The Extremism Industry: A Political Logic of Post-Hegemonic Liberalism

Introduction

An Australian Government handbook from 2015, Preventing Violent Extremism and Radicalization in Australia, provides an accessible guide targeting those adopting ‘attitudes and behaviours that seek to substantially transform the nature of society’ (Attorney-General’s Department, 2015: 4). Brimming with the language of what might be called ‘wellness liberalism’ – respect for difference, social cohesion, vulnerability, marginalisation, community resilience – the document exhibits the running together of consensual post-politics and the security-exclusionary state activities characteristic of contemporary political life in core states. A set of vignettes deals with individuals who had variously drifted into nationalist groups, Islamic militancy and radical environmentalism under the influence of the alternative music scene, depression and self-esteem issues. When their ideological gods inevitably failed, these individuals are shown to have positively engaged in the construction of their own identities – returning to sports, getting their drinking under control and connecting with others. This can clearly be a painful and protracted process. ‘Erin’, for instance, ‘does not entirely trust the government or police yet – it takes a long time to change some habits of thinking’ (Attorney-General’s Department, 2015: 5). The booklet aims to help those vulnerable to extremism. It is also a manual for concerned friends and relatives of persons whose, say, ‘incomplete knowledge may make them vulnerable to adopting negative ideas’ (Attorney-General’s Department, 2015: 23).

We mention this admittedly soft target as it is symptomatic of liberal attempts to exorcise the spectre of extremism. Using the ProQuest database to search blogs, podcasts, websites, government and official publications, magazines, newspapers and reports, we see a steep rise in discussion of extremism over the past couple of decades. Results for each of the three decades 1970–1979, 1980–1989 and 1990–1999 are modest: 22, 35 and 217 respectively. A significant rise to 2517 occurs between 2000 and 2009, followed by an enormous escalation in extremism talk between 2010 and 2019, with 62,823 results. A closer survey of popular news sites, one sector of this voluminous production, suggests that a good deal of this commentary and concern focuses on Islamic extremism. A second major focus of this extremism talk is on organisations and leaders on both sides of the Left-Right political divide: Le Pen, Bolsonaro, Golden Dawn, Orbán, Vox, antifa, Maduro and even Corbyn (Eguia and Giovannoni, 2019). Using ProQuest to examine the scholarly realm – books, conferences, dissertations, working papers, academic journals – suggests a similar story to that of ‘extremism’ in the realm of more popular intellectual production. A rather flat and steady output across the 1970s (3088) and 1980s (3527) is followed by a doubling in the 1990s (7795), and then a steep surge in the subsequent two decades: 21,733 between 2000 and 2009, and 28,876 between 2010 and 2019.

It is necessary, we argue, to examine this extremism industry at a number of levels. A first level, and the major focus of this article, is that of representation, intellectual production or ideology. In exploring this level, we outline the crucial elements used by the extremism industry to construct extremism as a ‘syndrome’. We examine how this syndrome manifests in a number of disciplinary-explanatory settings, within which a handful of narrative devices are particularly important. The first part of this article explores these representational-ideological contentions. A second crucial level is conjunctural, and beyond the scope of this article. On this level, between ideological generalities and world-systemic processes, it is clear that extremism talk varies with place. For instance, extremism discourse in Italy is shaped by such factors as that nation’s collective memory of fascism and resistance, and by the fallout of political scandals in the 1990s. In the same period, New Zealand, the place from which we write, was marked by other factors. Here, a Labour Government undertook rapid neoliberalisation, which intertwined with certain progressive political-cultural tendencies. These tendencies included the institutionalisation of elements of Indigenous resistance, which has held in check the emergence of an explicit, public white nationalism that is found in other settler societies. Despite such particularities and discrepancies, though, a third level is needed in approaching the extremism industry: the historic bloc that is the contemporary world-system.

