I previously wrote about Antonio Gramsci’s ideas about the concept of cultural hegemony. In that article, I noted that I would not necessarily recommend reading Gramsci. Instead, I would recommend a more modern treatment of the concepts. That is the goal of this series of articles.
Concepts
Sometimes, the ruling classes enforce their will on others through the coercive power of the state. However, the ruling classes can also dominate culture through soft power, leveraging wealth, prestige, and social position. This is cultural hegemony.
Common Sense
The set of values and beliefs that the people absorb uncritically in a given society is that society’s common sense. It is driven not by active inquiry, but by passive conformity to what people perceive as the settled, default, logical, neutral, or obvious viewpoint.
Common sense, when it contradicts the views of the ruling classes, can be a barrier to their domination. It is also the primary means by which the ruling classes accomplish cultural hegemony. The ruling classes achieve cultural hegemony by manipulating what people perceive to be common sense.
Of course, you think this. How could you not? This is sane and sensible.
You don’t want to be “ideological,” “crazy,” or “extremist.”
This is the language of common sense.
A hegemony subverts common sense only when common sense disagrees with it. Thus, hegemonic tactics are typically employed only when the public disagrees with a viewpoint. Consequently, when common sense language is invoked, it is usually the hegemony that holds the “extreme” or minority viewpoint.1
Submission
Once a cultural hegemony has succeeded in rewriting common sense, then submission2 has occurred. Submission is popular support made to look “spontaneous,” but in reality, it has been engineered by cultural hegemony.3 It is the result of controlling the narrative and subverting popular opinion to the point that popular opinion itself changes, becoming what the cultural hegemony wants.
Cultural Hegemony without Submission
We can see the phenomenon of cultural hegemony empirically.
Cultural hegemony is most apparent when submission has not occurred. In this case, there are typically bipartisan4 majorities that oppose a viewpoint; however, elite culture—mass media, academia, and activist organizations—frames the viewpoint as the only acceptable one.
In other words, when cultural hegemony is being exercised without the public’s submission, the commanding heights of culture act as though their preferred viewpoint is common sense. At the same time, the public has a consensus that disagrees with the viewpoint.
Cultural Hegemony with Submission
Cultural hegemony is less apparent when submission has occurred. However, this is only because the exact same conditions of cultural hegemony without submission had happened in the past.
Even after public opinion is in submission to the cultural hegemony, it leaves its distinctive trace. There was a point in recent history when elite opinion-makers pretended that their preferred viewpoint was the only acceptable one, even though a majority opposed it.
Packaging of Viewpoints
When people conform most or all of their viewpoints to a cultural hegemony, they are hegemonized. The existence of hegemonized people leads to a correlation of viewpoints together into a package.
This correlation arises because hegemonized people share the same viewpoints on separate issues because they were influenced by the same hegemony. The farther along a hegemony is, the more hegemonized people there are, and the more unrelated viewpoints are packaged together.
Examples
Cultural Hegemony without Submission
I have already discussed an example of hegemony without submission in Born Curious. In “Gender Critics Shouldn’t Take a Victory Lap Just Yet,” I commented on a New York Times / Ipsos poll published in January 2025 that found that majorities of both Democratic-leaning and Republican-leaning voters opposed transgender athletes competing in women’s sports and puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones for gender dysphoric minors.
This is remarkable because people had been getting deplatformed or ostracized over the previous several years for expressing viewpoints that, it turns out, most Americans shared.
For instance, on February 17, 2019, the Sunday Times published an op-ed by tennis champion Martina Navratilova arguing that transgender athletes should not compete in women’s sports. Just two days later, Athlete Ally published a statement denouncing her comments as “transphobic,” removed Navratilova from its Advisory Board, and dropped her as an Athlete Ally Ambassador.
Another example occurred the following year, when Abigail Shrier’s book, Irreversible Damage, was set to be published on June 30, 2020. The book argued that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones were overprescribed and often led to permanent health and fertility consequences. Campaigns launched to have the book removed from major retailers, including Amazon and Target.
Amazon temporarily suspended a paid advertising campaign for Irreversible Damage one week before its release, but went on to sell the book and continues to sell it to this day. Target, on the other hand, removed the book from its online catalog on November 16, 2020, after complaints on social media. This caused a backlash to the cancellation, prompting Target to re-list the book on November 17, 2020. However, on February 24, 2021, Abigail Shrier reported that Target had once again removed her book from its website, quietly and without explanation.
What is remarkable about these cases is the disconnect between hegemonic elites and public opinion. The authors expressed viewpoints held by an overwhelming majority of the public.5 Still, these viewpoints were treated as beyond the pale, equivalent to racism, and in need of deplatforming and censorship.
Cultural Hegemony with Submission
I have also already discussed an example of hegemony with submission in my analysis of public opinion about the legalization of abortion-on-demand (in which abortion is legal for any reason).
