What Gang-Backed Government Could Do to America

[homersapien 11,440]

January 6 was a warning: When public authority and private muscle join forces, democracy is in danger.

 

By Rachel Kleinfeld

In the year since a mob invaded the Capitol, the trend lines for political violence in the United States have worsened. According to a new poll from The Washington Post and the University of Maryland, about one in three Americans believes that violence against the government is sometimes justified. But even more disturbing than the hardening of attitudes is the governing pattern coalescing—like an array of magnets pulling one another near—in pockets of the country. In some localities, conservative politicians and law-enforcement officials are melding with armed vigilantes who have similar politics. In Grand Traverse County, Michigan, last January, a citizen asked local officials at a virtual public meeting to denounce the Proud Boys, a right-wing gang that took part in the Capitol riot and had previously introduced a local gun-rights resolution. Instead of disavowing the group, the county commission’s vice chair stepped off-screen and returned brandishing his rifle. Closer to Michigan’s capital, Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf made news in August by speaking approvingly of militias and claiming the power to recruit posses to “suppress rioting.”

These officials’ beliefs might be shared by their constituents. Or not—the prospect of intimidation from violent citizens supported by governing powers makes dissenters less likely to speak up. Gang-backed governments fundamentally distort democracy. Public authority and private muscle collude to maintain power and narrow the range of people who can vote. In the resulting mobocracy, supporting policies, rights, or candidates outside accepted boundaries becomes difficult and in some cases dangerous.

These dynamics are familiar in countries such as Nicaragua and India, but they also represent the most serious realistic danger to the stability of American democracy. In fact, the United States also has considerable experience with such a system. To comparative-government scholars, the Jim Crow South was an authoritarian enclave, a bastion of one-party rule nestled within a broader democracy. In many states, laws kept a large fraction of the population from voting. Vigilante violence, backed by partisan police and judges, kept citizens from altering the situation through the political process.

The return of any such system may feel far-fetched. Fortunately, rifles remain a rare sight at local-government hearings. Modern America has 3,000-odd counties that appear to function in reassuring bureaucratic drabness. The U.S. also has about 800,000 law-enforcement officers, the majority of whom are, no doubt, committed to the rule of law. But January 6 and subsequent revelations should shift Americans’ understanding of what is possible. While commander in chief, Donald Trump chose to spur on a violent mob and let its riot continue long enough to disrupt congressional certification of the presidential vote. Rather than provoking revulsion from political elites, that day’s events may have offered a guidebook. Allen West, the chair of the Texas Republican Party, posed with militia members just days later, and in March he appeared with the leader of the Oath Keepers militia after the latter had been charged with involvement in the January 6 attack.

Our current moment has some commonalities with the period following the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling that the Constitution forbids official segregation in public schools. The intimacy of the federal government intruding on whom one’s children might sit next to in school drove a furious response. “Citizens councils” mushroomed across the South. Composed of white professionals, these groups normalized and sometimes abetted a revived Ku Klux Klan. Bloody extremism mingled with mainstream sentiment among white southerners. Perpetrators of violence enjoyed impunity because of the tacit or explicit support of local authorities.

In the Jim Crow South, mobocracies exercised tight control over state and local governments. Southern courts excused white vigilante justice. Murderers, such as those who killed Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955, went free. Politicians used state security to uphold their campaign of “massive resistance” to school integration. Arkansas’s governor ordered the state’s National Guard to block nine Black students from integrating a Little Rock high school. Law enforcement took a side. One notorious Mississippi sheriff, Neshoba County’s Lawrence Rainey, was suspected of playing a role in the murder of three civil-rights workers.

The mobocracy now unfurling has so far been less violent than its Jim Crow forebear. But it has a broader political and geographic base. Should it succeed, it will not be confined to the South, nor will it be based solely on race. Extremists use today’s mainstream causes—such as opposition to COVID-vaccine mandates and disputes about school curricula—as gateways for recruitment. Conspiracy theories, culture wars, and a generalized antipathy toward the concerns of women and people of color are fueling the growth of mobocracy in states such as Oklahoma and Iowa, where legislatures have already passed bills granting immunity to drivers who strike protesters with their cars.

