In Defense of Political Extremism: ‘Us Versus Them’ Versus Neoliberal Ideology

The term ‘black and white’ is often used to label ways of thinking that are considered dismissive, narrow-minded, or simplistic. Informing someone that “the world isn’t split into black and white” is often used to suggest a person has failed to think outside of the box or is trapped in a false dilemma. Though black-and-white, ‘us versus them,’ and similar labels can certainly be used as handy substitutes for pompous-sounding terms like causal-reductionism, they also prop up one of the core delusions of the neoliberal ideology.

The Meaning of ‘Neoliberalism’ & ‘Ideology

First, a few words about a few words. Because the words ‘liberal,’ ‘neoliberal,’ and ‘ideology’ are all used in a few different ways, it seems worthwhile to clarify how each is being used here to avoid confusion.

The Meaning of ‘Ideology’

A lot of people nowadays use ‘ideology’ to mean ‘worldview’ or ‘belief-system.’ In this post, however, it refers to traditions, philosophies, conventions, ‘common sense,’ and customary beliefs that justify how a society functions.​ For example, people in one society enjoy stories about the present ruler’s heroic ancestors and people in another society feel a sense of honor in upholding a tradition of obeying their elders. Each idea offers a way to make sense of the particular ways their society does things — that is ideology. Like the genes copied by living organisms to reproduce themselves, ideology is a set of notions that leads members of a society to replicate its particular social and organizational patterns. Whether obedience to elders is a good system or not, the notion of it being the basis for collective honor helps to ensure that tradition continues.

Ideology can show up almost anywhere but it is often found masquerading as ‘common sense’ and lurking under popular ideas. ‘Bigger is better’ may be common sense in societies fueled by consumerism but it would seem like nonsense in a nomadic society. Components of ideology that are central to one system may be incompatible with or even toxic to another.

Neoliberalism in a Nutshell

The central idea of liberalism is that government’s main role is to ensure the liberty of the individual by upholding (more-or-less) free markets, free trade, and rights like the freedom to own property, free speech, religious freedom, free association, etc. Notice a pattern? While classical liberalism at least recognizes a need for limited government, the neoliberal ideal is to basically let the private sector run everything, including government. Neoliberalism replaces public schools with private-voucher systems, lets private firms run public infrastructure for profit, grants ‘rights’ to non-human corporations — that sort of thing.

In a nutshell, neoliberalism sees reality itself as a big market.

Black & White & Us Versus Them:
How Extremism Subverts Neoliberal Ideology

“Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral”
— Paulo Freire

Returning to the topic at hand — the notion that extremist politics are bad is widely accepted as common sense in the technically-advanced, capitalist USA. This is particularly true among the rich white intelligentsia usually hired by media to referee the nation’s political discourse. But this anti-extremist bias is problematic, to say the least.

‘Black & White Thinking’ in Science, Philosophy, & Art

“Opposition brings concord. Out of discord comes the fairest harmony” — Heraclitus

One of the more glaring issues with assuming black-and-white views are less valid is the fact that scientists observe binary, either/or, and zero-sum phenomena in the natural world all the time. Physical reality is built from opposing forces — electric current arises from opposite charges, the elements are all configurations of the same two positive and negative particles, and atomic properties depend on whether the number of nucleons is even or odd. Deductive logic (the thing Sherlock Holmes uses to solve mysteries) depends on a binary notion that statements have truth values, i.e. that statements like ‘Egypt is in Africa’ are either true or not and that nothing is both in-Africa and not-in-Africa at the same time.

Science also shows the cosmos is full of continua, spectra, and shades of grey, of course — the point is that both kinds of thinking are useful. Some stuff is clearly a spectrum — color, gender, electromagnetism, and so on — and other stuff can only be grasped in binary terms. Artists use both all the time, melding binaries like foreground-background and center-periphery with spectra like hue, shade, tint, and tone to form a unified meaning. Each mode has its uses in art, logic, and science.

And then, there’s politics.

The Political Taboo of Extremism

“The question is not whether we will be extremists but what kind of extremists we will be”
— Martin Luther King Jr.

While no one is blasted for overly-gradated opinions or excessive nuance, people are flayed left and right for views seen as polarizing or divisive, black-and-white thinking, using terms of ‘us’ and ‘them,’ and extremism. These kinds of views are unwelcome in politics. The political realm appears to be ruled by special laws that differ from those of logic, science, and art.

When a person is told she has an ‘us versus them’ mindset, it implies that the idea of ‘us’ opposing ‘them’ is unreasonable or unwarranted. By stating the critique as a matter of fact, the critic also implies that such a view itself is evidence that she failed to grasp ‘the real issue’ — or, even worse, that she is too stupid to grasp it or too churlish to care. The exasperated sigh that “things aren’t so black and white” is meant to rebuke a person for refusing to compromise with the implied shades of grey, all of which are apparently presumed to be equally valid.

As a result of this broad dismissal of extremist or uncompromising views, those who hold them also learn to hold their tongues while moderates and other grown-ups bravely hold the lines on either side of every trivial shade of reform imaginable.

