Emergence and Hegemony
A brief look at big questions.
A leapfrog timeline takes past events and connects them to future events. When a new idea is introduced for the first time, its first and earliest participants and proponents (the youngest being teenagers and young adults) experience it as a break from the past. This is referred to as “memetic emergence,” where a new idea forcefully and visibly overtakes an older idea. However, once that new idea becomes established, it is then perceived as hegemonic by a new generation. Therefore, each memetic “ripple” in the culture has two waves: first, the phenomenon as it is experienced by its adopters, second, the phenomenon as it is experienced as a form of “hegemony.” This can be applied to sexual and racial politics.
For example, the internet as we know it became mainstream between 1993 (eternal September) and 2005 (founding of MySpace). The first adult users of the open internet were born in 1975, while those who were 6 years old in 1993 were born in 1987. For those born in 1975 (who are now 48), they can remember a time and a childhood before the internet. For those who were born in 1987, the internet has been a ubiquitous concept, and when they turned 18 in 2005, they were the early adopters of MySpace and Facebook.
There is no definite age at which a child develops “political awareness.” However, when the question is asked, “when did you have your first political memory?”,1 answers generally range from 7 to 11. Prior to age 6, children do not have a conscious awareness of politics as an abstract, societal concept. After age 12, almost all children become aware of political distinctions, but might ignore politics, find it uninteresting or annoying.
Assuming that prior to puberty, LGBTQ identity is a purely political phenomenon, then an average age for initial political awareness around age 9 seems backed up by the latest research. An SDSU study (2018) suggests that “More than 13 percent of parents, when asked about the sexual identity of their children, reported their child might be gay.”2 Considering that parents pass on their religious and political views to their children, with a success rate between 81% - 89% of the time,3 it may be possible that this 13% of “wishful thinkers” are convincing their children to identify as gay. It is also possible that where parents are absent, other authority figures such as social media celebrities or school teachers could serve the same role as parents.
A 2022 study found that 25% of children aged 10.7 had their own cellphone, and 75% by age 12.6.4
Using an exponential equation, we can model the likelihood of a child having a cellphone by fitting these two data points to a curve.
If we zoom in on the years between 8 and 9, we can estimate cellphone ownership between 5% and 9%.
20% of Gen Z (11 to 26 years old) identifies as LGBTQ. One hypothesis for the difference between Gen Z and previous generations is that Gen Z is exposed to online propaganda regarding LGBTQ from a young age in a way that other generations were not. If we assume that owning a cellphone will induce 20% LGBTQ identification, and we multiply that rate by the number of 8 year olds who own cellphones, this comes out to 1%, which is in line with the SDSU study (2018).
The adoption of the internet and the smartphone was a pivotal cultural event for Americans born in 1975. They were the first early adopters of social media, and it defined Gen X as the first internet generation, as opposed to the Boomers, for whom it was (and remains) a foreign concept. Boomers can remember a time before the internet, whereas for Gen X, it was a defining moment in their young adulthood, like a rite of passage.
For Gen Z, however, the internet is being experienced in an entirely different way, as a hegemonic cultural force rather than as something emergent. Gen Z cannot imagine life without the internet. Going back further, we can examine the first Gay Pride Parade of 1970.
The actual participants in the first gay pride marches would have been born in 1952. This represents the first “emergent” generation of gay rights activists. Children born in 1964 would then grow up to view gay pride parades as something hegemonic. The term hegemonic is not meant to mean “dominant,” but comes from the ancient Greek, “to guide or lead.” Whereas the emergent generation is a vanguard which breaks from the norms, the hegemonic generation cannot remember a time before gay pride parades.
