Rules of the game and stacking the deck

The rhetoric of extremism is always a mask for controlling the fundamental modes of political expression. Whenever a tiff like the ‘teddy bear’ debate arises, ‘western’ Muslim groups almost immediately attempt to distinguish moderate from extremist Islam. A call for moderation concerning the issue of offense goes out from representatives of ‘other’ cultures in the west. Even news sources like Fox News get into the discussion as a defense of the right to free practice of religion. Of course, what we understand as the free practice of religion can never be such, because clearly, it does not allow the free expression of what we call ‘extremist Islam.’ Therein lies the quandary. The game of multiculturalism can be played until someone breaks the rules, making the culture of rule-breaking the one culture that can never be brought into the fold. The difference between “the Right howling in outrage at the prospect of a kindly woman teacher being lashed under Sharia” and “the Left tying itself in knots to demonstrate cultural sensitivity” (found here) is only one of degree. Both positions demonstrate a messianic promise of utopian politics; the right position rejects the free expression of ‘Muslim extremists’, the left rejects the expression of westerners in Sudan by acceding to Sudanese punishment of the teacher. Neither is any more open than the other, neither any more sensible as a way to check political violence

The label ‘extremism’ operates by this same playbook of multiculturalism. In a war on ‘islamofascism’ it makes our enemy our mirror image. We fight for nuance and the embrace of political difference in ‘debate,’ they fight in the name of wholesale rejection of cultural compromise. The original ‘dialogue’ myth of American democracy serves as the foundation for what amounts to a war on the refusal to accept a particular vision of free choice. The rules of the game – freedom to practice religion, freedom of speech, etc. - by no coincidence reflect the rules of that other American foundation, free market capitalism, which defines the freedom of choice as its fundamental principle. debate is the red-herring of cultural openness, because its embrace of other cultures, and it empowers the use of arbitrary labels such as ‘extremism’ and ‘fundamentalism.’ Determining what constitutes a restriction on the freedom of speech often is totally arbitrary, and sometimes borders on the totally inane – many in the commentary class during the controversy of cartoons of the prophet Muhammed said that calls for an apology by the cartoonist constituted a threat to free-speech… which of course makes very little to no sense (and again, disqualified the right of protesters to freely express their desire for an apology).

These same rules of engagement serve as checks on radical activism. Controlling the rules for discussion and acceptance of others constitutes the fundamental form of political control in an increasingly open and flowing global space. This reflects most notably in the immigration debate, which does not wholesale reject the entry of foreigners to the US, rather it asks that they accede to the terms of entry set by the United States. The neutrality of the rules is assumed; accepting the rules of the game becomes the key to any form of political expression. We need to focus our attention on how rules of privacy, choice, freedom and the proper means for political expression stack the deck against particular forms of political change. The difference lies between critical mass and advocating for bike lanes at city council meetings; staging a blockade of a port and petitioning to end the war. Political arguments are never merely arguments; they reflect an institutional context that sets the conditions for possible expressions. It is those conditions that should be the focus of change.

Duncan