Many in the United States have been transfixed by goings-on abroad over the course of the past week. In eastern Ukraine, a passenger airliner carrying 289 people was shot out of the sky by pro-Russian militants using advanced surface-to-air missiles, and in Gaza, the latest confrontation between Israel and Hamas has led to the deaths of hundreds of Palestinians and several Israelis. Then, on our southern border, rivers of child refugees are fleeing a brutal criminal insurgency in Central America that has turned their homes into battlegrounds.
Given such coverage, Americans could be forgiven for thinking threats of violence lurk only outside of our borders, that enemies to our way of life are found elsewhere and are alien to our experience here at home. But the reality is that political violence — terrorism — is something we’ve seen quite a lot of here at home, mostly carried out by folks you might mistake for your next-door neighbor.
Who are these people that sit quietly, plotting fiendish attacks against houses of worship, government facilities and law enforcement officers? None other than the members of America’s political far right, who have killed and maimed far more people than any foreign terrorist since Sept. 11, 2001. Yes, that’s right: the biggest threat to American liberty isn’t to be found in immigrant neighborhoods in our big urban cities, but in our rural areas and majority-white suburbs, the natural home of America’s far right.
Just this past April, for instance, a man with long-standing ties to the KKK and the American neo-Nazi movement shot and killed three individuals at a Jewish Community Center in Kansas City, Missouri. After being taken into custody, he began screaming “Heil Hitler.” Then in early June, two anti-government extremists, who had taken part in the militia jamboree at the Cliven Bundy ranch in rural Nevada a month prior, shot and killed two Las Vegas police officers and a member of the public in the hopes of starting a far-right revolution.
Taken as a whole, incidents such as these bring the number of individuals killed by right-wing extremists since the 2001 al-Qaida attacks to 37 — four more than have been killed by al-Qaida-inspired jihadists over the same period. What’s more, while no al-Qaida-inspired extremist who has been caught and indicted for plotting an attack has been able to acquire material that could be converted into a biological or chemical weapon, 13 individuals inspired by right-wing ideology did so over the same time period noted above.
More disturbing still, whereas jihadist-inspired plots and activity in America peaked in 2009 and have been steadily decreasing ever since, far-right political violence has been on a marked uptick, spiking in 2008, 2010 and 2012. If those years seem familiar they should: as election years, they noticed a rise in right-wing political mobilization and activism that research has demonstrated correlates strongly with far-right political violence. Indeed, a major study published by the U.S. Army’s Combating Terrorism Center at West Point argues that “a contentious political climate and ideological political empowerment” play a crucial role in increasing violence, largely due to the “sense of empowerment which emerges when the political system is perceived to be increasingly open to far-right ideas.”
In plain language, this means that when our politics and media make room for, and increasingly accept as legitimate, far-right claims and arguments like those one commonly hears on right wing cable news, radio and online websites, right-wing political violence becomes more common. However, this does not mean one — media — is the primary cause of the other, though right wing media no doubt helps stir the pot. Rather, while hot days are associated with increases in both sunburns and ice cream sales, it’s far more likely that upticks in right-wing political activism, media consumption and violence are all caused by something else. As for what that “something else” might be, consider the following clues.
First, between Jan. 1, 2007 and Oct. 31, 2009, the FBI reported that white supremacists were involved in 53 acts of violence — 40 assaults, seven murders, and three incidents of arson or intimidation — directed primarily against blacks in the U.S., representing a noticeable rise in such incidents. Though they were classified as “racially motivated” crimes, there is little doubt that these are, in fact, examples of far-right, albeit low-level, terrorism. Meanwhile, the Southern Poverty Law Center registered what it described as “explosive growth” in the number of white supremacist hate groups and conspiracy-minded, anti-government “Patriot” groups after 2008. In 2012, these kinds of groups hit an all-time high of 1,360.
This rise in right-wing political violence is clearly associated with the election of America’s first black president, his re-election and efforts by the right to stymie Barack Obama’s efforts to govern the country. Indeed, the unprecedented intransigence of legitimate GOP opposition to Obama on everything from judicial nominees to health reform and the debt ceiling demonstrate a basic unwillingness on the part of the right to negotiate with the president and the Democrats on anything or even concede that the Obama White House has a constitutional right to govern via executive orders, as past presidents have commonly done.