In some ways, the left is feeding right-wing fears of tyranny. Especially in academia and other high-profile fields, the muzzling of dissent from progressive orthodoxies drives conservatives’ claims that they are the ones facing cultural autocracy. The enactment of COVID-related emergency measures, while necessary for public health, has abetted authoritarianism in other countries and fueled similar fears on America’s right.

Commentators, particularly on the right, have been chattering about civil war for some time. Since America’s founding, insurgency has been linked to patriotism. This framing taps into a strong mythos of patriots taking up arms against tyranny. Yet since 2013, the Global Terrorism Database has charted skyrocketing violence on the right and only a slight increase on the left. The left has no equivalent of an interlinked political, militia, and state-security infrastructure. The term civil war makes violence sound citizen-led, and it tends to confer blame on each competing camp. But a two-sided war is not what America is facing.

Moreover, though many Americans distrust their government and bear arms at the highest per capita rate in the world, most political-science research suggests that weapons and grievances don’t correlate with combat. The U.S. does have serious risk factors for political violence, chief among them political parties defined by racial, geographic, and religious cleavages. But insurgents don’t attack wealthy democracies with the military strength of the United States. They seek to govern them.

Instead of worrying about the 1860s, Americans should consider how modern democracies disintegrate. In 1920s Italy, Benito Mussolini gained power legally after 25,000 of his Blackshirt paramilitary devotees marched on Rome and a co-opted establishment bowed to his leadership. In 1970s Chile, street skirmishes between the left and the right led to middle-class cries for law and order, ending in General Augusto Pinochet’s coup. India, long praised as the world’s largest democracy, recently dropped to “partly free” in Freedom House’s ranking after its popularly elected government—supported by riots and upheld by Hindu-nationalist police—passed too many laws that tilted elections, quelled protest, and stifled speech.

The United States, too, is dropping fast in rankings such as those compiled by Freedom House and the Economist Intelligence Unit. International experience suggests that centrist politicians aren’t capable of stopping the slide on their own. When the researcher David Solimini and I examined countries that had faced similar forms of democratic degradation, we found that ineffectiveness and infighting sidelined pro-democracy legislators, while populist or authoritarian leaders quickly transformed their parties into sycophantic amplifiers of their own demagoguery.

Far more important in upholding democracy is a neutral, nonpoliticized security sector. But retired American generals are so concerned about “turmoil in our armed forces” that they are writing op-eds to put the public on alert. In the past decade, the number of U.S.-military veterans arrested for extremist crimes was more than 300 percent higher than in the previous decade. One in 10 of the rioters who stormed the Capitol had served in the military. Twelve National Guardsmen sent to protect President Joe Biden at his inauguration had to be removed after a last-minute extremist screening. The anti-polarization organization More in Common found that more than half of Afghan War veterans feel like strangers in their own country, betrayed and humiliated by officers and civilian leaders for the pullout debacle. The military’s recent initiatives to curb radical behavior are at best a first step.

Still more worrying is the politicization of state National Guards. In November, Oklahoma’s governor fired the state’s top general in order to find someone willing to challenge federal authority. Most news coverage has framed this story as a fight over vaccine mandates enacted by the Biden administration. It is actually a contest for control of the military. National Guards are federally funded, although they are generally under gubernatorial leadership. They are subject to federal requirements for troop readiness, because they can be called for federal service at any time; Guard and Reserve units composed nearly half of the forces sent to Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet Texas, Alaska, Mississippi, Iowa, Nebraska, and Wyoming have joined Oklahoma in contesting the federal government’s authority over military forces.

The U.S. military, however, has a long tradition of disciplined political neutrality—a doctrine that should enable it to prioritize democratic civics if it chooses. Law-enforcement politicization is more advanced and a harder problem to solve.

The fear long harbored by some communities of color that local police sometimes choose not to uphold the rule of law is spreading. A lawsuit credibly alleges that officers in San Marcos, Texas, laughed off multiple calls for help as Trump supporters tried to force a Biden-campaign bus off the road in 2020. Despite sharp increases in far-right political violence and hate crimes, and evidence that right-wing protests are twice as likely as left-wing ones to turn violent, U.S. police intervened one-third as often in right-leaning protests as in left-leaning ones in 2020, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, an information-analysis nonprofit. In 2021, the group found that police intervention in far-right protests had decreased further, even as the Proud Boys in particular had become more violent.

