Can anyone answer this University of Cambridge question ?

Question

To what extent did the policies of the Conservative governments between 1979-97 reflect the hegemony of the ideology of the New Right?

Answer 1

New Right is used in several countries as a descriptive term for various forms of conservative, right-wing, or self-proclaimed dissident oppositional movements and groups that emerged in the mid- to late twentieth century.
The theory of hegemony attempts to explain the relative stability of political authority and control in capitalist democracies, such as the U.S. and many Western European countries, despite crises, World Wars and Depressions. The original theorist in this vein is Antonio Gramsci, an Italian who wrote his major work as a political prisoner in the 1920s and 1930s. Gramsci (1971) began with the insight that, most of the time, political power in liberal democracies is exercised not through government use of force (imprisoning political dissenters, killing protestors, etc.), but through a dominant world-view, or ideology. This commonly-held set of ideas and symbols legitimates existing rulers, helping them to win the citizens' consent, or at least acquiescence. Thus, in a Medieval feudal economy, where serfs (agricultural labors in bondage to the lords who owned the land they worked) were ruled over by an aristocracy, and the aristocracy by a monarch, a whole set of political structures and ideas had to be invented to legitimate and perpetuate the aristocracy's and monarch's exclusive control of property. The notion that kings had a "divine right" to rule, given to them by God, is a good example of an idea that seems archaic to us today, but which served to support centuries of rulers.

Although Gramsci's main inspiration was Karl Marx, his theory is quite different from traditional Marxism. Classical Marxists often viewed society as a kind of building where the economy was the "base," upon which sat a "superstructure" of political, civil and cultural institutions and beliefs. For them, the economy was the foundation of society, and it determined people's behavior and thinking in the political and cultural spheres. To use the above example, a feudal economy caused people to dream up the idea that kings had a divine right to rule. In contrast to traditional Marxists, Gramsci suggested that the ideas and symbols of the ruling ideology could be as powerful and determining as the economy. As Raymond Williams, a British theorist of hegemony, has suggested, the relationship of base and superstructure is dialectical -- each affects and changes the other. Williams (1977, 34) adds that we can still speak of the economy (or culture) as "determining," but only if "determination" means "setting bounds" or "setting limits" to how we act or think, rather than "causing" us to act or think this way in some mechanical manner. So the theory of hegemony knocks the economic foundation out from under classical Marxism, arguing that ideas and cultural institutions can shape us as powerfully as how we make a living.

Gramsci also saw the ruling forces of society in a more complex manner than did Marx. Marx tended to portray society's rulers as those who owned the means of production: factories, land, machinery, whatever was used to produce goods. For Marx, governments and other institutions of capitalist societies had little independence from the owners of capital. The state, he wrote, was simply the "committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie" (Marx, 1848/1988). Gramsci, on the other hand, did not reduce the ruling forces of a society solely to the capitalist class, but saw society as governed at any given time by an "historical bloc." Historical blocs are shifting coalitions of interests that share some political solidarity at a point in time. These blocs may be bound as much by ideological ties as by shared economic interests, and they are subject to change. They are not necessarily from one economic class, but may represent fractions of several classes. For example, it could be argued that the New Right, which helped the Republicans win the White House and the Senate in 1980, represented a coalition of multinational corporations, suburbanites demanding lower taxes, white Southerners, some elements of white labor that disliked affirmative action programs, and Christian fundamentalists and other cultural conservatives. These groups had not always voted similarly in the past, and Bill Clinton was able to peel enough of them away from the Republicans in 1992 to divide this bloc, and win the Presidency.

Gramsci defined hegemony as the process by which the dominant classes or class fractions, through their privileged access to social institutions (such as the media), propagate values that reinforce their control over politics and the economy. These values form a dominant ideology. The dominant ideology in any society is a set of common sense assumptions that legitimates the existing distribution of power. Ideology makes this structure of power seem "natural," "normal," or "inevitable," and therefore beyond challenge. Aspects of the reigning ideology might include such "common sense" sayings as: "The poor will always be with us" (despite the fact that there have been many societies in human history in which wealth was owned communally or divided more equally than in our society); "You can't fight City Hall" (despite the fact that people sometimes do take on government, and make changes); "Blacks are less intelligent and lazier than whites, so they need to be watched over" (despite the fact that slaves worked far longer and harder than their white masters, and there is no legitimate evidence that any race possesses more intelligence than another); "Asians are docile, so they don't make good leaders and managers" (despite the fact that Asians seem to have ruled themselves for quite awhile before white folks showed up on their shores); "America is the land of equal opportunity" (despite the fact that some people start out life in slums while others start out in mansions.)

