Muscle-Flexing at Muslims
Muscle-Flexing at Muslims
Tim Stanley: Muscular Liberalism
ACROSS THE West, politicians are toughening up on homegrown Islamic extremism. The call has gone out for a restatement and reinforcement of Western values. In February, British Prime Minister David Cameron told an EU security conference that multiculturalism has left settled Islamic communities isolated and radicalized across Europe. Political correctness, according to Cameron, has reduced the will of the West to challenge extremism head on. “Frankly, he said, “we need a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years and a much more active, muscular liberalism.” German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy have both insisted that integration replace multiculturalism for Islamic immigrants. Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair has warned British Muslims that they have a “duty to integrate,” to sign up to “the belief in democracy, the rule of law, tolerance, equal treatment for all, respect for this country and its shared heritage.”
The muscular imagery has traveled across the Atlantic. Representative Peter King’s hearings on domestic Islamic extremism took place in a different social climate from Europe: the American Muslim population is smaller and less visible. But the murderous rampage of Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, who shot thirteen people dead at Fort Hood in 2009, lent credence to warnings that a domestic front has opened in the War on Terror. Dr. Zuhdi Jasser of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy told King’s inquiry, “We need programs to look at the common ideological slides of these Muslim extremists and not just play defense but have a forward offensive promotion of the ideas of liberty that will inoculate them…It needs, as Prime Minister Cameron stated, a forward, ‘muscular liberalism.’” The Tea-Party Right has embraced Cameron and Jasser’s call (although its members have urged that the word “liberalism” be dropped from the formula, because it doesn’t quite translate to the American context). A rave review of Cameron’s speech by Rick Santorum is typical of the conservative response: “As a result of multicultural relativism…we are seeing the American aspiration eroded, our common purpose lost, and a ‘re-appearing tyranny and oppression’ that is not only poised against us abroad but is also pointing its dagger at us here at home…Our American sense of toleration, in other words, is now protecting noxious philosophies that are anti-American.”
On both sides of the Atlantic, critics are asking that multiculturalism be replaced with a prescribed sense of “traditional Western values,” enforced by law and education. They argue that tolerance of Islamic fundamentalism is incompatible with civil rights gained in the twentieth century, that the autonomy of a culture can suppress the autonomy of an individual. In defense of women’s rights, wearing the burqa in public has been outlawed in France and Belgium. In Britain, an anti-Islamic activist group dubbed the English Defence League has claimed a large gay contingent, and even the leader of the racist British National Party has labeled Islam “homophobic and sexist.” Tennessee Republicans invoked similar language when they recently introduced a bill to the state senate banning Sharia law; anyone caught citing it would face up to fifteen years in jail. Opponents of the Ground Zero mosque leapt on revelations that its imam once told students that there was a link between homosexuality and sexual abuse.
At its best, the active enforcement of “traditional Western values” could be a revival of the Vital-Center ethic of the 1950s—the belief that there’s something innately tolerant about the West that must be protected and promoted as an alternative to extremes of both left and right. At its worst, it is xenophobia dressed up as a concern for democracy and liberty. Whatever its motivations, muscular liberalism is contradictory, unworkable, and undesirable. Unless its discourse is challenged, it could replace the flawed compromise of multicultural liberalism with the tyranny of an artificial monoculture imposed from above. This is likely only to heighten a sense of victimhood among Muslims, and to increase the threat of radicalization.
The Problem of National Identity
Part of the problem with the project is that national identity cannot be defined by law. Citizenship can be, and citizenship can help to shape an individual’s character. But identity is organic, intangible, and ever-changing. Most people have multiple identities that defy integration. Representative King owes his loyalty and taxes to the United States. But, as a Roman Catholic, he also cedes moral authority to the Vatican. If an American law should conflict with his moral conscience, King would be obliged to disobey it. Moreover, as a man who is highly conscious of his Irish heritage, King once called the terrorist Irish Republican Army “the legitimate voice of occupied Ireland.” Such a statement transcends the moral and political loyalties of his other two identities.