We approach this contradiction-ridden level of analysis in the second part of this article, where we find three intersecting vectors along which extremism is best understood: world-economic and class structures, post-hegemonic geo-politics and predominant geo-cultural features. In approaching this historic bloc, we suggest (drawing on Davies, 2016, 2017) that liberalism has, in broad terms, moved through three phases since the 1970s: a period of combative neoliberalism running from the early 1970s to the late-1980s; a triumphant neoliberalism from the late 1980s into the 1990s; and a post-hegemonic liberalism beginning in the late 1990s. This final period is marked by a crisis of intellectual and moral leadership, and a fragmentation of the liberal project into three tendencies: punitive neoliberalism, a liberalism of fear, and neo-Keynesianism. The acceleration of outputs from the extremism industry is symptomatic of this period of post-hegemonic liberalism.

Extremism as Syndrome

The extraordinary ascension of ‘extremism’ over the last couple of decades calls for critical-theoretical explication and evaluation. ‘Extremism’, in our estimation, is related to concepts like ‘totalitarianism’, ‘fanaticism’, and ‘fundamentalism’, which function as ‘prohibitions on thinking’ as part of a post-political project (Rancière, 2010; Toscano, 2010; Žižek, 2001). ‘Extremism’ is, then, an ideological phenomenon in the critical sense, a mystification, an instrument of domination and legitimation that serves the interests of dominant groups, and that blocks utopian thinking (the imagination of other, better ways of being). In Gramscian terms, it is part of a contemporary war of position, or battle for common sense, deployed from the camp of liberal elites.

We assess extremism as an object of liberal concern by using the resources of ideology critique – demystification, the diagnosis of a class-inflected political unconscious, and the unmasking of cultural representations (Jameson, 1981). To undertake this assessment, we chiefly draw on the scholarly wing of the extremism industry, as it presents a more systematic literature than the wider (more popular) field of intellectual production on extremism, and it coheres with, and is expressive of, broader patterns in the extremism industry.

How does the extremism industry define its object? In his introduction to the multi-volume collection Political Extremism, Cas Mudde (2014) – arguably the leading intellectual figure in the extremism field – notes that the literature on extremism is fragmented, with the concept itself often underdeveloped and undefined. Conceptually, extremism tends to receive its substance from association with equally vague ideas – such as fundamentalism, totalitarianism, authoritarianism and terrorism – or by reference to apparently antithetical notions, such as democracy, openness, liberalism, tolerance and moderation.

This last antithetical notion, ‘moderation’, is particularly important due to its connection to the widely-lauded ‘ethics of moderation’. Moderation is, here, the opposite of the excessive, the ‘farthest out’, that which pushes at the very edge of the thinkable. In this sense, ‘extremism’ is often closely bound to the idea of statistical-democratic normative values: extreme positions are those that stand outside of mainstream attitudes, violating common standards or conventions. Frequently, this type of emphasis provides the foundation for attempts at definition, as in Wintrobe’s (2014: 44) contention that an extremist is ‘someone whose views are outside the mainstream on some issue or dimension’.

Three immediate critical retorts suggest themselves. First, what is considered an outlying political value is profoundly variable across history – for instance, opposition to slavery in the eighteenth century, or votes for women in the nineteenth century. Second, such a definition is marked by a contestable democratic fetishism, which implies the unquestionable legitimacy of a majority count, separate from moral and political assessment. The issue here is that few scholars working in the extremism industry would consider majoritarian support, say, for the Nazis in 1930s Germany, or for Viktor Orbán’s party in Hungary today, as an indicator of legitimate normative mainstream political expression. A third problem is the underlying assumption of any unproblematic access to and measurement of middle-lying normative values.

The centrality of ‘moderation’ in this predominant approach to extremism is, crucially, virtually definitional of liberalism in the contemporary imaginary, and it is bound tightly to other core liberal values – liberty, individualism, rationality, progress, tolerance, diversity and the limitation of power. Liberalism as an ideology, in the sense of a world-view, is, like other major modern ideologies, complex and changing. Despite its multiplicity and transformations, however, liberalism has been the dominant geo-culture of the modern world-system (Wallerstein, 2011), carried by industrial, financial and political elites. Following the work of Losurdo (2014), we see liberalism as a tangle of both freedom and oppression, emancipation and dis-emancipation. The negative thread of this tangle ties liberalism, historically, to the politics of a ‘master race democracy’, an ‘aristocratic community’ of free, property-owning individuals. Following the hegemony of the ‘elite civilizing project’ (Mann, 2017: 69) that was the social-liberal Keynesian consensus, the newly dominant liberalism, neoliberalism, has been marked by new dis-emancipatory emphases – with, for instance, the deletion of economic and social rights, and the rehabilitation of imperialism (Losurdo, 2016) – which we will explore further below.

