Mosque Fever, American Intolerance, and the Need for Critical Conflict Theory

After months of heated controversy, the debate over plans to build an Islamic cultural center two blocks from New York’s City’s Ground Zero has finally provoked some commentators to recall the long story of American intolerance. But, having evoked that sad and revealing history, the commentators do not know what to do with it other than use it as a club with which to beat opponents of the “Ground Zero Mosque.” Does opposition to the proposed center spring from an anti-Islamic groundswell similar to the xenophobic, anti-immigrant movements of earlier eras? Perhaps; there are some important similarities between earlier nativist movements and the current Islamophobia. I want to argue here, however, that without a critical theory of social conflict, historical arguments of this sort do little but furnish one conflicting party or the other with debating points. By presenting the popular tendency to demonize minorities as a fault of national character, they obscure the structural aspects of this behavior and close the road to a deeper understanding of the conflict and the possible ways of resolving it.

Let me explain. Ground Zero, of course, refers to the site of the September 11, 2001 al-Qaeda attacks on New York’s World Trade Center. The proposed cultural center, which includes a mosque, is known as Park51 – formerly, Cordova House, a name recalling the Andalusian city where Christians, Jews, and Muslims long lived in relative harmony during the centuries of Muslim rule. Until quite recently, the dispute over the cultural center proceeded without much reference to America history. Advocates for the project argued that the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom protects the right of Muslims to build a mosque and school anywhere they like, so long as they comply with relevant local laws. Opponents insisted that the structure would insult the memory of the victims of 9/11. Pro-mosque forces replied that innocent Muslims were also killed on 9/11 and that a few al-Qaeda extremists, not Muslims in general, were responsible for those attacks. Opponents responded that the real issue was the sensitivities of the victims’ families, friends, and others whose wounds would be reopened by situating a symbol of Islam so close to Ground Zero. No, countered the proponents, since al- Qaeda does not represent the vast majority of Muslims, the real issue must be the critics’ anti-Muslim sentiments.

And so it went, and still goes, with each side effectively talking past the other. Compromise positions have been suggested; for example, President Obama defended the Muslims’ legal right to build the Center, while refusing to call their decision wise or morally justified. More interestingly, some conflict specialists have argued that if many Americans are still traumatized by the events of September 11, something should be done to help heal that trauma. For example, if the proposed memorial museum to be constructed at Ground Zero were to be completed, that memorial might provide facilities for the kind of contemplation, analysis, and dialogue that have made the National Holocaust Museum and the Vietnam War Memorial places of healing for many visitors (1). (On the other hand, if the level of anti-Muslim hostility remains high, the museum itself is likely to become a contested project.) Finally, as the extent of opposition to the “Ground Zero mosque” becomes clear (68% of Americans disapprove, according to an August 2010 CNN/Opinion Research survey)(2), historical references have now made an appearance in the debate – but without altering its essential character.

The clearest expression of the historical perspective, perhaps, is that penned by Nicholas D. Kristof in The New York Times under the headline, “America’s History of Fear.” Kristoff’s article recalls the history of “waves of intolerance” directed by the American majority against domestic minorities: Irish Catholics, Italians, Germans, Chinese, Japanese, Jews, and others. He recalls the burning down of Catholic convents by nineteenth century mobs, the anti-Chinese riots and legislation a few decades later, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and the long tradition of ant-Semitism, and concludes that:

"All that is part of America’s heritage, and typically as each group has assimilated, it has participated in the torment of newer arrivals — as in Father Charles Coughlin’s ferociously anti-Semitic radio broadcasts in the 1930s. Today’s recrudescence is the lies about President Obama’s faith, and the fear-mongering about the proposed Islamic center."

According to Kristof, the starting point for such episodes “isn’t hatred but fear: an alarm among patriots that newcomers don’t share their values, don’t believe in democracy, and may harm innocent Americans.” These fears are traditionally exploited by local demagogues, the latest of whom are certain Tea-Partiers and Glenn Beck. But, not to worry. For if fear-driven intolerance is part of the American heritage, so is “a more glorious tradition . . . one of tolerance, amity and religious freedom. Each time, this has ultimately prevailed over the Know Nothing impulse” (3).

