March 11, 2021
The Challenge of Mass
Extremism
America must,
unfortunately, come to terms with its own increasing theat of mass extremism.
Violent extremism, as a problem
for U.S. policy, needs to be viewed in much different terms than it has
hitherto. Terrorism,
the component of violent extremism that traditionally has most alarmed
Americans, also needs a major rethink. The need for rethinking is greater than
after past incidents that, traumatic as they were, shaped what has been the
dominant American way of thinking about violent extremism.
A major facet of that thinking
over the past two decades has been that a terrorist attack on September 11,
2001 was a watershed moment that marked a great change in threats to U.S.
national security. But what suddenly changed twenty years ago was popular
attitudes—because of the spectacular nature and casualty toll of that one
attack—not the threat itself. The nature of the threat had already been recognized by
those responsible for countering it. The U.S. government was actively combating
that threat before 9/11. Most of the tools needed to combat it after 9/11 were the same ones
used before.
Very recently there has been
recognition that the violent extremist threats the United States faces today
come less from foreign jihadists of the sort who perpetrated 9/11 than from domestic white supremacists and others on the far right, with
responsible authorities such as the Department of Homeland Security adjusting their focus accordingly. That recognition has
been retarded by political motivations and still extends to
only a portion of the American population. Such recognition constitutes a part,
but only a part, of the necessary rethinking.
At least as big a part is to
realize that violent extremism today is a matter not only of small groups but
of large numbers of people. In twenty-first-century America, support for
political violence has become a mass phenomenon. As a measure of that phenomenon,
a recent poll conducted by the Survey Center on American Life
found that 29 percent of Americans, including 39 percent of Republicans,
support using violence “if elected leaders will not protect America.”
Thirty-six percent of Americans, and a majority (56 percent) of Republicans,
agree with the statement, “The traditional American way of life is disappearing
so fast that we may have to use force to save it.”
The attack on the U.S. Capitol
on January 6 was
an act of terrorism. Whether or not it gets routinely described as such, it
meets the criteria in most official definitions of terrorism, which involve
politically motivated violence against noncombatants, conducted by someone
other than the military forces of a state. Although investigators have
uncovered some preparatory organization by groups involved in the incident, the attack
was primarily a mass phenomenon. It was fed by a nationally propagated
lie—still held by many Americans—about supposed fraud in an election and had
the extremist objective of overturning the result of the election.
Counterterrorism,
as we have come to know it, and as it has focused primarily on foreign
terrorist organizations, does have some useful things to say about extremist
beliefs in a larger population. Even where terrorist acts are committed by a
few people in a small group, the incidence of terrorism is affected by the
extent of relevant beliefs, including extremist beliefs, in a general
population from which a terrorist group recruits its members and to which the
group looks for sympathy and support. Counterterrorist specialists recognize
this dynamic, and the subset of their field dealing with mass beliefs relevant
to terrorism usually comes under the label “countering violent extremism” or
CVE.
But the more that violent
extremism becomes a mass phenomenon rather than a matter of small groups, the
less relevant and useful are the traditional counterterrorist tools.
Penetration of a clandestine terrorist cell through creative intelligence or
police work has usually been thought of as the apotheosis of counterterrorism,
but any such thought is mistaken in an era of mass extremism.
CVE or other aspects of
counterterrorism that deal with large rather than small numbers of people
change character greatly when the extremism being targeted is domestic rather
than foreign. For one thing, the technique most used overseas when aimed at an
enemy with large rather than small numbers of people is military force—such as
the force used to reduce the ministate in Iraq and Syria established by the
so-called Islamic State or ISIS. Similar use of military force clearly is not
applicable domestically, short of the horror of a new civil war.
Another difference concerns the
particular manifestations of political extremism that worry us or ought to
worry us. With foreign extremists, most Americans’ concern is narrowly focused
on the physical harm that terrorists might do to Americans. As a matter of
popular sentiment and also often of U.S. policy, the other damage wrought by
political extremism abroad, including authoritarianism and other political
pathologies, usually gets little attention as long as no Americans get killed
or injured in the process.
But with mass political extremism
at home, we ought to have a much broader concern. The biggest threatened harm
is not the deaths or injuries to individual Americans from terrorism—which by
most comparative measures is small—but instead the severe injury and threat of death to
America’s democratic political system. The mob at the Capitol easily could have
killed even more people than it did, and that would have been tragic for the
individuals involved and their families. But what would have been even more
tragic for the republic is if they had succeeded in killing American democracy
by overturning a free election.
Yet another difference between extremism
abroad and extremism at home is that the latter is enmeshed in the nation’s
politics, and that above all makes it hard to counter. This unfortunate fact is
reflected in the party-specific results in the aforementioned poll about
attitudes toward the use of violence. It is reflected in how much of the
Republican Party is still in the grip of Trumpism, which at the end of Trump’s
term became a movement with the extremist objective of overturning democracy.
As the FBI and the Department of
Homeland Security chip away at domestic extremism by disrupting clandestine
cells and arresting their members, we should not delude ourselves that this
deals with the greater part of the problem. Countering mass extremism in the
United States is an enormous task. It entails nothing less than the
construction, or reconstruction, of a democratic political culture. It entails
public education to help dispel mass belief in politically damaging lies. It
entails somehow dealing with those politicians and mass media that propagate the lies. It entails a host of social and
economic conditions that affect susceptibility to extremist ideas and
movements. (Consider, for example, that a majority of those facing
criminal charges for their participation in the assault on the Capitol have histories
of financial problems.) For these and other reasons, countering
mass extremism is one of the preeminent challenges of our time.
Paul R. Pillar is a
contributing editor at the National Interest and the author of Why America Misunderstands the World.
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