Meanwhile, the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, which grew out of a 1970s white-supremacist movement and promotes the idea that law-enforcement officers can personally interpret the Constitution, has flourished since Trump’s pardon of its board member Joe Arpaio. One Michigan sheriff is refusing to uphold the secretary of state’s ban on guns at election sites. In Wisconsin, Racine County Sheriff Christopher Schmaling recommended criminal charges against members of a bipartisan election board who had directed clerks to send absentee ballots to nursing homes. Former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, a prominent Trump surrogate, told a QAnon conference this fall that the next insurrection needs better planning. The conservative Claremont Institute, a think tank whose chairman believes that the U.S. is in a “cold civil war,” has launched a fellowship in which sheriffs discuss topics such as “today’s militant progressivism and multiculturalism.”

Jim Crow ended thanks to a federal government that worked assiduously—goaded by community leaders—to stop impunity, often against the will of local law enforcement and politicians who had gone rogue in states such as Mississippi. Biden’s administration is not quite there. As Republican and Democratic election officials face unprecedented death threats for refusing to bend to electoral conspiracy theories, the Justice Department has been slow to prosecute cases of intimidation and harassment.

But the Justice Department could get serious. The FBI could prioritize protection for secretaries of state and other officials. The Department of Homeland Security could fund proven techniques to help states and local governments reduce violent crime, whose rapid growth makes voters more likely to acquiesce to gang-backed government. Senators could rise to the historic moment and pass the Freedom to Vote Act, a moderate bill that would protect election officials and voting itself. They could remove some incentives for targeted violence by passing the John Lewis Act, which would restore voting-rights protections gutted by the Supreme Court, and reforms to the Electoral Count Act, which governs the vote-certification process that insurrectionists tried to thwart on January 6.

Without these and other steps, America may soon face varying levels of mobocracies supported by unfair balloting, police batons, and vigilante bullets. Activists who protest these dynamics may find themselves facing armed individuals, without protection from law enforcement. In the 16 months after George Floyd’s murder, more than 100 car rammings of protesters occurred; the drivers faced charges in less than half of those cases. The perception that police are taking sides is likely to fuel further polarization. Left-wing militias would form for protection, spurring backlash and calls for law and order.

Because of recent experience, nightmare scenarios are easy to imagine: Civic leaders find armed mobs at their home, and if they call 911—well, unsympathetic local police might respond a trifle too late. Elected officials trying to right these wrongs might find their children facing threats at school—and then be told that the intimidation just doesn’t quite meet actionable levels. Election officials who quit would be replaced by mob supporters. In winner-take-all elections like ours, modest changes to the rules or the composition of the electorate produce radical differences in outcomes.

If the mobocracy gains a foothold, laws and voting procedures could be changed legally to discourage opposition voters. If law enforcement becomes more politicized, good cops would find other work. Vigilantes would gain greater impunity. Dissidents in localities falling under mobocracy could keep fighting—or just move somewhere more welcoming. Many would. Over time, majorities would support the local system. Ironically, one danger of mobocracy is that it may not require much overt violence. Just an occasional reminder that the authorities and the extremists have become one and the same would be enough to keep the peace.

 

Rachel Kleinfeld is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of A Savage Order: How the World’s Deadliest Countries Can Forge a Path to Security.

 

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/mobocracy-january-6-riot-guidebook-gang-backed-government/621174/

[CoffeeTiger 5,169]

Good article. 

 

One thing that does give me hope about America's future is that even as the American Right wing grows more militant and accepting of violence, their overall influence on society (outside of the federal government) doesn't seem to be increasing. 

I think larger police forces and the military in general is on the right path towards trying to weed extremists out of their ranks.

Right wing groups seem to slither back into hiding pretty quickly whenever they gain notoriety like in the "United The Right" white nationalist rally in Carolina. 

Right wing Universities and "think tanks" don't seem to have as much impact on society as they used to have.

The primary Republican voting block of white, evangelicals are decreasing every year as a portion of total population. 

 

There are a lot of guns out there and there would certainly be some chaos and death if a large revolt ever actually broke out, but I don't think any extremist right wing group would actually have the manpower or support to take down the government. 

 

Examples of what happened in the Jim Crowe South likely wouldn't be allowed to take place in our society with increased media exposure and federal oversight over the states and our education and judicial systems. Many Southern states are still under federal oversight to this day due to their unwillingness to segregate or not discriminate. 

