Not Your Father’s Extremists

The New Radicalism
The samples of both the CPOST and COE studies are small – about 200 subjects each – so we should treat the findings as indicative rather than conclusive. But these findings do suggest that we should begin to reassess our understanding of the sources and appeal of violent, anti-democratic radicalism and the most effective ways to address this emerging threat.

These topics come to mind:

First, it appears that despair of and hostility toward democracy and democratic principles are no longer limited to the fringes of the American body politic. The majority of those arrested for storming the Capitol were middle class, middle-aged, employed, earning more than the average household income, mostly college-educated, and had no ties with the extremist groups.

Second, the majority of those arrested on the Capitol probably never resorted to violence in their private lives, yet they were willing to employ violence to undermine American democracy and subvert the election in order to do something never before done in American history: Follow their leader’s Big Lie exhortations to “fight” in order to keep him in power, even though he had lost the election.

Third, most of the deradicalization and deprogramming methods now used to treat and “cure” individuals who had joined radical, violent groups, and the psychological, social, and economic means employed to counter violent extremists, are geared toward treating younger people who are typically lacking in educational achievement and professional prospects and who, additionally, are often unemployed, socially isolated, aimless, had brushes with the law, and often with a family trauma in their background. These methods and approaches would be irrelevant for dealing with most of the people who stormed the Capitol.

Fourth, monitoring violent far-right organizations should continue, and even bolstered, but it will not do much to address the motivation of most of the people who stormed the Capitol, and it will not prevent rioters of similar demographic characteristics from trying again to wield power by using force.

Fifth, we have assumed that threats to American democracy would come from outsiders: International terrorists who come from foreign lands, or domestic extremist groups outside the mainstream of American society and politics. But what we saw between 3 November and 6 January (and some argue this started even earlier) was a slow-rolling coup attempt intsigated from the inside by the president of the United States (not only slow-rolling, but conducted in plain sight).

Political scientists call this a “self-coup” (or autogolpe, in the original Spanish): a form of coup d’état or putsch in which the nation’s leader, after coming to power through legal means and then losing a subsequent election, unlawfully renders the national legislature powerless so he can stay in power even though he had lost the election. In many cases, the now-unlawful leader assumes extraordinary powers not granted under normal circumstances, typically citing an emergency due to unspecified threats to national security.

Among the recent examples of successful autogolpes: Aleksandr Lukashenko in Belarus (election: 2020); Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela (2017); Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey (2015); Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia (1997); Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran (2009), Laurent Gbagbo in Ivory Coast (2010); and Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe (2013).

Sixth, the most disturbing and dangerous aspect of this sorry episode is the fact that tens of millions of good, law-abiding, decent — and not uneducated — Americans have been effectively persuaded to abandon fact-based reality for an alternative reality – a fantastical, made-up concoction of brazen lies, falsehoods, and conspiracy theories spun by Trump and amplified by Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Lin Wood, shameless purveyors of bizarre, even hallucinatory, conspiracies (the three were referred to as Trump’s “legal team”).

This abdication of reason has taken place within a specific context: social media has allowed people to ensconce themselves in nearly hermetically sealed echo chambers; two TV channels kept promoting Trump’s lies in a battle with another channel over shares of Trump’s supporters; and Trump is an able and reckless demagogue, the master of identifying and exploiting people’s grievances and stoking their fears and resentments. Some aspects of this context may change.

Still, it is worrisome that tens of millions of Americans were willing to take leave of their senses and abandon truth, reason, and adherence to democracy for what Senator Ben Sasse (R-Nebraska) aptly described as “the weird worship of one dude.”

Lies and Consequences
“The U.S. system has held up, but only just,” the Financial Times observed. “It has been a close-run thing.” As a result of Trump’s endless stream of lies, the FT continues, “roughly three-quarters of Republican voters believe that the election has been stolen. The system’s guardrails have held up. But they have been badly weakened.”