Beyond the initial approach to ‘extremism’ as the antithesis of liberal moderation, a further critical question can be asked about what might be called the investigative cosmology of the extremism industry. That is, what is the ‘object’ of investigative scrutiny when we set our sights on extremism: an ideology in a critical or neutral sense; a structure of knowledge or feeling to be found in certain places and times; a utopianism, an ideational and emotional social lever for activating another, supposedly better way of being; a diagnosable mental illness, a psychological or personality trait, or perhaps a mindset? There is no consensus on the character of this object in the vast literature around extremism.

Nevertheless, a survey of the extremism industry suggests that a ‘rough consensus’ exists on who we are speaking of when we speak of ‘extremists’: Islamists, activists from outside of the established parties of the political Left and Right, animal liberationists, extra-parliamentary environmental radicals, ¹ the militants of antifa, for instance. Within this consensual gathering, we suggest, ‘extremism’ is typically assembled into a kind of syndrome, containing the following six ideational and behavioural elements: non-normative values; anti-democracy; anti-liberalism (a hostility or indifference to rights, tolerance, choice, plurality); utopianism and a war on the present; totalisation and abstraction; and justifications of unlawfulness. ²

This syndrome is often imagined as taking a narrative structure that energises and propels people into unacceptable courses of thought and action, as in the following from Saucier et al. (2009: 265) when summarising their 16-featured extremism model:

We . . . have a glorious past, but modernity has been disastrous, bringing on a great catastrophe in which we are tragically obstructed from reaching our rightful place, obstructed by an illegitimate civil government and/or by an enemy so evil that it does not deserve to be called human. This intolerable situation calls for vengeance. Extreme measures are required; indeed, any means will be justified for realizing our sacred end. We must think in military terms to annihilate and purify the world of it. It is a duty to kill the perpetrators of evil, and we cannot be blamed for carrying out this violence. Those who sacrifice themselves in our cause will attain glory, and supernatural powers should come to our aid in this struggle. In the end, we will bring our people to a new world that is paradise.

Within the extremism industry, this definitional labour is closely connected to the utopic-political tasks of upholding and extending civilised and modern values, democratic political systems and individual liberties. Midlarsky (2011), for instance, informs us that extremists kill people in large numbers and are profoundly socially disruptive. Extremism, that is, is connected to violence, a ‘preamble to terrorism’ (Awan, 2013). Such representational affinities between extremism and disruption, violence, terror and death, explain the prominence within the literature of themes such as security, containment, pre-emption, protection of democratic institutions; policy suggestions directed at re-education, de-pathologisation, de-radicalisation; and the urgency given to diagnosing social and psychological factors in extremism.

Investigative Settings, Diagnostic Devices

We move now to examine the intellectual places and diagnostic devices that characterise the extremism industry. Naturally, there exists a robust critical literature that takes aim at Islamophobia, conformist assumptions around terrorism, and growing trends of state surveillance, exclusion and securitisation. However, this critical work neither matches the volume and availability of the intellectual production of the extremism industry, nor has it been centred on ‘extremism’ closely, contesting instead related issues. In this section, we will focus in some detail on three investigative settings, vantage points or neighbourhoods (albeit contradictory, overlapping and impure) from which extremism is visualised, and on five major diagnostic devices through which extremism is engaged. We are not denying the role that the phenomena identified here plays in relation to what is characterised as extremism – which includes such things as dislocating social change, education, psychological distress, the search for meaning and identity, religious transformation and conflictual encounters between nations. What we contest is the ideological role the literature plays and the narrowness of its explanatory terms.