 

As has been mentioned the biggest threat to America isn't a "civil War 2.0" IMO, but Republicans gerrymandering the hell out of our elections to a point where they can elect enough extremists to congress that a Democratic election victory could realistically be overturned or rejected by a Republican majority congress. 

[homersapien 11,440]

4 hours ago, CoffeeTiger said:

As has been mentioned the biggest threat to America isn't a "civil War 2.0" IMO, but Republicans gerrymandering the hell out of our elections to a point where they can elect enough extremists to congress that a Democratic election victory could realistically be overturned or rejected by a Republican majority congress. 

That's exactly what  concerns me.

Regarding our democracy, it's not the precipitous insurrection that concerns me as much as the more gradual one. 

But I really appreciate your optimism.  At my age, it's something I long to hear from the generations that are to come.

Keep the faith.

Edited January 7, 2022 by homersapien

[PUB78 1,362]

Homer and Coffee,

Keep looking for the boogie man under the bed or in the closet. The threat to democracy is from the Left, especially academia and the MSM.

[autigeremt 6,686]

Gerrymandering isn’t a GOP issue. It’s a DC political establishment issue. Democrats share that blood letting. 
 

Try again. 

[DKW 86 7,440]

But of course, DTP HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THE RISE IN VIOLENCE....

This is just another in a long line of shear lunacy posted on the web to absolve the Real Power Brokers from anything they may have brought on themselves.

[CoffeeTiger 5,169]

12 hours ago, PUB78 said:

Homer and Coffee,

Keep looking for the boogie man under the bed or in the closet. The threat to democracy is from the Left, especially academia and the MSM.

 

Yes, we know. Education and information is bad.  

 

Republicans elect a mentally unstable, reality tv show host to be President,  and it's the Democrats fault that things all go to hell. 

classic. 

 

 

[homersapien 11,440]

15 hours ago, autigeremt said:

Gerrymandering isn’t a GOP issue. It’s a DC political establishment issue. Democrats share that blood letting. 
 

Try again. 

Yeah, get back to me when Democrats start using gerrymandering to maintain power when they are in the minority.

But more importantly, which party do you think is more likely to address partisan gerrymandering? 

 

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/573116-voting-bill-seeks-to-crack-down-on-gerrymandering

"A new voting bill from Senate Democrats seeks to immediately address the most egregiously gerrymandered maps as states begin the once-a-decade redistricting cycle. 

The latest version of the Freedom to Vote Act seeks to address what courts have long been reluctant to do, giving judges firmer ground for rejecting maps by barring those that unfairly give a significant advantage to one political party. 

The legislation also goes further by establishing a test courts would use to immediately block the use of extremely gerrymandered maps in an effort to sidestep lengthy legal battles that might otherwise leave them in place for years......

......But the Freedom to Vote Act is arguably tougher when it comes to gerrymandering — requiring courts to immediately toss any map that doesn’t pass mathematical muster using two tests. 

In many ways the bill is designed to address the 2019 Supreme Court decision in Rucho v. Common Cause that determined that while gerrymandering may be inconsistent with democratic principles, “partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts.” 

If the bill passes — a big if given Democrats’ slim margins in the Senate — it could stave off a number of attempts at gerrymandering just as states are beginning the process of redrawing district lines.

“The new bill is really, really clear to the point of being mechanical,” Nick Stephanopoulos, a professor at Harvard Law School, told The Hill."......

It's Republicans who continue support gerrymandering. 

Wake up!  

Edited January 7, 2022 by homersapien

[PUB78 1,362]

3 hours ago, CoffeeTiger said:

 

Yes, we know. Education and information is bad.  

 

Republicans elect a mentally unstable, reality tv show host to be President,  and it's the Democrats fault that things all go to hell. 

classic. 

 

 

Yes, indoctrination and lies are bad Coffee.

[autigeremt 6,686]

2 hours ago, homersapien said:

Yeah, get back to me when Democrats start using gerrymandering to maintain power when they are in the minority.

But more importantly, which party do you think is more likely to address partisan gerrymandering? 

 

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/573116-voting-bill-seeks-to-crack-down-on-gerrymandering

"A new voting bill from Senate Democrats seeks to immediately address the most egregiously gerrymandered maps as states begin the once-a-decade redistricting cycle. 

