Kelley wrote:
>
> the way these things become unquestioned truisms, especially among the
> right, is by virtue of the freakin rightnut media. i watch it happen every
> single day on that politics list i sub to.
>
This is true but not quite to the point I think. You describe effective propaganda (and you are right that leftists cannot use a similar strategy), but you do _not_ describe hegemony, which is the entire set of social relations which makes such propaganda effective.
Barbara Fields writes:
(Note: The _word_ ideology has any number of perfectly legitimate meanings, some of which conflict with its usage here. If you don't like the word for what is described here, invent a different word. I am interested in the actuality described, not in the words used to name it.)
****** Ideologies are real, but it does not follow that they are scientifically accurate, or that they provide an analysis of social relations that would make sense to anyone who does not take ritual part in those social relations. Some societies (including colonial New England) have explained troublesome relations between people as witchcraft and possession by the devil. The explanation makes sense to those whose daily lives produce and reproduce witchcraft, nor can any amount of rational "evidence" disprove it. Witchcraft in such a society is as self-evident a natural fact as race is to Richard Cohen of the _Washington Post_. To someone looking in from outside, however, explaining a miscarriage, a crop failure, a sudden illness, or a death by invoking witchcraft would seem absurd, just as explaining slavery by invoking race must seem absurd to anyone who does not ritually produce race day in and day out as Americans do. Ideologies do not need to be plausible, let alone persuasive, to outsiders. They do their job when they help insiders make sense of the things they do and see--ritually, repetitively--on a daily basis.
So much ideology is. Here is what it is not. It is not a material entity, a thing of any sort, that you can hand down like an old garment, pass on like a germ, spread like a rumour, or impose like a code of dress or etiquette. Nor is it a collection of dissociated beliefs--"attitudes" is the favoured jargon among American social scientists and historians they have mesmerized--that you can extract from their context and measure by current or retrospective survey research. (Someday the reification of conduct and demeanour in "attitudes" will seem as quaint and archaic as their reification in bodily "humours"--phlegmatic, choleric, melancholic, sanguine--does now.) Nor is it a Frankenstein's monster that takes on a life of its own.
Ideology is not the same as _propaganda_. Someone who said, "Anti-slavery _ideology_ infiltrated the slave quarters through illicit abolitionist newspapers," would be talking rather about propaganda than about ideology. The slaves' anti-slavery ideology could not be smuggled to them in alien newsprint. People deduce and verify their ideology in daily life. The slaves' anti-slavery ideology had to arise from their lives in slavery and from their daily relations with slaveholders and other members of slave society.[35] Frederick Douglass was not propounding a paradox but speaking the simple truth when he said that the first anti-slavery lecture he ever heard was delivered by his master in the course of explaining to his mistress why slaves must not be taught to read. By the same token, slaves who decided at the first shot of the Civil War--or even earlier, with Lincoln's election--that emancipation was finally on the nation's agenda were not responding to prevailing Northern propaganda (which, indeed, promised nothing of the kind at that time). It was their experience with slaveowners, not least the slaveowners' hysterical equation of the Republican Party with abolition, that made slaves see Lincoln as the emancipator before he saw himself that way. And, I might add, it was the slaves' acting on that foreknowledge that forced Lincoln to become the emancipator.
====================================================
{35. The slaves' religion arose in the same way. In an astute and eloquent passage, Donald G. Mathews diagnoses the error of supposing that the slaves should or could have had a "correct" version of Christianity by an outside agency. To argue that way, Mathews correctly insists, presupposes that the slave could "slough off his enslavement, ancestry, traditional ways of viewing the world, and sense of selfhood in order to think the oppressor's thoughts after him. . . .The description of action in which the slave is expected to remain passive while receiving a discrete body of ideas and attitudes which exist apart from social and cultural conditions reveals one of the most mischievous and flawed assumptions which scholars make." _Religion in the Old South_, Chicago, 1967, p. 187.}
====================================================
_Ideology, Propaganda and Dogma_
To insist that ideology and propaganda are not the same is not to suppose that they are unrelated. The most successful propagandist is one who thoroughly understands the ideology of those to be propagandized. When propagandists for secession before the American Civil War emphasized the danger that the Northerners might encroach upon Southerners' right of self-determination, they emphasized a theme that resonated as well with the world of non-slaveholders as with that of planters, even though the two worlds differed as night from day. "We will never be slaves" was good secessionist propaganda. "We must never let them take our slaves" would have been poor propaganda and the secessionists knew it; just as today "Strategic Defense Initiative" makes a good advertisement for a weapons programme, whereas "Strategic Offensive Initiative" or "First- Strike Initiative" would not. ****
We have to understand the social actuality that makes it it impossible for large numbers of people (including millions who have never listened to much of "freakin rightnut media) to _hear_ any statement that does not presuppose good intentions on the part of the U.S. Because millions -- 10s of millions -- of people who don't believe "rightwing" propaganda _still_ presuppose that u.s. intentions are always honorable. Take it for granted that 25% of the population are never going to listen to leftist arguments, and that it is a serious waste of time to try to talk to that 25%. Moreover, at any given time, probably only about 30%, at most, of the population will, under the best of conditions, listen to us.
And those people, our most promising audience, the ones we might reach _now_ (not in some never-never land where everyone acts like the students in an ideal civics class), _those_ people have a hard time believing that u.s. intentions are fundamentally wrong.
How do we explain _that_ exercise of capitalist hegemony?
Carrol