This invocation of historical precedent performs a useful service by directing attention to the persistent reappearance of “waves of intolerance” in the United States. Moreover, Kristof’s emphasis on fear as a generator of anti-minority sentiment seems justified by the historical evidence. His analysis leans heavily on that of scholar John Higham, who famously described American “nativism” as a passionate prejudice directed against newly arrived immigrant groups (4). Like Kristof, the older historian attributed nativist sentiments to a combination of popular fears of new, culturally different groups and manipulation of these fears by political and religious demagogues. But Higham also paid some attention to the socio-economic factors influencing such episodes as the “Red Scare” of 1919-21, a movement of panicky hostility directed against immigrant labor leaders preaching socialism or anarchism, and repeated campaigns of racist violence directed against African-Americans. Kristof does not focus on these latter movements, perhaps because they represent more than “waves of intolerance.” His approach, while perceptive, remains on the level of what one might call shallow culture, as opposed to the “deep culture” explored by anthropologists like Clifford Geertz (5). Mass movements of intolerance, as he presents them, reflect a sort of national moodiness. A form of bipolarity, perhaps? No – nothing so serious. As Kristof’ sees it, they are products of current fears and suspicions that can be trusted to disappear when newcomers become culturally “assimilated” and earlier worries prove unfounded.

One’s initial reaction to this optimism is skeptical, since it does not account for the repetitive nature of waves of intolerance except by reference to America’s history of immigration, which is more problematic than Kristof seems to think. Some immigrant groups provoked intense popular hostility, while others did not. Until the September 11 attacks, for example, hostility toward American Muslims was not nearly as intense as that directed against earlier groups like the Irish, Chinese, and Italians. Moreover, the targets of the fiercest prejudice and discrimination, Native Americans, African-Americans, and many Latinos, were not immigrants at all! What we need to know, then, is why waves of intolerance reappear so often in American history, how to read them when they do appear, and how to combat them as a generic phenomenon, not just a temporary seizure of the body politic.

There are pressing reasons to make this inquiry, since the Kristovian faith that America’s traditions of tolerance and amity will triumph over her fear-ridden Dark Side is similar to the faith that American traditions of peace and “civilianism” will triumph over the tendency to glorify military force and to accept the normality of continuous war. Indeed, the two faiths are not just similar, they are related, since anti-Islamic sentiment in the U.S. was triggered by a military event and is continuously fed by Washington’s War on Terrorism. If the WOT is merely a temporary policy (the cognitive equivalent of a mood), we may expect it to yield before long to more peaceful and enlightened policies which, among other things, should reduce popular hostility towards the Muslim minority. But if the WOT is a largely structurally determined policy, the faith in a return to reason will very likely prove utopian.

What do I mean by “largely structurally determined”? Structure, as the term is used here, refers to relatively stable, frequently institutionalized patterns of social thought, feeling, and behavior. Certain structures that interconnect across the boundaries ordinarily believed to separate relatively autonomous socio-economic, political, cultural, and psychological systems have more power to determine our thoughts and actions than more localized structures do. In part, this influence is related to their relative invisibility. Since each system tends to claim autonomy and to construct the world in its own terms, boundary-crossing structures are initially invisible. Thus, before Marx, there was little understanding of the relationship between capitalism, democracy, and legalism; before Freud, the conscious mind seemed the autonomous master of subconscious drives; before Foucault, few understood how new forms of power and new forms of knowledge shape each other. If “waves of intolerance” are generated and shaped by structural arrangements and forces, we will have to develop a better understanding of these factors in order to avoid playing the role of King Canute, who tried to calm the tides by commanding the ocean waves to retreat. The tidal progress of Canute’s waves, of course, was entirely determined by natural forces, whereas social moods and policies are “largely,” not wholly, determined by underlying structural factors. Even if Canute had been Galileo, he could not have tamed the tides, while, for us, truths about social structures may be empowering

Suppose we investigate the structural causes, conditions, and determinants of America’s waves of intolerance. What will we find? In a short essay, the most I can do is to suggest a few possible findings and to encourage other scholars to pursue new lines of research.