Two years after gay pride began, in 1972, Jobriath became the first openly gay signed musician, and “She’s a Winner” by The Intruders became one of the earliest disco songs. From 1972 to 1979, disco was the dominant “pop music.” Toward the tail end of this period, in 1978, the Village People released their hit song, "YMCA," which is probably the most recognizable disco song to this day. It portrayed a homosexual, multi-racial group, which today seems mainstream, fun, campy, and normal. However, at the time, disco was thought of as highly effeminate, sexual, and racially dirty.5
White and homophobic resentment toward disco culminated in 1979, with the Disco Demolition Night, organized by radio jockey Steve Dahl. Dahl produced a parody song lampooning disco as sexually promiscuous,6 inauthentic,7 obsessed with appearances and over-grooming.8 Dahl offers the solution to disco's inauthenticity in the form of rock music, which is masculine, gritty, unconcerned with appearances, and hardcore. Dahl's message was appealing, and the Disco Demolition Night became an "anti-disco riot" which featured the explosion of 55,000 disco records. The resulting mass chaos caused hours of rioting by triumphant anti-disco reactionaries, which had to be put down by police. Vince Lawrence, a black producer, “points out that many of the records Dahl detonated weren’t disco — they were R&B records by Black artists,” and says “it was a book-burning. It was a racist, homophobic book-burning.”9
The distance between the emergence of disco and the “hegemonic reaction” is 7 years, but if we view it as part of a larger trend of effeminacy going back to Gay Pride, this was a year year period. Although it is “common sense” now to view the 1960s as a period of effeminacy represented by hippies and Woodstock, Woodstock only began in 1969, and the 1960s were largely dominated by Rock n’ Roll legends, such as Elvis and the Beatles. The Beatles and Elvis were white acts who sang in the range between baritone and tenor. Disco, by contrast, was, from its very beginning, a multi-racial, nearly-cross-dressing, falsetto enterprise.
While Elvis and the Beatles could be accused of breaking many standards of normalcy, racial and sexual, their insistence on wearing shirts, and the continued prominence of the buttoned shirt, the suit jacket, the tie, and other “throwbacks” to “stiff culture” differentiates it from disco. Disco threw out everything perceived as old and stodgy, and preferred the new and tight, especially with the emerging popularity of spandex and other artificial fabrics. Glittering, shimmering disco cannot be conflated with the earthy authenticity of the hippie movement, which was never a mainstream movement, but a counter-culture.
Unlike the hippies, disco did achieve mainstream cultural homogeneity. This may have been partially a result of its political reorientation. Hippies were, first and foremost, peace activists, associated with opposition to the Vietnam War, who promoted marijuana, were sympathetic to the Soviet Union, but also anarchism, supported the Black Panthers, and were intertwined with the “peaceful protests” of the Civil Rights era which often turned violent, often due to persecution at the hands of the police. The most famous of these, Kent State in 1970, brings to the forefront the Jewish American role in the hippie subculture: three out of the four students shot were Jewish.10 Bob Dylan, folk hero of the hippies, was Jewish, as were feminists Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. The New Left was the ideological core of a serious intellectual movement which included Herbert Marcuse. Even the comedians of the 60s, like Lenny Bruce, were fighting serious legal battles for the right to free speech. This kind of leadership meant that, even if some hippies were “bums” or uninterested in politics, there was a core to the movement which sought the “emergence” of a challenge to the system.
Disco rode the coattails of the New Left and the Civil Rights movement, enjoying freedom from obscenity trials and freedom of interracial marriage. Rather than being counter-cultural, changing the world, or having a revolution, disco was all about having fun. Instead of smoking weed and using psychedelics to open the mind to new spiritual experiences, disco was secular, and preferred cocaine and Quaaludes, which gained the nickname "disco biscuits." Whereas the hippies opposed the foreign policy establishment and Cold War containment, disco was saccharine and its only agenda was having a good time.
Radical black nationalists in South Africa attacked interracial disco clubs in 1978 as promoting drinking and prostitution.11 The response to disco’s excesses would not solve the link between music and vice, but would take it in another direction.
In the year that "disco died," rap began. In 1979, the Sugarhill Gang released Rapper's Delight. Rapper's Delight was criticized by others in the hip hop scene for being inauthentic, because it delivered a lighthearted "pop" message that was meant to appeal to whites rather than blacks.12 The music video for Rapper's Delight portrays three black rappers, surrounded by a crowd of all-white male and female dancers.
Some of the lyrics reference the effeminacy which rap was opposing:
“Just let me quit my boyfriend called Superman"
I said, "He's a fairy, I do suppose
Flyin' through the air in pantyhose”
While not explicit, the description of superman wearing pantyhose could have been a reference to the tight spandex promoted in disco. The implication is that the new rappers would be stealing the girlfriend’s of the disco “supermen.”
