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🪵 The Threshold

The Enemy-Making Machine: Ours, True, and the Identity That Defends Both

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This theme traces how group life manufactures enemies — and how doctrine is quietly demoted to a servant of the group that claims to hold it. What unites these claims is a slow inversion: prejudice and hatred are not flaws of individual psychology but byproducts of collective identity, where shared perception of threat binds an ingroup into solidarity even when that threat is manufactured or nonconscious. The threads below move from the foundational claim that enemies are required for self-definition, down through the mechanics of threat, the defense of identity against boundary-blurring others, and finally into the specific Islamophobic case where religion becomes a racial surrogate and the enemy image is institutionally reproduced.

Seed Claims

Chains of Thought

The Enemy Is Not Optional: Identity’s Founding Contradiction

Group identity formation requires the existence of enemies to define the self against opens the case with the starkest possible statement of the mechanism: identity is built negatively, by differential exclusion, and the friend is only legible against the frame of the foe Huntington evokes through the Dibdin demagogue’s “old truths.” The force of that opening claim is that it makes enmity look like a precondition — something ontologically prior to the group it seems to threaten. But Enemy and friend categories are mutually constructed within identity immediately reframes this: Ernst shows that the phobic and the philic are the same architectural gesture, so that stipulating the qualities of the Muslim friend is already the act of fabricating the Muslim enemy. What Huntington presents as a prior need, Ernst dissolves into a simultaneity — the enemy and friend are twin casts from one mold, which is itself the disciplinary inclusion that purports merely to sort them.

Because the two categories are co-produced, Ideology defines the self by stigmatising the Other follows as the operative machinery: ideology, as Allen glosses Clarke, “creates a form of order, who we are, or perhaps more precisely who we are not” — the who-we-are-not is not a side effect of the ordering but its very grammatical subject. This is the point at which the chain’s stakes sharpen. If enmity is not a threat to identity but its constitutive condition, then the enemy cannot be an external brute fact that befalls a pre-existing community; it is a positional category doing structural work from the inside. Enemy distinctions constitute rather than merely reflect the theological-political divide draws out the epistemological consequence with real precision: Anidjar insists that perceptions of the enemy cannot be treated as an “epiphenomenon” of the theological-political distinction but are instead constitutive of it. Note what that verb choice does — it inverts the commonsense direction of explanation, so that the divide we normally take as causing enmity is itself caused by the work of enemy-distinction.

This is where the argument acquires its unsettling momentum. If the enemy is constitutive rather than contingent, then the resolution of any given conflict cannot peace the structure that generated it — it can only reassign the position. Resolving one conflict merely produces a fresh enemy to define oneself against states this as the hard corollary: the disappearance of one enemy generates new personal, social, and political forces that give rise to others. Huntington’s own text draws the Chinese-whispers echo of his opening Dibdin quotation: the Mazrui line that “us versus them” is, in the political arena, “almost universal.” So the mechanism is not merely constitutive — it is recursive, perpetually refilling the vacancy it cannot tolerate.

And here the history of “the other” reveals its own sedimentary structure, because the vacancy is not filled arbitrarily but from a kind of inventory of already-authored Others. Designated enemy groups expand over time beyond their original definition notes the internal logic of dehumanization — the “mental adjustments” that first license harm toward a defined group quietly authorize its expansion. And Ideologically rationalized bigotry historically recurs against successive target groups confirms this on the longue durée: the Runnymede document observes that rationalized bigotry moves through women, Black people, Jewish people, LGBT communities, and now Muslims — a “long line” of targets caught “in the crossfire of these so-called rational arguments.” The chain has now moved from a structural claim (enmity is constitutive) to a historical one (the position keeps getting re-filled across time), and these two claims are not merely compatible — the first explains the second’s regularity.

But notice something in that historical inventory: the targets are not interchangeable. Genocide, dispossession, civic exclusion, sexual-morality panic — each “target group” is shaped to a particular fantasy of threat, and each episode has its own ideology of justification. What, if anything, holds the succession together? Medieval crusade ideology asserted enemy culpability as self-evident rather than argued offers a clue by showing the deep grammar of the justificatory gesture itself. Norman Daniel observes that Humbert of Romans “justified” the crusade war enthusiastically but irrationally: the culpability of Muslims was “not argued, but stated as self-evident.” That is precisely what ideological rationalization does to its object — it asserts the premise from which all further deductions flow, then lets those deductions run. The targets change (Communists, lesser races, Muslims, Jews) but the form of the syllogism never does: an asserted, non-negotiable culpability, and then the “rational” work of population control that Jost and Sidanius describe, killing defined groups “on behalf of” the groups for whose sake the killing is said to be done. The unargued premise is the hinge.

So the structure appears airtight: identity demands an enemy; the enemy slot is constitutive; it replenishes itself across history; and its ideology always asserts rather than argues its own ground. Airtight, that is, until one asks the question the entire apparatus is designed to foreclose: what happens to an identity that stops demanding an enemy? Accepting relationships with out-group members model new identity structures for exiting extremists provides the rare empirical answer. In the exit narratives studied by Fisher-Smith and colleagues, former far-right extremists describe “transgressive relationships” with out-group members — precisely the category that the constitutive mechanism says must remain the enemy — and these relationships served as “breaking” relationships that “simultaneously modeled new ways of being.” The exit from extremism did not run through ideology-critique or counter-narrative corrective; it ran through a relationship that made the self-constituting work of enmity unnecessary, by supplying an alternative ground for identity in compassion and non-judgmentalness.

This returns us to the opening with its sting intact. The mechanism of enmity is so deep that escape looks less like a refutation than like a rupture — a break in the form, not a better argument within it. And thereby hangs the closing observation that none of these claims states alone but they collectively force: because the enemy is not an entity but a position within the self’s architecture, the historical succession of Muslim, Jew, communist, and “lesser race” is not a series of failures to recognize particular Others correctly, but the same structural vacancy being refilled stage after stage — which means the remedy is not more accurate perception of any given out-group but the substitution of relationship for designation, of the “breaking” encounter for the asserted premise. Yet precisely here the chain reaches for what no claim in it supplies: the counterfactual test. If enmity is truly constitutive of identity, then an identity structured by transgressive relationship should be systematically fragile — should require constant relational labor to hold — and the extremism-reentry literature should show high rates of relapse as old identities reassert themselves under stress. No thread in this collection measures that fragility, or asks whether the “breaking” relationship models a durable architecture of selfhood or merely a temporary rupture that the constitutive mechanism eventually re-seals. The very literature that offers the exit may be describing not an escape from the mechanism but a brief suspension of it — which would make the closing insight less a promise than a hope.

The enemy is not optional because it is not properly an obstacle at all — it is a load-bearing structural position inside the self, which is why defeating or re-educating any particular enemy never disables the mechanism and simply re-templates the vacancy for the next target in the historical line. The ideology of enmity always asserts rather than argues its premise, because the premise is doing architectural work no argument could justify — which is exactly why the only documented exits from the mechanism run through “transgressive” relationships that replace the asserted premise with a lived one, modeling identity not against an Other but with one.

Foregrounding the Group: From Personality to Collective Furnace

The opening premise of this thread is a demolition: Individual-difference theories cannot explain how prejudice reproduces as collective ideology — prejudice, the argument runs, is not a private pathology distributed unevenly across persons, but a public inheritance that outlives any single bearer. The phrase “reproduces itself” is doing precise work here; it borrows the vocabulary of biology and ideology alike, slyly insisting that a prejudice behaves more like a species or a regime than like a tic. If that premise holds, then the whole edifice of personality-based explanation — Allport’s “negative evaluation,” Adorno’s authoritarian syndrome — collapses, because each presupposes that the unit of analysis is the individual mind, when the phenomenon actually persists at the scale of crowds and centuries.

Social identity theory reframed intergroup conflict as arising from categorization and comparison supplies the alternative unit of analysis. Where authoritarian personality theory had rooted hostility in the deformations of childhood rearing, and realistic conflict theory in competition over material resources, Tajfel and Turner’s 1970s program relocated the cause to a sterile-sounding but quietly revolutionary place: mere categorization. The claim is not that people hate because they are damaged or because they are hungry, but because they sort. And sorting is unavoidable — it is, as the theory’s heirs like to note, the very machinery of thought. Once you admit categorization as sufficient, you have severed intergroup conflict from every scarcity narrative that had previously seemed its precondition.

This is worth pausing on, because of what it throws overboard. Tajfel’s famous minimal-group experiments made the point with diabolical elegance: strangers allocated money to other strangers on the basis of nothing but an arbitrarily assigned label — a preference for paintings by Klee versus Kandinsky, or a coin toss — and still reliably favored their own category. There was no history, no competition, no threat, yet the bias appeared, fluorescent and on schedule. Prejudice stems from identity needs, not personality or resource competition makes the theoretical claim explicit: neither personality defects nor competition for scarce resources is doing the work. The motivating engine is a thirst for self-worth that runs through group belonging. The etymology is revealing — the Latin competere means “to strive together,” and somewhere along the way “striving together” became “striving against.” Tajfel and Turner quietly argued the two were never the same thing, and that the second could arise entirely without the first.

How does the self-worth actually get generated? Social identity derives its value from comparisons against out-groups answers with a mechanism: social identity is not intrinsic but relational, determined “with reference to specific other groups through social comparisons in terms of value-laden attributes.” An in-group has no taste of its own; it only has better taste than its out-group. This is why the folklore of ethnic prejudice has always insisted on pairing — the industrious group and the lazy one, the clever and the crude — each portrait existing only to flatter its mirror image. There is a subtle asymmetry hidden in the theory’s third postulate that matters enormously: because evaluation is comparative, the enhancement of one’s own group requires the devaluation of another. Not merely permits it — requires it. Self-esteem on the collectivist account is a zero-sum ledger, and that single fact is the seed from which everything downstream in this thread grows.

Which is precisely why Prejudice gains power from shared identity, leadership, and politics, not individual bias matters as the next step. Haslam and Reynolds argue that the potency of prejudice — its capacity to move armies and pass laws, as opposed to its bare existence in a solitary mind — comes from three things: shared social identity, leadership that mobilizes it, and the politics that institutionalizes it. A prejudice becomes socially potent not when more individuals happen to hold it but when a group comes to share a collective belief, “grounded in a particular model of social identity,” that gives that belief its force. The sharedness is the force. This is the claim’s quiet inversion of common sense: we habitually imagine social power as the sum of individual opinions — add enough bigots and you get bigotry. The group-based account insists the arithmetic runs the other way: the collective belief is what licenses and intensifies the individual one.

Ideological labels function as social identities that shape group attitudes extends the logic into the polling booth and the campaign trail. If prejudice is identity work, then the labels around which political life organizes — liberal, conservative — behave not as coherent philosophies but as social memberships. Conover and Feldman’s finding is pointedly anti-intellectualist: people cling to ideological labels “even if the common usage of these terms lacks philosophical coherence,” because the label isn’t an argument, it’s a flag. To hold an ideology in this sense is less to believe a proposition than to belong to a team, and thereby to inherit a ready-made portfolio of positive and negative attitudes toward other teams. The conceptual echo of earlier group-process accounts is unmistakable — same mechanism of in-group value via out-group contrast, wearing a three-piece suit.

Now the thread takes what is, in the essayistic sense, its most consequential turn, because the frame stops being merely descriptive and becomes transformative. Intergroup relations begin when people adopt collective rather than personal identity states the crucial switch: a person may define herself alternately as the embodiment of a social collective or as a unique individual, and at the group level “the goals and achievements of the group are merged with one’s own.” This is the depersonalization that social identity theory treats as the gateway to all intergroup behavior — and note the word choice, “merge,” which carries the flavor of alchemy rather than arithmetic. The individual is not erased so much as furnaced: poured into a shape where her welfare and the group’s welfare are no longer separable quantities. This is the hinge where individual-difference psychology loses its grip entirely, because at the group level there is no longer a discrete individual about whom differences can be predicated.

Once merged, identity and grievance begin to loop. Collective identity and shared grievances reinforce each other bidirectionally describes the feedback: collective identity fosters homogenization and self-stereotyping, which transform “your” and “my” experiences into “our” experiences, and conversely, shared grievances reinforce collective identity. The great and dreadful efficiency of this loop is that it is self-energizing — each revolution tightens the coupling, each cycle makes the group more group-like and the grievance more shared. Here prejudice is no longer an event occurring inside a mind but a process occurring between minds, and the individual has been demoted from author to conductor of a current that flows through her.