The dangers democracy faces are daunting, especially if leaders who are entrusted with guarding and strengthening it do their best, with the help of unfettered access to social media, to undermine and weaken democracy.

Observers have noted that social media platforms, if abused, threaten democracy by fostering an epistemic crisis, that is, by allowing malign actors to blur, if not destroy altogether, the lines between truth and untruth — by attacking the idea that there are such things as facts and truth (see, for example, Jonathan Rauch, “The Constitution of Knowledge,” National Affairs, Fall 2018; and Peter Wehner, “Trump’s Sinister Assault on Truth: The President Appears Committed to Destroying the Very Idea of Facts,” The Atlantic, 18 June 2018).

Thomas B. Edsall writes that,

A decade ago, the consensus was that the digital revolution would give effective voice to millions of previously unheard citizens. Now, in the aftermath of the Trump presidency, the consensus has shifted to anxiety that online behemoths like Twitter, Google, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook have created a crisis of knowledge — confounding what is true and what is untrue — eroding the foundations of democracy.

These worries have intensified in response to the violence of Jan. 6, and the widespread acceptance among Republican voters of the conspicuously false claim that Democrats stole the election.

Nathaniel Persily, a law professor at Stanford and author of the 2019 report, “The internet’s Challenge to Democracy: Framing the Problem and Assessing Reforms,” told Edsall that “Twitter and Facebook allowed Trump both to get around legacy intermediaries and to manipulate them by setting their agenda. They also provided environments (such as Facebook groups) that have proven conducive to radicalization and mobilization.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) minced no words in describing the threat Trump posed for American democracy, highlighting the direct link between Trump’s unremitting, incessant lying and the violence on 6 January. In his memorable 13 February 2021 speech on the floor of the Senate, McConnell said:

January 6th was a disgrace. American citizens attacked their own government. They used terrorism to try to stop a specific piece of domestic business they did not like…. They did this because they’d been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on earth because he was angry. He lost an election.

….

The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president and having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories, and reckless hyperbole, which the defeated president kept shouting into the largest megaphone on planet Earth. The issue is not only the president’s intemperate language on January 6th. It is not just his endorsement of remarks in which an associate urged “Trial by combat.” It was also the entire manufactured atmosphere of looming catastrophe. The increasingly wild myths about a reverse landslide election that was somehow being stolen. Some secret coup by our now-president.

….

This was an intensifying crescendo of conspiracy theories orchestrated by an outgoing president who seemed determined to either overturn the voters’ decision or else torch our institutions on the way out.

Trump is a congenital liar. George F. Will described him as the “Vesuvius of mendacities.” He is the master of what RAND scholars Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews called “The Russian ‘Firehose of Falsehood’ Propaganda Model” (Steve Bannon, explaining Trump’s unrelenting attacks on the quality media, said it more colorfully: “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit”).

But Trump’s mendacity should not conceal the fact that he did not invent the anger and sense of helplessness many Americans feel in the face of rapid social, economic, and cultural changes. He identified the anger and resentment, and then cynically exploited and inflamed them. But the anger and sadness are real.

The example of Trump’s nihilism, the recognition of the growing sway of social media, the pessimism which now pervades large segments of the American population, and the two studies about the Capitol rioters, should make us ponder three questions:

First, our democratic system has managed to see off the Trump challenge. But what if the next amoral rabble-rouser to test American democracy is more competent, disciplined, and adroit than Trump? Second, what if millions of Americans, with real grievances and a genuine sense of being treated unfairly by a condescending, detached, and indifferent coastal elite — and who are increasingly alienated from a society in which, in the words of Ross Douthat, liberal orthodoxy and conformity now reign in “culture-shaping and opinion-forming institutions,” and in which liberalism has “a monopoly in the commanding heights of culture” — prove ready to follow this rabble-rouser? And third, what if millions of good, decent Americans conclude that democracy, as currently run, no longer serves their interests, and that efforts to shore it up are not worth the candle?

What indeed?

Ben Frankel is the editor of the Homeland Security News Wire