A majority of Americans were opposed to legalized abortion-on-demand from 1965 to 2018, according to the General Social Survey (GSS) and its preceding “amalgam” survey.6
In the year 2000, majorities of both Democratic-leaning voters and Republican-leaning voters opposed legal abortion-on-demand.
However, also in the year 2000, the Associated Press published the 35th edition of its Stylebook, which introduced,
Use anti-abortion instead of pro-life and abortion rights instead of pro-abortion or pro-choice.
At a time when a bipartisan majority of Americans opposed legal abortion-on-demand, the AP Stylebook recommended oppositional framing (“anti-abortion”) for this majority opinion and reverential framing (“abortion rights”) in accordance with elite, minority opinion.
Media bias extends far beyond the AP Stylebook. The Stylebook just wrote down the bias down in so many words.
Since 2000, the AP Stylebook has continued to pile on. It strongly prefers “fetus” over “unborn child” or “unborn baby” in most contexts, and it recommends “anti-abortion centers” to “pregnancy resource centers.”
Indeed, the AP Stylebook now discourages the very terms “abortion-on-demand” and “elective abortion.” But as the GSS and other data show, public opinion on abortion turns heavily on whether an abortion is elective, versus done because of risk of death or serious bodily injury, because of rape, or because of severe fetal deformity.
Packaging of Viewpoints
The phenomenon of viewpoint packaging is something I alluded to in my article that was inspired by lawn signs of the “In This House” or “In Our America” variety. In it, I noted that the probability that someone would have uniformly partisan-conforming views on eight separate, unrelated issues is infinitesimal. Nonetheless, these lawn signs exist, proudly proclaiming the home's occupants’ conformity.
This is a phenomenon that the writer
labeled the “Omnicause” in her article “Why is Greta wearing a Keffiyeh?”…all contemporary radical causes seem somehow to have been absorbed into one. A protean animating energy seems to ingest every progressive issue it encounters, to create a kind of ever-spreading, all-encompassing omnicause.
It is highly unlikely issues as unrelated as anthropogenic climate change and the conflict in the Middle East are “profoundly interrelated” as some hegemonized people would assert. Instead, the issues are united only by being championed by the same social forces. The hegemonized simply reflect back all the causes promoted by the hegemony that dominates them.
Looking Ahead
This is the first article in a multi-part series.
We now have the conceptual tools to identify cultural hegemony empirically. When elite opinion-makers portray their viewpoint as common sense while a majority of the public holds the opposite view, cultural hegemony is being exercised.
If public opinion eventually matches the elite opinion-makers, then submission has occurred. In this case, we need to look for evidence of hegemony in the past.
When submission has not happened, hegemony is more evident due to the ongoing disconnect between majority opinion and elite opinion-makers.
Finally, the increase in individuals holding unrelated viewpoints packaged together with remarkable consistency is evidence of hegemony in action.
Understanding what cultural hegemony looks like is only the beginning. The next question is how it works. How do wealthy elites and their professional allies manipulate culture so effectively? What are the mechanisms by which a minority viewpoint becomes institutionalized as common sense despite majority opposition?
Part 2 will examine the methods of cultural hegemony: the role of wealth in financing activist organizations, the credentialing systems that select for conformity, the deplatforming mechanisms that exclude dissenting voices from mainstream discourse, and the deliberate control of language that shapes how people think about contested issues.
Understanding these methods reveals cultural hegemony not as a vague theory, but as a concrete set of institutional practices with observable patterns.
This is a specific form of what has come to be called “gaslighting,” if we accept the Merriam-Webster definition of “psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories…” However, it is gaslighting using the most prestigious heights of culture.
In Gramsci’s language, this is “consent” with scare quotes. However, since Gramscian “consent” is ironic and means something opposite to consent, I use the word “submission” here.
This concept of submission is very closely related to “astroturfing,” which Merriam-Webster defines as “organized activity that is intended to create a false impression of a widespread, spontaneously arising, grassroots movement in support of or in opposition to something (such as a political policy) but that is in reality initiated and controlled by a concealed group or organization (such as a corporation).”
The term “astroturfing” is widely attributed to Lloyd Bentsen, then a Senator from Texas, who said in 1985, “A fellow from Texas can tell the difference between grass roots and Astroturf.”
In the United States, we have multiple political parties. However, at any one time, only two end up as contenders in elections. Why this is the case is beyond the scope of this article, but according to political science, the two-party system is a result of
having a single-district, first-past-the-post national election for President, and
the influence of Presidential politics on state- and local-level elections.
To be fair, The Sunday Times is published in the United Kingdom, not the United States, whereas The New York Times / Ipsos poll surveyed residents of the United States.
Technically, the GSS didn’t ask about abortion-on-demand until 1977, since it was such an extreme position. However, public opinion about abortion-on-demand tracks very closely with other elective abortion cases, and elective cases were asked about in the initial 1973 GSS and in the 1965 “amalgam” survey.