Yet precisely at this point of maximum collective determinism, one of the thread’s own sources introduces a turbulence that the social identity account tends to smooth over. Perceived discrimination strengthens group identity only for those already highly identified with their group reports that identification increases in response to perceived discrimination “at least among those who are already highly identified with their group.” This is a shock to the bidirectional loop, because it reveals that the loop does not wind itself up from nothing — it requires a pre-existing flywheel of high identification to get traction. The grievance does not create the identity out of the void; it intensifies an identity that is already strongly wound. Somebody who is lukewarm about her group, on this finding, simply shrugs off the discrimination. The theory has been quietly smuggling in a starting condition — a threshold of prior commitment — that it never fully explains.

The complication deepens when we set this threshold finding against Prejudice against one group predicts prejudice against all groups. Allport’s observation, reproduced across the generations, is that people “who are antagonistic to Jews are likely also to be antagonistic to Negroes and to ‘Japs,’” and he notes there is “no logical necessity” in the correlation — if each attitude were grounded in personal experience with each group’s members, the correlation would be inexplicable. The correlation only makes sense if the source of prejudice is a disposition sitting upstream of any particular target. For an individual-difference theorist like Allport, that upstream source is a personality structure. But read through the group-theoretic lens, the correlation acquires a richer meaning: if prejudice is identity work, then the person who is antagonistic to many out-groups is not exercising several discrete judgments but performing a single act — the affirmation of one in-group through the negation of every rival. The “generalized prejudice” is not a personality type; it is a collective posture worn simultaneously against all comers.

Which brings the thread to its most instructive edge case. Negational identities produce both out-group derogation and in-group favoritism draws on research into identities defined by what one is not rather than what one is — the white supremacist who knows himself chiefly as not black, not Jewish, not Asian. In minimal-group studies this distinct pattern orients entirely around repulsion: the out-group is the gravitational anchor and the in-group is shadow. This finding is the thread’s sharpest pressure-test because it threatens to reintroduce, through the back door, exactly the individual-difference psychology the opening premise exiled. If negational identity — a susceptibility to defining yourself by negation — varies meaningfully between people and predicts their bias, then we have a stable individual trait doing causal work, and we are back inside Adorno’s house, albeit wearing different clothes.

Yet the negational case need not break the collective account; it may instead illuminate its frontier. A negational identity is, after all, an identity — it still runs on the engine of self-worth derived through intergroup comparison, it still requires the full apparatus of categorization and depersonalization. What the negational finding suggests is only that the content of the identity can be almost absent, a pure rim with no filling, as long as the out-group supplies the centripetal pressure. Consider what happens, then, when the furnacing of collective identity — the merging of personal welfare into the group’s — encounters a group whose only shared content is negation. The paradox clarifies itself: the very mechanism that lifts an individual out of isolation into belonging is the same mechanism that, aimed at an out-group, produces the ugliest known forms of hatred.

And this is where the closing insight finally surfaces, stained, perhaps, by James Baldwin’s observation that “the most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose” — restated in the idiom of the collective: the most dangerous creation is the identity that has nothing to be for, only everything to be against. The individual-difference frame asked what kind of person hates; the group frame answered that hatred is a property of belonging, not of persons. The negational case reveals the deeper truth: belonging itself is hollowable — it can be emptied of positive content until all that remains is the shared act of not-being. When identity is fully negation, the person has ceased to be a self and the group has ceased to be a common project; both have become pure furnace, and what the furnace burns is whoever stands outside it.

Read together, these claims reveal that the collective turn in prejudice research did not abolish the individual so much as relocate the dangerous pivot: the threshold finding that high prior identification is what amplifies discrimination, and the negational-identity finding that identification can run on pure negation, converge to show that the collective furnace has a feed-rate problem. Prejudice becomes catastrophic not when many people share a grievance but when a group’s shared self has been emptied of positive content — at which point the same mechanism of belonging that dignifies individual life flips into its destructive complement, and the group’s only project is the maintenance of a boundary that exists to exclude.

New Synthesis — beyond the sources

If the bidirectional loop between collective identity and shared grievance requires a high pre-existing identification threshold to gain traction, AND if negational identities can run on pure exclusionary content, then the most amplification-prone groups are not those with the strongest positive bonds but those whose shared identity has the highest ration of grievance-to-positive-content — which predicts that perceived discrimination itself functions as an identity-building resource most powerfully for groups whose identity is already chiefly negational, producing a self-reinforcing spiral where the strategic cultivation (by leaders) of felt victimhood becomes the cheapest available route to membership intensification precisely because it requires no positive project to be constructed. This yields the testable prediction that leaders in negational-identity groups will preferentially amplify perceived threats over affirmative programs — not out of malign ideology but because threat-amplification is the only lever that moves the identification dial when positive content is absent — and that such amplification will be most effective precisely among those already at the identification threshold, making the group’s own leadership a downstream consequence (rather than upstream cause) of the negational structure.

Beyond Antipathy: Prejudice as Position, Control, and Protective Wall

Prejudice is a group-level status defense, not individual hostility opens the ground by relocating prejudice entirely. Herbert Blumer’s 1958 argument strips the phenomenon out of the individual psyche — out of the sphere of personal antipathy where Allport had placed it — and reframes it as a political posture: dominant groups defending a “sense of group position” against perceived encroachment, sustained not by fleet feelings of animus but by durable cultural depictions engineered at the group level. The refusal to be merely hostile is the tell. Blumer insists prejudice is something a collectivity held itself toward, a stance that outlasts any particular angry individual’s mood.

Because this is the frame, Racial attitudes comprise a felt group position of superiority, proprietary claim, and perceived threat follows as the anatomy of that stance. Jost and Sidanius dismantle the felt sense of group position into three interlocking social products — a feeling of superiority, a proprietary claim to resources, and a perception that the outgroup threatens that claim. Note the word “proprietary.” This is the language of property, of real estate, of a title that can be trespassed against. Blumer’s prejudice turns out to be less an emotion than a deed: a claim of ownership over position, with the threat perception doing the work of keeping the deed enforceable. Superiority unthreatened might be mere complacency; it is the proprietary claim plus the threat that converts a social hierarchy into something actively policed.

Yet this still leaves the mechanism vague — how does a group defend position without constantly declaring war? Intergroup discrimination is driven by rational self-interest and control, not hatred supplies the surprising answer: precisely by not declaring war. Mary Jackman’s argument is counterintuitive enough to slow the reader down. She asserts that the central motivator for dominant groups is not hatred but the desire to control, and that indiscriminate hostility is, fatally for the dominator, “too incendiary to be effective.” The efficient strategy for locking in long-term inequality is the opposite of the lynch mob — it is the conditional offer of positive feeling, the affectionate gesture extended only so long as the subordinate stays in place. The desire to control, not hatred, drives dominant groups’ discrimination reinforces this through the lens of gendered paternalism: research on ambivalent sexism shows favorable attitudes toward women actively reproducing women’s subordination. The rose is part of the cage.

Here the chain acquires its teeth, because Defining prejudice as antipathy blinds the field to paternalistic control forms names the exact cost of Allport’s founding error. By defining prejudice as “an antipathy based upon a faulty and inflexible generalization,” Allport pointed an entire discipline toward exclusion and violence — the loud forms of bias — and away from what Eagly, Diekman, Jackman, and Rudman each explore: affectionate paternalism, the subtle machinery that exploits while it smiles. The definition was not merely imprecise; it was a form of empirical myopia that manufactured what it studied, teaching researchers to look for hate and therefore to find it, while the warmer modes of domination sat invisible in the field’s periphery.

That this is not speculative is established by Positive group attitudes can coexist with pervasive discrimination against that group. The sexism literature delivered the empirical verdict that broke the traditional model: women elicit predominantly positive sentiments as a social group — the communal warmth finding that Eagly and Mladinic documented — and yet remain systematically discriminated against. A group can be loved and subordinated simultaneously. The earlier assumption that discrimination must be undergirded by negative attitudes simply collapsed. And this returns us to Group-difference beliefs only become problematic when they justify prejudice — Allport himself had conceded that beliefs about group differences were not intrinsically pathological; they only became so in the service of justifying prejudicial attitudes. But if the justifying attitude can be warm rather than hostile, then the entire diagnostic category shifts. Difference-beliefs in service of antipathy were the problem Allport could see; difference-beliefs in service of paternalistic control were the ones his framework rendered invisible.

What emerges, then, is a redefinition of prejudice as something internal to a group rather than a breach of social norms. Prejudice can operate as a social norm internal to a group pushes against the popular intuition that prejudice is deviant — a breaking of norms. When norms change over time, the authors note, different segments of society come to disagree about what is acceptable, which is precisely why one group’s “prejudice” can be another group’s “natural order.” The paternalistic dominator experiences no deviance, no violation; they experience propriety. Yet this redefinition risks losing its anchor if taken too far.

The anchoring comes from All prejudice involves intergroup relations with a built-in ingroup preference, which holds the line shared across all definitions in the volume no matter how diverse they otherwise are: prejudice is ultimately intergroup, and it carries an implication that the ingroup merits more favorable treatment than the outgroup. Here the text pivots on a haunting observation that Allport himself made and that threatens to undo the antipathy framework from within — Love-prejudice toward one’s ingroup is more basic to human life than outgroup hate. Allport, who built his career on hate-prejudice, admitted that “this love-prejudice is far more basic to human life than is hate-prejudice,” that defending a categorical value of one’s own can proceed at the expense of others’ safety, and that hate-prejudice grows out of love-prejudice rather than the reverse. The architect of the antipathy tradition conceded the primacy of its opposite.

This concession blooms into a whole literature demonstrating that Ingroup favoritism operates independently of outgroup hatred. Brewer’s proposal — that ingroup love does not entail outgroup hatred, and that intergroup discrimination can index preferential treatment of the ingroup rather than hostility toward the outgroup — was confirmed in the minimal group paradigm, where group membership is manufactured in a laboratory and discrimination appears without any negative sentiment toward the outgroup ever being induced. The discrimination is pure ingroup preference, hatred-free. This tracks with Ingroup attachment does not necessarily produce outgroup hostility, which corrects Sumner’s older ethnocentric wisdom: Allport himself proposed that ingroup attachment is psychologically more primary and that outgroup hostility “usually stems from other sources.” And it deepens with Ingroup identification is necessary but not sufficient for outgroup hatred, which notes that Allport, in a remark anticipating modern multi-level self theory, understood that “hatred never arises without love” — hatred being, at bottom, love for values threatened by the hated other.

Then the chain tightens to a discriminator that matters enormously for the account of prejudice-as-position-defense: In-group glorification but not attachment predicts justifying harm against out-groups. Roccas and colleagues, studying Israelis, found that in-group attachment was negatively related to justifications of mistreatments of Palestinians and positively related to self-reported guilt — while in-group glorification, though correlated with attachment, ran in exactly the opposite direction: the more glorification, the more exoneration of wrongdoing and the less guilt. The distinction is crucial because it tells us that mere love of the ingroup does not produce harm-justification; something else — glorification, the sanctifying of the group as unconditionally worthy — is required to convert preference into license. This converts the “control not hate” thesis into a more textured claim: control is not driven by any old attachment to one’s group, but by an investment in the group’s glorious standing, the form of belonging that cannot tolerate the group being diminished or challenged.

But where does the perceived threat that activates all this come from, and where does it discharge? Threat can redirect hostility toward unrelated weaker outgroups shows that threat need not strike only its source. Sometimes it does — men whose gender identity is threatened sexually harass a female confederate, a direct strike at the proximate cause. But threat can also be displaced: psychology students whose status was threatened by medical students then discriminated against a different, wholly unrelated outgroup. This is the pressure-valve logic of hierarchy — the proprietary claim is defended not only against the claimant at the gate but against whatever weaker party happens to be standing nearby when the wall feels breached. And at the extreme, Chronic perceived threat can reverse normal in-group bias dynamics in hate groups shows the machinery overheating: under chronic threat, out-group negativity can come to exceed in-group positivity, and the two — normally independent, as Brewer showed — become coupled, rising together. The very independence of ingroup favoritism from outgroup hatred is a product of stable, non-threatening conditions; strip those away and the two collapse into a single fused pulse of glorified self-defense.

What this chain has performed is a systematic dismantling of antipathy from the inside out. It began with Blumer relocating prejudice from the individual to the group, descended through Jackman’s demonstration that control rather than hate is the operative motive, watched that control operate through the very warmth that Allport’s definition made invisible, and ended by showing that even the pure ingroup love Allport privileged can, under glorification and chronic threat, become the engine of harm. The proprietary wall is the constant; hatred is merely one weather pattern on it.