The latest version of the Freedom to Vote Act seeks to address what courts have long been reluctant to do, giving judges firmer ground for rejecting maps by barring those that unfairly give a significant advantage to one political party. 

The legislation also goes further by establishing a test courts would use to immediately block the use of extremely gerrymandered maps in an effort to sidestep lengthy legal battles that might otherwise leave them in place for years......

......But the Freedom to Vote Act is arguably tougher when it comes to gerrymandering — requiring courts to immediately toss any map that doesn’t pass mathematical muster using two tests. 

In many ways the bill is designed to address the 2019 Supreme Court decision in Rucho v. Common Cause that determined that while gerrymandering may be inconsistent with democratic principles, “partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts.” 

If the bill passes — a big if given Democrats’ slim margins in the Senate — it could stave off a number of attempts at gerrymandering just as states are beginning the process of redrawing district lines.

“The new bill is really, really clear to the point of being mechanical,” Nick Stephanopoulos, a professor at Harvard Law School, told The Hill."......

 

It's Republican who continue support gerrymandering. 

Wake up!  

HISTORY........check it out. 

[homersapien 11,440]

3 minutes ago, autigeremt said:

HISTORY........check it out. 

Get me started.....   

[autigeremt 6,686]

2 minutes ago, homersapien said:

Get me started.....   

Selective history doesn't count 

[homersapien 11,440]

5 minutes ago, autigeremt said:

HISTORY........check it out. 

How about current events?

No comments on the "Right to Vote Act"?

[homersapien 11,440]

Just now, autigeremt said:

Selective history doesn't count 

Well, provide me your version and I will decide for myself.

[CoffeeTiger 5,169]

23 minutes ago, PUB78 said:

Yes, indoctrination and lies are bad Coffee.

That’s always the go to for Conservatives. 
 

if science, academics, researchers, and media all over the world disagree with your view on something the only possible conclusion is that it’s all a massive conspiracy of lies. 
 

if only the world were so simple. 

[autigeremt 6,686]

2 minutes ago, homersapien said:

Well, provide me your version and I will decide for myself.

How Gerrymandering Began in the US - HISTORY

[homersapien 11,440]

1 minute ago, autigeremt said:

How Gerrymandering Began in the US - HISTORY

So, what's your point? 

More specifically, what does this have to do with solving the gerrymandering problem of today?

 

[autigeremt 6,686]

3 minutes ago, homersapien said:

So, what's your point? 

More specifically, what does this have to do with solving the gerrymandering problem of today?

 

My point is BOTH PARTIES ARE GUILTY OF IT! Solve it by passing a law which neither party seem to be in favor of. 

[homersapien 11,440]

On 1/7/2022 at 2:34 PM, autigeremt said:

My point is BOTH PARTIES ARE GUILTY OF IT! Solve it by passing a law which neither party seem to be in favor of. 

Of course both parties of guilty of it.  It's a built in feature of our electoral system.  Do you seriously expect either party to unilaterally disarm?  That's not remotely realistic.

My point is DEMOCRATS HAVE MADE A GOOD FAITH EFFORT AND PROPOSED LEGISLATION WHICH ADDRESSES THE PROBLEM OF GERRYMANDERING,  AND REPUBLICANS OPPOSE IT.

Yeah, one could argue that the only reason they are doing so is that they are the one who are currently being damaged the most by gerrymandering, but so what?  If they fix the problem by changing the rules for everyone, does it really matter what's motivating them?  I say no.

And one could argue that Democrats have gerrymandered in the past, but what does that have to do with the fact they are the ones proposing a solution to the problem today?

So, what is your response to that specifically? 

You are apparently more interested in scoring points for your side - or more accurately, criticizing the other side - than you are in solving the problem for the American people.

Your suggestion of "passing legislation that both parties oppose is impossible, by definition. 

It also presumes Republicans also have any  desire to address the problem of gerrymandering, which they clearly do not. 

Edited January 8, 2022 by homersapien

[aubiefifty 16,903]

On 1/6/2022 at 3:11 PM, homersapien said:

January 6 was a warning: When public authority and private muscle join forces, democracy is in danger.