Thinking, and Thinking Beyond, the Extremism Industry

As noted in our introduction, it is necessary to approach the extremism industry on a number of levels. We have, above, explored the representational-ideological contentions surrounding extremism – looking at the component elements from which extremism as ‘syndrome’ is constructed, and then turning to the disciplinary-explanatory settings in which this syndrome manifests. We are engaged, here, in ideology critique, underscoring the partial and distorted character of the intellectual production of the extremism industry, and emphasising the delimiting, circumscribing function it enacts in response to the imagination of other ways of being. We are certainly not denying that political polarisation and struggle are steeply rising – the rise of the far-Right, a significant leftward movement, especially among the young, within centre-Left parties and new Left organisations, climate activism, feminist, anti-racist, and LGBTQI+ activism. It seems clear to us that major contestatory and ideological transformations are taking place. We are contending that the liberal framing of these shifts as ‘extremism’ is thoroughly inadequate and mystifies and depoliticises such contention. Critically examining the figures and devices of this approach to extremism, we are not denying that elements used to explain this contestation – psychological distress, uncertainty, dogmatism, oppositional values, turbulent social change, societal dislocation – can play important parts in the phenomena labelled extremist. We are, first, contesting the function of such labelling as ideological, in the critical sense, as connected to mystification and domination. Second, we are arguing that such explanations are overwhelmingly one-dimensional, lacking attention to how such factors are mediated by world-systemic issues and shifts that are deeply intertwined with contemporary liberalism itself. This literature, then, impedes a cogent understanding of the ‘extremism’ it focuses upon.

As mentioned in our introductory comments, two further levels of investigation are essential to comprehend what is labelled extremism and the workings of the extremism industry. At a meso-level, we have the task of conjunctural analysis, a focus on the particularities of ‘extremism’ as a globally-visible set of emergent contestations, which, nevertheless, takes different forms across various locations. Exploration of this level is beyond the scope of our project. Instead, we turn now to a third level of analysis, that of the world-system as a totality, so as to broadly think the wider conditioning factors and mediations connected to the emergence of the extremism industry.

We suggest that the seeds of the contemporary concern with ‘extremism’ can be found in the years 1973–1977 – the years in which ‘combative neoliberalism’ first emerges. This was a watershed moment, both with respect to Left defeats and setbacks and to transformations in world capitalism, prompted by the beginnings of a long period of global-economic downturn. Combative neoliberalism formed as an adaptive-systemic response to the close of the thirty golden years of post-War prosperity and stability – and also to the peak power of organised labour in the West – a programme suggesting a number of ‘fixes’ to profitability problems. Significantly, globalisation and the reconfiguration of the international division of labour are associated with the transformation of business organisations, production, class re-composition, finance and global logistics. A pivotal transformation was the dismantling of the social-liberal Keynesian compromise, which signalled a new period of class warfare and class reconfiguration. Significant features of this period include: the transnationalisation of an increasingly hegemonic faction of ruling elites; a polarisation of wealth and power; the dismantling of labour protections and growing precarity; and the expanded autonomy of economic dynamics of profit, growth and competition, vis-a-vis political, social and cultural realms. These economic transformations are inextricably bound to political shifts, as part of what Gramsci referred to as a ‘historic bloc’, and we separate these spheres for purely analytical purposes.

Combative neoliberalism aimed to destroy collectivist competitors, beginning with the 1973 coup against the Allende government in Chile, it took hold in the West in the 1980s, and shifted into a ‘normative’ mode during its triumphant period in the 1990s. As Davies (2016: 127) puts it, the ‘neo-liberal telos became a constructivist one. . . rendering market-based metrics and instruments the measure of all human worth’ across all realms of life. The narrative form deployed by this confident, normative liberalism conjured a vision of progress that went beyond statism’s various guises (communism, social democracy, fascism), and in which market forces would deliver freedom, innovation and prosperity .

At its farthest edge, this narrative implied something of a death-of-politics thesis. This is captured in former chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan’s comment just years before the global financial crisis (GFC): ‘We are fortunate that, thanks to globalization, policy decisions in the U.S. have been largely replaced by global market forces’ (as cited in Szali, 2018). While this post-political rhetoric acutely captures the convergence of party-political programmes and neoliberal intellectual hegemony, we see in this period the transformation rather than the demise of state power, with new modes of regulation and intervention, and with greater insulation of policy-making from popular demands.