The closing insight that emerges from reading these claims against each other — visible in none of them singly — is this: prejudice as a field has been studying the wrong affective signature because it started from the wrong phenomenology. It assumed the hostile explosion was the core phenomenon and the warm maintenance was a mere absence of prejudice, when in fact the reverse is true. The stable, controlling, affectionate defense of group position is the baseline condition of unequal societies; hatred is what happens when the proprietary wall is breached or chronically menaced and control fails. Antipathy is not prejudice’s essence but its failure mode — the sound the status-defense makes when it breaks. The warm paternalism is the working mechanism; hate is the alarm.

Two open questions follow from this reformulation that the claims here do not supply. First, Intergroup discrimination is driven by rational self-interest and control, not hatred establishes that control, not hate, motivates discrimination among dominant groups, yet says nothing about whether modern egalitarian norms — the “change in norms over time” that Prejudice can operate as a social norm internal to a group alludes to — have forced dominators to abandon conditional warmth altogether or merely to code it in subtler, more individualistic registers; the empirical trajectory of what Jackman’s strategy looks like under an official anti-paternalism is uncharted in these claims. Second, Roccas’s glorification/attachment distinction was established among Israelis; whether the attachment-glory split predicts the same dissociation between controlling warmth and explosive hate among dominant groups not currently in active or violent conflict — say, in the sedate, low-threat settings where the paternalism model presumes pure control operates — remains a direct, testable extension of the thread’s core wager.

Reading these claims together overturns the field’s founding emphasis: prejudice’s defining phenomenology is not the hostile explosion but the stable, affectionate, controlling defense of group position, and outright antipathy is best understood as that status-defense’s failure mode — what hatred becomes when the proprietary wall is breached or chronically menaced. Warm paternalism is the working mechanism of inequality; hate is the alarm the system sounds when control breaks down. The Allportian tradition studied the weather and missed the wall.

The Threat Thermometer: Nonconscious Defense and the Amplifier Logic

Group identity processes operate autonomously from objective intergroup conflict opens the problem: what looks like a mere epiphenomenon of conflict — the group’s self-regard, its boundaries, its felt shape — turns out to run on its own clock. Realistic Conflict Theory treated identification the way a weather vane treats wind, as a passive indicator of objective rivalry. But the mechanism that resolves the dispute between these two framings is hiding in plain sight: Perceived rather than actual conflict drives intergroup prejudice. Allport’s famous organ metaphor is doing more work than its musical surface admits — the realistic conflict is the “pure note,” but what the listener actually hears is the “surrounding jangle,” the sympathetic vibration of pre-existing prejudices. The organ, note, does not compose new chords; it only sounds the ones already strung. This is precisely why Perceived conflict activates pre-existing prejudices tuned to the same issue: the perception is the reagent, and prejudice is the substrate it acts upon.

So the chain of causation runs backward from where Realistic Conflict Theory placed it. Group conflict attitudes reduce to perceived incompatible interests, relative deprivation, and threat — three perceived states, not three objective ones. Perceived incompatibility, felt deprivation, sensed threat. And the crucial move arrives: Group-defense reactions can be triggered without any conscious perception of group threat. Subliminal primes of ingroup and outgroup salience shift conscious social identification even when subjects never consciously registered the stimulus. The perception itself can be nonconscious — a thermostat set before the room got cold.

But why would an identity reaction fire without its triggering perception passing through awareness? Here the claims begin to thicken. Shared prejudice threats build protective ingroup solidarity: Allport’s misery finds balm in the closer association of the co-miserable. Group cohesion under threat is not a side effect but a coping technology — yet Intragroup solidarity and intergroup hostility mutually reinforce each other, as Sherif’s boys demonstrated by flipping cooperation and competition like two faces of a single coin. The self-protective close ranks, but can the ranks close without sharpening their edges? Self-protective ingroup solidarity can backfire by preventing stereotype disconfirmation: the balm of separation from the threatening outgroup is purchased at the price of never testing the stereotype against reality. Solidarity becomes a wall that keeps the corrective experience out as surely as it keeps the threat out.

This is where the symmetric counter-case matters: Common external threats can reduce prejudice among ordinary outgroups. Threat does not inherently point its hostility in any particular direction; it points it wherever the boundary is drawn. Draw the circle around Americans, and a shared external danger dissolves the prejudice between Black and European Americans within the fold. The same amplifier, different wiring. Group-level threats and individual-level threats trigger systematically different responses makes the geometry explicit: a threat aimed at the group’s existence produces cohesion, anger, collective defense; a threat aimed at the individual produces fear, avoidance, disaffiliation, even identification with the aggressor. Same organism, opposite response — which forces the question of what exactly distinguishes the two channels. Symbolic threat targets ingroup values while realistic threat targets power and wellbeing — one strikes the meaning-structure, the other the resource-structure. And Individual frustrations explain spontaneous prejudice while collective processes explain organized persecution: individual threat yields momentary derogation, but the thing that turns frustration into pogrom requires the collective relay. Collective frustration acts through ideology rather than directly causing aggression — frustration becomes a mediated cause; the proximal trigger that actually pushes the hand is an ideology, a scapegoating narrative given collective ownership.

Watch this “amplifier logic” reach its fullest articulation: Threat amplifies preexisting intergroup responses rather than creating them. Threat is a volume knob, not a composer. It does not write new melodies of hostility; it turns up the ones already scored. This is why Threat-driven cognitive biases facilitate and justify intergroup violence — amplification of what was latent. And the biases being amplified are specific, directional. Threat amplifies attribution biases that exonerate ingroups and damn outgroups: the ultimate attribution error, in which our failures and their successes are situational while our successes and their failures are characterological, leans stronger under threat. Threatened groups deny outgroups distinctively human emotions: under threat we strip the outgroup of nostalgia and guilt, leaving only the animal register of anger and pleasure. There is an etymology worth pausing on here — the very word “infra-humanization” borrows the Latin infra, “below,” the same prefix that gives us “infrastructure,” the load-bearing frame beneath a building. The threatened mind builds its load-bearing frame beneath the human, deciding which creature stands on top of it and which below.

So we have arrived at an account in which threat does not create but amplifies, and what it amplifies depends on what was pre-arranged in the wiring. Which returns us to the autonomy of identity processes with which we began. General dominance beliefs crystallize into specific intergroup fears under conditions: a person high in Social Dominance Orientation — believing in hierarchical, zero-sum relations between groups in general — will, under specified conditions, crystallize that general creed into a specific fear of a specifically negatively-interdependent outgroup. The general belief precedes and shapes the specific fear; the situation merely precipitates it. And this crystallization is not randomly distributed: Intergroup threat susceptibility is predictable from personality and background traits. The insecure, the suspicious, the death-anxious, the inexperienced, the strongly ingroup-attached, the order-desiring — these are the people who will feel the most threat. Note the haunting specificity of the authors’ own example: lower-echelon American soldiers sent abroad embody almost every predictive trait on that list. The amplifier is not randomly placed; it is installed in particular psyches.

But here the picture acquires a crucial moderator: Ingroup identification strength moderates whether group-level or individual-level threats drive attitudes. High identifiers react strongly to group-level realistic threats; low identifiers are steered instead by intergroup anxiety, an individual-level threat. Identification is the standing wave that determines which frequencies of threat a person will even register. Group members’ responses to threats to group image depend on how strongly they identify: confronted with their nation’s morally culpable past, high identifiers defend, low identifiers engage guilt. The same historical record, completely different responses, split along the axis of identification.

Now a genuinely paradoxical finding presses against the death-anxiety story that terror management theory has made famous. Control motivation but not implicit death cognition drives threat-based ingroup defense: in Agroskin and Jonas’s study, death-thought accessibility had no effect on ingroup defense, but need for structure did, robustly. The claim that defends against mortality is defeated by evidence — the amplifier is not tuned to death but to control, to the felt capacity to order an environment. This complicates the tidy terror-management narrative and suggests the threat machinery runs on a more quotidian fuel: the desire that the world not be chaotic.

What the machinery produces, however, is anything but quotidian. Prejudice provides authoritarians a sanctioned outlet for aggression: the authoritarian personality’s repressed aggression against authority is displaced onto minorities, and its repressed faults are projected onto them, and the projections then rationalize the displacement. This is the individual circuit. But the amplifier logic cuts both ways — top-down as well as bottom-up. Prejudiced attitudes also serve group and system-justificatory functions beyond individual psychology: Allport thought personality structure primary and the “ethos of a culture” secondary, but the system-justification tradition reverses the priority. And Prejudice propagates when privileged groups stand to gain from exploiting minorities closes the loop: Allport gave running credit to the Marxist intuition that stratified systems are exploitative, and that dominant groups have a motive, conscious or unconscious, to promote myths implying the exploitation is fair. The projection that served the authoritarians’ psychic economy now serves the dominant group’s material economy — Aggression toward out-groups is not limited to subordinate-group targets reminds us that dominance is about cost, not category: groups aggress where power asymmetries make it cheap.

Now the whole mechanism stands exposed. The autonomous identity processes with which we began do not merely parallel objective conflict — they set the gain stages of the amplifier. What feels like a direct response to an objective threat is in fact the sounding of a pre-tuned prejudice through a perception that need never reach consciousness, gated by identification strength, powered by a need for control rather than fear of death, and shaped by whether the individual or the group is felt to be under attack. The closing of the loop is the sobering part: because threat amplifies rather than creates, and because amplification inherits the direction already wired by identification, dominance orientation, and authoritarian personality, the same objective situation produces wildly different outcomes depending on whose amplifier is in the circuit.

And this is what the closing claim, that prejudice propagates when a group profits from it, has been building toward all along: amplification has an operator. The amplifier logic is not a law of nature but a technology of position.

The autonomous identity processes that Realistic Conflict Theory dismissed as epiphenomenal turn out to be the actual locus of causation: threat is not the composer of intergroup hostility but an amplifier whose gain stages — identification strength, dominance orientation, need for control, the boundary-drawing that decides who counts as “them” — were pre-set by identity processes running independently of objective conflict. The practical terror follows from the engineering: because amplification inherits the pre-tuned direction of prejudice, a situation’s hostility output is determined less by the objective threat than by who is positioned at the gain stages. That positioning is itself an artifact of profit and power — the dominant group’s material interest in propagating justifying myths primes the amplifier toward exploitative targets. The only way to reduce intergroup violence is therefore not to eliminate threats, which are largely beyond intervention, but to rewire the stages that decide which pre-existing prejudice a given threat will amplify.

The Blurred Boundary: Why the Enemy-in-Our-Midst Is the Deepest Threat

The deepest threats to a group’s identity are not the enemies who seize its territory or constrain its freedom, but the ones who blur the boundary of the territory itself. The enemy-in-our-midst threatens identity by blurring boundaries, not controlling territory opens the case: the alien in this first sense “threatens to penetrate the native group and fuse with it,” effacing the difference between the familiar (right) and the alien (wrong) way of life. This is Bauman’s late-twentieth-century refinement of a fear far older — but it immediately poses a question: a boundary does not exist until someone draws it, and drawing it requires choosing which boundary matters.

Collective violence nearly always activates a we-they boundary from among multiple available identities supplies the answer: any individual or population carries multiple identities — worker, woman, Hindu, Gujarati, villager, caste member — and therefore multiple available boundaries. Collective violence is not a reflex of some pre-given division but an act of selection, singling out one shared identity and its opposition to others. In India, Tilly notes, the very same people will on different occasions act as workers, women, Hindus, Gujaratis, villagers, or members of certain castes. The enemy-in-our-midst, then, is not discovered threatening an identity; the threat is what makes one identity, out of many, momentarily non-negotiable.

That selection is no idle preference. Groups tolerate dissent unless it threatens identity-defining core beliefs explains what is at stake: the in-group’s tolerance for minority positions is broad — “all bets are off” only when the out-group (or even an in-group minority) is seen to threaten the features that make the group a group. Crano and Seyranian’s leniency model shows that dissenters who menace identity-defining qualities are cast “out into the outer darkness, otherwise known as the out-group.” This is why the blurring enemy is felt as a special catastrophe rather than an ordinary rival: it attacks the load-bearing wall of the house, the one member that cannot be replaced without the whole structure collapsing. Which is precisely why the perceived enemy is so useful.

Here the argument takes its darkest turn. The perceived permanent Enemy binds pluralist societies into cohesive defense societies shows that “the Enemy is permanent. He is not in the emergency situation but in the normal state of affairs.” Marcuse’s chilling insight is that pluralism itself becomes ideological — it “extends rather than reduces manipulation,” since free institutions compete with authoritarian ones in making the Enemy “a deadly force within the system,” one that stimulates growth by turning the whole society into a defense society. The permanent enemy converts the liability of internal difference into the asset of mobilized unity. And because unity is precisely what pluralist societies chronically lack, Groups invoke external enemies to justify the suppression of internal disunity follows as the operative technique: pied-noir associations after the loss of Algeria actively promoted “solidarity” and “friendship” against a remembered adversary, their magazines declaring in 1977 that “we want to maintain our identity, living as we want to, proud of our past and strong because of our fraternal links.” The enemy is invoked — the exile community’s own archive shows it — to produce fraternal links that would otherwise not hold.