In the same year, Spoonie Gee released "Spoonin' Rap." The song references disco in a positive light, seeming to associate rap with disco.13 Spoonin’ Rap can be considered as a transitional zone between rap and disco. But themes of violence already distinguish early rap from the pacifism of disco:
See I'ma roll my barrel and keep the bullets still
And when I shoot my shot, I'm gonna shoot to kill
'Cause I'm the Spoonie-Spoon, I don't mess around
I drop a man where he stand right into the ground
The line, “I'm the midnight stalker” brings to mind Richard Ramirez, the serial killer nicknamed the “night stalker” in 1984. Spoonie’s willingness to call himself a killer and a “midnight stalker” introduces a new dark, violent masculinity that would define gansta rap, in stark contrast to disco.
Like later rappers, Spoonie includes explicit references to butts and asses.14 He also mentions, for perhaps the first time in rap, the phenomenon of prison rap:
But if you go to jail, watch yours for a crew
'Cause when you go in the shower, he's pullin' his meat
And he's lookin' at you and say you look real sweet
And at first there was one, now ten walked in
Now how in the hell did you expect to win?
I said you better look alive, not like you take dope
And please my brother, don't drop the soap
The elements missing from this formula is drugs and gambling, since Spoonie raps, "I don't drink, I don't smoke, I don't gamble neither." Nonetheless, this was the beginning of "old-school hip hop," which lasted from 1979 to 1983, before the "golden age" of hip hop began.
The young adults who turned 18 in 1979 would have been born in 1961, and would have attended 1st grade in 1967, at the height of desegregation and bussing. At that time, black identity was undergoing a new confrontation with white culture. The act of desegregation brought black students into spaces where they were unwanted, as a small minority, sometimes as mere individuals. Pictures of small black school children being marched into classrooms by soldiers with bayonets were plastered in newspapers. The archetype represented by these images were of a child who is forced into a white culture, and who is rejected from that culture. The response to this trauma is the rebel archetype, which says, “you can’t fire me, because I quit,” or, “you can’t reject me, I reject you.” Rap music, therefore, exists as an egoic defense for black identity, rejecting white culture and disco in favor of a masculine, violent, rebellious, street-smart black culture.
Racial integration in schools would remain highly contentious around the country, especially in Boston, where it was not successful until 1977. The children who entered 1st grade in 1977 were represented by Ice-T, who expressed their pent up rage and frustration against a white society which pretended to accept them, but obviously rejected them for the 23 years between 1954 and 1977. It is no surprise that Ice-T began rapping in 1982, 5 years after this struggle ended.15
Just as gansta rap was emerging to express rage at the white machine, interracial music was also emerging. The first song to feature a black man and a white woman singing a sexual duet was "Fire and Desire," by Rick James, a funk artists, and Teena Marie. (1981)
In 1981, Blondie's single "Rapture" topped the charts of the "Billboard Hot 100," and became the first chart-topping song to feature rapping (by a white woman no less!) with black dancers. In 1983, the Beastie Boys, the famous Jewish rappers, released their first hip hop single.
Whodini also released their first studio album, and in the previous year shot the first hip hop music video. Todd Anthony Shaw, known as Too $hort, began recording albums in 1983 out of Oakland California. "Wild Style," a film released in 1983, has been described by Rolling Stone as "arguably the first great hip-hop album.”16
Pew and Gallup disagree on the timing, but both research institutes agree on the event: sometime between 1990 and 1994, there was a sudden and sharp increase in approval of interracial marriage, from under 49% to over 60%. What caused this jump?
The immediate and proximate causes could have been Paula Abdul, who although Jewish, was white presenting in her song “Opposites Attract” about interracial relationships. In 1990, Vanilla Ice's "Ice Ice Baby" became the first ever rap song to top the Billboard Hot 100. It is possible that these cultural events shocked America into accepting interracial marriage. However, attitudes on race are intergenerational, and do not form or change in a single year. To truly understand this shift, we have to go back 12 years.
The period from 1990 to 1994, if we subtract 12 years, corresponds to the period 1978 to 1982. The children who were 6 years old during the 78-82 period came of age starting in 1990. Early hip hop, which was emergent in 1979, was a hegemonic part of the culture for children who then turned 18 in 1990. The next four years, they would go to college and take their openness to rap with them.