Moving from the house of established power to the question of resistance and counter-power, the periods of combative and triumphant neoliberalism coincide with the diminishment of what world-systems thinkers call antisystemic movements. These movements had been extraordinarily successful, particularly in the period 1945–1968 – with the ‘social democratic consensus’ in the West, the spread of ‘really existing socialism’, and decolonisation in the South (Wallerstein, 2002). However, these antisystemic movements became dislocated and weakened in the 1970s, first, by the Leftist critiques that developed in the 1960s and pointed to the exclusions, corruption, weaknesses and failures of the antisystemic forces in power, and second through the ruling-class counter-offensive of combative neoliberalism. In the wake of their decline, a number of newer antisystemic forces have emerged and strengthened, including Islamism and Right nationalism.

Finally, we must situate the extremism industry in relation to post-1970s transformations in the realm of culture-ideology. Central, here, is neoliberalism itself – as a set of business practices, policy orientations of governments, political parties and other decision-making organisations, and also as an ethos, a set of values and a map of the world. This ideology was memorably described by Perry Anderson (2000: 13), at the beginning of the twenty-first century, as the ‘most successful. . . in world history’. This pessimistic diagnosis of triumphant neoliberalism was shared widely on the Left, as captured, for instance, in Rancière’s (2010) notion ‘consensus’, as a ‘machine of power’, a ‘machine of vision and interpretation’, a ‘map of war operations, a topography of the visible, the thinkable and the possible’ (Rancière, 2010: viii); this machinic consensus ‘asserts a reality that is unique and incontrovertible. . . [and] which leaves no room in which to dispute its presence’ (ix). Rancière links these consensual times closely to ‘the arguments developed on behalf of the end of utopias and of history’ (Rancière, 2010: viii).

Undoubtedly these transformations have been extensive, and at the level of representation neoliberalism in its combative and normative phases was a powerful and successful hegemonic project. In ideological and utopian terms, we see in this period a widespread transformation of common sense around states and markets, the public and the private, equality and freedom, the community and the individual, and around the valuing of competition, growth and wealth.

From the period of combative neoliberalism through to the present, any attempt to think beyond the parameters of liberalism was derided as ideological, utopian, potentially totalitarian and extremist. While, in this combative period, these labels function as the negative opposites to liberal democracy and free market capitalism, a new liberal intensity and alarm becomes visible from around the symbolic date 1999 – this being the point at which we enter a period of ‘post-hegemonic liberalism’. It is from this time that the extremism industry starts to dramatically increase the rate of its outputs, prompted by the antisystemic dynamics of the alternative-globalisation movement and the rise of Right nationalism, and further accelerated in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks of 2001 with the threat of Salafist Islam. We suggest that it is from this point that a growing crisis of liberal intellectual and moral leadership occurs on a global scale, which has become more acute in the wake of the GFC of 2008. Symptoms of this hegemonic crisis include the rise of visible collectivist forms of contestation, including the 2011 Movement of the Squares, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, Right nationalism, the Climate Justice movement and Islamic State. The intellectual shifts of this period include the return of both ideology and utopia – with a resurgent social democratic current, a re-flowering of the ‘idea of communism’, an emboldened far-Right – and the fragmentation of liberalism.

With the splintering of liberalism we see the arrival of what Davies (2016) calls ‘punitive’ neoliberalism after the GFC – which for us is one of the fragments of a post-hegemonic liberalism. Here, the disconfirmation of assumptions around the autonomous, self-correcting and widely beneficial qualities of deregulated markets was joined by an austerity-centred turn by governments, which sought to off-load the costs of the crisis onto the public. As Davies (2016) notes, neoliberalism now ‘operates with an ethos of heavily moralized. . . punishment’, where ‘economic dependency and moral failure become entangled in the form of debt. . . [a] condition in which governments and societies unleash hatred and violence upon members of their own populations’ (Davies, 2016: 130). In the place of argumentation, reasoning and justification, or visions of a better tomorrow, punitive neoliberalism operates ‘without any principle of equivalence, with no appeal to common humanity, but purely via contingent acts of preservation of the status quo’ (Davies, 2017: 156). Its goal is simply to reinforce power. Neoliberalism is now, for Davies, violent and literally ‘unjustified’.