 

By Rachel Kleinfeld

In the year since a mob invaded the Capitol, the trend lines for political violence in the United States have worsened. According to a new poll from The Washington Post and the University of Maryland, about one in three Americans believes that violence against the government is sometimes justified. But even more disturbing than the hardening of attitudes is the governing pattern coalescing—like an array of magnets pulling one another near—in pockets of the country. In some localities, conservative politicians and law-enforcement officials are melding with armed vigilantes who have similar politics. In Grand Traverse County, Michigan, last January, a citizen asked local officials at a virtual public meeting to denounce the Proud Boys, a right-wing gang that took part in the Capitol riot and had previously introduced a local gun-rights resolution. Instead of disavowing the group, the county commission’s vice chair stepped off-screen and returned brandishing his rifle. Closer to Michigan’s capital, Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf made news in August by speaking approvingly of militias and claiming the power to recruit posses to “suppress rioting.”

These officials’ beliefs might be shared by their constituents. Or not—the prospect of intimidation from violent citizens supported by governing powers makes dissenters less likely to speak up. Gang-backed governments fundamentally distort democracy. Public authority and private muscle collude to maintain power and narrow the range of people who can vote. In the resulting mobocracy, supporting policies, rights, or candidates outside accepted boundaries becomes difficult and in some cases dangerous.

These dynamics are familiar in countries such as Nicaragua and India, but they also represent the most serious realistic danger to the stability of American democracy. In fact, the United States also has considerable experience with such a system. To comparative-government scholars, the Jim Crow South was an authoritarian enclave, a bastion of one-party rule nestled within a broader democracy. In many states, laws kept a large fraction of the population from voting. Vigilante violence, backed by partisan police and judges, kept citizens from altering the situation through the political process.

The return of any such system may feel far-fetched. Fortunately, rifles remain a rare sight at local-government hearings. Modern America has 3,000-odd counties that appear to function in reassuring bureaucratic drabness. The U.S. also has about 800,000 law-enforcement officers, the majority of whom are, no doubt, committed to the rule of law. But January 6 and subsequent revelations should shift Americans’ understanding of what is possible. While commander in chief, Donald Trump chose to spur on a violent mob and let its riot continue long enough to disrupt congressional certification of the presidential vote. Rather than provoking revulsion from political elites, that day’s events may have offered a guidebook. Allen West, the chair of the Texas Republican Party, posed with militia members just days later, and in March he appeared with the leader of the Oath Keepers militia after the latter had been charged with involvement in the January 6 attack.

Our current moment has some commonalities with the period following the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling that the Constitution forbids official segregation in public schools. The intimacy of the federal government intruding on whom one’s children might sit next to in school drove a furious response. “Citizens councils” mushroomed across the South. Composed of white professionals, these groups normalized and sometimes abetted a revived Ku Klux Klan. Bloody extremism mingled with mainstream sentiment among white southerners. Perpetrators of violence enjoyed impunity because of the tacit or explicit support of local authorities.

In the Jim Crow South, mobocracies exercised tight control over state and local governments. Southern courts excused white vigilante justice. Murderers, such as those who killed Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955, went free. Politicians used state security to uphold their campaign of “massive resistance” to school integration. Arkansas’s governor ordered the state’s National Guard to block nine Black students from integrating a Little Rock high school. Law enforcement took a side. One notorious Mississippi sheriff, Neshoba County’s Lawrence Rainey, was suspected of playing a role in the murder of three civil-rights workers.

The mobocracy now unfurling has so far been less violent than its Jim Crow forebear. But it has a broader political and geographic base. Should it succeed, it will not be confined to the South, nor will it be based solely on race. Extremists use today’s mainstream causes—such as opposition to COVID-vaccine mandates and disputes about school curricula—as gateways for recruitment. Conspiracy theories, culture wars, and a generalized antipathy toward the concerns of women and people of color are fueling the growth of mobocracy in states such as Oklahoma and Iowa, where legislatures have already passed bills granting immunity to drivers who strike protesters with their cars.

In some ways, the left is feeding right-wing fears of tyranny. Especially in academia and other high-profile fields, the muzzling of dissent from progressive orthodoxies drives conservatives’ claims that they are the ones facing cultural autocracy. The enactment of COVID-related emergency measures, while necessary for public health, has abetted authoritarianism in other countries and fueled similar fears on America’s right.