The unspoken issue of racial integration is teenage sexuality. From a puritanical standpoint, the unique opposition to integrated schooling seems unfounded. Why oppose integrated schooling as a “last stand”? Why not oppose integrated water fountains, parks, movie theaters, or other projects of integration? In Boston, where slavery was illegal since 1783, school desegregation was opposed in a genuine populist revolt against the political establishment.
Whether conscious or not, the fear of anti-integrationists was not over school quality, states rights, funding disputes, or other pedantic matters. Rather, the intuitive apprehension over integration was, at its core, a fear of interracial teenage sexual relationships.
This intuition was not only correct, but dramatically so. Children who entered first grade in the contentious period of integration, from 1954 to 1977, turned 18 between 1972 and 1995. The last four years of this period, where bussing began to be implemented, was, in fact, the four years of the greatest acceleration of public opinion toward full acceptance of interracial marriage.
Just as the iPhone has created a generation of 9 year olds who identify as LGBTQ, integration bussing created the first American generation which supported interracial marriage. What began as an emergent, shocking culture with the Stonewall Riots, or the Ole Miss riot of 1962, eventually returned in a series of ripples as a hegemonic culture. In the case of gay rights, New York police refused to provide security for gay parades until forced by the courts. Were it not for JFK’s deployment of 31,000 troops to the University of Mississippi in 1962, outnumbering the white students 5 to 1, the south could have repeated the successes of April 3, 1877. In 1877, white supremacists in South Carolina successfully used violence, intimidation, terrorism, and insurrection to bully the federal government into standing down and giving up.
LGBTQ and racial integration owe their success to the decisions of elites. Elites supported these movements against the wishes of the masses. Once made law, they became hegemonic and normalized. Today, anti-racism is so thoroughly ingrained in the population that neo-Nazis argue in favor of color blindness. All of this was fundamentally established in the three decades between 1944 and 1977. Since that time, increases in support for racial integration have less to do with new advances, but the “ripple effect” of hegemony, and the dying off of older generations. The Boomers of today used to be the Gen Z of Civil Rights.
Generationalism in MAGA
This model can be used to model future events. What will come of Trump, and the MAGA movement? Let us briefly assign it three characteristics:
Opposition to free trade
Opposition to mass immigration
Opposition to foreign wars
The Trump movement is a movement of Gen X, ages 30 to 50. It is true that older Republicans also support Trump, but not in greater numbers. Trump support peaks at age 50, and doesn’t increase much past that age. This contradicts the facile assumption that conservatism is simply a measure of how old you are.
Instead, by leapfrogging these numbers, we can find out what exactly happened in the last 24 to 44 years that created the Trump movement. In the earliest development of the MAGA collective unconscious, we have Reaganism and the victory of integration in the 80s. This is foundational for Trumpism, because even though insurrectionists are willing to threaten Nancy Pelosi, they will never threaten Martin Luther King.
After the 80s, Gen X experienced the “Great Sucking Sound” coined by Ross Perot, where American manufacturing and industry left the country for Mexico and China. For people who are now retired, this is not as big of an issue. However, for Gen X, this was an “emergent” phenomenon, which was shocking and life changing for many of them. This is where Gen X gets its passion for opposition to free trade.
Despite the love of Reagan, this is also the period when Reagan’s amnesty led to unpreceded Hispanic migration. Gen X remembers when there were more Blacks than Hispanics, and in addition to feeling cultural and racial anxiety, they correctly perceive that immigration is driving down wages and driving up the price of housing. Boomers who are retired are not worried about wages, and they actually enjoy the boost to housing prices, since they already own homes.
Finally, and unlike Boomers, Gen X had a traumatic experience during 9/11, 23 years ago. Anyone younger than 30 is not likely to remember that event, but it represented a dramatic shift in American consciousness. Before 9/11, the Cold War was over, the troops were coming home, and the whole world could drink a coke. After 9/11, we began two wars, seemingly lost both of them, with the troops who fought coming home confused and demoralized without having accomplished much.
During the Vietnam War, hippies protested and vilified the Vietnam veterans. However, in the fields themselves, soldiers were rewarded and decorated for killing the enemy. The goal was simple: kill communists. That was the stated purpose, and soldiers could buy into that goal and feel they did their duty, even if the war was lost. By contrast, in Iraq and Afghanistan, despite leftist moralization, the goal was never to “kill Muslims.” Instead, soldiers were sent into a foreign land with the goal to “spread democracy.”
