Tolerance as a Discourse of Depoliticization

What kind of political discourse, with what social and po­litical effects, is contemporary tolerance talk in the United States? What readings of the discourses of liberalism, colonialism, and impe­rialism circulating through Western democracies can analytical scru­tiny of this talk provide? The following chapters aim to track the so­ cial and political work of tolerance discourse by comprehending how this discourse constructs and positions liberal and nonliberal subjects, cultures, and regimes; how it figures conflict, stratification, and dif­ference; how it operates normatively; and how its normativity is ren­dered oblique almost to the point of invisibility.

Part of the project of this book, then, is to analyze tolerance, espe­cially in its recently resurgent form, as a strand of depoliticization in liberal democracies. Depoliticization involves construing inequality, subordination, marginalization, and social conflict, which all require political analysis and political solutions, as personal and individual, on the one hand, or as natural, religious, or cultural on the other. 

Tol­erance works along both vectors of depoliticization—it personalizes and it naturalizes or culturalizes—and sometimes it intertwines them. Tolerance as it is commonly used today tends to cast instances of in­ equality or social injury as matters of individual or group prejudice. And it tends to cast group conflict as rooted in ontologically natural hostility toward essentialized religious, ethnic, or cultural difference. That is, tolerance discourse reduces conflict to an inherent friction among identities and makes religious, ethnic, and cultural difference itself an inherent site of conflict, one that calls for and is attenuated by the practice of tolerance. As I will suggest momentarily, tolerance is hardly the cause of the naturalization of political conflict and the on­tologization of politically produced identity in liberal democracies, but it is facilitated by and abets these processes.

Although depoliticization sometimes personalizes, sometimes cul­turalizes, and sometimes naturalizes conflict, these tactical variations are tethered to a common mechanics, which is what makes it possible to speak of depoliticization as a coherent phenomenon. ­Depoliticization involves removing a political phenomenon from comprehen­sion of its historical emergence and from a recognition of the powers that produce and contour it.

When the ideal or practice of tolerance is substituted for justice or equality, when sensitivity to or even respect for the other is substituted for justice for the other, when historically induced suffering is reduced to “difference” or to a me­dium of “offense,” when suffering as such is reduced to a problem of personal feeling, then the field of political battle and political trans­ formation is replaced with an agenda of behavioral, attitudinal, and emotional practices 

The culturalization of politics analytically vanquishes political economy, states, history, and international and transnational relations. It elimi­nates colonialism, capital, caste or class stratification, and external 
po­litical domination from accounts of political conflict or instability. In their stead, “culture” is summoned to explain the motives and as­pirations leading to certain conflicts (living by the sword, religious fundamentalism, cultures of violence) as well as the techniques and weapons deployed (suicide bombing, decapitation)."

— Wendy Brown,  Tolerance as a Discourse of Depoliticization in Regulating Aversion - Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire, 2008