, of new media sources, but also there’s consolidation, the ability of conglomerates to seize and hold communication points. In the 1980s and 90s, the deregulation moves of the FCC allowed for fewer restrictions on opinion programming on air and the growth of big media companies. The combination meant that people heard the same opinions everywhere. As

   Matt Stoller
   writes, this type of “reform” accelerated with the Telecommunications Act of 1996: “The fundamental thrust of the Telecom Act was to overturn New Deal restrictions on media consolidation. That law changed strict bright line media ownership rules that prohibited acquisitions of local stations by chains, and moved them to a discretionary system where regulators could approve such acquisitions, which they did and are doing now.” Meant to foster competition, it instead created an oligopoly that can be pressured from above.

5. Civil Society is a battlefield. The theory of George Soros, taken from his reading of Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies, is that a robust civil society, full of independent NGOs that are neither state nor capitalist enterprises, is a key feature of a healthy democracy. Today, after the total reversal of the Soros project in Hungary and its coming under assault all over the world, one must ask serious questions about the viability of that model. It seems to me that Antonio Gramsci has the better theory: civil society is not some estate that organically provides a check on government power, but is itself a site of constant power struggles. We can see very clearly how this is playing out with law firms, universities, and now the media. Civil society is not necessarily “good” or “bad,” it’s a terrain of political conflict.

6. War of maneuver vs. war of position. What has made the last 8 months so terribly unstable is that Trump and the right have been waging a nonstop, rapid war of maneuver against liberal institutions, and in many cases, managed to surround and destroy them. Or at least, cause mass surrenders. With Kimmel, it seemed they had broken through a major bulwark with a combined-arms attack: state and conservative civil society working together. But perhaps now things will set into the war of position, long-drawn-out trench warfare, and sieges. In The Prison Notebooks, Gramsci wrote, “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; and at the moment of their advance and attack the the assailants would find themselves confronted by a line of defence which was still effective. The same thing happens in politics…. A crisis cannot give the attacking forces the ability to organise with lightning speed in time and in space; still less can it endow them with fighting spirit. Similarly, the defenders are not demoralised, nor do they abandon their positions, even among the ruins, nor do they lose faith in their own strength or their own future.” They clearly wanted to use the Charlie Kirk assassination to rally their forces for a big thrust, and it seemed for a moment like the last ditch, but there are many behind it. And often the ferocity of the assault will rally more to the opposition, the lightning strikes of maneuver can leave your forces isolated and cut off, and vulnerable to counterattack by a bigger force. Sometimes it’s better to go softly, “piano piano,” as the Italians say, but that’s not Trump nor his people’s style.

7. Can Trump’s movement become hegemonic? That is to say, can they fundamentally change what counts as common sense and form a long-term national leadership class that redirects the country to their priorities? In other words, can they convince enough of the country that they are the country, that they embody the nation? I wonder. According to Gramsci’s understanding of Caesarism, a charismatic leader can arise and try to “force” a solution, but ultimately, they will not have the strategic depth to create a new permanent political settlement: “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.” Does anybody have the strength for victory, or are we going to settle in for a long siege?