A Brief Look at ‘Extremism’ in History

“It is a world of clashing interests — war against peace, nationalism against internationalism, equality against greed, and democracy against elitism — and it seems to me both impossible and undesirable to be neutral in those conflicts”
— Howard Zinn

But why is framing an issue in terms of us-versus-them automatically wrong? Is history not full of examples of one group being oppressed by others with greater power and did the oppressed not often find justice only in open conflict and uncompromising opposition to the interest of groups who benefited by their oppression?​ Martin Luther King Jr seemed to think so — in his Letter From Birmingham Jail, King reflected on being called an ‘extremist’ for his involvement in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s:

“…though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.’ Was not Amos an extremist for justice: ‘Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.’ […] And [was not] Abraham Lincoln [an extremist]: ‘This nation cannot survive half slave and half free.’”

130 years before King sat in that cell, the radical abolitionist and writer William Lloyd Garrison was labeled an extremist in the 1830s for stubbornly insisting that enslaved Black people should be freed immediately. To his critics, Garrison replied: “I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity?” Activists who struggled for women’s suffrage and opponents of Jim Crow were also criticized for extremism in their day.

How Extremist Politics Subvert Neoliberalism

“The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing”
— Albert Einstein

These false critiques are all rooted in the ideological heart of neoliberalism — : unshakable faith in the market. From within the neoliberal framework, ‘the market’ is not just the free market or even market-economics generally but an idealized market-principle more akin to a law of nature than to a human artifice. Of all liberties, the most holy is the liberty for private individuals to partake in the market with as little oversight as possible. The underlying ideological premise is that a perfect free market — that is, a perfectly unregulated market — produces the best result possible and that intervening always has a negative effect in spite of any noble intention.

This also applies to other ‘markets’ like the marketplace of ideas where any censure of free speech presumably harms the debate. Liberal notions of ‘diversity’ also approach culture as a market with the ideal “melting pot” being an imagined result of differing ways of life, religions, and customs freely competing.​ This neoliberal logic requires every individual, private enterprise, and political view to be treated as equally valid or, at least, with equal respect. Since intervention always favors some individuals over others, intervening is an abomination to the neoliberal commentariat, which is why they become so upset with people who punch literal Nazis. Beneath the concern for free speech is an ideological fear — if people can intervene in the market of ideas against Nazism for ethical reasons, why not intervene in private enterprise against fossil fuel or insurance companies for ethical reasons?

How Extremism Contradicts the Market’s Logic

This is where extremist views and refusals to compromise come to an impasse with the neoliberal ideology. Ex-President Obama put it well by saying, “America is the union leader and the CEO who put aside their differences to make the economy stronger.” This is about as neoliberal as rhetoric can get. If a person takes the view — as many US Americans do — that the right of workers to the fruits of their labor and to decent living-standards are more important and valid than an already-wealthy CEO’s right to profit, it conflicts with the CEO’s ‘liberty.’ Telling this CEO to get stuffed is not only uncompromising — it is ‘un-American.’ Also uncompromising is the position that the health of the environment is always 1,000% more important than all investors’ portfolios put together. Or the idea that the bosses and the Wall Street investors — ‘them’ — really do share interests that are fundamentally opposed to the interests of workers, aka ‘us.’

Non-Extremist Resistance Will Always Be Bullshit

“When you are right, you cannot be too radical”
— MLK

Oppression never grows from nothing. Each instance of oppression expresses a relation of power arising from conflict between social classes with opposing interests. All of that — class, power, conflict — depends on the specific forms of social and economic architecture that presently exist in the society. It depends, in other words, on all that ideology exists to preserve and replicate — that, and your consent to the status quo.

“Neutral” Politics & a Parable About Flowers

Each particular thing depends on forces outside itself to exist. A flower, for example, depends on water and light in certain amounts, a specific type of soil, insects to pollinate it, and other forces that cannot be separated without destroying the flower. All of it — water, soil, light — is as much a part of a flower as its petals and those who disagree should try removing one. But each of these in turn depends on its own set of forces — water, for instance, may increase or decrease due to irrigation, climate change, and many other factors. Flowers do not grow from soil alone but in the center of a cosmic tug-of-war between multitudes of forces. Even slight disturbances to this web might alter what types are able to grow or make their growth impossible altogether.

Now, rather than flowers, think of society, its institutions, and all the various forms they take. Replace water, sun, pollinators, and other component-forces with you, me, our neighborhoods and apartment buildings, investors, workers, bosses, cops, and every other cell that makes up the body of society. The institutions of oppression that have grown up around and inside us — mass incarceration, economic exploitation, the terror of the police state — all depend on this social configuration staying the way it is. Conditions of oppression ever depend on our neutrality — on our non-intervention. And so ideology whispers — be neutral. And if being neutral is impossible, then at least act neutral — no interventions. What, are you some kind of extremist?

Be an Extremist!

“Indeed, it is impossible to be neutral. In a world already moving in certain directions, where wealth and power are already distributed in certain ways, neutrality means accepting the way things are now”
— Howard Zinn

Today’s politicians would probably say that people like King were mis-labeled as extremists but the truth is that King was not just an extremist — he was an open and unrepentant extremist. The worst kind. Neoliberal doctrine, however, requires extremists to be bad and MLK was clearly good, which forces politicians to devise a story that resolves the contradiction. But no matter how many times they say 2 + 2 = 5, the sum is 4, was 4, ever will be 4, and Rev. Dr. King remains the same unapologetic extremist he told us he was in that cell.

He knew that some things are black and white and that every position is not equal — that sometimes it really is us versus them.

In solidarity,
John Laurits

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