But not every enemy works for every reunification project, and that selectivity is itself revealing. A manufactured enemy works best against groups that reject the unifying cause demonstrates the precise calculus during the American First World War propaganda years: anti-Catholicism and racism only strained existing bonds, whereas anti-radicalism “served to counteract an existing disunity,” because all religions and races joined the war effort while many radicals did not. The nationalist attack on radicals gathered strength not despite but because of the radicals’ resistance. Higham’s point is architectural: the ideal unifying enemy is the one structurally positioned outside the coalition being assembled, so that crushing it does not wound any member being recruited. This remains true even — especially — for groups that by any objective measure hold the power.

Here the paradox compounds. Objectively powerful groups claim victim status by merging current and past enemies shows that a strong group consolidates its moral authority by categorizing itself as the victim — merging current enemies with past ones in an “Axis of Evil-doers” who are “all out to destroy us.” Inclusive categorization that ties disparate outgroups together “might increase the ingroup’s ability to justify harm” and “reduce the likelihood that collective guilt will be experienced.” One watches a kind of moral alchemy: by fusing the contemporary rival with a historical persecutor, the powerful group borrows the moral currency of genuine past suffering. And Threatened privilege, not disadvantage, can also trigger politicized collective identity confirms this from the social-psychological side: extreme-right Whites in South Africa developed a politicized collective identity not from shared deprivation but from awareness that their status and privileges were threatened. For high-status groups, the reappraisal of relative status is “part and parcel of this politicizing step.” Disadvantage, it turns out, is not the engine of group mobilization; threat to what one has — including what one has had unjustly — works just as well, often better.

Threat alone, however, does not yet produce a politicized collective identity. Politicized collective identity requires power struggles reaching beyond immediate antagonists refines the condition: confrontation is not enough; the struggle must be about “control in the wider societal context,” involving third parties such as societal authorities or the general public. The enemy in our midst becomes politically real only when the contest between it and the in-group is staged before an audience whose allegiance is the true prize. Which helps explain a counterintuitive finding that sits oddly with the boundary-blurring thesis: Assimilation can intensify rather than reduce group hatred as boundaries blur discovers, in Lewis’s history of the Middle East, that as the hated outsider gains procedures to cross the barrier — accepting a level of assimilation — “hatred survives and may indeed acquire a new intensity,” directed against the remaining outsider “seen as a rival and a threat.” One would think that drawing the outsider in would dissolve the boundary; instead it makes the surviving, unassimilable residue more hateful precisely because the boundary’s permeability has been demonstrated. The man next door who almost counts as one of us is a greater insult to the architecture of identity than the man on the far shore who never could.

This is where the psychological architecture of the whole mechanism comes into view. Enemy and friend categories are mutually constructed within identity reveals that inclusion and exclusion are one gesture, not two: Ernst’s “disciplinary inclusion” constructs Muslim enemies “even as (or precisely because) it stipulates the qualities of Muslim friends.” The friend is defined by his capacity to control and marginalize the enemy, “a contest that unfolds in the Self, the family, the community, the nation-state.” The two categories are not opposites facing each other across a boundary — they are co-produced by the same act of drawing, each one’s content fixed by the other’s. This is why the boundary-blurring enemy is so intolerable: the friend’s identity is mortgaged to the enemy’s clarity, so an indecipherable enemy leaves the friend himself unreadable.

Once this mutual construction is granted, the violence that follows reveals its true function. Violence against racial others functions to convince perpetrators of their own superiority argues that the torture and killing committed by Canadian peacekeepers against Somalis should be read as “colonial violence, born of the conviction that it is the white man’s burden to civilize and keep in line through force racial others.” The acts convinced the soldiers “of their own masculine, racial, and national superiority.” Violence is not the expression of an antecedent belief in superiority; it is the technique by which that belief is produced and sustained. The beating is evidence manufactured retroactively — I am superior because I can and did do this. Projection functions to justify aggression against minorities who are believed equally aggressive adds the cognitive warrant: the prejudiced man’s aggression is legitimated by attributing to the outgroup the very aggression being committed. The man who deliberately underpaid a Jewish salesman and “out-Jewed a Jew” felt “not particularly sorry because of what the Germans did to the Jews. I feel the Jews would do the same type of thing.” And Projection lets prejudiced people condemn in outgroups the traits they secretly possess gives the mechanism its Freudian interior, via Allport: “One may imagine qualities in a group and hate the group for them because one is in conflict over the same qualities in oneself.” Accusations against the outgroup “symbolize our dissatisfaction with the evil in our own nature.” The enemy in our midst, it turns out, is partly a mirror.

What makes the whole apparatus contagious — and here the chain tightens toward its endpoint — is that it propagates even through the very utterances meant to deny it. Egalitarian statements can transmit prejudice between group members shows, with stunning perversity, that a White perceiver exposed to the egalitarian statements of a racial ingroup member ends up expressing more prejudiced racial attitudes. The claim of nonprejudice itself communicates prejudice “in an epidemiological sense,” because the effort to appear unprejudiced leaks the very assumption it tries to disavow. Ingroup use of derogatory outgroup names increases hostile prejudice in bystanders completes the channel: when an ingroup speaker uses an ethnophaulism, hostile prejudice rises in the ingroup bystander — a “singular development in the study of linguistic factors.” Derogatory words spoken in the presence of fellow group members train the audience’s hostility upward. Prejudice is thus not held but broadcast — a virus whose vectors are the moments group members talk to each other about those others.

Read back against Marcuse’s permanent enemy, this epidemiological finding snaps into focus: the boundary that the enemy-in-our-midst blurs is not drawn once and defended — it must be redrawn, daily, in speech, by a whole society talking itself into vigilance. The peculiar horror of this situation is that the egalitarian’s disavowal and the bigot’s slur are performatively the same act: both keep the boundary vivid by keeping the outgroup the topic of urgent collective attention.

That returns us, chastened, to Bauman’s opening. The enemy-in-our-midst does not threaten identity by controlling territory but by “blurring the boundary of the territory itself.” But the whole weight of the intervening material now suggests the threat is inverted. The alien does not merely blur the boundary; the boundary cannot hold because it is not a line on a map but a continuous, labor-intensive performance — and the performance requires the enemy to remain perpetually legible. A group that needs its enemy permanent — as Marcuse’s defense society does — has made its own cohesion hostage to an outgroup’s stable wickedness. The violent efforts to “maintain identity” — the torture that manufactures superiority, the slur that trains bystanders, the egalitarian claim that leaks prejudice — are all attempts to fix in place an enemy whose ambiguity is existential to the group’s self-esteem. The truly frightening possibility the evidence raises is that the enemy in our midst is not the penetrator but the unboundaried self: the group’s recognition that its identity was never a thing to be defended but a habit to be sustained — and that the one whose presence most threatens that habit is not the stranger at the gate but the familiar at the table who almost, but not quite, counts as us.

The closing insight: the boundary-blurring enemy is dangerous not because it crosses a line that already existed, but because its ambiguity exposes the painful truth that the boundary is a daily fiction — and that the group’s unity has therefore always been running on credit borrowed against an enemy clear enough to hate and others like us. Every effort to redraw the line (the manufactured war enemy, the projected trait, the broadcast slur) deepens the debt rather than repaying it.

The enemy-in-our-midst is not dangerous because it crosses a real line, but because its ambiguity exposes that the boundary was never a line at all — it is a continuous, labor-intensive performance requiring the enemy to stay perpetually legible. A group that makes its enemy permanent (Marcuse) has therefore mortgaged its own cohesion to an outgroup’s stable wickedness, and every technique of repair — manufactured war enemies, projection, the broadcast slur, even the egalitarian disavowal that leaks prejudice — only deepens the debt. The sharpest consequence is that assimilation, far from resolving the threat, intensifies it: the neighbor who almost counts as us is more existentially corrosive than the stranger who never could, because he demonstrates that the dividing line was always an act of will.

New Synthesis — beyond the sources

A testable corollary of the closing insight: since the boundary is a performance whose cohesion is mortgaged to a perpetually legible enemy, and since egalitarian disavowals and slurs alike keep the outgroup the topic of urgent attention, the sharpest threat to a group’s identity should come not from open hostility (which is reassuringly legible and mobilizes the boundary clearly) but from cordial, unremediable proximity — situations where the alien is liked, welcomed, and treated as one of us, yet where some unmistakeable residue (skin color, lineage, speech) prevents full equivalence. In such conditions, the boundary cannot be drawn by aggression (nothing to fight) and cannot be dissolved by acceptance (difference persists), so the group should resort to ever more baroque regulatory distinctions — rules about who counts, blood quantum, caste micro-hierarchies, purity-testing of belonging — as compensatory boundary work. Concretely: increase in favorability toward an outgroup member should paradoxically predict an increase, not decrease, in the elaboration of differentiating micro-categories around them, because the performance of boundary maintenance now has to work against the current of positive affect rather than with the current of negative affect. This predicts that “the beloved exotic” (the tolerated, valued foreigner — the house servant, the model minority, the tournament-borrowed athlete) is a more fertile site of boundary-repair speech than the despised enemy, since the latter does the boundary’s work for free.

Doctrine Defects: When Unity Outranks the Creed It Claims to Serve

Identity’s political meaning derives from domination structures, not attachments themselves is the opening premise: identifications — religious, ethnic, cultural — have no fixed political valence of their own, but take their meaning only from the structures of domination they are made to serve. Rouhana and Shalhoub-Kevorkian make this with unsettling precision: strip away the “material means to reproduce those structures,” and the meaning of Jewish identity, as currently constituted, might dissolve into something that no longer entails a system of domination “that is, for many Jews, in contradiction with” — the sentence trails off, unfinished, because the thought it reaches toward is genuinely disruptive of the identity it describes. The attachment itself does not want what the structure wants; the structure retroactively assigns the want.

If identity’s political meaning is granted by domination rather than carried intrinsically, then a profound error follows, and Identity politics presumes identity guarantees politics when it is actually forged through struggle names it. The presumption that one’s identity necessarily defines one’s politics — that there can be no politics “until the subject has excavated or laid claim to his or her social identity” — inverts the causal order, because identity actually grows out of and is transformed by action and struggle. The claim here is that politics does not express a prior, excavated identity; identity is a residue of struggle. But this immediately raises the question of what happens to that residue when it is grasped by people who mistake it for a cause.

Identity politics in one domain can stabilize oppression in another is the complication — and Stuart Hall is the sharpest voice on it because he refuses to let any single axis claim moral purity. A transgressive politics on one dimension is “constantly sutured and stabilized by reactionary or unexamined politics in another”: dominant ethnicities are always underpinned by a particular sexual economy, a particular masculinity, a particular class identity. Reaching for an essentialized racial identity gives “no guarantee… that it will always turn out to be mutually liberating and progressive on all the other dimensions.” This is the internal fracture that the unity-obsessed version of the creed cannot see, because it thinks identity is the answer rather than the terrain.

But why does this fracture go unseen? Why does identity politics so reliably mistake itself for the whole of politics? Dominants adopt individualism as a new defense when group-based hierarchy is challenged supplies a mechanism that looks paradoxical until you consider regime type. Under paternalism, the group basis of social life is exalted by dominants — subordinates are told to honor their place precisely as group members. But when that arrangement comes under challenge, dominants pivot wholesale: they deny the group basis of social life and elevate “individualism” to a lofty moral principle, so that subordinates’ demand for equality of outcomes reads as brazen disrespect for the rights of individuals. The same dominants who insisted on your group membership yesterday will, the moment you organize as a group, lecture you that group-based demands are illegitimate. This is not a contradiction in the dominant ideology; it is a sequencing device.

That sequencing points toward something deeper about how ideology actually operates, and Ideology operates through belief about what others believe reorients the whole model. Mark Fisher, from his K-Punk fragments, argues that “ideology isn’t about what you or I spontaneously believe, but about what we believe that the Other believes.” The locus of ideological control is not the private conviction but the public estimation of conviction — the belief that a diffuse, judging Other holds certain views, a belief still “determined to a large extent by the content of mainstream media.” This is why the shift to individualism works even on people who privately reject it: the enforcement of individualism is second-order, a matter of what one fears the collective believes, not what one holds in one’s own head.

