Month: April 2011
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Populism & Hegemony (series)
The broad political Left in the United States has been plagued for decades now with a culture of reaction, fragmentation, issue silo-ing, and a chasm between insiders and outsiders. Can the concepts of populism and hegemony help to explain these challenges? What insights might we gain through an exploration of these ideas? A series on…
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Wisconsin: How Populism Works | Populism & Hegemony pt.5
This is the fifth post in a series. Teachers, students, firefighters, police officers, veterans, farmers, and even Green Bay Packers players, visibly aligned and defiantly mobilized together in Wisconsin last month, conveyed something very important and powerful. Okay, duh. That’s obvious. If we could orchestrate that kind of line-up all the time, we would, of…
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Long lefty laundry lists | Populism & Hegemony pt.4
This is the fourth post in a series. Let’s say that I care a lot about the war in Iraq, and I start planning with some other folks in my town to put together a public rally to call for an end to the war and occupation. Well, what if we made the rally about…
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Bonding & Bridging | Populism & Hegemony pt.3
This is the third post in a series. Strong group identity is something of a double-edged sword for social justice movements. On the one hand—as discussed in part one of this series—it is absolutely essential. There can be no serious social movement—the kind that challenges the powerful and privileged—without a correspondingly serious group identity that…
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Marx’s error | Populism & Hegemony pt.2
This is the second post in a series. As discussed briefly in part one, in modern society our identities are complex. Our lives tend to be fragmented. In different spheres of our lives, we play different roles, hold different loyalties, perform different identities, and cultivate different aspects of our identities. Take a minute to think…
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Shout-out to a few great folks who made the new site possible
Huge thanks to Bryan Falcon for the fantastic web design work over the past several weeks. (You can just keep the car as payment.) Thanks to Dana Leeper for our new brand and logo design. (FYI, Dana does great design work for hire.) And thanks to Becca Rast for a million things that made this…
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Welcome to the new BeyondtheChoir.org!
Welcome to the new BeyondtheChoir.org! This is an online space for grassroots change agents — folks who are engaged in grassroots organizing, campaigning, activism, advocacy, etc. — to share practical strategies, tactics and tools. It’s also a place to dig into deeper social change theory and to make it practical. There are lots of great…
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Anatomy of Political Identity | Populism & Hegemony pt.1
The broad political Left in the United States has been plagued for decades now with a culture of reaction, fragmentation, issue silo-ing, and a chasm between insiders and outsiders. Can the concepts of populism and hegemony help to explain these challenges? What insights might we gain through a study of these ideas? Populism and hegemony…
Jonathan Matthew Smucker 