Who Governs, which made Dahl an intellectual and academic celebrity and superstar, would prove to be a critical jumping off point for empirical and normative theoretical analyses and critiques of American politics in the late 1960s and in the 1970s, the era when I took my undergraduate degree at a university that will henceforth remain nameless because of its increasing theo-fascism. The late 1960s, of course, saw a revival of Marxist theory and practise in the US in American intellectual life and American academia and many Marxist critics of Dahl’s work and his later theory of polyarchy. grounded in his early work, saw Dahl as too much of a consensus theorist. Dahl, however, was hardly, like Max Weber, a purely consensus or functionalist theorist since he argued that there were power inequalities in American political culture. Some interest groups, Dahl argued, had more power, authority, and hence influence than others. But then attacks in the social sciences during the long sixties on consensus and functionalist theorists was as much in the heady and overgeneralising academic air just as it was in the countercultural air of core nations more broadly at the time and this almost revivalistic oxygen did not really breed more nuanced critiques.
For many of those who did recognise that Dahl was both a consensus and a conflict theorist it was Dahl’s conception of power that many of them had a problem with. Many of Dahl’s critics found it to limited and limiting. Subsequently, of course, the conception of power and its adjunct authority has broadened in the social sciences since Dahl and this is all for the good in my opinion. Power is not only about getting A to do B, as Dahl had it. It is also discursive. Humans are, as contemporary studies of power have shown, embedded in socially and culturally constructed webs thanks to socialisation, for instance, that rule out certain ideological options by marginalising them and silencing them, something that should be remembered in these looney politically and ideologically correct days on increasingly fascist university campuses. As such power, in both its social and cultural constructionist discursive and rhetorical form and in its ability to make A do B form, is central to traditional, modern, and postmodern societies with their class, ethnic-racial, gender, and age inequalities.
As I have grown older I have become increasingly convinced that conscious ideology plays a very limited role in how American (and core nation) politics actually works and functions, something that some if not many academics and intellectuals embedded as they are in their own little fetishised world of Enlightenment rationality with education as the means to right thinking enlightenment and subsequently liberation (intellectual and academic nirvana) aren’t likely to agree with me on. There are, of course, a few true believers for who conscious ideological purity is important. Sometimes such ideological purity movements can give rise to a cult centred around a charismatic figure in the Weberian sense. I give you the contemporary Republican party which has become an institutionalised cult centred around their holy figure of Donald Trump, their Tangholio. For most potential voters, however, I am increasingly convinced, fatigue, tiredness, and weariness of the party in power plays an important role in who they vote against and who they consequently vote for.
Such weariness of those in power, of course, works hand in hand and hand in glove with the demagogic polemical attack strategies of those prominent political forces not in power. In a media world with a steady diet where those prominent and elites out of power attack those in power for all sorts of political, economic, and cultural woes, with their sky is falling sensationalistic if it bleeds if leads apocalyptic rhetoric coming from polemicists and demagogues and which has become central to the communication sphere, works quite well, as it always had, with the masses. As such, the social and cultural construction of weariness and tiredness is quite easy to manufacture and, in turn, manipulate. We can readily see this process working in contemporary Britian where those who once voted Tory, even in areas traditional Labour geographies which switched to Conservative in the last election, look ready to switch to Labour to throw the bastards out in the upcoming election. We can see it in Canada where the Liberals of Trudeau, who won two successive elections, are running behind the Conservatives once again. Shades of Harper Tories. We can see it in attack dog politics in the United States today.
Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean to assert that political culture is nothing but fatigue politics. Luck and being in the right place at the right time are factors in elections. The recent Labour victory in the United Kingdom, for instance was aided and abetted not only by fatigue with the Tories after fourteen years of Conservative rule in the UK but also by scandals in the Conservative Party, the incompetence of the Conservative Party, specifically the incompetence of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, and scandals in the Scottish National Party, all of which aided the Labour Party.
Additionally, there are, as I noted earlier, true believers who operate on the elite faithful and elite demagogic political levels and on the mass political level in the core nations. There are a cadre of true believers among the masses. Political culture in core nations is also, as the celebrations of D-Day today show, symbolic, grounded in cultural meanings even if those cultural meanings, as they have been on this “sacred" D-Day, rather and necessarily so vague since one can interpret things like “freedom” and “liberty’ in multiple ways while others can see such meanings for what they are, the ways and means great powers like Imperial America, Imperial Russia, Imperial China and wanna be Imperial Europe manipulate the masses via vague declarations that play on national and regional faiths and broad notions of what has been socialised into some as profane.
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