The Hegemon’s Illusion

I once read an essay lamenting the disappearance of what I recall the essayist calling, “negroes in white shirts and bow ties.”  The essayist was one of those late-onset conservatives we call “liberals mugged by reality.”  The “negroes in white shirts and bow ties” were the polite, often Christian, white-acting blacks who had won the late-onset conservative’s sympathy when the Civil Rights Movement was young.

What the late-onset conservative did not understand was that the success of the Civil Rights Movement entailed the disappearance of “negroes in white shirts and bow ties.”  Obviously, “white shirts and bow ties” here simply signify acting white.  That is what respectable white men were wearing around 1960, and because whites were hegemonic in 1960, respectable blacks wore them too.

The wardrobe of lower middle-class American males changed very markedly by the late 1960s, so there were very few blacks outside the Nation of Islam wearing white shirts and bow ties; but the disappearance of “negroes in white shirts and bow ties” was caused by something deeper than the sartorial revolution of the late 1960s.

The success of the Civil Rights Movement meant that blacks were now free to act black.  The key word that I just used is hegemony.  To this I must add the companion word toady.   A hegemon has the power to impose his vision on the world, the toady yields to that power and conforms to that vision.

What we can learn from the lament of the “mugged-by-reality” liberal (a.k.a the “late-onset conservative”) is that hegemons can fail to see their own power.  When they survey a throng that dresses and acts like down-market versions of themselves, the hegemon does not see toadies.  At least not always.  He sees “negros in white shirts and bow ties,” who’s unlikeness to him goes no deeper than to the color of their skins.

But the point of a liberation movement like the Civil Rights Movement is not to allow toadies to go on dressing and acting like their former masters.  It is to liberate the toadies from hegemony and allow them to act like themselves.

We see this in the liberation movements we call the Women’s Rights Movement and the Gay Rights Movement, both of which quickly went places that shocked some of their early supporters.  Thus the “feminine businesswomen” and “confirmed bachelors” quickly went the way of “negroes in white shirts and bow ties.”   They did not all become power-skirts, leather-boys, and black panthers, but enough did to make many former hegemons into “late-onset conservatives.”

The hegemony of straight white Christian males has been, of course, entirely destroyed.  This is why the teaching toadies of today’s actual hegemons do little but rail against it.  We must never forget that Cassandra was effectively mute, while the appointed oracles of the regime always shriek with contagious alarm at newfangled phantoms and ghosts of rivals long dead.

We must also never forget what I will call the Hegemon’s Illusion, which is to believe he is loved when he is in fact only feared.  I do not suppose that straight white Christian males will be in a position to fall under the Hegemon’s Illusion any time soon, but as toadies we may possibly use it to our advantage.

2 thoughts on “The Hegemon’s Illusion

  1. The “Hegemon’s Illusion” really only exists in Western European countries, as far as I can surmise.

    Freeing people from the constraints that force them to behave decently is hardly relegated to black people, which you noted at the very end of your piece. Women run amok, sexual deviants riding the subway in their underwear (with the support of their local government, no less!), drag queens, and the rest are clear evidence of that. Which leads me to the term Christian Nationalism, so maligned by our current media.

    When a culture pretends to have no standards, the standards fall as low as the degenerate human imagination will sink, and that is pretty darned low. Tolerance stretched so far that it becomes intolerant of standards is the current standard. Not whether, but which. We should always remember that.

    My point is that it really comes back down to shameless sinners or penitent sinners. All with their own flavors and backgrounds and shades of sin, but leave any group of people to run amok in an amoral system, and eventually, you’ll see every group that is not brought to heel behave in the most disgusting manner.

    We now have white men taking hormones to breast feed little baby girls. There may be men of all hues out there doing it in the name of trans, but I haven’t seen their disgusting displays yet.

    I suspect that we haven’t even begun to see how bad things can get.

    • I think most hegemons overestimate the degree to which they are loved, and underestimate the degree to which they are feared (and hated). It is a standard illusion of power. But the old WASP hegemons were especially deep in the illusion.

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