“Cultural Hegemony” is a Marxist idea about how the oppressive elite impose their elitist oppression onto the masses. This is part and parcel of Marx’s own idea of “base and superstructure”.
It is a worldview and analytical framework that imposes presupposed conclusions, and one which is increasingly adopted by not only the Left, but also the purported Right. It’s overthrow requires one to be “woke” about the systems of oppression as James Lindsay notes, quoted in full full below due to the limitations of Twitter/X embeds.
“People want a ‘simple’ explanation of ‘Woke’ that they can understand. There’s a problem, though. You cannot define ‘Woke’ without understanding the not-easy concept of ‘cultural hegemony.’
“You cannot understand Woke Left or Woke Right without understanding cultural hegemony.
“You cannot understand why Tucker Carlson is Woke Right without understanding cultural hegemony.
“You cannot understand why the post-liberal Right is Woke Right without understanding cultural hegemony.
“You cannot understand why CRT, Queer Theory, radical feminism, or all the rest are Woke Left without understanding cultural hegemony.
“You can reduce it down to identity politics, victimhood centrality/culture, cancel culture, smearing, mob abuse, a ‘based ritual’ or ‘Woke ritual,’ or whatever else, but you will never understand it until you understand cultural hegemony.
“Woke means having ‘woke up’ to the ‘realities’ of cultural hegemony. It is cultural Marxism or a kind of quasi-fascist reaction to cultural Marxism that plays on the same turf. When we say ‘Woke means having a critical consciousness,’ what it means is ‘having a critical consciousness of cultural hegemony.’
“Woke Left is therefore Left-wing Cultural Marxists, i.e., Left-wing Gramscians.
“Woke Right is therefore Right-wing Cultural Marxists by Reaction, i.e, Right-wing Gramscians or Right-wing Counter-Gramscians, if you want.”
Further:
“(Note: I frequently use the term ‘Woke’ more generally for all these sociognostic dispositions including classical Marxism, Fascism, etc., but to be specific, it’s this particular variant that became ‘Woke’ rather than using the old 19th and 20th century terms.)
“Cultural hegemony means believing society is completely rigged against you through its culture by dominant groups who are seeking to maintain their illegitimate basis for their own power. That’s all it means.
“It doesn’t matter who the ‘dominant groups’ are. We’re familiar with the Leftist screeds: wealthy, straight, white, male, Christian, blah, blah, blah. The Rightist screed is that it’s ‘liberals’ and the Woke Left, who are then deliberately conflated as though they’re the same thing when they aren’t.
“So, Woke Right means believing the Woke Left has rigged society for the maintenance of its own illegitimate basis for power down to the very fabric of society and its culture (and that something must be done about this).
“What is to be done about the problem is always the same from the Cultural Marxist perspective: wage ‘counter-hegemonic’ cultural warfare including by infiltrating the culture-producing institutions and converting them from within and/or building parallel culture-producing institutions (which can also be leveraged to achieve the infiltration). It’s always this.
“Therefore, because being ‘Woke’ is primarily a state of mind (lit. ‘awakened’), most of what being “Woke” means boils down to two things:
“1) Believing some dominant group has rigged the entire societal and cultural game to its own illegitimate benefit, including down to what we should believe is ‘true,’ ‘false,’ ‘valid,’ and ‘invalid’ (i.e., we live under unjust cultural hegemony); and
“2) Believing that anything outside that rigged game that also challenges its dominance is therefore more ‘true’ and ‘valid’ while anything that supports it is more ‘false’ and ‘invalid’ (i.e., pushing cultural counter-hegemony).
“When CRT uses ‘counterstories’ and ‘counternarratives’ to challenge ‘existing dominant narratives’ about race and ‘racism,’ it is identifying a ‘white supremacist’ cultural hegemony (in a Woke, conspiratorial, lunatic, culturally Marxist way) and then challenging it with an outsider-knowledge counter-hegemonic play (again, based in a Woke, conspiratorial, lunatic, culturally Marxist way).
“Being ‘Woke’ means preferring and advancing the counter-hegemonic (Cultural Marxist praxis) to the hegemonic (deemed to be illegitimately dominant).
“That means being ‘Woke’ means preferring and advancing ‘other ways of knowing’ or ‘just asking questions’ (that which is outside the existing cultural hegemony and that challenges it) over ‘established knowledges’ or ‘what we’re allowed to talk about’ (that which is inside the existing cultural hegemony and that maintains it).
“Do you understand?
“I am sorry that it cannot be made simpler than this if you want to understand it.
“You have to deal with this fact.
“Now look at the whole ‘just asking questions’ or Tucker Carlson’s whole shtick. Is it this? Yes. It is.
“Now look at the whole ‘postwar consensus’ narrative, which allegedly only allows certain very limited right-wing thought to be considered legitimate (‘valid’). That is a theory of cultural hegemony, people.
“A Woke Right theory would posit that the postwar consensus as a cultural hegemony needs to be challenged and overthrown. It would decry anything that disagrees as being motivated by a desire to keep the current cultural hegemony (postwar consensus brain, and particularly ‘Boomer mindset,’ since Boomers were the first children raised in the ‘postwar consensus’), or a functional inability to see outside of it (‘false consciousness’).
“Thus it prefers counter-hegemonic narratives challenging and critiquing it.
“Thus it also alleges that anything that disagrees with their analysis is motivated by a corrupt desire to maintain the status quo of the current consensus, or that it comes from the false consciousness engendered from being within it (cultural hegemony as cultural capture).
“The goal of a Culturally Marxist (Gramscian) move is to occupy the positions of cultural dominance with counter-hegemonic thinkers and actors and displace thinkers and actors who ‘maintain’ the current alleged cultural hegemony.
“Does that look like how the Woke Right acts? Yes, of course it does. Why? Because that’s what they’re doing. Are they doing it on purpose, though? Yes, in many cases, they are. Is it Woke? Yes, Woke af.”