Through ideology, ruling groups attempt to universalize their own interests as the interests of all. An example might be the notion that cutting taxes on the rich encourages them to invest this money and create jobs for the rest of us. How do we know that they will create jobs? How do we know that these will be decent paying jobs? Most importantly, why should we give the wealthy the power to decide whether to make jobs for us, rather than using the money for other purposes? Many economists in this country speak of a "maximum level of employment" beyond which we cannot pass or inflation will rise. When "too many" people are employed, government policy makers take measures to stop the economy from growing as fast, which can throw some people out of work. Why then is the ability to get a job seen as a matter of "personal responsibility," and why are welfare payments for those who cannot get a job not seen as compensation for denying them the ability to earn a living? Why do we speak of giving preferences to college applicants based on their race or gender as "affirmative action," while giving other applicants preferences based on the fact that their parents attended the same college is not called the same thing? Gramsci argues that it is by these ideational means, rather than through the coercive force of the state, that ruling groups maintain their power. And power is most effectively exercised not through overt inculcation and censorship, but "also and especially (by) the ability to define the parameters of legitimate discussion and debate over alternative beliefs, values and world views" (Sallach, 1974: 166).

A note on the common usage of "ideology" is in order here. Often the word is used negatively, as an epithet. Ideology is something that other people have, a dogmatic closed-mindedness and inflexibility from which all right-thinking folks are miraculously free. But Gramsci saw ideology differently. We all have some kind of ideology, in the sense that we have a framework of ideas that allows us to locate our identities (as Americans, or Californians, or working class or middle class), and our interests (in higher wages, or control over our work, or the prevention of abortion). Ideology, in this version, doesn't just limit our vision, but enables it. And ideologies aren't simply concocted and spread by small conspiracies of rulers. They are not created by a handful of political elites who meet in a smoky room and decide what we should all believe.

Instead, for theorists of hegemony, the creation and spread of ideology is a very complex process. Cultural institutions play a key role in perpetuating aspects of the dominant worldview. These include the family, religious organizations, and the mass media, among others. Some argue that hegemonic ideology acts primarily as a kind of social glue that holds together the farflung and diverse peoples of contemporary democracies. Todd Gitlin (1980), for example, sees the specialization of work, identities and interests in contemporary capitalist democracies as undermining the unity of elites and subordinate groups. Neither march in lockstep on all issues. Elites often differ substantively over ruling strategies, as when Franklin Roosevelt and the Democratic Party inaugurated the New Deal programs of the 1930s to try to bring America out of the Depression, while Republicans denounced the growth of government as socialistic. Both parties saw themselves as saving capitalism, albeit with different remedies. Similarly, subordinate groups rarely accept hegemonic terms fully and regularly. Ideology takes on a particularly important role in welding together a ruling bloc, and in ensuring others' consent to be ruled. Nonetheless, as Gitlin (1980, 255) puts it, "the relative autonomy of the different sectors legitimates the system as a whole." The news media cannot play a role in securing consent without appearing independent of other elite interests, or citizens wouldn't trust them. Hence, the widespread elite acceptance of the ideal of objectivity, media corporations' frequent self-characterization as public servants, and their toleration of journalists' claims to be watchdogs on power.

If Gitlin focuses on the cohesive power of hegemony, others emphasize that consent can be structured without consensus. The consent of the subordinate, notes T.J. Jackson Lears (1984), is a "complex mental state . . . mixing approbation and apathy, resistance and resignation" (569). Hegemonic ideas may bolster support for the market economy and the state by marginalizing discussion of viable alternatives and lowering our expectations for achieving greater equality, or mitigating the turmoil created by the economy. However, just as often it is not agreement with ruling ideas that keeps the subjected in their places, "but rather a lack of consensus in the crucial area where concrete experiences and vague populism might be translated into radical politics" (Mann, 1970). As David Sallach (1974, 166) puts it, "The hegemonic process does not create a value consensus but confusion, fragmentation, inconsistency in belief systems."

The Media's Role in Hegemony

Hegemonic theory says that the main role of media is not to act as a watchdog on government, or a realm in which elites debate policy issues to woo voters. Instead, the news media's role is usually to shore up capitalist states by disseminating the worldview of ruling classes. According to this theory, the news media both shape and are shaped by the legitimating ideology of those who really rule capitalist democracies -- usually identified as top political leaders, corporations in the leading economic sectors, and whatever social groups and classes ally with them.

