We need ‘a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years and much more active, muscular liberalism.’
David Cameron has announced that the ‘doctrine of state multiculturalism’ has encouraged different cultures to live separate lives. He went on to say that, while we are quick to condemn white racism (really?), we are ‘too cautious’ when someone who isn’t white holds ‘equally objectionable views’.
Has Cameron been reading Christian Joppke’s Veil: mirror of identity? I presume not. However, both these privileged, white men are making the same argument: it is necessary to be illiberal and to curb the rights of ‘different others’, would be ‘separatists’ and ‘extremists’ in order to protect the greater good of liberalism, or what Cameron called ‘our values’.
He said it himself: we need ‘a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years and much more active, muscular liberalism.’ Adding to the doubts Cameron patronisingly expressed with regards Egyptians’ capacity for democracy this week, his comments on multiculturalism display all the racist assumptions of a ‘Schmittian liberal’ elite fearful of its own demise, yet determined to hold on at all costs to the fiction of their superiority. In that they still holds the reins of power, the news for those on the receiving end of their built-up liberal muscles is not good.