ArgumentRiots, White Supremacy and Accelerationism

White supremacists are gleeful as police violence and the resulting rioting tear apart cities, Dan Byman writes in Lawfare. “Even if the unrest ends in the weeks to come, they may look back at the violence as a win for their side,” he writes.

He adds:

Some delight in the killing of George Floyd and in police violence against African Americans—“a knee is the new noose!!” exulted one sign held up by white supremacists during protests. It is unclear how much organized white supremacist groups are involved in the violence, and it is easy to use them as an excuse for much broader societal problems related to police violence and systemic racism. For now, any white supremacist involvement appears to be more individual than collective, but even if the violence declines it may bolster an increasingly important white supremacist concept—“accelerationism.”

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Accelerationism is the idea that white supremacists should try to increase civil disorder—accelerate it—in order to foster polarization that will tear apart the current political order. The System (usually capitalized), they believe, has only a finite number of collaborators and lackeys to prop it up. Accelerationists hope to set off a series of chain reactions, with violence fomenting violence, and in the ensuing cycle more and more people join the fray. When confronted with extremes, so the theory goes, those in the middle will be forced off the fence and go to the side of the white supremacists. If violence can be increased sufficiently, the System will run out of lackeys and collapse, and the race war will commence.

Byman notes that the white supremacist embrace of acceleration is relatively recent, but that capitalizing on, or even creating, polarization is not a new strategy.Unfortunately, the current political situation is made more promising for accelerationists. Accelerationism thrives on polarization, tensions, and conflict. “Even when President Trump does not openly embrace the white supremacists’ cause, he is often their ally due to the polarization in which he revels” and the division and conflicts which he promotes and encourages, Byman writes.

Some white supremacists already see the riots and broader polarization as vindication of the idea of accelerationism, and “law enforcement and civil society activists concerned about the growth of extremism should watch to see if this idea takes further hold within white supremacist groups and organizations in the coming weeks and months,” Byman concludes..