Daniel Hallin's (1993) essay on Cold War ideology offers a good example of how hegemony can be applied to the news media. He recounts how American ideology after World War II portrayed the globe as a battleground between the "Free World" and a dangerous, expansionist Communist bloc, led by the former USSR. This worldview helped legitimate the terms of the peace after 1945. At this time, America moved to bring as many countries as possible into a global capitalist system dominated politically and economically by the U.S. Cold War thinking ensured consent among Americans for U.S. leadership abroad, and the sacrifices it required, from higher taxes to pay for increased defense spending to risking American soldiers' lives in Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere. The picture of an imminent and pervasive communist threat (often inflated beyond reality) also justified an increasingly secretive foreign policy to protect national security, concealing from Americans much of what the military and intelligence agencies did in the name of protecting them.

Against this background, Hallin carefully studied TV coverage of the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s and U.S. involvement in Central America (El Salvador, Nicaragua) in the 1980s. He sees the hegemony of the Cold War frame weakening after Vietnam, when some elite voices questioned an aggressive foreign policy, yet the frame continued. In the 1980s, journalists reported the Reagan administration's claims that U.S. military intervention in Central America was justified by growing communist Cuban and Soviet influence there, as well as the views of the administration's Congressional critics. But reporters' continued reliance on government sources constrained the debate over Central America within the range of opinions offered by political elites. Their debate was over how best to manage and preserve U.S. power abroad, either by allying ourselves with violent right wing governments to curb communism at all costs, or by representing ourselves as bringing democratic elections to the region and urging our allies to stop their paramilitaries from terrorizing and killing peasants. There was little coverage in the 1980s of U.S. citizens who opposed military involvement in Central America. And, Hallin found, Central America was framed as most Third World nations were viewed by Cold War American policymakers: as battlegrounds between U.S. and Soviet interests, where conflict was an expression of superpower struggle. There was little attention to how civil wars in Central America broke out for other, local reasons; to how stark social inequality was a major cause of struggle (between oligarchs who controlled much of the land, and the poor); and to the desire of some to move out from under the thumb of U.S. domination after years of American imperialism. Like much of the reporting on developing countries, news of Central America tended to present it as a place without history, where conflict was endemic and inexplicable, almost native to the soil. This frame ignored the history of American support for the handful of wealthy families that ruled El Salvador and Nicaragua, and whose rapaciousness sparked revolts against them at the time. The Cold War frame made these countries appear as squares on a chessboard to be captured by U.S. or Soviet interests, or as barbaric lands that required U.S. intervention to be civilized.

Todd Gitlin, the other major American theorist of hegemony and news, shows how the theory can be applied to coverage of domestic issues. Gitlin (1980) studied how CBS News and the New York Times covered Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the leading organization of New Left college students and young people in the 1960s. SDS worked on a number of issues in the early 1960s, including African-American civil rights, but devoted itself almost entirely to anti-Vietnam War protests thereafter. The group organized the demonstrations outside the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, which ended with the city's police attacking protestors with billy clubs and tear gas in the streets, in full view of television cameras.

Gitlin argued that protest movements such as SDS, which challenge the interests of elites, are covered in ways that marginalize the importance of their messages, discouraging public sympathy with these challengers. He identified a number of framing devices that are often used in news reports of social protest. These include:

- Trivialization (making light of a movement's language, dress, or goals)
- Polarization (emphasizing counterdemonstrations, no matter how small; identifying protestors with "extremism," and equating all protestors as equivalently "extremist")
- Emphasizing internal dissension within the movement
- Marginalization (showing demonstrators as deviant or unrepresentative of the public, focusing on the most inflammatory rhetoric or figures in a movement)
- Disparagement by numbers (undercounting protestors at demonstrations to belittle their significance)
- Disparagement of movement's effectiveness (portraying protest as futile)
- Emphasis on violence at protests, or the possibility of it
- Delegitimizing the claims and labels of the movement (e.g., presenting demonstrators as taking part in a "so-called peace march," or characterizing protestors as "self-appointed community leaders.")

Gitlin noted how SDS protests were often treated as a crime story, despite citizens' First Amendment rights in the U.S. Constitution to petition government for redress of greiveances, and to free speech. He noted that this kind of negative coverage of challengers was also driven by news' tendency to focus on events (rather than underlying conditions), on conflict (versus agreeement), on the fact that advances a story (rather than that which explains it), and to rely heavily on official sources.

Gitlin also took stock of how media coverage changes social movements. He drew on his own experience as a student leader in SDS to show how protest movements depend on media coverage to recruit new members, to alert the public to their views and actions, and to get policy makers' attention. Media coverage, he found, had the power to influence the movement's leadership by selecting its most flamboyant members as spokespeople. The news converted political leadership into celebrity. When this happens, the question of whether a movement is valid can be reduced to whether its most outspoken leaders are. Think about how Jesse Jackson, or Louis Farrakhan, are often held up as the only African-American leaders in the national media today, and how they have become touchstones for judging all black civil rights efforts. Media coverage can also influence the choice of projects on which groups may choose to work. Efforts that are likely to get into the news are often prioritized, even if they are less effective in the long run than work that might be done outside the spotlight (such as going door to door and organizing people in their homes.) Funders and others may use media attention as one way to measure the impact or success of a movement. Finally, news coverage can shape a group's identity or style. They may become more combative or colorful to get media attention, or they may acquire a reputation in the media that attracts certain kinds of newcomers to join up (in the case of SDS, stories that portrayed the organization as more confrontational than it was attracted more confrontational enlistees.)