To begin with, we may find that the phenomena classified under the heading “waves of intolerance” or “mass hysteria” are wrongly classified together and that, in many cases, something more complex is taking place. These metaphors suggest a surge of popular sentiment that quickly rises and just as quickly falls. The image is based upon what many commentators imagine to be the experience of earlier-arrived Americans confronted by immigrant groups like the Irish, Italians, and Jews. Even as to these white European groups, however, racialist stereotyping, discrimination, and violence took far longer to fade than the metaphors suggest (6). This is because the antagonism was not the result of simple identity anxiety or the alleged tendency to glorify one’s own identity group and disparage others studied by theorists like Henri Tajfel (7). The major waves of immigration to the United States were permitted, encouraged, and even subsidized by native businessmen and entrepreneurs responding to America’s congenital labor shortage. This had two predictable effects: while providing the newcomers with work, it intensified competition between them and earlier-arrived workers, who often formed labor unions to try to defend existing wage rates against pressure from the cheap labor imported by their employers. The struggle for decent jobs and wages was inter-linked with struggles among workers for political power and cultural influence – a boundary-crossing structural context that intensified conflict all along the line. Indeed, the bitter conflict between “native” workers and immigrants was not mitigated until Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition expanded to include the newer groups, and until it committed itself to a program of structural reforms.

“Waves” of intolerance or hysteria hardly provides an adequate description of this sort of conflict. But the wave metaphor becomes meaningless when one considers the three centuries of racist prejudice, oppression, and violence directed against Native Americans and African-Americans. Not only are these conflicts long-lasting, their duration is related to their revolutionary (or counter-revolutionary) nature. That is, they are not simply about groups competing for relative economic advantage, political power, or social status, but about the nature of the social system and who will control it. Even after the American slave system was overthrown by what Barrington Moore calls “the last capitalist revolution,” white supremacy in the South was maintained for another three generations by reducing legally free Blacks to economic and political serfdom (8). The Native Americans were almost annihilated in eighteen major military campaigns and a host of minor campaigns that established capitalism, capitalist democracy, and Christianity as dominant systems on the North American continent. It seems clear that the scale, intensity, and duration of inter-group conflicts increases with the increase in salience of structural issues. Perhaps this is why the animus and discrimination against immigrants who preached socialism or anarchism did not recede wave-style, but continued until they were either deported, jailed, or silenced by some other method.

If we return our attention to the American Muslims now subject to “Islamaphobic” attacks of various sorts, two things now seem clear. First, the issues underlying anti-Muslim sentiments are in many ways unlike those that conditioned anti-immigrant feelings and ideologies at an earlier period of American history. Muslim immigration to the United States has increased markedly over the past three decades, but that community, for the most part, is not in intense competition with earlier-arrived workers for jobs, living space, or cultural influence, and is more prosperous than most other immigrant groups. In one respect, the analogy with earlier immigrants remains relevant, since periods of very heavy immigration, interacting with economic crises and other sources of insecurity, have sometimes generated neurotic doubts among Americans as to the purity and viability of their culture and contributed to what Richard Hofstadter called “the paranoid style in American politics” (9). The period of greatest Muslim immigration into the United States also saw the largest influx of other immigrants (in particular, Latinos and Asians) since the explosive era of 1880-1920.

But a more important structural issue, at least where Muslims are concerned, intersects and influences this insecurity: the fact that the group shares important cultural characteristics with a foreign enemy. The relevant comparison here is not so much with Irish or Italian immigrants as with the Germans and Japanese. During World War I, German-Americans, at the time the nation’s largest ethnic minority, were legally persecuted and socially terrorized – a grim history recounted by John Higham and other scholars. During World War II, more than 100,000 Japanese, including Japanese-American families well established in America, were summarily evicted from their homes and interned in relocation camps in the West for the duration of the war, as well as being subjected to other punitive measures. These legal and socio-political pressures relaxed at the end of each war, although it took another generation for them to disappear. (In 1988, Congress finally passed a law providing $20,000 in compensation to the Japanese internees of 1941-45.)

