Extremism Has Spread Into the Mainstream – By Cynthia Miller-Idriss (Defense One) / June 19 2021
Preventing American radicalization requires a public-health approach.
In the two decades since September 11, the U.S. has fought terrorism and extremism by concentrating on law-enforcement and intelligence readiness, with experts focused on disrupting fringe groups before they carry out violence. This Band-Aid approach is ill-suited to combatting modern far-right extremism, which has spread well beyond fringe groups and into the mainstream.
The extremism we’re now seeing in the U.S. is “post-organizational,” characterized by fluid online boundaries and a breakdown of formal groups and movements. Violence is mostly perpetrated by lone actors who are influenced by ideas online rather than by plots hatched by group leaders in secret gatherings. Most successfully executed far-right terrorist attacks in the U.S. in the past 20 years—including in Charleston, South Carolina; Pittsburgh; and El Paso, Texas—were carried out by men who were not official members of any groups. Even though the January 6 insurrection was a mass gathering, it included thousands of individuals mobilized through online disinformation campaigns and propaganda. Just 14 percent of those arrested to date are members of extremist groups.
To fight this amorphous kind of radicalization, the federal government needs to see the problem as a whole-of-society, public-health issue. It needs to, for example, beef up security at the U.S. Capitol, but also put the same kind of effort and money into preventing radicalization years before anyone would ever think to mobilize in Washington, D.C.
The federal government, so far, has not been capable of such a paradigm shift. Part of the problem is partisan gridlock and Republican resistance to anything related to far-right extremism, as they’ve demonstrated with the vote against the January 6 commission. The other problem is that the federal government focuses too much on security, and not enough on preventing radicalization in the first place.
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