Some movements, Gitlin notes, are particularly dependent on the media. Social protestors who have a narrow constituency may rely more on media coverage to spread their views, since they cannot mobilize large numbers of people to march, or lobby government. They may design dramatic and telegenic protests to win journalistic attention. At the same time, groups that have broader, society-wide goals must reach out through the media to recruit participants and win approval from many people for their program. A good contemporary example might be environmental organizations that work on many issues (from global warming and acid rain to protecting endangered species and public lands), and who therefore need a broad constituency. Movements that present themselves as reforming social problems, rather than demanding revolutionary change, are likely to be able to control coverage, and get a fairer hearing in the media. Thus, consumer rights groups that present themselves as alerting citizens to the dangers of specific products rather than challenging capitalism are widely cited media sources.

Limits to Hegemony

One growing criticism of hegemonic theory is that it understates the power of social movements to partake in politics and get access to the news. Critics argue that the theory too often sees citizen groups that challenge state and corporate power as either coopted or marginalized by the media. These groups must either learn to frame their demands in ways that accommodate the power of capital and government, or be ridiculed and excluded from public discourse. Gitlin, for example, concludes that "an opposition movement is caught in a fundamental, an inescapable dilemma" between remaining outside the rules of mainstream political methods and discourse, and thus being rendered irrelevant or trivialized by the news, and observing media conventions, and thus being assimilated. "This is the condition of movements in all the institutions of liberal capitalism," he continues. By excluding and taming dissent, "the media reinforce one of the central rhythms of American political history. Opposition movements emerge but their radical identities weaken" (291).

Critics of hegemony reject such a closed and despairing vision of the political system, questioning its assumed split between "reform" and "revolution." Social change, they argue, is not an "all or nothing process" (Barker-Plummer, 1995, 309). They remind us that the relationship of reform and revolutionary movements is dialectical, and their rise and fall complex. Pointing to the ways in which some feminist groups have worked through the news media, Bernadette Barker-Plummer concludes that the theory of hegemony seems to "deny the reflexivity or strategic agency on the part of social movement actors themselves to learn about and strategically use dominant systems and discourses -- in this case journalistic routines and practices -- as resources in themselves" (309). Some challengers may speak successfully through the media, tailoring their message to journalistic needs for conflict and color, without losing their identity and purpose. Environmental groups, such as Greenpeace, have made effective use of the media to draw attention to illegal whaling, logging threats to the old growth redwood forests of Northern California, and the siting of toxic waste dumps and incinerators in low-income communities of color.

Another blind spot of hegemony theory as applied to news is that its practitioners tend to focus on criticizing existing media and economic relations, without offering much of a positive vision of how things might be different. Remember that we are looking at theories that both attempt to describe what role the media actually play in democracy, and what role they ought to play. Theorists of hegemony often spend their energies explaining the existing function of news, rather than proposing a vision of how it might contribute to democracy. If pressed, those who rely on the notion of hegemony might well advocate some of the same changes in the media that participatory democrats suggest.

Answer 2

If you know what the new right was in 1979-97 then you just have to reflect the hedgemony on the policies of the Conservative gov. and also say to what extent did they reflect on them. Good luck I don't know what the new right was so I can't answer this part without knowing.

Answer 3

Er, in straight to the point English does it mean, did the modern day thinking of the Conservative government in 79-97 have any influence on New Labour, gosh not a clue sorry but hope you get your place if your wanting to study there.

Answer 4

Tv set is produced to the lowest common denominator - i.e., the average IQ of everyone, whereas a written booklet is written to the best common denominator

Answer 5

I love watching TV, I really like the animal shows, the medical shows and the Judges and judge shows

Answer 6

Hegemony? Let's first work that one out...

Answer 7

Was it Sheffield Wednsday in 1976?

Answer 8

To a large extent, obviously. Otherwise they would not have this kind of question.

Answer 9

No, but you could make an attempt after looking here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hegemony#Theories_of_hegemony

http://ics.leeds.ac.uk/eurpolcom/exhibits/Britain2.pdf

Good luck.

Answer 10

To some extent, the answer is, yes.

Answer 11

nope I cant - not without looking up some very weary books.