The Fragility of Victory

 "You have to keep living." I was on a zoom for LGBTQIA+ United Methodists and their allies earlier. The Bishop of our conference formed a ministry team to address the needs of queer folk in our state. We face the happy conundrum of deciding what to do and how to advocate after a systemic victory. The last General Conference (the quadrennial meeting of worldwide United Methodists) vaporized sections of the Book of Discipline (the polity and policy document for the UMC) that were gay-exclusionary and homophobic. Each conference can tailor regulations to fit its culture best. (This was primarily with a nod to UMC conferences in African and the Philippines.)

So we won! After decades of struggle, we had achieved some degree of equality. What now?

I've argued elsewhere that one primary mode of activism aims to put activists out of work. Suffragists succeed when there's no more need for suffragists. Abolitionists win when they no longer need to be abolitionists.

Social movements achieving such victories have two basic paths before them. They can go out of business, switching to the Next Great Cause. Or they can shift the quality of their work from oppositional change to something more like a church. They might deepen and widen their cause to embrace other struggles. They might adopt a maintenance and preservation mode, solidifying their victory as hegemonic.

I use hegemonic in the good sense here. When Antonio Gramsci (the first theorist of political hegemony) wrote about this term, he meant it not as the Big Bad System to fight but as a name for the mutually buttressing functions of consent and coercion that maintain a political status quo. Social movements (parties, in Gramsci's writing) want hegemony. They want their (initially minority) views of what Ought To Be not only to prevail in a single election. They want these views to become the political common sense of the whole society, so integrally part of the political sense of normalcy that the views cease to be political (in the sense of "contested") at all. 

Women's suffrage is a good case in point. The right of adult women citizens to vote in the US has for decades been hegemonic. It enjoys widespread consent (most people think it a good thing that women won the right to vote), and it's protected with the armor of coercion. If someone blocked a woman from voting, some kind of state force--lawyers, judges, police, or, beyond that, the armed forces--would enforce her right to vote. And, up until recently, to seriously call into question whether women should be allowed to vote is to mark yourself bizarrely out of step with political consensus.

And yet.

Political realities are inherently unstable, discursive. A political victory, however solidly won, is not eternal. Women have the right to vote--anyone has the right to vote, for that matter--only so long as there's a system of consent-coercion strong enough to recognize and enforce that right. 

This is a hard reality for some. I read a post on Bluesky that asserted that any right that could be taken away was not in fact a right at all, and that the aim of activism should be to create a system where rights become truly unquestionable.

But this just isn't how human societies work. How could they? There's inevitable disagreement and friction about exactly how to define, apply, and delimit rights. Systems that ignore or quash such disagreement tend to be totalitarian, stuck in a singular, frozen vision. They eventually lose some vital hegemonic element--consent, coercion, or both--and fall apart.

I write this because so many of the victories we thought won--specific rights for queer folk, but deeper and ostensibly more durable political systems as well--are proving perilously fragile. Trump seems to be hijacking many of the coercive systems of the state, forbidding them from defending certain rights formerly protected and directing them to enforce other rights--the rights of "bullies and billionaires" to use the phrasing of activist Anat Shenker-Osorio. 

Gramsci would hardly approve. Aside from being an ardent foe of fascism (Mussolini's OG Fascist party threw him in prison), Gramsci would note that the Trumpian wrecking ball of coercion seems to be losing popular consent. This lays a lethal groundwork for some pretty awful and bloody conflicts between segments of the armed forces and executive branches loyal to Trump and, well, everyone else. But history suggests that pure coercion alone rarely holds for long. 

I hope it doesn't come to that even. I hope folk can realize the bullies and billionaires only hold power as long as everyone else gives them power. I hope we take it from them soon.

Of Manifestos, Hegemony, and Women's Suffrage

Finally--the editorial is done (well, done until revisions, that is).

Funnily enough, my focus in that piece touched on some of the issues that Bishop Spong raised in his manifesto. There he declared that he is done with arguing, debating, discussing, and defending his stance that GLBT people and behaviors are no more or less acceptable to God, that they are no more or less deserving of equal opportunities to participate in civic and ecclesiastical life, than straight people are. He resolves to view the issue as closed, a moot point not worthy of serious debate.

In a sense, that resolution captures the wish of every practically every political cause. Activists paradoxically work to render their activism unnecessary. The women's suffrage movement in the US, for example, dissolved after the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified. Abolitionists in the US had to move on to other issues after the Civil War (well, after the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, technically). The successful activist is ideally the out-of-work activist.

