Conflict Grifters And Counter-Hegemony

In my last post about the killing of Charlie Kirk I said I’d written as much as I wanted to about him and he would now take up zero amounts of my emotional energy going forward. I lied. But in my defence, I didn’t know at the time I was lying. And I blame Nancy Fraser.

Nancy Fraser is the author of The Old Is Dying And The New Cannot Be Born, and this week I started reading it again after not picking it up for a few years. I’m compelled to come back to Kirk and specifically the reaction to his death, because in her book Fraser illuminates a dynamic that is clearly at play in the martyrdom narrative being constructed around Kirk.

Fraser explains how a central component of hegemony - the process by which a ruling class makes its domination appear natural - is the politics of recognition. She defines this as a general sense for how society apportions respect and esteem to individuals and identity groupings. Respect and esteem, she says, are essential normative components out of which hegemonies are constructed.

In practice this simply means that a common set of ideas and practices about fairness, respect and rights sit at the centre of our shared cultural understanding. For example, we agree, broadly, that marginalising people who are openly racist is an important societal firewall. Because we don’t want society run by racists. We agree that a person’s gender, race, religion or sexual orientation shouldn’t affect their public standing or life chances. Because we don’t want bigots to run society. We extend legal protections to a broad range of identities, from gay people to immigrants, because we want the engine of society, in broad terms, to be fairness, not bigotry.

Now, these ideas and practices can break down under certain pressures, both legal and political, but they are broadly held as correct, aspirational and worth protecting. They are, in essence, the common cultural glue that holds together a liberal society. But this glue is starting to lose its power. It is starting to flake away. And conflict grifters like Charlie Kirk have squirreled into the cracks.

By espousing openly racist and bigoted views, these grifters challenge the politics of recognition that underpin liberal society. And they do it for this reason. They farm conflict for clicks, they target liberals for the likes. Because, and this is critical to understand, they have no interest in channelling the rage of their audience towards an analysis of the structural economic forces pressing down on their lives. They have no interest in elucidating the component parts of a neoliberal economics that leaves people angry and seeking scapegoats for their declining material conditions. They have no interest in a class-based approach and analysis to the problems of society.

Conflict grifters don’t farm outrage in spite of the economic settlement that neoliberalism has left us with, they do it as a consequence. The wreckage left by neoliberalism has provided the Charlie Kirks of this world the perfect platform to scapegoat identity groupings and leverage the politics of recognition in the name of (white) nationalist renewal. By fuelling the collapse of material conditions, neoliberalism has provided conflict grifters with the perfect audience and platform to get rich and famous by playing the bigot and claiming free speech.

And so to the reaction.

What we're watching are attempts by the counterhegemonic bloc, loosely defined as the white nationalist renewal bloc, to create a new hegemonic recognition norm. The fawning reaction. The demands to venerate Kirk. His putative positioning as a free speech martyr. The goal is to re-make ideas of respect and esteem. If a man that any decent civil society should ostracise can instead be made into a figure worthy of reverence, a new hegemonic recognition norm is established. In addition to this, making the death of a fascist something to lament under the auspices of free speech raises the quality of the arguments made not just by the dead fascist but by the living ones too.

All of sudden, outrageous ideas are normalised.

This is hegemony in construction.

But this isn’t just a Charlie Kirk thing. Attempts to construct and embed a new, nastier and more bigoted politics of recognition, as an attempt to influence policies and political outcomes, are underway across the west.

Look at Gaza. We’ve been instructed, literally at times under threat of arrest, to view genocide as the norm, to grant respect and esteem to the people doing a genocide, not to their victims.

Look at immigration. The tone of the debate, from the US, to the UK to the EU has turned increasingly hateful. An average Facebook post about the death of immigrants in the English Channel, in the Mediterranean or at the US border is now routinely met with thousands of laughing emojis and openly racist statements in the comments.

There are dozens and dozens of Instagram accounts with millions of followers now trading in casual racism, white supremacy and bigotry against groups considered woke or left-wing.

Firewalls are being breached.

Previously agreed standards of civility are breaking down.

And these efforts to construct a new politics of recognition are bleeding and have bled into politics, most obviously with Donald Trump and his cabinet of conflict grifting podcasters.

Which is why, despite some criticism, I stand by my article last week de-canonising Charlie Kirk. Because to do anything other than call him a fascist prick undeserving of our sympathy would help fuel the new hegemonic norms that would further an agenda of bigotry and harm.

The biggest lie of this whole affair is that it is all just a question of free speech.

It is in fact a question of norms, and attempts to create new, more hateful ones.

Anyone who cares about a decent future should see through this effort and thoroughly reject it.

Anyway, you should really read Fraser’s book.