Editor's note: Bruce Hoffman is a senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security at the Council on Foreign Relations and a professor at Georgetown University. Jacob Ware is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and DeSales University. This article is an excerpt from their new book, God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America (Columbia Univ. Press). The views expressed in this commentary are their own. Read more opinions on CNN.
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With three months to go until 2024, dire predictions of political violence seem to be commonplace from both the country's extreme fringe and the mainstream. Former President Donald Trump has perhaps been the most vocal in prophesying, warning that if the criminal charges against him lead to his loss in the 2024 election, “the country will be thrown into chaos.” Today, even seemingly mundane political proceedings can carry the promise of violence. When the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the Biden administration in January and allowed federal border agents to remove concertina wire installed in Texas, some elected officials said it was a sign of civil war. Stated. In its 2024 Threat Assessment, the Department of Homeland Security predicted, among other threats, that his 2024 election cycle would be a “significant event that poses the potential for violence.”
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In her 2022 book, How to Start a Civil War and How to Stop It, eminent political scientist Barbara F. Walter writes that the toxic mix of political turmoil is bringing us “more closely to civil war than anyone would like to believe.” He claims that Extremism and polarization, social and cultural tribalism, popular acceptance of conspiracy theories, proliferation of guns and armed militias, and a decline in trust in governments and Western liberal democracies. Among the key factors she cites is accelerationism. Walter describes this as “an apocalyptic belief that modern society is irredeemable and that its demise must be hastened in order to create a new order.”
Accelerationism has been embraced as a clarion call to revolution by a variety of people, including white supremacists, white supremacists, racists, anti-Semites, xenophobes, and anti-government extremists. I am. They fervently believe that modern Western liberal states are so corrupt and incompetent that they are irredeemable and must be destroyed in order to create new societies and ways of governing.
With Western nations on the brink of collapse, proponents of accelerationism argue that violent uprisings are necessary to push democracies to their limits and into oblivion. . It is believed that only by hastening its destruction can a white-dominated society and new order emerge. Therefore, it fosters division and polarization through violent attacks on racial minorities, Jews, liberals, foreign invaders, and power elites, thereby causing a catastrophic collapse of the existing order and Causing a second civil war is an accelerationist trade stock.
But this terrorist strategy is actually part of a long tradition of extreme and destabilizing far-right violence. To understand why, and to place these events in a broader context, we need to see January 6, 2021, as another milestone in a trajectory that began in the late 1970s and gained momentum throughout the 1980s. there is. Its development slowed in the wake of a nationwide law enforcement crackdown after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, but after Barack Obama was elected president in 2008 and the Great Recession rocked the country that same year. , a new purpose was injected. And then, in the 2010s, it was weaponized by social media and further empowered by the heated rhetoric and polarization of politics that continued to divide America.
Stephen Simon and Jonathan Stevenson, former National Security Council staffers with deep knowledge of sectarian conflicts in Northern Ireland and the Middle East, similarly described situations in which the United States could easily descend into civil war. They said the country “currently appears to be in a state of 'unstable equilibrium', a term originated in physics to describe an object whose slight displacement causes other forces to move further away from its original position.” ” he wrote. Violence risks plunging the United States into the chaos and anarchy that accelerationists yearn for.
But the most gloomy assessment comes from Canadian journalist Stephen Marche, who argues in his 2022 book The Next Civil War: Deployments Shape America's Future that another American civil war is inevitable. are doing. “The United States is coming to an end. The question is how.'' In his mind, “the United States is not the world's most enduring democracy and largest economy, but a poor country with a history of violence.'' “We are descending into the kind of sectarian conflict that we normally see.”
As enthusiastic and alarming as such claims may be, there is more than a grain of truth behind these fears. A 2021 poll conducted by the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement at the University of Maryland and the Washington Post found that nearly a quarter of Democrats and 40% of Republicans believe that the use of violence against the government is “somewhat justified.” It turned out that he was thinking that.
This was the highest percentage among respondents to this question going back more than 20 years. A new study recently conducted by both the Post and the same University of Maryland Center for 2024 shows that those concerns have done little to alleviate them. “Republicans are more sympathetic to those who stormed the U.S. Capitol and likely to absolve President Donald Trump of responsibility,” the Washington Post reported, “with more attacks than in 2021.” Ta.
But neither polls nor forecasts are prophecies. We believe the likelihood of civil war is relatively low, primarily because America's political divide no longer falls into clear geographic categories such as North vs. Not because it centers around one controversial issue, but because the country is currently facing a different kind of threat. Resisting simple red-state and blue-state distinctions and urban-rural divisions, another form of violence is potentially more likely to manifest itself as sustained, national terrorism than organized separatism.
Remember, the United States leads the world by far in the number of privately owned firearms. The United States has only 4% of the world's population but accounts for about 40% of the world's firearms, according to the Small Arms Survey, an independent research project based in Switzerland. There are an estimated 393 million personally owned guns in the United States, which means that each person owns at least one gun. In fact, there are more civilian-owned guns in the United States than in the top 25 other countries in the world combined. In fact, more guns were purchased in the United States in 2020 than in any year on record, approximately 23 million. Simon and Stevenson argue that this proliferation of privately owned weapons in the United States is due to the “leaderless resistance advocated by late 20th century militia theorists and now represented by the far-right anti-authoritarian Hawaiian Boogaloo Bois.” “It's creating movement,” he observed. Shirts are even more practical. ”
In fact, some of the most ardent defenders of Second Amendment rights have expressed a desire for another civil war. Gun rights also inspired militia movements in the early 1990s, and until September 11, 2001, Timothy McVeigh carried out the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which became the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil. It played a big role in motivation.
If the United States were to avoid an actual civil war, there would be a range of politically violent possibilities that would destabilize the country, further entrench existing divisions, and seriously challenge the government's ability to protect its people. It's not difficult to imagine various dark scenarios. In his 2023 book on the erosion of democratic norms in the United States, then-Council on Foreign Relations Chairman Richard Haas raised the possibility that the United States would confront the long-standing “problem” of Northern Ireland.
“If there is a model of what we should be afraid of, it is that of Northern Ireland, the 30-year struggle that began in the late 1960s and involved multiple paramilitary groups, police and soldiers, and caused some casualties. It comes from unrest,” Haas warns. 3,600 people died and local economic output was significantly reduced. Leading white supremacists in the United States, who have been at the forefront of civil war and incitement for years, are emulating Northern Ireland and the Irish Republican Army (IRA), the state's leading terrorist organization. He is listed as a worthy person. Robert Miles, one of the early leaders of America's violent far-right underground, said in an online forum in the 1980s, “Soon we will have our own version of 'Trouble,'” code-named in Scandinavian “Fafnir.” I wrote it in “The IRA's pattern of activity will be seen across the land. […] Soon, America will become a re-creation of Ireland. ”
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Despite the successful final certification of the 2020 presidential election. More than 1,000 rioters who took part in the January 6, 2021 storming of the U.S. Capitol have been arrested. Guilty pleas or convictions in at least half of those cases. Despite the largely peaceful events surrounding the 2022 midterm elections, the threat of far-right terrorism in America continues.
The long historical trajectory that culminated in the events of January 6th, the continued proliferation and proliferation of conspiracy theories, and the entry of race into the mainstream of American political and social discourse along with readily available weapons. Given the rise in discrimination, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia, there is a potential for new domestic acts of politically motivated violence, including mass shootings, attacks on critical infrastructure, bombings, and other attacks. It cannot be ignored or ignored.