Political struggle is fundamentally waged over the legitimacy of concepts and ideologies

Evidence

One may readily endorse Stuart Hall’s program based, as I understand it, on the notion that the fundamental level on which political struggle is waged is that of the struggle over the legitimacy of concepts and ideologies; that political legitimation comes from that; and that, for example, Thatcherism and its cultural counterrevolution were founded fully as much on the delegitimation of welfare-state or social-democratic (we used to call it liberal) ideology as on the inherent structural problems of the welfare state itself. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 577

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s cognitive-map goal — delegitimation is a form of ideological repositioning of one’s own place in the system. — connects to: Reading liberatory theory can transform a reader’s political identity through struggle; Liberatory struggle requires claiming theory as practice, not merely critiquing misuse; Political events only matter when their meaning is established through struggle — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1955
• SEED: Modern examples: the delegitimation of climate science or of ‘woke’ discourse as present-day Thatcher-style cultural counterrevolutions — an essay angle on how legitimacy struggles precede policy.