Efforts to prescribe a national identity are invariably authoritarian. It would be hysterical to say that King’s hearings come close to McCarthyism, which was a genuine mass movement designed to weed out a conspiracy that could infect any aspect of American life. But muscular liberalism does accord with historical attempts to define American identity in terms of politics and character, and to expose those who fall short. In an effort to curb Jacobin influence, the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 extended the period of naturalization required before gaining citizenship, authorized the deportation and imprisonment of aliens considered “dangerous to the peace and safety” of the United States, and banned anti-government publications. The Know-Nothings of the nineteenth century tried to restrict Catholic immigration and create a public school system that would indoctrinate pupils in the Protestant faith. During and after the First World War, Woodrow Wilson promoted the very muscular “100 percent Americanism,” which he defined as “utterly believing in the principles of America.” (In accordance with this doctrine, sauerkraut was renamed “liberty cabbage.”)
All of these efforts encountered controversy and resistance. In the United States this was usually because the enforcement of American identity required an extension of state power that was, paradoxically, un-American. Popular revulsion at the Alien and Sedition Acts helped kick their author, the Federalist Party, out of office in 1800. One Hundred Percent Americanism created a constituency of dissent that included German Americans, pacifists, and the labor movement. The coalition might have been stronger were it not for the social pressures of war, and one could argue that subtler forms of resistance could be found in the black nationalist Universal Negro Improvement Association, white ethnic mafias, and the nearly one million votes that Socialist Party candidate Eugene Debs received in the 1920 presidential election (Debs was in prison at the time, serving a sentence for sedition). Since the Second World War, a conservative libertarian movement has reclaimed many of these narratives for itself, casting even Eugene Debs as an unlikely poster boy for limited government.
Here then is one contradiction within Americanism that muscular liberalism cannot resolve: some define Americanism as loyalty to law and community, some define it as resistance to both. This is why the outlaw Billy the Kid was just as American as his nemesis, the lawman Pat Garrett. National identity and its associated ethics are impossible to define or teach. Precisely what values system would a muscular liberal state force Muslims to accept, and with what authority?
Muscular Liberalism as an Oxymoron
If national identity struggles with certain inbuilt contradictions, then so too does muscular liberalism. The term is so oxymoronic as to be deceptive, or useless. Is it muscular and discriminatory, or liberal and tolerant? Refusing to tolerate intolerance implies an abjuration of…tolerance. If the agenda is really a mask for xenophobia, then the semantic trick is good strategy. But if anyone does believe that muscular liberalism is a philosophically and historically consistent principle, then they are misguided.
The postwar liberal project has been all about trying to strike a balance between opposing forces—to find accommodation among classes, races, genders, and generations. Liberalism prefers to manage those tensions rather than resolve them, partly because resolution might mean an unjust tyranny of the majority. Liberalism and multiculturalism go well together. Rather than an ideological project, multiculturalism is better understood as a pragmatic effort to integrate minorities into mainstream society while protecting as much of their autonomy and identity as possible. It emerged in the 1970s, at a time when minority groups across the Western world demanded a fairer share of wealth and power while simultaneously refusing to surrender the proud sense of cultural difference that they had gained through civil rights activism. The federally backed effort to encourage small business ownership among African Americans known as “black capitalism” was a positive model of an alienated group becoming part of the polity while retaining a sense of difference.
Like liberalism, multiculturalism has been hijacked and exploited by special interest groups who use it to promote and finance controversial agendas (one local council in London was forced to revoke funding for a “faith school” after it was discovered that it was run by members of a radical Muslim political party). But multiculturalism has also helped expand our understanding of what it means to be American, or European, at a time of rapid social change. At the beginning of the 1960s, Americanism was a patriarchal, Caucasian, heterosexual construct represented well by the innocent domesticity of the all-white Leave It to Beaver. By 1980, national identity had to include employed women (The Mary Tyler Moore Show), a nascent black middle class (The Jeffersons), and the sexually nonconformist (Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman). Multiculturalism smoothed that process by building institutional structures to give voice to minorities, or laying down laws to pacify the inevitable backlash by the offended majority. The alternative might have been monoculturalism, and the resentment of the oppressed could have been expressed in violence. The collapse of the Soviet Union into myriad nationalisms is an imperfect analogy, but a dramatic example of the kind of Balkanization that can occur when people are forced to subjugate their faith and values to a political system.
