Garrison State Hegemony in U.S. Politics: A Critical Ethnohistory of Corruption and Power in the World’s Oldest ‘Democracy

Guided by Gramsci’s question of why so many victims support the labyrinth of their oppression, Robert A. Williams queries garrison state machinations in electioneering to promote hegemony. This pioneering ethnography explores the role and function of the U.S. garrison state in U.S. electioneering through participant observation of the United States’s largest third party-the Libertarian Party (LP)-as a window to wider sociocultural dynamics of covert power in U.S. politics. Some three decades of insider membership roles within Libertarian Party electioneering combined with two years of doctoral fieldwork provide an ethnographic window into cultural hegemony in U.S. electoral politics and sociological analysis of the information warfare that sustains it.

Anchored in original and extensive participant observation including interviews and surveys, this ethnography of United States’s sociologically understudied Libertarian Party (LP) probes the power of cultural hegemony to constrain human agency in electioneering. Through a privileged membership point of view by becoming the phenomenon, the author provides a critically reflective analysis of the sociocultural context in which LP electioneering unfolds. Membership roles in Libertarian electioneering range from donors to candidates, from volunteers to party officials, and from anti-authoritarian libertarians to authoritarian conservatives. Exploring its transition from a radical anti-establishment party to a party more in line with mainstream opinion, Williams shows how a member’s relations of shared cultural logics constrain her or his behavior to ultimately reproduce garrison state social practices.