The Larger Forces At Work

If we seek to know what is going on in Trump World, Paul Chadwick writes, we have to step outside the news cycle and carefully choose our sources. One of those reliable sources is the blog Lawfare:

I want to highlight one of the big slow wheels to which attention was presciently drawn a few days before the 2016 presidential election. Noting that Trump had a 33% chance of winning, the US-based blog Lawfare, which consistently manages to tap the rich thinking and experience of experts in varied specialist fields, pointed to the “large literature on the process of radicalisation and countering violent extremism” and applied it to Trumpism.

Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes argued that Trumpism is “a movement that exists within an electoral system but which has a deeply ambivalent relationship with the democratic norms of that system, a movement which both formally rejects violence yet manages also to tolerate and encourage it”.

Summarising the literature, they wrote: “The radicalising subject goes through a series of steps, with each step drawing him or her closer towards extremist beliefs and sometimes mobilisation towards violence as well.” The individual’s social ties play a part, including, particularly, social media.

 Trump has radicalized his supporters in the same way his arch foe, Al Qaeda, has radicalized millions of Muslims:

Nazis and white supremacists, previously talking only to each other without ways to reach large audiences, embraced Trumpism and were not repudiated. “So all of a sudden, huge numbers of people are potentially subject to the influence of peer groups they didn’t even know they had. More perniciously still, the radicals get to approach this very large new audience through the cleansing lens of an apparently mainstream political candidate and party. That Trump supporter taught [at a rally] to shout “Lügenpresse” [“lying press”] presumably didn’t know that he was screaming a Nazi slur; he was just following Trump’s lead, and the lead of those around him, in jeering at the ‘dishonest media’.”

In 2016 the authors thought that if their theory was right “we will see a significant spike in white supremacist violence over the next few years. The Trump campaign has provided a baseline undemocratic ideation to hundreds of millions of people and also provided a platform through which extremists, both violent and non-violent, can recruit and cultivate. If our collective understanding of the process of violent radicalisation is correct, the result will be blood.”

It was pretty prescient stuff. The folks at Lawfare understand the larger forces at work.

Image: MeglomaniacState.com