The second-order nature of ideology explains a disturbing possibility that Denying that Muslims are enemies can itself construct them as threats exposes — namely, that a statement can produce its opposite at the level of public meaning because the audience hears not the speaker’s intended content but the Orientalist frame it activates. When a political actor announces “Muslims are not the enemy,” the utterance sutures Muslims to the category “enemy” by the mere gesture of preemptively denying it; the denial is the reminder. And here is the twist that ties this back to the paternalism-to-individualism sequence: this operates “akin to dog whistle tactics,” precisely the mode of speech that lets the speaker maintain deniability by insisting on the literal, individualist reading of their words while the collective, group-level meaning does the work. The literal meaning is the defense; the activated frame is the operation.

And the frame activates even where one would least expect it. Dominant ideology recruits the dominated by neutralizing rival ideologies’ antagonism documents, through Selod’s Chicago interviews, that anti-Muslim sentiment thrives “regardless of the political leanings of the local population” — in a politically liberal city, in a population whose stated ideology should be antagonistic to Islamophobia. This is the recruitment function Fisher’s model implies but Selod proves empirically: liberalism does not reliably neutralize the orientalizing frame because the frame operates beneath ideology, in the domain of what is believed about what the Other believes, in the pre-formational register where “Muslim” already names a suspect.

Now the chain seems to be converging on a bleak symmetry. But Modern equality makes ineradicable natural differences the basis of cruel group conflict opens a historical register that explains why this symmetry is not merely incidental. Arendt’s genealogy: the modern doctrine of universal equality, by abolishing the legal and social hierarchies that once fixed a person’s place, simultaneously released individuality and demanded universal equality — a dualistic tension in which each aspiration tends to be “inadequate in the same degree for the broader masses.” The consequence is that the natural, ineradicable differences among humans — matters of birth and body that no legal reform can touch — become the only remaining grounds on which to distinguish persons, and thus the fields on which group conflict grows cruel. Equality does not end hierarchy; it reroutes hierarchy into the differences that survive it. This is Arendt seeing in 1951 exactly the structural insight that the paternalism-to-individualism pivot encodes: once formal equality makes group claims illegitimate, difference itself — biological, ineradicable — becomes the sole permissible basis of domination.

But Arendt’s account risks making domination look entirely strategic — a cynical rerouting by coherent dominants. Men and women express prejudice through different evolved strategies, fear versus aggression breaks that coherence at the level of the agents themselves. It is “not the case that men should be the only agents of intergroup prejudice,” and men will not always exhibit more of it than women; rather, both are agents, but each sex expresses prejudice through the strategy that addressed its distinct adaptive challenge — women motivated by threats to reproductive choice, men by competition with sexual rivals. This matters enormously for the thread because it severs prejudice from any single originating ideology: the motivations are distinct, bodily, evolved, and differently tuned. If prejudice is multiply sourced across the species in this way, then no single ideological correction will disarm it — and, more importantly, the dominants who reroute hierarchy under “individualism” are not simply cynical engineers but themselves agents of a prejudice that will outlive any ideological structure.

Which raises the most unsettling question yet: if identity’s meaning comes from domination structures, and dominants are themselves bearing evolved, pre-ideological antagonisms, then what would it take for a subordinate group to actually break the structure rather than merely win a place within it? Resource inequality creates intergroup conflict only when subordinates reject their negative self-image gives the condition, tentatively: unequal resource distribution promotes antagonism “provided that the latter group rejects its previously accepted and consensually negative self-image, and with it the status quo, and starts working toward the development of a positive group identity.” The subordination is not merely material but consensual — sustained by the dominated group’s own acceptance of its negative self-image — and the dominant group’s crisis begins only at the moment of that acceptance’s repudiation. Notice what follows: the dominant reaction is then either to “maintain and justify the status quo” or to “attempt to find and create new differentiations in its own favor.” New differentiations — which is to say, the dominant group stops defending the old hierarchy and starts inventing new ones, updating the basis of domination to outrun the subordinates’ newly positive self-image.

And so the full architecture coheres. Identity’s political meaning is conferred by structures of domination (Rouhana/Shalhoub-Kevorkian); identity politics mistakes the conferral for a cause, presuming identity precedes and guarantees politics rather than being forged by struggle (Goldberg/Solomos); this error guarantees that even transgressive identity politics will quietly stabilize the oppressions it does not examine (Hall) — because dominants, no longer able to defend group hierarchy directly under modern equality, pivot to individualism as a defense that renders group-based subordinate claims “morally unacceptable” (Dovidio/Glick/Rudman); and this pivot works because ideology operates at the second order, as belief about what the Other believes (Fisher), which is why liberal audiences can carry an anti-Muslim frame their stated politics should reject (Selod) and why even the denial of Muslim-as-enemy activates the enemy frame (Kumar). Underlying all of it, the modern doctrine of equality has abolished the old hierarchies only to reroute domination onto ineradicable natural difference (Arendt), and dominants are hardly strategic engineers so much as bearers of multiply-sourced, evolutionarily distinct antagonisms (Brewer’s festschrift authors) that will be redeployed the moment their current differentiation fails — which is why the subordinate group’s positive self-reclamation (Jost/Sidanius) is not an endpoint but the trigger that launches the whole cycle of differentiation anew.

The thread has quietly inverted what the identity-politics creed — and its critics — most commonly assume. Let me name that inversion directly.

The unity identity politics demands is purchased at the price of the very struggle that would actually give identity political meaning — and this is not an accident but a design feature of how domination updates itself. Because dominants respond to every subordinate self-affirmation by “creating new differentiations” (Jost/Sidanius), and because belief about what others believe travels faster than any individual’s stated convictions (Fisher), the form of pure, unified identity functions as a static target: the moment a group consolidates a single essentialized identity, it hands the structure of domination a stable differentiation to reroute itself through. The only identity with genuine political force is therefore the one kept deliberately in motion — the residue of ongoing struggle rather than its precondition — precisely because a moving, self-fracturing identity cannot be captured and re-dominated. The creed’s demand for unity is, ironically, the most reliable way to keep subordinates inside the structure, since unity is what the structure can always reabsorb; the fracture Hall describes is not the failure of identity politics but its only feasible success condition.

The Muslim-Enemy Case: Religion as the New Racial Signifier

The point of departure is an arresting equivalence. Religion serves as a surrogate for racial threat identification in American institutions establishes that across citizenship proceedings, segregation-era legislatures, and national-security bureaucracies, religion has long done the work of sorting who belongs to “a free White Protestant nation” and who threatens it. The term matters as much as the claim: “surrogate” implies religion is not itself the target but a stand-in — an available, legible proxy for a threat whose older vocabulary (race) had become unstable. Yet notice the direction of the borrowing. Religious identity functions as a racial marker within American hierarchies shows the interaction is co-constitutive, not metaphorical: “religious identity in certain contexts functions as a racial marker,” meaning religion does not merely echo race but participates in producing “a racial-religious hierarchy.” The literature on racial formation, Aziz complains, “does not adequately incorporate the role of religion” — the surrogate has been quietly promoted to full partner in the hierarchy it was hired to stand in for.

Psychology supplies the micro-mechanism for this macro-structure. Religious group solidarity organizes others into outgroups by identity finds that strong religious identification “organizes people’s social perceptions in much the same way as other social identities, leading the religious to respond to diverse others as outgroup members.” The telling detail is the authors’ own caveat: this perception “might reflect the practice of religion largely within race such that race serves as a proxy for religious group identity.” So the surrogate relationship runs both ways at the level of everyday cognition — race proxies for religion as much as religion proxies for race, because the two are so thoroughly practiced within each other that the perceiver cannot always say which category fired the outgroup trigger.

Where does this asymmetry land in the American case? Post-Cold War American identity depends on having a Muslim enemy situates the Muslim American in a double exclusion: presumed either foreign-born or African American, “Muslim Americans must be new, alien, and from somewhere else — not fully American.” The historical hinge is a genuine rupture, not an example. Before 1989 the Cold War dyad gave American identity its negative space; the vanishing of that Soviet Other left a vacancy that “in the post-Cold War era” needed refilling, precisely what the religion-as-racial-surrogate machinery was positioned to supply. Four interconnected groups jointly project the Muslim-enemy image identifies the interested parties: neocons hunting “Islamic terrorists,” Zionists policing Israel criticism, the Christian Right, and ex-Muslim and ex-Christian apostates profiting from Islam-bashing. The observation is sociological in the truest sense — ideology is not ambient vapor but an aggressively produced commodity, and each faction projects the enemy image for its own reasons, which only sometimes overlap. Anti-Muslim animus happens to serve all of them, and their convergence makes the projection look like consensus rather than a coalition of convenience.

But a coalition of elites projecting an image does not explain why the image sticks — why it becomes policy, and then architecture. Structural Islamophobia institutionalizes the presumption that Muslim identity threatens national security supplies the institutional turn: Khaled Beydoun’s definition centers governmental enactment of policies “built upon the presumption that Muslim identity is associated with a national security threat.” The move from image to presumption is subtle and decisive. An image is what the four groups project; a presumption is what officials carry into a checkpoints-and-watchlists apparatus, where suspicion need not be argued because it has already been structurally embedded. Islamophobic ideology self-perpetuates as natural and normative explains why this is so hard to dislodge: such ideology “underpins and justifies the way in which the ‘self’ – here ‘the West’ – responds,” and — worrying — “these responses also become both naturally and normatively self-assuring and perpetuating.” The ideology survives by erasing its own history, presenting as common sense what was deliberately constructed, which is precisely the signature of the racial categories Stuart Hall described.

Here is where the chain must take its most uncomfortable turn. Racist ideologies both oppress subordinated groups and can be inverted into resistance — Hall, writing generally about racism, notes these ideologies “dehistoricize,” translating “historically specific structures into the timeless language of nature” and recomposing disaggregated individuals into “the great coherences” of new ideological subjects. But Hall adds the under-read second thought: this recomposition is “also pertinent for the dominated subjects — those subordinated ethnic groups or ‘races’ which live th[rough]…” — meaning the very category that oppresses can be seized and revalued by the oppressed. The dominated can invert the sign. This is the theoretical hinge on which the rest turns, and it predicts complications that the empirical literature indeed finds.

For the excluded do not merely suffer the Muslim-enemy category; they are forced to live inside it, and living inside a category reshapes the inhabitant. Anti-Muslim prejudice shapes Muslim-American identity formation from within shows the enemy-friend binary cannot be ignored, only negotiated: “In the very act of building their own communities and public identities, American Muslims must take into account the prejudices and expectations of an imagined, non-Muslim observer.” The result is a startling irony of disciplinary inclusion: “phobic and philic sentiments [turn] into the very architecture of identity formation.” Identity is built around the hostile gaze, internalizing its terms even to resist them — the double vision of a subject who must always know how the Other sees them. This is Hall’s deanthropologized insight made lived.

And the complications multiply down the hierarchy, not just up against it. Low-status groups can also hold prejudice against dominant group members notes how neglected the topic is, and why: “researchers’ perception that [the] mo[re powerful groups are the more prejudiced]…” — a disciplinary blind spot hiding the fact that minority groups also carry prejudice, both against dominant groups and against other minorities. Gaining assertive identity can make minority groups disparage other minorities gives the mechanism: “social creativity may restore or create a positive self-image but… at the price either of a collective repression of objective deprivation or, perhaps, of spurious rivalry with some other deprived group.” A dominated group can purchase its own assertive identity by redirecting ressentiment sideways onto a rival deprived group. One group’s social-creativity strategy is another group’s added threat burden. This is not a footnote; it is the internal fracture that enemy-image projection exploits.

Now the deepest historical resonance arrives. A group’s dependence on state protection leaves it scapegoated in social conflicts — Bauman on the Jews — describes dependence on the sovereign as its own trap: Jews were “Königjuden, property and wards of the King,” their position “determined by the body politic,” which “had no other social reality,” leaving them “socially speaking, in the void.” The parallel with the structural Islamophobia case is uncomfortable and instructive and imperfect all at once. A group whose security is guaranteed by the state rather than by organic social embeddedness is vulnerable precisely because its protector can reframe protection as suspicion the moment politics shifts. But the parallel breaks, because the Muslim’s structural position is not defined by royal dependence but by the presumption of threat to the state — the inverse of the Jew’s being a ward of it. Where the Jew was over-attached to the body politic and thereby left in a social void, the Muslim is posited as an agent against the body politic and thereby placed in an institutional void.

The danger the Runnymede authors flag is that this entire apparatus gets surgically separated from the longer history of racism. Separating Islamophobia as ideology from racism undermines anti-racist struggle calls it “one of the most dangerous sophistications in Islamophobic discourse”: detaching anti-Muslim ideology “from Muslims themselves” and anti-Muslimism “from the longer and broader historical and social context of racial discrimination.” The separation is not analytic clarity but a strategic disarmament — it lets Islamophobia pose as a novel, sui generis panic with no debt to the racial order that trained American institutions to read religion as a surrogate in the first place.

