We should continue to track known extremists, and investigate and bring to account those who commit crimes. Though one may recoil at the thought, it provides the most useful template for action, which must consist of three elements.įirst, the easiest and most straightforward, is criminal justice. The challenge facing us now is one of counterinsurgency. Without a program of effective national action, they and their new adherents are capable of producing endemic political violence of a sort not seen in this country since Reconstruction. Their numbers may be relatively small, but even a small slice of a nation of over three hundred million is substantial. But if popular anger has crested, left in its wake is a bitter, simmering restiveness, one that will provide a nurturing environment for the worst among us - the extremists who seek a social apocalypse. Relatively few of our citizens would embark on a program of sustained violence in any case. The violent demonstrations feared for Inauguration Week, in the face of extraordinary security precautions, didn’t materialize. Trump and his allies in the political class and among large elements of the right-wing media, preposterous as it may be, will have incalculable implications not just for long-term political comity in this country, but also for national security. If I believed as they do, I would be marching with them. In context, their fury is understandable. The sincere belief, reportedly held by a majority of Republicans, that the Democrats stole the recent national election through massive fraud has taken the longstanding fears and resentments of a large section of our fellow citizens to a new and qualitatively different level. This, in very general terms, is the core segment of the nation that has been unified, championed and politically energized by Donald Trump.īridging the urban-rural cultural and political gap with facts, tolerance and empathetic sincerity is a vital national project, but one which has become effectively impossible. That coalition, in their eyes, abridges their religious freedoms, disparages and ‘cancels’ their most cherished beliefs, seeks to impose ‘socialism’ and is ultimately prepared to seize their guns. There has long existed in this country a large, religiously conservative segment of the population, disproportionately (though not entirely) rural and culturally marginalized, that believes with some reason it is being eclipsed by a politically and culturally ascendant urban coalition of immigrants, minorities and the college-educated secular elites of tech and mainstream media. They may be easy to identify and arrest now, but there are others - well armed, dangerous and now forewarned - who had a glimpse of what may be possible in the political environment Mr. Given impetus and, they believed, political cover by former President Donald Trump, the capering idiots who filmed themselves in the Capitol seemed to think they were untouchable. Some of these groups may have planned their incursion in advance, but they could not have breached the Capitol if not for the wave of populist anger that swept them forward and over the barricades. 6 were others, hardly ordinary, committed to violent extremism: the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, the Oath Keepers, “Christian” national chauvinists, white supremacists and QAnon fantasists, among others. Overrepresented among the ranks of angry but ordinary citizens who stormed the Capitol on Jan.
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