In a great irony, the tools they were given to “spread democracy” were guns. Then, soldiers were told to “minimize the use of force.” In fact, if you kill too many of the enemy, that might inspire terrorism, which would create more enemies. “If you kill your enemies, they win.” Soldiers were demoralized on day one. For comparison, imagine if southern students fired on national guardsmen during the resistance to integration, and national guardsmen were forced to shoot back, and this went on for 20 years. At least in that case, the guardsmen would be fighting in their own country. In essence, Iraq and Afghanistan were wars of alienation, much more so than Vietnam.
While wars are sometimes lost, losing a war can be grounds for national pride, if the effort was valiant. Take, for example, the honor which Dixiecrats laid upon the Confederacy. But the war which cannot be forgiven is the war of alienation. Wars of alienation produce only disgust. Gen X, in living through, fighting, and dying the 9/11 Wars became alienated from and disgusted by the neocon establishment.
Zoomers, however, don’t remember 9/11. They don’t remember Ross Perot, or the Great Sucking Sound, or Reagan, or the amnesty, or Bill Clinton’s speech on border security. For Zoomers, immigration, free trade, and wars in the middle east are hegemonic, rather than emergent. They take these things for granted, and are unable to want to “make America great again,” because they don’t remember what America was like before. Zoomer Republicans vote 44% for non-white candidates, and only 21% for Trump.
The decline in Trump support between Gen X and Gen Z is crushing, at least 20% if not more — and only 21% of Zoomer Republicans in Iowa supported Trump. In 20 years, we should expect that to crash closer to 5-10% for Gen Alpha, as immigration, free trade, and 9/11 fade into complete “hegemony.”
Instead, Gen Alpha’s big political issues will be 9 year old trans kids, COVID 2.0, drag queen story hour, highschool seniors doing OnlyFans, incels, and irony poisoning. Another disturbing development is the tendency of Gen X and even millennial parents to medicate their 4 year old children with anti-depressants, Adderall, and anti-psychotics — all three pills at once.17 In the state of Louisiana, 16.1%18 of children are put on drugs. Volunteer wars, Mexican immigration, and free trade are the least of these kids worries.
https://www.markpack.org.uk/9201/first-political-memory/
https://www.sdsu.edu/news/2018/09/gay-transgender-identity-may-begin-early
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/05/10/most-us-parents-pass-along-their-religion-and-politics-to-their-children/
https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2022/11/children-mobile-phone-age.html
This is not unlike the controversy which plagued Elvis, 20 years earlier.
[I like to dance with / Girls in sleazy dresses / Lipstick, nail charms / And makeup in excesses]
[Though I look hip / I work for E. F. Hutton]
[I spend so much time / Blow drying out my hair] / [Am I superficial / Looking hip's my only goal]
https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/ct-ent-disco-demolition-bee-gees-showtime-1219-20201218-2s3uhxsjsbduvl4kqswnvpswny-story.html
The non-Jewish student, William Schroeder, was not participating in the protest, and was walking to class when he was shot accidentally in the chaos
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1978/07/26/multiracial-disco-nightclubs-flourish-in-johannesburg/b8314cf0-8d15-42c3-9ba2-94d20e7f4c68/
Morris Levy, who funded Sugar Hill Records, was a real life gangster who was arrested in 1984 for extortion and running heroin. The FBI alleged that his brother Zachariah was killed in an attempted hit on Mo by rival crime families.
[the disco beat] / [And everybody who disco know your name] / [Say I was breakin' and freakin' at a disco place]
['Cause my twenty-twenty vision was right on her butt / I have all the fly girls shakin' their ass]
“Cop Killer” was not released until 1992, but it should be taken as culmination of a genre begun in 1982, rather than a new development in itself.
https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-lists/from-wild-style-to-8-mile-20-landmark-films-in-hip-hop-history-67842/style-wars-1983-162816/
https://www.madinamerica.com/2020/11/increasing-numbers-children-prescribed-multiple-psychiatric-medications/
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psychiatry-through-the-looking-glass/202108/are-children-and-adolescents-overprescribed