Read in sequence, these claims conduct an argument about substitution and its costs. Religion entered the racial hierarchy as a surrogate — a convenient proxy for threat that the four-group coalition could wield when race-talk became legally embarrassing (post–civil rights, immigration reform, the euphemism of “national security”). But surrogates accrete their own reality: the stand-in becomes the system, gets institutionalized as structural presumption, and acquires the self-perpetuating naturalness of the very racism it replaced. The dominated then must build identity inside the category that subjugates them, and the hierarchy below fractures as groups seek assertive identity by redirecting prejudice sideways at rivals. The whole complex is a properly racial formation in Hall’s sense, borrowing race’s dehistoricizing grammar even as it is denied the name of racism by the discourse’s own most sophisticated defenders. One cannot dismantle it by persuading the four groups to drop the word Muslim — only by confronting the deeper racial machinery that made religion a legible threat-signifier in the first place.

Read together, these claims reveal that Islamophobia’s most durable feature is not the false accusation of threat but the substitution economy it inherits: religion became the legal and bureaucratic stand-in for race precisely when overt race-talk grew costly, and then the surrogate hardened into a full ontology — acquiring race’s dehistoricizing self-evidence, its capacity to shape the identity of its targets from within, and even its internal competitions among the subordinated — all while its defenders insist it is merely ideology, not racism. The refusal to name it racism is not an analytical failure but a structural one: to accept the surrogate’s own denial of descent is to let the deeper racial machinery that made religion legible as a threat-signifier operate unchallenged behind a euphemism.

The Enemy as Political Necessity: Leadership, Democracy, and the Exit From Enmity

The trouble begins with a paradox that Democratic equality cannot exist without a correlate of inequality and exclusion puts before us: a democracy cannot actually consist of everyone, because the very act of constituting a demos draws a line that leaves someone outside it. Chantal Mouffe turns this apparent scandal into a founding principle — Democracy’s task is converting antagonism into agonism, not erasing it insists that the political is not a problem to be solved but a condition to be managed, that the democratic project succeeds exactly insofar as it domesticates hostility into rivalry rather than pretending hostility away. This is why Violence and antagonism are ineradicable and admit no final political solution: an ethics suitable to pluralist democracy must refuse the dream of reconciliation, because the recognition that we are divided subjects is precisely what keeps the space of the political open. And the wake of that refusal is uncomfortable but firm: A fully realized pluralist democracy would dissolve itself, since the moment all conflict were resolved would be the moment pluralism itself had been superseded — a “self-refuting ideal” whose realization coincides with its disintegration. Mouffe is willing to court the most chilling of intellectual companions to make this point, since Schmitt’s homogeneity thesis illuminates an aspect of democratic politics liberalism erases — she insists that the provocation of an author whose later politics she roundly rejects nonetheless names something real, that every “us” needs a “them,” that liberalism’s fatal evasion is its conviction that deliberation can outrun the friend/enemy distinction that structures any collective at all.

From this opening premise, a first consequence follows. Because every consensus is a provisional hegemonic stabilization, Every consensus is a provisional hegemonic stabilization entailing exclusion — Mouffe’s rejoinder to Rawls is that no rational debate could dissolve power, because any settlement is just power having won for now, and to believe otherwise is itself a danger to democratic institutions. So Rawls’s well-ordered society erases the adversary from democratic politics: the liberal dream of an arrangement that would satisfy all reasonable people has as its precise cost the expunging of the opponent from the scene, which is to say the expunging of the political itself. The insight that keeps this from collapsing into mere cynicism is subtle and worth pausing over — for Mouffe, The them symbolizes the impossibility of any us, not a concrete opposite, meaning antagonism is not the dialectical mirror of a particular community but the mark of the impossibility of any full community. The excluded “them” is a structural position, not a specific people, and that is why no future renegotiation of boundaries could ever retire it. Yet this structural reading cuts against the grain of what the leaders in our story are actually doing — and here the argument descends from the abstract to the psychologically concrete.

*** What makes the descent work is an unlikely bridge. Mouffe tells us the political needs an adversary and that consensus is a temporary victory, but she does not tell us who gets to draw the line between us and them, nor how anyone comes to be obeyed once that line is drawn. The social-identity research supplies the missing machinery: Whoever controls category definitions holds the basis of social power, because category definitions are world-making things, and those who control them “make and remake the world.” Cast your eye backward from the footnote — Turner, 2005 — and notice the literalness of “world-making”: this is not metaphor but mechanism, the same operation by which a cartographer’s line in the sand turns a landscape into a sovereignty. The leaders who exercise this power understand something Mouffe would grant them: Leadership requires shared identity but also active identity entrepreneurship by leaders, since a leader is never a passive onlooker to identity but its active creator and transformer. Because leadership depends on representing a consensus, and consensus is a product of shared identity, Leaders lead by representing a consensus that shared identity makes possible — one voice can speak for all precisely where a “we” already binds them, which is why the relationship of leader and follower is doubly dependent on a shared social identity. The empirical proof is almost embarrassingly concrete in its comedy and pathos: Without shared identity, group members cannot trust one another enough to delegate. The Stanford prisoners never built a shift system because going off shift required a trust in colleagues that their failed identification never allowed — the collapse of the entire edifice of authority was legible at the level of an unscheduled nap.

Now the connection tightens into a single mechanism, and it is here that the psychology generalizes into a political law with genuinely disturbing implications. Because leaders operate by recategorizing — by redrawing the boundary of the “we” — Leaders build cohesion by recategorizing conflicts in shared terms: the would-be leader DM in the BBC prison study worked to fuse prisoners and guards into a single category of “workers” arrayed against “management,” generating cohesion by relocating the conflict line. This is the same gesture Mouffe describes, executed at human scale: someone is always drawing the line, and whichever side of it you land on determines not only your allies but your very self. But the convergence cuts the other way too, and this is the part that should make a democrat nervous. The same identity-entrepreneurship that builds democratic solidarity is also the entry point for the pathologies that democratic theory wants to keep outside the door.

Interrogate exit — the RAND interviews with former extremists name the disquieting symmetry outright. Domestic radicalization is primarily psychological and emotional, not material: the drivers that tip a person toward violence are matters of belonging, recognition, meaning — the affective register that Passions and affects, not rationality, secure allegiance to democratic values told us is precisely what actual allegiance runs on. Mouffe’s argument that liberalism’s error is to privilege rationality over the passions finds its chilling confirmation in radicalization research, which finds the same passions doing the work on the other side of the line. A trusted friend’s offer of belonging can initiate the radicalization pathway — the white supremacist who shared his bullying with a friend was met not with condemnation but with a flyer: “I belong to this organization that is a lobby group for people like us… with European backgrounds.” The offer is structurally identical to the democratic leader’s recategorization: come inside this “we,” and your suffering will have meaning. And the reason members stay is that the alternative self is unbearable: Members stay in extremist groups because status there outweighs real-world misery, the “revered” and “legendary” figure in the movement who outside it was just “an alcoholic, high school dropout” in his mother’s house. The category definitions hold because the identity they confer is worth more than the world outside can offer.

This is where the thread finds its real torque, because the exit research turns out to confirm Mouffe’s deepest claim while reshaping its politics. No single factor robustly drives radicalization across the sampled extremist cases — but the exceptions cluster on a single axis, and it is not the axis of ideology. A single core need drives both entry into and exit from extremism: the same need for belonging and a coherent self that recruits a person into a white supremacist group is what, when met differently, calls them out of it. Because exit is recursive rather than linear — Disengagement from extremism is a recursive process, not a linear one, marked by “bi-directional dynamic movement and even at times stagnation” — deradicalization cannot be a single event but must be a sustained relationship. And the content of that relationship is decisive: Effective exit relationships shift former extremists toward inclusive we-frameworks, moving people from “psychological insularity and polarizing boundaries” toward “a ‘we’ framework, rather than a more sharply oppositional stance that cast others as out-groupers.” Here is the astonishing thing — the intervention that works is not the rational argument against the ideology, which would be a debate among equals in a Rawlsian forum, but the relational recategorization that draws a wider circle: Unexpected acceptance from expected-rejecting groups drives deradicalization, the white supremacist called up by his pastor to share his testimony and met with warmth where he braced for rejection. The mechanism is the inverse of DM’s, executed in the other direction: instead of splitting one “us” into warring factions, it absorbs a “them” into a “we.” Even more direct is Encountering hated groups treating one normally dismantles extremists’ stereotypes — the person forced by work to travel and meet the hated group finds the other “treating me as a normal human being,” and the world-making category quietly dissolves.

But the symmetry has a shadow side that the same research exposes, and it returns us to Mouffe’s caution about the state. Heavy-handed state intervention and stigmatization deepen rather than halt radicalization: punitive measures and the stigmatization of whole groups “push individuals with risk… further down the extremist path,” because to be branded a “them” by the state is to have the state confirm the very category logic that recruited you. The heavy-handed state is an identity entrepreneur too, and its redrawing of the line is the one that feeds the adversary relation it claims to be extinguishing.

Here Mouffe and the exit researchers appear to converge on a single, unnerving conclusion. Because the passions that secure allegiance cannot be reasoned away, and because category definitions are the currency of power, the task of democratic politics is not to dissolve the us/them structure but to make its lines permeable — to keep the them from ever hardening into an enemy with whom no reconciliation is imaginable. Yet the social-identity research complicates Mouffe’s neat formula, since The them symbolizes the impossibility of any us, not a concrete opposite suggests that the excluded position cannot be satisfied by any particular inclusion — there will always be a new them. What the extremists’ exit narratives add is a temporal dimension Mouffe’s structural account lacks: a person can live inside a category of exclusion and then be drawn out of it, the “them” of the white supremacist’s worldview being a concrete national enemy rather than a structural placeholder. This is the gap that reveals itself: Mouffe’s theory of the political operates at the level of the system, where the them is permanent; the exit research operates at the level of the person, where the them is reversible. And those two levels can split apart with violent consequences, as Political events can re-trigger radical feelings years after an extremist exit shows — the former extremist watching statues of Columbus come down feels the boundary redraw itself around him again (“society progressed really fast and we kind of got left behind”), proving that deradicalization is never a settled achievement but an ongoing contest over the category boundary. Leadership, in this light, is the daily labor of drawing and redrawing that line — which is why the study of exit processes arrives, unbidden, back at the theory of leadership with which it began. Identity redefinition succeeds only where mobilization outpowers sedimented resistance — the power generated by a social mobilization must overcome the resistance of past versions of identity “sedimented into the organization of laws, institutions and customs,” plus the “immediate and active opposition” of rival leaders and their groups. Sedimentation is the word that holds the whole argument together: every consensus Mouffe calls “provisional” is sedimented identity, every adversary is a rival mobilizer, and every exit is a successful counter-mobilization that outlasts the sedimented pull of the group that once made someone somebody.

The closing insight, then, is that a democrat who takes Mouffe seriously must stop imagining that the alternative to antagonism is a politics without exclusion, and must instead ask what kind of exclusion a given line produces — because the boundary can be drawn thick or thin, hard or permeable. The them can be a structural placeholder, always receding as the we widens — that is the democratic exit from enmity that Mouffe gestures toward. Or it can be a concrete, stigmatized, hunted population — that is the state’s heavy-handed recategorization, which feeds the very identity-work it means to suppress. The retreat from enmity is not the erasure of the line but its re-drawing as a low, passable threshold rather than a high, fortified wall: the exit researchers’ “we framework” is not the end of the us/them distinction but its renegotiation at wider scale, one trusted friend, one unexpected acceptance, one normal encounter at a time. And the bitter corollary is that liberalism’s rational consensus, which Mouffe dismantles and the exit literature ignores, was never the enemy of radicalization at all — the enemy of radicalization is a better, wider, more generous act of the very identity-entrepreneurship that builds radicalization in the first place.

Read together, Mouffe’s political theory and the exit-radicalization research disclose that the “we/them” boundary is not a fixed structural given but a contested, re-drawable achievement — which means democrats cannot choose between having an “us” and not having one (that choice is foreclosed by the correlate of exclusion), only between drawing the line thick and fortified or thin and passable. The exit narratives reveal that the same identity-entrepreneurship that builds a violent group can, redirected toward inclusion, dissolve it — so the real work of democratic leadership is not the liberal dream of a politics beyond enmity but the endless, sedimented-and-resisted labor of widening the circle just fast enough that no “them” hardens into an enemy.

