Tag: hegemony
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Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals
At long last, my book… “A powerful, rigorous, and clear-eyed guide to building social justice movements.” —Publishers Weekly “As the world faces the horrors of a Trump presidency, many good people are asking, ‘What can I do?’ Jonathan Smucker’s book provides an urgent field manual for answering that question.” —Jeremy Scahill author of Blackwater and Dirty…
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“Counter-hegemony” and Left Ambivalence Toward Power
I’m reading Cihan Tuğal’s Passive Revolution: Absorbing the Islamic Challenge to Capitalism. I’m still working my way through it, but so far I’ve found it very insightful. There are so many things in the book that I’m looking forward to digging into, so I feel a little bad that I’m about to start with the…
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Claiming and Contesting Meanings and Symbols of the Nation
The nation as a constructed concept frames a commonality amongst citizens who live within the borders of a defined land mass. The conceptual common terrain of nation has provided a large part of the ground upon which the idea of a public was built. Though a plausibly common terrain, it is also an arena of…
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Theory of Political Behavior SERIES
In July I wrote a four-part series elucidating parts of a theory of political behavior. This here is a landing page for that series. Here are the parts: A theory of political behavior Evolutionary logic of identity Political dimension of group identity Imagined communities & populist alignment And here are a few “companion” posts that…
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A theory of political behavior (pt.4: imagined communities & populist alignment)
Modern society significantly complicates the group-oriented identity framework I’ve been discussing (in parts one, two, and three). Most of us juggle multiple roles in multiple spheres, each of which holds a degree of our individual identity. The temptation is to then look at identity as a predominantly individual matter. But each sphere of an individual’s…
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Sunday afternoon rough notes on messaging for populist alignment
Messaging (/symbolic contestation) for populist alignment: very rough notes, pieces of the puzzle, for future exploration… Messages and memes (i.e. carriers of messages) must be potent enough to penetrate the meaning-making processes of existing social aggregations (aka “groups”). Proximate groups are the primary spaces where meanings are processed, judged, opinions shaped, etc. (A “proximate” group…
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when ritual replaces strategy
In utopianism and the would-be political group I explored a layer of utopianism within intense social change movements like Occupy Wall Street, and I suggested that the utopian drive in these situations may be at least as much about immediate participant experience as it is about an envisioned ideal future. That is to say the…
Jonathan Matthew Smucker 