While some of this is motivated by principled opposition and not a bit of political theater, there is an underlying, racially-motivated feeling among many on the right that Obama is an inherently illegitimate president, unfit to hold the office even though he scored thumping victories in not just one but two presidential contests. This can be seen — and quite easily, as a matter of fact — in the way the political right constantly trucks in things like the birth certificate conspiracy theory or other similarly absurd claims about the president.
Perhaps the best example of the right’s true feelings about the president and the America he represents was the uncontrolled outburst by a white, conservative South Carolina congressman during the live broadcast of the 2009 State of the Union address, wherein the red-faced buffoon representing a state that started a war to keep slavery legal shouted out to all of America that that our first black president was a liar. Alarming at the time, this racially-laden hostility espoused by actors on the right hasn’t dissipated at all. In fact, it has arguably burrowed even deeper into the mainstream of the conservative, political right.
That’s because even though the number of right-wing hate groups tracked by the Southern Poverty Law Center has declined since 2012, the views articulated by the legitimate political right have grown more extreme, signifying the partial adoption of rhetoric and modes of thinking that used to be relegated to the fringe-right portion of the political spectrum by mainstream conservatives. This can be seen in matters such as the blatantly discriminatory laws enacted by right-wing state legislatures in places like Arizona and Mississippi and the rants of state lawmakers directed at busses thought to be filled with displaced Hispanic children from Central America.
What all this gives credence to is what scholars of right-wing political violence call the “iceberg model.” That is, the American far right is best understood not as a classical protest movement that is relatively small and powerless, but as the extremist tip of a large social and cultural “iceberg” hidden by and submerged in the larger, mainstream culture. Pyramidal in structure, this iceberg broadens as one goes from the extremist tip to the less extreme base, and this broader base, moreover, is hidden precisely because it is seemingly moderate and its members seem just like everybody else.
As the right becomes mobilized in reaction to perceived threats — either due to a black president or busses filled with immigrant children — more of this base will be revealed above water and become visibly radicalized. Naturally, one will therefore see more acts of right-wing political violence, but an obvious corollary is that mainstream conservative politics will also become radicalized because, like the KKK or neo-Nazi Aryan Nations, the GOP is essentially recruiting from the same hidden pool of disaffected, right-wing political sentiment.
Luckily for us, the partial siphoning off of this radicalized right-wing base into mainstream politics defuses the threat they pose because instead of setting off bombs or murdering non-white immigrants, they mount filibusters or threaten debt defaults. Indeed, that’s how democracy is, in fact, supposed to work. It takes different parts of the political spectrum and gives them power, via elected office, with the use of that power thereby allowing demands to be met, grievances to be satisfied or threats ameliorated. The political obstruction we’ve seen is a sign that by preventing massive amounts of bloodshed, the system is actually working as it’s designed to.
Depressingly, however, this era of “peace” may soon be coming to an end. While the right-wing base may be currently mollified by electoral politics, we might not be so lucky in the future. That’s because it hasn’t gone away and remains radicalized, angry and ready to lash out violently if given the opportunity. The West Point scholars go so far as to say that the country may be facing what it calls a “continuous rise” in the level of violence, noting that over the past six years, the country has seen an increase in the size of the hidden, iceberg base of the radicalized far-right. Attacks are up, the number of right-wing plots are up and just as crucially, the amount of right-wing hate and conspiracy mongering that has seeped into and been accepted by certain sections of the larger culture has also increased.
Thus, the most dangerous era in some time is approaching as we enter not just another election cycle but also a long-predicted period of massive demographic, cultural and economic change expected to be deeply traumatizing to America’s white, Christian, culturally-rural masses. What’s worse, though, is that the safety valve provided by democracy and elections is soon going to stop working to siphon off right-wing rage due to demography and the harsh logic of electoral math. Progressives may cheer this coming victory, but there is much to fear, too.
That’s because in the new America that is coming, the right as currently constituted is very likely to become a relatively powerless minority in what they see as their own country. Given this fall from power, they may in turn decide to turn their backs on peaceful politics and turn to the ways of the gun and the bomb as other radicalized ethnic and sectarian minorities have done in countless countries around the world — a scary proposition, to say the least.