New Synthesis — beyond the sources

Because effective exit is driven by “unexpected acceptance from expected-rejecting groups” while Mouffe insists that the them is a permanent structural position (not a concrete people who can be retired), there may be a measurable asymmetry in WHERE the exits that succeed come from: the acceptance must come from a group that the extremist expects to reject him — i.e., the deradicalizing “we” must not be one the extremist already counts as kin, because a widening circle that merely absorbs a former enemy into an already-familiar “us” lacks the identity-disconfirmation shock. A testable prediction: deradicalization interventions that issue from groups the radical already partially identifies with (fellow nationals, co-religionists of his own tradition) will be less effective per contact than interventions delivered by the very out-group the radical has been taught to hate, precisely because only the latter forces the category boundary — not the ideology — to do the work of reconstruction.

Bias Without Bigots: How Bureaucratic Structure Manufactures Prejudice

Frontline workers’ discretionary acts, not stated policy, constitute government action is the opening premise of Michael Lipsky’s whole argument: the low-level employees we usually dismiss as mere cogs actually deliver the state to citizens, one interaction at a time. The welfare check arrives or doesn’t, the “criminal” label is conferred or withheld, through the individual judgment of a caseworker or an officer. Because these discretionary acts are government, it follows that Street-level bureaucrats are frontline workers exercising substantial job discretion matters enormously — teachers, police, social workers, judges, health workers exercise discretion precisely because their work is too human and too variable to be scripted. The state’s reach is funneled through a bottleneck of people who must decide, in the moment, whom to help and how.

Here is where Lipsky’s account takes its first genuinely counterintuitive turn. We might assume the cure for dangerous discretion is more rules — that regulation tightens the screw on the street-level bureaucrat. But Rule proliferation paradoxically expands rather than constrains frontline discretion inverts that intuition: welfare regulations are “encyclopedic” yet “constantly being changed,” so adherence to anything beyond basic eligibility cannot be expected; police behavior is so hyper-specified that officers must invoke the law selectively, since no one could arrest everyone for everything they observe. Because rules multiply past the point of consistency, they become resources for discretion rather than restraints upon it — the over-abundant code grants the worker license to pick which law to enforce and which to let slide. The “gap” so many reform efforts chase simply cannot be closed by adding more directives; it widens.

Now notice what this does to our default explanation for biased frontline treatment. Frontline work structure, not worker prejudice, creates receptivity to stereotypes makes the strong claim that whatever prejudices individual bureaucrats harbor or don’t, the structure of their work requires differentiating the client population — they cannot serve everyone richly, so they must sort, triage, simplify — and this creates what Lipsky calls “structural receptivity to prejudicial attitudes.” The need for simplification “exists, so to speak, prior to the stereotype.” This is a remarkably clean argument against the bigot-as-culprit story: bias becomes a feature, not a bug, of the job. But then Lipsky immediately complicates his own claim, because the need is empty until culture fills it: Work structure creates the need for bias while society supplies its content. Some form of differentiation is demanded by the workload, yet which differences get seized upon — race, class, ethnicity, accent — comes from the surrounding society’s stock of ready-made categories. The structure makes a demand; the culture answers it. So the front line is not where prejudice originates, nor even where it chiefly lives, but where latent social bias is operationalized under pressure.

The consequences compound, and this is where the thread starts to feel genuinely frightening. Bureaucratic functionality makes bias officially unacknowledgeable and contested closes off the most obvious remedy: because race- or class-graded sorting is useful to the agency — it speeds processing, it allocates scarce benefits efficiently — the institution cannot admit that bias exists without indicting its own functioning. Clients see unfairness; workers see “rational responses to bureaucratic necessities”; neither can persuasively talk to the other because they are describing the same act under two incompatible descriptions. And Differentiation produces the evidence that retroactively justifies itself makes the pattern self-sealing: police surveil Black adolescents more, so they arrest them more, which “confirms” that Black young adults are the delinquency problem. The error is not merely uncorrected; it manufactures the appearance of its own correctness. Tracking does the same in reverse — Tracking judgments rest on inferred class and reported data, not measured potential reveals that students aren’t even sorted by measured ability but by inferred social class or the biased data handed down from earlier street-level bureaucrats, so that an entire trajectory rests on hearsay dressed as assessment. Client labels depend more on setting and discretion than objective traits completes the demolition: the fast-track student in a poor school might be a slow learner in a white middle-class one — the label tracks the population mix, not the person.

This brings us to the dark engine of the whole system, where the structural argument acquires its human weight: teaching. Client control operates through four distinct dimensions including teaching client behavior establishes that street-level bureaucrats don’t merely process clients — they construct them, in part by “teaching clients how to behave as clients.” Frontline workers teach clients to expect few services, dampening demand in advance shows the pedagics of low expectation: teachers’ tracking tells students they aren’t expected to learn much; police inform citizens they can’t expect recovery of stolen property; welfare workers say nothing can raise benefits. The client learns, before even asking, not to ask. Because Sustained agency contact teaches poor clients they are undeserving, this lesson hardens precisely among those most dependent on services — the poor who bounce from agency to agency absorb reinforced dependency, powerlessness, and anger. But the teaching works even in a single encounter: Police treatment teaches stopped citizens their own worthiness of respect — the person stopped “discovers whether they are or are not the kind of person to whom respect is normally granted,” a verdict delivered in the span of a traffic stop.

Yet — and here the account gains its most tragic dimension — the teaching produces the very pupil-behavior that justifies it. Control-oriented policing provokes the hostility it predicts among stopped minorities. is a self-fulfilling prophecy with a reverse sign: approaching people as hostile provokes rebellion, and a person stopped on suspicion may act aggressively not from guilt but from a sense of injustice at being stopped. Meanwhile Ambiguous police stops confirm minorities’ belief that officers are racist operates on the client’s side: uncertain why they were stopped, minority citizens attribute the officer’s brusque manner to their own identity, confirming their sense of racial targeting. The two confirmations cancel each other’s evidentiary force — each party’s experience ratifies its own pre-existing reading of the other — and neither can see the structural machinery operating beneath both. And at the lethal extreme, the pedagogy of deference has no tolerance for those who cannot perform it: Police demand visible deference gestures that demonstrate suspect status understood requires the stopped person to communicate civility, penitence, and fear, and People physically unable to perform expected deference cues risk lethal police sanction supplies the grotesque endpoint — the deaf or mentally handicapped person who cannot perform the expected cues and is shot as a “defiant” citizen. The demand for deference is a test, and failing a test one never knew one was taking can be fatal.

Notice what has happened to the original “discretionary act.” The innocent-seeming sorting decisions have become systematically redistributive in a direction that escapes accountability. Selective coaching of clients redistributes benefits away from the uncoached shows that even helping — telling one defendant to appear penitent, coaching an elderly applicant into emergency categories — reshuffles benefits away from those who received no coaching, so kind acts and cruel ones converge on the same outcome. Routine processing silently subverts stated policy by reproducing prior patterns of advantage. generalizes this to entire agencies: a life insurer’s declared ghetto-enrichment policy was quietly gutted by routine loan processing that followed prior procedures and aided “those who were most able to receive credit anyway.” Policy says one thing; routine does another; routine wins. Which is why Routine frontline judgments are political acts that allocate social benefits and harms. is where the analysis ripens: the routines, simplifications, and low-level decisions are politics, the real allocation of goods and harms through public authority, entirely outside the normal channels of democratic contestation. This is government action in the most consequential sense — and it is ungoverned.

Two structural feedbacks now seal the system shut against reform. Self-selection leaves agencies staffed by those untroubled by service gaps explains who is left in these jobs: the idealists quit or never apply, despairing over their inability to deliver the services they were trained to give, so the agencies are progressively staffed by those untroubled by the gap between objectives and capabilities. And Anti-bias training works only when it solves frontline work problems explains why the standard remedy fails on the same logic that the whole account has been building: training that denounces prejudice addresses nothing the worker experiences as a problem, because the bias is not experienced as bias but as the rational solution to an impossible workload. The remedy that would work — workshops showing workers that their assumptions about clients are “not necessary to function effectively,” and teaching alternative interaction techniques — attacks the functional need directly. But this remedy is precisely the one that reform almost never supplies, because it requires conceding that bias is a work-design problem rather than a character flaw. The moral architecture is complete: Bureaucratic contact stigmatizes even people officially cleared or acquitted, for involvement alone — an ex-con long after discharge, a defendant acquitted, a patient held for examination and judged sane — leaves a trace that others read, and if others treat one differently, one begins to incorporate that view as self-image. Teaching and stigmatization are the same act; you cannot crack down on the one without dismantling the other.

Stand back and take the scaffolding in. Lipsky’s own concluding knot in this material is worth seeing on its own terms: Coping responses arise from work structure but take content from culture. restates the master formula of the whole project — the demand for differentiation is endogenous to the workplace, but each era’s prevailing cultural assumptions color which differences get seized, and so the specific bias at the front line is historically movable even as some bias or other remains structurally guaranteed. This is the same pattern that appears in Work structure creates the need for bias while society supplies its content, and noticing the repetition should make visible what each single claim cannot: the chain is a metabolism. Structure demands food; culture provides it; the product — biased, normalized, deniable routine — is excreted back into the culture as confirmed evidence that the initial differentiations were warranted, which then re-enters the agency as a fresh justification. Bias without bigots is not a static state but a closed loop, one that reproduces itself through the participation of people who believe, with complete sincerity, that they are merely doing their jobs well. The self-fulfilling prophecy is not an error the system makes; it is the system’s own nutrient cycle.

The genuinely new insight that emerges only from holding these claims in this order is that anti-bias reform has been aimed at the wrong layer of the loop. We have spent decades trying to de-bias the worker (training, sensitivity, implicit-bias modules) or to de-bias the rulebook (procedural reforms, quotas, oversight) — but the chain shows that individual corrective measures die at the boundary Lipsky marks: the worker’s bias is a solution to a structural problem, so removing the “bias” without removing the problem just forces the worker to find another sorting heuristic, which is why measured prejudice often migrates rather than diminishes. The layer that actually sustains the loop — where the need for differentiation meets the culture’s supply of categories, and where the resulting routines generate the evidence that re-authorizes them — is never addressed, because addressing it would require naming the state’s own distributive functioning as the bearer of bias. The whole system runs on bias being functional; that is precisely why it must remain unacknowledgeable. The story of modern bureaucratic inequality, read against itself, is the story of an institution whose prejudice is structural precisely because its members are not, individually, bigots — and whose reform will fail until the work is redesigned so that prejudice stops paying.

Anti-bias reform has aimed at the wrong layer. Because the frontline worker’s bias is a solution to a structural workload problem rather than a personal flaw, training that targets the worker or the rulebook removes a symptom that the work-design will promptly re-grow through a fresh sorting heuristic — so measured bias migrates across categories instead of diminishing. The layer that actually sustains the loop is where structurally demanded differentiation meets culture-supplied categories and then generates the confirming evidence that re-authorizes both; naming that layer means conceding that the state’s own distributive functioning is the bearer of prejudice, which is why it remains officially unacknowledgeable. Bias without bigots is a closed metabolic loop, and only a work redesign that makes stereotyping stop paying will break it.

New Synthesis — beyond the sources

A concrete, testable prediction follows from holding the “bias migrates rather than diminishes” dynamic together with the emergence of new culturally-supplied sorting categories: as explicit race-based differentiation grows more socially costly and legally risky, the structural demand for simplification will not be met by less stereotyping but by a substitution toward whichever culturally salient distinctions remain cheap to deploy and hard to contest — most plausibly those encoded in quantified data (credit scores, risk algorithms, school test metrics), because numeric proxies carry the same bureaucratic functionality as traditional stereotypes while enjoying a credibility that race-laden ones have lost. If this is right, then algorithmic decision-support systems adopted to “depersonalize” frontline judgment will not reduce bias-via-work-structure but will simply relocate the metabolism’s fuel: the content of bias becomes the algorithm’s training data (itself a record of prior frontline differentiations, per the self-fulfilling-prophesy claim), and the need for routinized differentiation is satisfied by a category system that is even more impervious to the “unacknowledgeability” problem because it presents as objective mathematics. The novel, falsifiable hypothesis: measured disparity will shift from demographic categories toward data-proxy categories (credit tiers, ZIP-code-adjacent risk scores, prior-contact counts) at a rate that tracks the legal/legitimacy cost of demographic bias — and anti-bias interventions aimed at retraining workers will show zero lasting effect specifically because the replacement category is structurally indistinguishable from the old ones in function, differing only in content, which the closing insight already shows is culturally supplied.