A second major fragment in the splintering of contemporary liberalism is that of neo-Keynesianism, as found in the commentary of liberal intellectuals and within global institutions, such as the IMF and the World Economic Forum. This strand seeks to raise the profile of the political in the wake of the GFC by advocating for a more active role for governments in the realms of finance and growth (stability), environment (sustainability), inequality (justice) and the revivification of electoral politics (trust). Neo-Keynesianism’s mode of address is directed at fellow liberal elites, and its predominant language is defensive and cautious – emphasising risk, uncertainty, vulnerability and resilience.

The ‘liberalism of fear’ (Schiller, 2016), a third fragment, is particularly important for understanding the emergence of the extremism industry. This mode of liberalism is characterised by the issuing of urgent dystopian warnings, with ‘extremism’ sitting alongside a host of other phenomena: protectionism, populism, utopianism, ideology, irrationality, fanaticism. Here, as in Toscano’s (2010) discussion of ‘fanaticism’, ‘extremism’ is a ‘remarkably resilient and adaptable weapon’, deployed as a way of ‘disqualifying or demonizing adversaries’ (Toscano, 2010: 249), and operating as a mobile ‘foil’ against which to defend ‘the proper path of politics’ (Toscano, 2010: xxv).

In different ways, all three of liberalism’s contemporary fragments shape ‘extremism’ talk today. Centrally, we see in this splintering a deep crisis of moral and intellectual leadership in the midst of global turmoil. A punitive neoliberalism seeks to reinforce extant power relations in authoritarian directions. The liberalism of fear raises the spectre of terrifying threats to anything that challenges global capitalism, while neo-Keynesianism is an elite-civilising project that urgently seeks a way of saving capitalism from itself. Each represents a significant break from the once confident, conscious and insurgent world-making project of triumphant neoliberalism in the 1990s. The three fragments of post-hegemonic liberalism are united in their shared suspicion of popular politics, the people or the masses. The contemporary liberal fixation on ‘extremism’ is, for us, a morbid symptom of a period of post-hegemonic liberal dislocation, crisis and realignment.

Conclusion

In this article we have sought to unpack the extremism industry’s representational settings, devices and narratives, connecting these to transformations occurring at a world-systemic level. The origins of ‘extremism’ as a pressing liberal concern in the contemporary era can be traced, first, to major changes taking place between the 1970s and 1999 in the periods of combative and triumphant neoliberalism, and, second, to the crisis-ridden post-hegemonic liberalism that appeared after 1999, and which has been further shaken in the wake of the GFC.

This hegemonic crisis has conjured into existence or strengthened a number of forces that are characterised as ‘extreme’ by the extremism industry. Such characterisations, however, only serve to mystify their targets while simultaneously legitimating established political elites. This process of identifying ‘extremists’ provides little in the way of illuminating what is taking place. To better understand what is labelled ‘extremist’, we need to comprehend the stratified power congealed in social relations. It is, for instance, absurd to denounce and demonise Right nationalism without taking into account how such political forces seek to draw on class issues and energise support with anti-elite and anti-systemic rhetoric. To give another example: it is nonsensical to pontificate on the tragedy of the Middle East’s susceptibility to extremist contagion without consideration of the prior failure of the hopes invested in socialist and nationalist solutions, amidst continued economic dependency, Western interference, structural adjustment, repression and the frustration of popular hopes and expectations (Al-Azameh, 1993).

It would be naively optimistic to imagine a dismantling of the extremism industry anytime soon. A more productive exercise, then, involves reconsidering the elements of what is today called extremism. It is within these elements, we suggest, that utopian tropes might be found, imaginative constructions of other, better ways of being. The widely-noted post-1970s retreat from utopia during the period of ‘capitalist realism’(Fisher, 2009) is over, and we are witnessing a ‘rebirth of history’ (Badiou, 2012). In terms of the utopian, as Traverso (2019: 187) puts it, ‘a change is afoot’ and ‘things are coming to a boil’.