True, multiculturalism’s leverage comes from political correctness, and PC has made it difficult to criticize people whose acculturated behavior is unethical. But PC is the language of a society that wants to avoid prejudice and conflict. By establishing rules of behavior, it helps us navigate the various pitfall of modern life without hurting anyone’s feelings. The rhetoric of muscular liberalism threatens this settlement.
The Real Source of Trouble
If we can subtract the liberalism from muscular liberalism, then what use is the muscle we are left with? None—because few of our societal ills have anything to do with the wimpy tolerance of multiculturalism. The prime causes of cultural tension within Western nations are poverty and racism. In some parts of France, Muslim unemployment is 60 percent and the murder rate is two to three times higher than the rest of society. Youth unemployment among Muslims is 30 percent in Germany and 23 percent in Britain. True, some literally refuse to work (85 percent of UK Somalis are unemployed), but to posit this as a religious stereotype is nonsense given the extraordinary acumen of the Muslim business community. Lack of work can undermine national community; so can too much work, or unhealthy working practices. A Muslim mom and dad doing a seventy-two-hour week on minimum wage will be unable to police their child’s religious education, and their exploitation could project a negative image about Western capitalism. An instinct to lash out against Western materialism, with its accompanying hypocrisy, pornography, injustice, and contempt for the sacred, is not irrational.
More importantly, Muslim radicalization in the West is about politics and policy. The War on Terror is perceived by fundamentalists as a war on Islam. Parliamentary inquiries into the Iraq War and the 7/7 Bombings in Britain have heard expert witness testimony (allegedly known in advance by then-Prime Minister Tony Blair) that participation in the War of Terror turned the UK into a target for domestic terrorism. Although he was not a rational man, countless witnesses have attested to Major Hasan’s anger at the invasion of Iraq. Western leaders dismiss foreign policy as a pretext to murder non-Muslims, but there’s a pattern of cause and effect that is hard to ignore. To some Muslims, Western military presence on holy soil, support for Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and blockade of the Gaza Strip, or opposition to Iran is as offensive as Catholics might find a NATO occupation of the Vatican. Their chosen response is culturally conditioned and morally unacceptable, but one cannot ignore the West’s culpability.
American history confirms that it is not only Muslims who have struggled with a division of loyalties caused by foreign policy. During the Mexican-American War of 1846-48, hundreds of Catholics who served in the U.S. Army defected to Mexico. They formed the St. Patrick’s Battalion, which flew a flag with a golden harp and shamrock upon a green banner. As conflict with Catholic states drove American Catholics into rebellion in the nineteenth century, so war against Muslim states is likely to engender radicalism in the twenty-first. The righteousness of the War on Terror is a different debate, but its consequences are obvious and unavoidable.
In terms of domestic policy, the language of muscular liberalism is only likely to radicalize young Muslims further still. It is easy for them to infer from its rhetoric that Islam itself is incompatible with Western democracy, which could confirm the prejudices of fundamentalists and turn a minority view into a majority neurosis. Trying to impose individual autonomy upon the Muslim community will not only contradict the anti-authoritarian promise of Western liberalism, but will also accentuate resistance to it. Put bluntly, forcing women to remove their veils is hardly likely to give conservative Muslims a sense of having a stake in Western democracy.
At its best, liberalism is a compassionate, tolerant response to complex societal problems. Multiculturalism is one of its finer achievements because it holds together—albeit, only just—disparate communities with its promise of both a stake in the nation and the protection of cultural integrity. It has helped manage immigration and religious change in the last forty years, and the greatest mark of its success has been a relative lack of ethnic tension compared to problems in the developing world and the former Soviet bloc.
In contrast, muscular liberalism is based upon a narrow understanding of national identity, is inherently authoritarian, and distracts us from real socioeconomic problems. But the idea will probably not go away. By redefining anti-immigration and anti-Muslim impulses as a defense of Western values such as women’s rights and the rule of law, it gives a veneer of responsibility to far baser emotions. It is a Trojan Horse for a subtle new authoritarianism that true liberals must resist.
Tim Stanley is a professor of history at the University of London and author of Kennedy vs. Carter: the 1980 Battle for the Democratic Party’s Soul.
Image: Anti–Ground Zero Mosque protests in 2010 (David Shankbone/Flickr)