Bernie’s War of Maneuver

The 2020 primary and Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony

Antonio Gramsci (Public Domain)

Joseph Buttigieg was America’s leading scholar on Antonio Gramsci and the translator of the authoritative English edition of the Italian Marxist’s influential Prison Notebooks. A professor of literature, he devoted much of his career to exploring Gramsci’s theories of cultural hegemony. It’s a shame that Buttigieg died before he could witness the 2020 primary and the role his son Pete played in it. The elder Buttigieg would have found it quite interesting as an object lesson in the very phenomena he spent his life studying.

Gramsci argued that the capitalist class does not rule by force alone. As capitalist societies mature, they rely less on naked coercion and more on ideological control through class dominance over institutions within civil society. He contrasted the two forms of control, labeling the former “dictatorship” and the latter “hegemony.”

His theories were an elaboration of Marx’s maxim that the “ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas.” Hegemony supplements coercion with manufactured consent, where the lower classes internalize the values, beliefs and attitudes of the dominant groups.

Writing in the 1930s before the advent of mass media, Gramsci was primarily concerned with the role of art, literature, newspapers, the church, intellectuals and educational institutions, but his work prefigured the more sophisticated system of cultural hegemony that has developed since.

With his characteristic fondness for military metaphors, Gramsci compared the state or “political society”— the police, the army, political parties, administrative officials— to a “forward trench,” while he likened civil society to a “succession of sturdy fortresses and emplacements.”

Gramsci divided class confrontation into two types: the War of Maneuver and the War of Position. The former is a direct assault on political society, such as a general strike or an armed uprising, while the latter involves the long-term work that is done within civil society to build alternative institutions capable of countering the hegemony of the ruling class.

The War of Maneuver is inevitably doomed to fail, Gramsci argued, without the preparatory work of the War of Position because the legitimacy of ruling groups is anchored in civil society. In the 21st century, hegemony is even more entrenched, with new forms of cultural control that didn’t exist in Gramsci’s time, such as think tanks, lobbyists, cable news, social media, etc.

The 2020 Democratic Primary provided a perfect case study of Gramsci’s theory. Though Gramsci used the term primarily to refer to revolutionary insurrections, such as the Spartacist Uprising or the Russian Revolution, Bernie Sanders’ campaign was arguably a War of Maneuver — or what passes for one in the United States, where opportunities for class confrontation on a mass scale are rare.

To use Gramsci’s metaphor, Sanders broke through the “forward trench” but was annihilated when he tried to lay siege to the “fortress.” Collectively, the elements of political society — his opponents in the primary — were weak and defeatable. They were uninspiring, out of touch with the party rank-and-file, and no single candidate could attract the undivided support of the ruling class.

Nevertheless, the ideological hegemony of centrism held firm thanks to the power of party-dominated mass media as well as a broad cadre of pundits, think tank wonks and political experts.

Sanders proved largely successful at advancing many aspects of his political program from 2016 to 2020. Attitudes have shifted within the Democratic Party to the point where more Democrats have a favorable view of socialism than capitalism. Growing support for Medicare for All forced many of his primary opponents to adopt it in their platforms or at least give a nod to it rhetorically, e.g. “Medicare for All who want it.”

But building support for specific policies or normalizing the idea of socialism could only get Sanders so far. Hegemony entails the power to construct and define “common sense.” The Democratic Party has cultivated what Gramsci called a forma mentis or “way of thinking” about how elections are won and who is “electable.”

“Common sense” holds that presidential elections are a fight over voters in the center situated at a point equidistant between the two parties. The most “electable” candidate is whoever is best suited to that task.

In this schema, the more moderate candidate is by definition more electable — even if this is contradicted by the experience of the past 20 years. Poll numbers, campaign infrastructure, scandals and other factors that might affect a candidate’s actual ability to win are irrelevant.

Notions about what is “realistic” and what is “pie in the sky” are also hegemonic. Incrementalism is inherently “pragmatic” whereas massive structural change is “utopian.” Medicare for All is “unfeasible” whereas the public option is “practical.”

The case for Sanders’ electability was always objectively strong — he consistently bested Trump in head-to-head polling for five years straight — but it wasn’t made on a level playing field. Liberal pundits warned that GOP strategists were licking their chops at the prospect of running against an “avowed socialist,” sowing doubt in the minds of primary voters who were absolutely terrified about the possibility of Trump’s reelection.

For a brief moment, Sanders appeared able to upend this “common sense.” In early states, he trounced the ostensibly more electable Joe Biden, raising public confidence that he could win. But the forma mentis about electability remained, providing the basis for Biden’s sudden comeback once the whole of the party establishment rallied behind him.

At that point in the story, Pete Buttigieg acted as an agent of the hegemony his father so fiercely critiqued, when he dropped out and endorsed Biden before Super Tuesday, effectively sealing the fate of Sanders’ leftwing challenge.