Success in this sense consists of convincing enough people that your side of a particular issue is so compelling that it is the default way of seeing things. Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Communist jailed by Mussolini, called this kind of success hegemony. Gramsci had been in the 1920s the president of Italy's Communist Party, a role which to post-Cold War US ears might sound like I'm describing him as Darth Vader's right-hand man. In post-World War I Italy, though, it was the Communist Party more than any other that posed the greatest domestic resistance to Mussolini's Fascism. Gramsci and the other Communists fought hard to prevent his rise, but as was the case in other European countries, their effort did not succeed.

During his years in prison, years which in fact ended up killing him, Gramsci reflected long and hard on how it could be that such a despicable bundle of ideas as Fascism could so achieve victory, winning power not only through force (the brownshirts) but also by gaining popular support. Through a collection of writings that came to be known as The Prison Notebooks, Gramsci looked to history and to foreign affairs for clues and examples as to why and how dominant political parties achieve and maintain their dominance.

One of his main insights is that it isn't enough simply to have superior force on your side. Even in non-democratic states, a dominant power must eventually win the consent (if not the wholehearted support) of its populace. Otherwise the overpowering force simply creates martyr after martyr, fomenting dissent while burning up the leadership's energy and resources stamping out rebellions. In democratic states where multiple parties vie for power, winning this popular consent takes a great deal of work. It basically consists of convincing most of the relevant (i.e., voting) population that your party's idea for the country is in fact in their (the populace's) best interests. You make your idea of the Good and the people's idea of the Good conform. It may be that you convince people to support your ideals wholeheartedly, but it would also work simply to convince people that your ideals, while not perfect, are simply better than any other alternative and that no other choice is really viable.

The ultimate goal would be to make your case was so convincing that your party's particular idea of the Good gets seen by most everyone as The Way Things Are And Should Be. You win when your take on an issue gets installed so deeply and permanently into the machinery of what it means to be Italian (or, perhaps, American or Christian) that no one really considers it to be one take among other possible choices.

Hegemony in other words, is when your take on things is the only game in town.

Part of the reason I love teaching theatre history is that I get to introduce students to past moments where the "game in town" was very, very different. To read a suffrage play from the 1910s, for example, is to tap into a world in which the question of whether or not women should be allowed to vote was considered up for debate. It's a bizarre experience to read a play that stages a realistic debate between characters of differing opinions on the suffrage issue (Charlotte Ann Perkins Gilman wrote several good ones along these lines). There's an odd sense of familiarity to the tone of the discussions--the worries about going too far, the call for moderation, the rationally stated resistance to the idea of women voting (voiced often by women themselves), and the desire to let the matter drop.

Plays like this highlight the extent to which present-day US convictions about women's rights are historically specific. We may affirm in 2009 the idea that women naturally have a right (as in, the endowed-by-their-creator natural right) to vote. But the naturalness of this right is a historical fiction, by which I mean not that it is fake or false but that it is the product of human effort. Suffragists worked for over half a century in this country to win people over to the idea that women have the same civil right to vote as men. That their effort was successful is evident in the fact that women's suffrage is now hegemonic. It has ceased to be a political issue in the US at all. No one (well, I'm sure you could find a few isolated voices) seriously suggests that this issue be re-opened, that somehow people should be presented with both sides of "the argument" and allowed to decide for themselves. "The argument" as such does not exist.

It is this state that Bishop Spong wishes to realize with his manifesto about GLBT status in civic and ecclesiastical life. Indeed, his argument is that the debate is already over, that continuing to discuss whether same-sex couples should be married or whether an openly GLBT person may be ordained is as silly as debating whether a woman should be allowed to vote because she's a woman.

But here's the rub: hegemony doesn't happen just because you want it to. Indeed, that Bishop Spong has to write a manifesto to say the debate is over proves that the debate isn't over. It's a common tactic--perhaps the most common tactic--for one side or party in a hegemonic struggle to declare preemptively that its side of things is The Way Things Are rather than one possible way out of many to see things. In critical theory parlance, that tactic is called naturalizing the argument; you frame your way of seeing things as natural, as not open to debate.

But issues that really aren't open to debate--well, they aren't debated. No one debates whether gravity is good or bad; gravity simply is. No one debates whether blood needs to flow through blood vessels in living humans; it simply does. These issues qualify, as far as we are able to imagine, as legitimately naturalized and out of the realm of moral-political debate. Issues about rights and inclusion simply lack that level of naturalness. The closest humans can come to making such issues seem as natural as gravity or blood is hegemony, and hegemony only happens--if it ever does--through loads of work and loads of time.

As much as I'd like to believe otherwise, debates about GLBT issues remain debated--and therefore debatable. Neither my side (which is similar to that of Bishop Spong) nor the "other side" has the privilege of hegemony or naturalization. I question, then, the value of pretending--or, rather, forcefully declaring--otherwise.

More tomorrow,

JF