Compared with these groups, American Muslims have not yet been seriously mistreated, despite an increase in reported incidents of violence or discrimination against them and the hostility revealed by the “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy. This may be attributable, in part, to the insistence by both the George W. Bush and Barrack Obama administrations that Muslims in general were not responsible for the al-Qaeda attacks and that the “War on Terrorism” was not a war on Islam. But if America’s overt or covert wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and elsewhere are structurally generated, they may last a very long time, blurring the distinction between anti-terrorist and anti-Islamic warfare, and increasing the intensity of anti-Muslim feeling in the U.S. (10). I have argued elsewhere, as have other analysts, that these wars are generated by the desire of U.S. economic and political elites to preserve America’s status as the world’s sole superpower and to sustain an unstable economic system based on “military Keynesianism” (11). I have also maintained that American patriotism, mobilized to support the so-called War on Terrorism, “does not reflect so much as create a clash of civilizations” (12). If so, that is, if the war tends over time to become a war against Islam, the wave metaphor provides little hope or consolation to a minority that finds itself culturally linked to America’s permanent enemy.

The punchline of this analysis is this: the resolution of structurally-generated conflicts requires structural change. In the case of American Muslims confronted by growing popular hostility, I think that this means ending the War on Terrorism in its present form. But if ending the WOT means altering the system that generates what permanent war, this defines the task confronting those who wish to resolve this conflict. Not just the war but the war system must be the target of analysis and action. One can, of course, work to convince the American public that U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere are making us less secure, not more, and that there are viable, conflict-resolving alternatives to costly, essentially unwinnable military campaigns. But there is a pressing need for analysis of the ways in which our current system generates war and, in particular, for alternatives to a socioeconomic order dependent upon the prosperity of giant military-industrial enterprises and their financiers. Perhaps the formation of a National Commission on Conversion to a Peacetime Economy is in order. The analysis of war-generating political and cultural structures is also needed. In any case, it seems to me that a creative response to the conflict over the “Ground Zero Mosque” must lead beyond an analysis of “national character” to an exploration of the underlying structural issues.

Works Cited:

[1] This suggestion was made by several students in a class on Religion and Conflict taught in the fall term, 2010, at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution.

[2] See The Hill, http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/113747-poll-public-stro...

[3] Kristof in The New York Times, September 4, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/opinion/05kristof.html?_r=1&scp=8&sq=n... kristof ground zero mosque&st=cse. A similar argument is made by R. Scott Appleby and John T.McGreevy in “Catholics, Muslims, and the Mosque,” New York Review of Books, 57:14 (September 30, 2010), p. 48

[4] John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1962)

[5] Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures. (New York: Basic Books, 1977)

[6] For example, it took the Kennedy family more than one century to rise from the status of despised Irish “Micks” in the 1850s to the family of the president in 1960 – and even then, John F. Kennedy’s Irish heritage was a live issue despite his family’s great fortune. See Theodore H. White, The Making of the President, 1960 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009).

[7] See Henri Tajfel, Human Groups and Social Categories: Studies in Social Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Tajfel’s theory is often presented as a description of innate human tendencies disassociated from historical-structural development.

[8] See Barrington Moore, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), pp. 111-157

[9] Richard Hoftstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). Hofstadter’s essay focused particularly on the paranoia of the petty bourgeoisie, farmers, and others whose individual effort was threatened by mysterious “forces.” I discuss the impact of American cultural insecurity on World War I propaganda in Reasons to Kill: Why Americans Choose War (New York and London: Bloomsbury Press, 2010), pp. 99 et seq.

[10] American direct military interventions in the Islamic world now date from 1990, when President George H.W. Bush initiated “Operation Desert Shield,” allegedly to protect Saudi Arabia from attack by Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces. As Andrew Bacevich and others point out, this represents the longest period of continuous warfare in American history. See Bacevich, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010).

[11] See Reasons to Kill: Why Americans Choose War, op. cit. See also David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Chalmers Johnson, Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York: Holt, 2004).

[12] Reasons to Kill, p. 105