Digressions

Off to the side of the main argument lie a few claims that keep tugging at the thread. The most quietly subversive is Prejudice arises from perceived mismatch between group traits and roles — the notion that Allport missed how prejudice is structural, a felt discordance between what a group is said to be and what a society needs doing. It reframes bigotry less as fear or hate than as a category error with consequences. That category error loops strangely into Racial self-identification can conflict with claiming discrimination status, where a plaintiff must assert he is “not Caucasian” to win protection precisely because his perceived mismatch with a role (the white manager he’s suing) is doing unnoticed work — the courtroom becomes a laboratory for trait-role discordance. Then there’s the stubborn finding that Escalating Israeli-Palestinian conflict did not alter how identification modes predict group guilt: context, it turns out, barely bends the psychological wiring, which makes Patriotism and nationalism are distinct dimensions of group identification with opposing effects feel less like a taxonomy and more like a law. And looming behind all of this is Social Darwinist theory treated intergroup conflict as a natural and inevitable outcome of contact, the nineteenth-century pessimism that assumed conflict was gravity — a claim that makes the Ingroup use of derogatory outgroup names increases hostile prejudice in bystanders finding feel like a small, hopeful counterweight: if linguistic choices among bystanders can ratchet hostility up, they might also, perversely, be renegotiable.

Open Questions

  • Do identities rebuilt through transgressive out-group relationships show measurable fragility (e.g., relapse rates under stress or scarcity) compared to enemy-structured identities — and if so, what relational or structural conditions stabilize them against that relapse? (from The Enemy Is Not Optional: Identity’s Founding Contradiction)
  • If enemy-distinction is constitutive of identity rather than epiphenomenal, does the historical succession of targets (Jews, Muslims, communists, lesser races, LGBT communities) follow any internal logic of substitution — i.e., are successive Others selected because they share formal features (liminality, perceived conspiracy, proximity) that let them occupy the identical structural vacancy? (from The Enemy Is Not Optional: Identity’s Founding Contradiction)
  • Allport’s observed generalized-prejudice correlation (antagonism to one out-group portends antagonism to all) coexists in this literature with the claim that prejudice runs through specific intergroup relations — does generalized prejudice dissolve once a group’s comparison targets are disaggregated, or does it indicate a persistent identity-structure that negational-identity research only partially captures? (from Foregrounding the Group: From Personality to Collective Furnace)
  • The threshold finding — only already-high identifiers show increased identification in response to discrimination — implies a causal sequencing the social identity literature rarely specifies: what actually produces high prior identification in the first place, if not the very grievances the bidirectional model says should create it? (from Foregrounding the Group: From Personality to Collective Furnace)
  • If negational identities produce a distinctive bias pattern, is the disposition toward negational self-definition itself a measurable individual difference — and if so, does that reintroduce a version of the authoritarian-personality metatheory the group-frame claims to have superseded? (from Foregrounding the Group: From Personality to Collective Furnace)
  • Does the glorification/attachment dissociation found by Roccas et al. among Israelis hold among dominant groups in low-conflict, high-stability societies, where the paternalistic-control model predicts discrimination should run on pure conditional warmth with outgroup negativity decoupled? An experimental replication in a non-conflict national context would test whether the coupling of ingroup positivity with outgroup negativity requires chronic threat or emerges in its absence too. (from Beyond Antipathy: Prejudice as Position, Control, and Protective Wall)
  • Have explicit egalitarian norms — the ‘change in norms over time’ mentioned in the social-norm account — forced dominant groups to abandon Jackman’s conditional warmth altogether, or only to code it in registers that evades egalitarian detection? Longitudinal content analysis of dominant-group discourse toward subordinates across a period of formal norm change could show whether control dropped its affectionate costume or merely updated it. (from Beyond Antipathy: Prejudice as Position, Control, and Protective Wall)
  • Which specific social conditions or interventions break the mutual reinforcement between intragroup solidarity and intergroup hostility — given that superordinate recategorization (the Sherif solution) reduces cross-group prejudice but apparently at the cost of dissolving the protective ingroup solidarity that buffers target-group members against discrimination-related psychological harm? (from The Threat Thermometer: Nonconscious Defense and the Amplifier Logic)
  • The Agroskin and Jonas finding that control motivation but not implicit death cognition drives threat-based ingroup defense directly contests a core terror management prediction — what experimental or longitudinal evidence would adjudicate between the two mechanisms, or specify the conditions under which each drives outcome? (from The Threat Thermometer: Nonconscious Defense and the Amplifier Logic)
  • If threat amplifies pre-existing prejudices rather than creating them, then new outgroup targets with no pre-existing enmity (e.g., novel immigrant groups) should be largely immune to threat-driven hostility — is there evidence that genuinely novel threats to novel groups fail to produce prejudice, which would be the strongest test of the amplifier logic? (from The Threat Thermometer: Nonconscious Defense and the Amplifier Logic)
  • Is intergroup threat susceptibility — the personality/background traits Stephan et al. list as predicting high threat response — itself socially manufactured (e.g., by institutional legitimation of threat narratives), or is it a psychological invariant that propaganda merely exploits? (from The Threat Thermometer: Nonconscious Defense and the Amplifier Logic)
  • If egalitarian statements and ethnophaulisms both transmit prejudice (though through opposite self-presentations), is there any form of ingroup speech that redraws a boundary less — that is, a representational mode that lowers rather than raises boundary salience? No claim in the thread tests this symmetric case, and the boundary-blurring thesis would predict such speech is vanishingly rare or self-defeating. (from The Blurred Boundary: Why the Enemy-in-Our-Midst Is the Deepest Threat)
  • The pied-noir and South African White cases show privileged groups marshaling victim identity, but what observable difference distinguishes a genuine historical-victim group from a powerful group borrowing victim status? The psychological and historical literatures in the thread both describe the mechanism; neither supplies a discriminating test. (from The Blurred Boundary: Why the Enemy-in-Our-Midst Is the Deepest Threat)
  • Bauman’s account implies boundary-blurring threats escalate in step with the group’s prior experience of assimilation (the ‘remaining outsider’ who is more hated after partial inclusion). Is that intensification reversible — can a group that has crossed the assimilation threshold ever downgrade the residual outsider back to ordinary rival, or is the trajectory one-directional? The historical evidence in Lewis suggests one-directionality but does not prove it. (from The Blurred Boundary: Why the Enemy-in-Our-Midst Is the Deepest Threat)
  • What observable evidence would distinguish a subordinate group engaged in genuine ‘positive identity development’ (per Jost/Sidanius) from one merely performing an essentialized identity that dominant structures can reabsorb — that is, is there a measurable behavioral marker of self-reclamation versus self-staging? (from Doctrine Defects: When Unity Outranks the Creed It Claims to Serve)
  • Selod’s finding that anti-Muslim sentiment is invariant across liberal and conservative ideology in Chicago — does this invariance hold specifically because of what Fisher calls second-order belief, or would it persist even in a media environment where belief-about-the-Other’s-belief were substantially different? This is testable against non-Anglophone, differently mediated publics. (from Doctrine Defects: When Unity Outranks the Creed It Claims to Serve)
  • Arendt’s genealogy treats equality-rerouting-onto-natural-difference as a feature of modernity generally — but does the paternalism-to-individualism pivot (Dovidio et al.) operate identically in societies that never adopted the full modern equality doctrine, such as hereditary or caste-based ones, or is its strategic ‘new differentiation’ response contingent on a prior egalitarian norm? (from Doctrine Defects: When Unity Outranks the Creed It Claims to Serve)
  • Accepting relationships with out-group members model new identity structures for exiting extremists. → builds-on → Effective exit relationships shift former extremists toward inclusive we-frameworks
  • Control motivation but not implicit death cognition drives threat-based ingroup defense. → builds-on → Death-thought accessibility does not mediate mortality salience effects on ingroup defense.

Gaps & Further Reading

AI-suggested leads — unverified, go find and check these yourself.

The MOC synthesizes the group-defense / threat mechanisms almost exclusively from the perspective of the dominant group and from the theorists who study dominants (Jost, Sidanius, Allport line, Stephan’s threat theory, terror management). The ‘Muslim-enemy case’ thread draws on the subordination literature (Beydoun, Selod, Aziz, Razack, Maghbouleh), but the overall architecture never lets the subordinated voice weigh in on the manufacturing mechanism itself — how targets perceive, narrate, and contest the alienation from their own doctrine. The note is almost entirely analyst-side; there is no primary record of Muslims themselves describing the moment their religious self-understanding gets recast as a threat-signifier, and no account of how the surrogate-ontology the note describes is resisted or re-signified from within.

  • Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) civil rights reports and the affidavits/testimonials collected in the New York City Police Department’s Muslim surveillance hearings (2012-2013, NYC Commission on Human Rights)
  • The diaries/interviews in Neda Maghbouleh’s The Limits of Whiteness (already cited) but specifically her Iranian-American respondents’ own re-narrations of being read as ‘Arab/Muslim’
  • Muslim public-opinion polling conducted internally by hate-crime victim service organizations (e.g., Muslim Advocates’ field interviews with hijabi plaintiffs in employment discrimination cases)

Thread 6 (‘Doctrine Defects’) concludes that the only anti-domination identity is one ‘kept deliberately in motion’ and self-fracturing — a striking and prescriptive claim — but the MOC never specifies a single concrete historical instance where such a moving, non-essentialized identity actually functioned as Hall hopes. The claim rests entirely on Hall’s and Fisher’s theory and on negative case studies (where unified identities got reabsorbed). There is no real-world example tested against this success condition, so ‘what succeeding would concretely look like’ is asserted, not evidenced; the reader cannot tell whether Hall’s fracture is actual or aspirational.

  • Peter Beinart’s and the Jewish People’s’ Council archive on the post-Holocaust British ‘Never Again’ movement as a test of whether refusing one fixed enemy-identity is sustainable
  • The Combahee River Collective’s own retention of Black-feminist specificity while refusing a single unified coalition — compare against later SWP-aligned collapses
  • Richard Alba & Victor Nee on how ‘borderline’ ethnic identities (e.g., Irish-American assimilation in the 1840s-1900s) drifted in and out of whiteness without ever being held deliberately in motion

The threat-machinery threads (2, 3, 4) are built almost entirely from social-psychology lab findings — meta-analyses, controlled experiments, survey instruments (RWA scales, SDO, terror-management mortality-salience primes). There is essentially no field or institutional data showing the mechanism operating in its real habitat: actual state institutions, police forces, immigration bureaucracies, or media production cycles. The ‘instrumentalizing elites’ claim (Jost/Sidanius profit-and-power) is asserted at the end of Thread 4 but never traced through concrete institutional machinery — no archival record of who funded which justifying myth, which agency wrote which memo, which editor chose which frame. The psychological mechanism is richly evidenced; its claimed transmission from ‘gain stages’ into real world-historical action is asserted.

  • The declassified CIA/Pentagon counter-terrorism training materials and FBI analytic ‘radicalization’ reports — including the actual leaked 2007 ‘Radicalization in the West’ FBI report used by the NYPD — to see the threat-amplifier concept operating as bureaucratic doctrine
  • Muzafer Sherif’s original Robbers Cave field-notes and the post-1954 intergroup-training records kept by the Institute of Group Relations at Oklahoma, for institutional not lab evidence of the amplifier on real children in situ
  • The UK Home Office’s pre-2011 PREVENT strategy internal evaluations and Channel program case files, showing the ‘gain stage’ logic applied to named individuals

Thread 7’s core claim is that religion became a ‘legal and bureaucratic stand-in for race’ via a substitution economy inherited from overt-race-talk’s decline — but the MOC never once cites the actual case law, statutes, or bureaucratic documents that would substantiate or complicate that substitution. It cites theory (Goldberg, Anidjar, Razack) describing the surrogate, yet never examines the concrete doctrinal genealogy: how did courts actually move from ‘Arab/Muslim’ being unprotected as a race to being treated as a race-equivalent? The note asserts the substitution ‘hardened into a full ontology’ but supplies no Supreme Court opinion, no EEOC ruling, no asylum-board decision tracing that hardening. This is a legal-historical claim resting on a purely theoretical evidentiary base.

  • Saint Francis College v. Al-Khazraji (1987) and Shaare Tefila Congregation v. Cobb (1987) — the two Supreme Court cases establishing that ‘race’ under §1981 includes ancestry/ethnicity, and the lower-court genealogy from them to later Muslim-as-race holdings
  • The EEOC’s Compliance Manual section 15 (Race/Color Discrimination) and its post-2001 guidance classifying anti-Muslim bias, plus Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. Abercrombie & Fitch (2015) on the hijab
  • Board of Immigration Appeals decisions on ‘particular social group’ asylum claims based on religion/race surrogacy (e.g., Matter of A-B-, Matter of S-E-G-) to see the substitution operating in administrative law
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