"The Mainstream" cont.
“This whole idea by the way of ‘getting inside’ [a la Alinsky]... we can also tag that to Gramsci too. He said it was critical with a hegemonic culture to get inside and create a counter-hegemony within -- to get inside a state and create a counter-state within, which we at this point are referring to as a 'Deep State' which we're not allowed to talk about.”
That was James Lindsay answering Sebastian Gorka, (about midway in the video I linked in my previous posting — which, by the by, was yanked by YouTube while I was watching it, so I was unable to finish the last 15 minutes).
Now, I don’t necessarily deny there is a Deep State (and/or a Swamp), but a question comes to mind: If the Left pretty much dominates the Mainstream, why would they need a Deep State? One problem with the Deep State symbolism, then, is that it has the effect — and is a symptom — of reinforcing the common myopia to the overwhelming Leftism of the Mainstream. At any rate, we’ll leave off probing the Deep State for now and continue focusing on the Mainstream.
So what is this “Mainstream” I keep referring to? It’s difficult to give a snap definition to it, because it’s so amorphous and generalized. I could just say it’s Everything around us, like the air and the sky. Culturally and socially, it is our total environment. As such, it’s easy for people to take it for granted, since they allow it, more or less unthinkingly, to merge with reality itself. And reality itself isn’t partisan, right? It’s a similar concept to what Peter Berger in 1967 referred to as the “Sacred Canopy”, except he was referring to how our collective meaning of life (mediated through cultural and religious symbolisms) in a psycho-cultural sense becomes — as it mediates — the cosmos itself.
I qualified that comparison by writing “except”; however, in another sense, considering the profound (and still largely unexplained) secularization of the West over the past couple of centuries, the Mainstream may well be the survival of the “Sacred Canopy” under a secularized form, where the traditional religious function has been demoted and co-opted in favor of whatever ersatz religion modern secularism has morphed into (a complex subject in itself, which we can’t get into here).
To repeat, the Mainstream culturally and socially is our total environment. Has the Mainstream ever been unbiased? Probably not. One doesn’t want to generalize and say it’s always been hopelessly biased, however. It seems it was less biased in decades past than now. The point is, the nature of the Mainstream makes it seem like it’s neutral and unbiased, so when it is biased, people are fooled into thinking it reflects reality and not a biased perspective. And when, or if, the Mainstream is more biased, even preponderantly biased (as I think it is now in favor of Leftism), that exacerbates the problem.
Has there always been a Mainstream? That’s an interesting historical and anthropological question, but outside the purview of this essay. I’d only say that yes, all societies have had a Mainstream, but of course with cultural variations. At any rate, the Mainstream of the West currently is dominated by the Left, and the Left is getting out of control on an extremist trajectory with no end in sight.