Thursday, September 11, 2008

...lull...

"Hegemony is the power or dominance that one social group holds over others,"(61). The powerful are using the media to enforce their ideological hegemony. People are governed by rules that seem in their favor when they really don't. Media's constant reproducing of a product in many forms is another example of hegemony. People sometimes have an ideological resistance the the hegemony creating a counter-hegemonic view to the powers in charge.

theamericanview.com
Something that conservative media do is push the fact that they are pro-life or at least pro-family. This was a huge part of president Bush's identity as a candidate. It helps hold a conservative hegemony because some people will vote one hundred percent based on whether a candidate is pro-life. I know because I have met them. My eleventh grade Sunday school teacher once spent an entire period together arguing that is how we should decide our vote. So people of all classes who deeply share this view will vote for them no matter what. The person in power is rarely, if ever, making pro-life related decisions, and then the decisions they do make don't necessarily benefit the people. I think some people have caught on to this, like my mom, but others will never give up and fight their uneducated battle.

2 comments:

josh said...

thats bold to say uneducated battle. what do you mean by this exactly. and how does people voting for a candidate who is prolife represent hegemony??

leebrew said...

I mean uneducated battle in that some people will fight and fight for a candidate purely based on whether they are pro-life of not. They are uneducated because some people literally don't check out what else the candidate stands for (I have met these people). Shouldn't people be basing their vote on a collection of issues that are being actively debated in congress?

Voting for a pro-life candidate holds this conservative hegemony because when you have a large population of voters voting based on one or two issues that aren't being discussed in congress. So these voters feel connected to the party and candidate. Meanwhile, this party and leader can do what they want on other issues while in power that aren't connected to these people.