The Far Right's First 100 Days: Getting More Extreme by the Day

By Sara Robinson, Campaign for America's Future. Posted May 6, 2009.

The DHS' concern about returning veterans was no doubt partly based on this recent history, which has given racist groups unprecedented access to propagandize troops at the front.

At the same time, the past 100 days have seen record gun sales and nationwide ammo shortages as terrified conservatives buy up guns in anticipation of a total weapons ban.

This seems like just another curious, only-in-America news story -- until you realize that the far right is already sporting most of the earmarks of a group that's gearing up for violent action. Given the rest of the pattern, we should take this trend very, very seriously.

Eighth: They're flexing their muscles. Groups who are flirting with terrorist action will usually start by experimenting with threats and petty violence. Learning that they can successfully intimidate others adds to the group's sense of invincibility and teaches them the dangerous lesson that violence works. Both these discoveries increase the chances that they'll resort to violence more quickly, and in greater magnitude, in the future.

The Southern Poverty Law Center carefully tracks hate incidents around the country, and it has seen a significant uptick in violence and threats since the inauguration.

While we can hope this will die down in time as people make their peace with the new status quo, we also need to be aware that there's a pattern where things go the other way -- that these events will embolden the right to commit bigger acts of thuggery and organize on a broader scale for actual domestic terrorism.

If our national terrorism watchers were tracking a religious or political group that had suddenly escalated on all eight of these fronts in a matter of three short months, they'd be seriously concerned. They'd be asking the question we need to ask: Now that we're here, what comes next?

... Go?

Let me start this last piece of the discussion with a warning. This isn't a prediction. It's just a description of how things typically play out when any authoritarian group arrives at the place where the American right now stands.

If they keep going this way, this is where the road leads -- but the people now in that movement still have a choice about whether they're actually going to make the trip. If they do, here's what lies ahead:

Further separation: One of the watershed moments in the development of a religious or political radical group is the day they decide to go upcountry, building some sort of secluded retreat or community away from the prying eyes of the authorities.

The Aryan nations, the fundamentalist Mormons, Jim Jones ... the list is long, because this is such a universal moment in the radicalization process. It's also the next place the gears shift.

The American right is too big to just all go off into the woods together -- but its obviously trying hard to retreat from the rest of us in other ways. The complete break with factual reality is one part of this. The growing talk of secession is another overt sign that it's desperately looking for someplace to escape to.

Given that impulse, it's very likely that land is already being quietly bought up and that some people are beginning to plan their moves to various locations around the country where they believe they'll be safer.

It's not unreasonable to expect that over the next year or two, we'll start to hear about a new round of separatist compounds, and that a few states will become right-wing havens where secessionist talk will turn more serious.

This is a dangerous development. Groups that try to separate always claim that they're retreating to "live in peace" -- but too often, peace is about the last thing that results from this.

Goin' up to the country is an overt declaration that the group believes that the mainstream culture is "out to get us," and is now asserting its right to live outside the law. There's an unquestioned conviction that the outside world means them harm -- and that they must organize and arm themselves for the coming showdown.

The isolation also allows high-dominance leaders to concentrate their power over group members without any pesky social or legal recourse to fairness. Suspicion and dependency flourish. People learn that might makes right and come to accept violence as a natural and proper way to deal with conflict.

This is why law-enforcement groups consider the moment of physical retreat as sort of Rubicon beyond which the likelihood of violence increases dramatically. We should be very concerned that the right wing seems determined to go there.

Overt lawlessness: A group that is separated from society, living in its own world, telling itself stories that justify violence, gripped with paranoia, perfectly willing to engage in petty thuggery and intimidation and is armed to the teeth has pretty much everything required to turn into a first-rate criminal cartel.

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Sara Robinson is a fellow at the Campaign for America's Future and a consulting partner with the Cognitive Policy Works in Seattle. One of the few trained social futurists in North America, she has blogged on authoritarian and extremist movements at Orcinus since 2006 and is a founding member of Group News Blog.

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