To understand why our society hasn’t (until recently) participated in much public discussion about wealth disparity and salary gaps, it is helpful to understand the concept of hegemony. The word hegemony has roots in ancient Greek, but in the 1920s and 1930s Italian philosopher and activist Antonio Gramsci worked out a modern understanding of hegemony: how a ruling class in a society maintains its power—not simply by military or police force but more commonly by citizens’ consent and deference to power. He explained that people who are without power—the disenfranchised, the poor, the disaffected, the unemployed, exploited workers—do not routinely rise up against those in power because “the rule of one class over another does not depend on economic or physical power alone but rather on persuading the ruled to accept the system of beliefs of the ruling class and to share their social, cultural, and moral values.”¹⁷ Hegemony, then, is the acceptance of the dominant values in a culture by those who are subordinate to those who hold economic and political power.

TABLE 13.1

HOW MANY WORKERS CAN YOU HIRE FOR THE PRICE OF ONE CEO?

Source: Douglas McIntyre, “How Many Workers Can You Hire for the Price of One CEO?”, July 7, 2010, http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/how-many-workers-can-you-hire-for-the-price-of-one-ceo/19540733/.

How then does this process actually work in our society? How do lobbyists, the rich, and our powerful two-party political system convince regular citizens that they should go along with the status quo? Edward Bernays, one of the founders of modern public relations (see Chapter 12), wrote in his 1947 article “The Engineering of Consent” that companies and rulers couldn’t lead people—or get them to do what the ruling class wanted—until the people consented to what those companies or rulers were trying to do, whether it was convincing the public to support women smoking cigarettes or to go to war. To pull this off, Bernays would convert a client’s goals into “common sense”; that is, he tried to convince consumers and citizens that his clients’ interests were the “natural” or normal way things worked.

So if companies or politicians convinced consumers and voters that the interests of the powerful were common sense and therefore normal or natural, they also created an atmosphere and context in which there was less chance for challenge and criticism. Common sense, after all, repels self-scrutiny (“that’s just plain common sense—end of discussion”). In this case, status quo values and “conventional wisdom” (e.g., hard work and religious belief are rewarded with economic success) and political arrangements (e.g., the traditional two-party system serves democracy best) become taken for granted as normal and natural ways to organize and see the world.

To argue that a particular view or value is common sense is often an effective strategy for stopping conversation and debate. Yet common sense is socially and symbolically constructed and shifts over time. For example, it was once common sense that the world was flat and that people who were not property-owning white males shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Common sense is particularly powerful because it contains no analytical strategies for criticizing elite or dominant points of view and therefore certifies class, race, or sexual orientation divisions or mainstream political views as natural and given.

To buy uncritically into concepts presented as common sense inadvertently serves to maintain such concepts as natural, shutting down discussions about the ways in which economic divisions or political hierarchies are not natural and given. So when Democratic and Republican candidates run for office, the stories they tell about themselves espouse their connection to Middle American common sense and “down home” virtues—for example, a photo of Mitt Romney eating a Subway sandwich or a video of Barack Obama playing basketball in a small Indiana high school gym. These ties to ordinary commonsense values and experience connect the powerful to the everyday, making their interests and ours seem to be seamless.

To understand how hegemony works as a process, let’s examine how common sense is practically and symbolically transmitted. Here it is crucial to understand the central importance of storytelling to culture. The narrative—as the dominant symbolic way we make sense of experience and articulate our values—is often a vehicle for delivering “common sense.” Therefore, ideas, values, and beliefs can be carried in our mainstream stories, the stories we tell and find in daily conversations, in the local paper, in political ads, on the evening news, or in books, magazines, movies, favorite TV shows, and online. The narrative, then, is the normal and familiar structure that aids in converting ideas, values, and beliefs to common sense—normalizing them into “just the way things are.”

The reason that common narratives “work” is that they identify with a culture’s dominant values; “Middle American” virtues include allegiances to family, honesty, hard work, religion, capitalism, health, democracy, moderation, loyalty, fairness, authenticity, modesty, and so forth. These kinds of Middle American virtues are the ones that our politicians most frequently align themselves with in the political ads that tell their stories. These virtues lie at the heart of powerful American Dream stories that for centuries now have told us that if we work hard and practice such values, we will triumph and be successful. Hollywood, too, distributes these shared narratives, celebrating characters and heroes who are loyal, honest, and hardworking. Through this process, the media (and the powerful companies that control them) provide the commonsense narratives that keep the economic status quo relatively unchallenged and leave little room for alternatives.

In the end, hegemony helps explain why we occasionally support economic plans and structures that may not be in our best interest. We may do this out of altruism, as when wealthy people or companies favor higher taxes because of a sense of obligation to support those who are less fortunate. But more often, the American Dream story is so powerful in our media and popular culture that many of us believe that we have an equal chance of becoming rich and therefore successful and happy. So why do anything to disturb the economic structures that the dream is built upon? In fact, in many versions of our American Dream story—from Hollywood films to political ads—the government often plays the role of villain, seeking to raise our taxes or undermine rugged individualism and hard work. Pitted against the government in these stories, the protagonist is the “little guy” at odds with burdensome regulation and bureaucratic oversight. However, many of these stories are produced and distributed by large media corporations and political leaders who rely on the rest of us to consent to the American Dream narrative to keep their privileged place in the status quo and reinforce this “commonsense” story as the way the world works.