Mainstream Extremism

Kyle Shideler points out that the word "extremism" is even more dubious than it appeared the last time we discussed it. 

How the government shifted its “Counter-Extremism” strategy to target the mainstream.

The narrative is here, and it doesn’t like you very much.

In recent remarks before members of the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee, the chief of the D.C. Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency claimed that domestic extremism has become “part of the cultural mainstream.”

Former DHS official and USA Today contributor Elizabeth Neumann agrees: “Far-Right Extremists went mainstream under Trump.”

“Extremists have gone mainstream,” echoes journalist Zahra Ahmad. “Lawyers, realtors and every-day folks make up their ranks.” Ahmad cites a figure suggesting a quarter of Americans hold “ideas incubated by white nationalists.”

Not to be left out, NPR warns that white extremism “seeps” into the mainstream. The Atlantic says the mainstream has gone extremist too. A study by the Chicago Project on Security and Threats warns that most January 6 “insurrectionists” were mainstream to the extreme...

That's incoherent, as he points out.

This is not sustainable. The mainstream of a society cannot be extremist. It might be foolish, or misled, or prone to irrational things, as crowds often are. The mainstream of a society might even be immoral or wicked in an objective sense when measured against other societies. But what it cannot be is extreme. An elite, however, can be extremist. An elite’s views may be so outside the mainstream of the society, beholden to foreign ideologies, that their views are unrecognizable to those they purport to lead.

He suggests a 'three cups of tea' strategy for getting to know those mainstream extremists, and figuring out how to work with them instead of against them. I suppose it's worth a try; although as a long-time counterinsurgent myself I can say that what really worked in Iraq was paying them to guard their own houses and communities, while trying to get the central government to treat them more fairly than it was inclined to do. The reason it stopped working was that we left the central government to its own devices, and it immediately resumed mistreatment. 

Who's going to make sure the central government doesn't do what it's inclined to do this time? We could do it in Iraq because we didn't really have any animus towards any of the Iraqi factions, and could not have cared less about their internal disputes. As such, all sides could respect the US military as a disinterested agent. Who is the reliable third party who can tell our central government to play nice with the parts of the citizenry it despises?