Commentators, particularly on the right, have been chattering about civil war for some time. Since America’s founding, insurgency has been linked to patriotism. This framing taps into a strong mythos of patriots taking up arms against tyranny. Yet since 2013, the Global Terrorism Database has charted skyrocketing violence on the right and only a slight increase on the left. The left has no equivalent of an interlinked political, militia, and state-security infrastructure. The term civil war makes violence sound citizen-led, and it tends to confer blame on each competing camp. But a two-sided war is not what America is facing.

Moreover, though many Americans distrust their government and bear arms at the highest per capita rate in the world, most political-science research suggests that weapons and grievances don’t correlate with combat. The U.S. does have serious risk factors for political violence, chief among them political parties defined by racial, geographic, and religious cleavages. But insurgents don’t attack wealthy democracies with the military strength of the United States. They seek to govern them.

Instead of worrying about the 1860s, Americans should consider how modern democracies disintegrate. In 1920s Italy, Benito Mussolini gained power legally after 25,000 of his Blackshirt paramilitary devotees marched on Rome and a co-opted establishment bowed to his leadership. In 1970s Chile, street skirmishes between the left and the right led to middle-class cries for law and order, ending in General Augusto Pinochet’s coup. India, long praised as the world’s largest democracy, recently dropped to “partly free” in Freedom House’s ranking after its popularly elected government—supported by riots and upheld by Hindu-nationalist police—passed too many laws that tilted elections, quelled protest, and stifled speech.

The United States, too, is dropping fast in rankings such as those compiled by Freedom House and the Economist Intelligence Unit. International experience suggests that centrist politicians aren’t capable of stopping the slide on their own. When the researcher David Solimini and I examined countries that had faced similar forms of democratic degradation, we found that ineffectiveness and infighting sidelined pro-democracy legislators, while populist or authoritarian leaders quickly transformed their parties into sycophantic amplifiers of their own demagoguery.

Far more important in upholding democracy is a neutral, nonpoliticized security sector. But retired American generals are so concerned about “turmoil in our armed forces” that they are writing op-eds to put the public on alert. In the past decade, the number of U.S.-military veterans arrested for extremist crimes was more than 300 percent higher than in the previous decade. One in 10 of the rioters who stormed the Capitol had served in the military. Twelve National Guardsmen sent to protect President Joe Biden at his inauguration had to be removed after a last-minute extremist screening. The anti-polarization organization More in Common found that more than half of Afghan War veterans feel like strangers in their own country, betrayed and humiliated by officers and civilian leaders for the pullout debacle. The military’s recent initiatives to curb radical behavior are at best a first step.

Still more worrying is the politicization of state National Guards. In November, Oklahoma’s governor fired the state’s top general in order to find someone willing to challenge federal authority. Most news coverage has framed this story as a fight over vaccine mandates enacted by the Biden administration. It is actually a contest for control of the military. National Guards are federally funded, although they are generally under gubernatorial leadership. They are subject to federal requirements for troop readiness, because they can be called for federal service at any time; Guard and Reserve units composed nearly half of the forces sent to Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet Texas, Alaska, Mississippi, Iowa, Nebraska, and Wyoming have joined Oklahoma in contesting the federal government’s authority over military forces.

The U.S. military, however, has a long tradition of disciplined political neutrality—a doctrine that should enable it to prioritize democratic civics if it chooses. Law-enforcement politicization is more advanced and a harder problem to solve.

The fear long harbored by some communities of color that local police sometimes choose not to uphold the rule of law is spreading. A lawsuit credibly alleges that officers in San Marcos, Texas, laughed off multiple calls for help as Trump supporters tried to force a Biden-campaign bus off the road in 2020. Despite sharp increases in far-right political violence and hate crimes, and evidence that right-wing protests are twice as likely as left-wing ones to turn violent, U.S. police intervened one-third as often in right-leaning protests as in left-leaning ones in 2020, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, an information-analysis nonprofit. In 2021, the group found that police intervention in far-right protests had decreased further, even as the Proud Boys in particular had become more violent.

Meanwhile, the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, which grew out of a 1970s white-supremacist movement and promotes the idea that law-enforcement officers can personally interpret the Constitution, has flourished since Trump’s pardon of its board member Joe Arpaio. One Michigan sheriff is refusing to uphold the secretary of state’s ban on guns at election sites. In Wisconsin, Racine County Sheriff Christopher Schmaling recommended criminal charges against members of a bipartisan election board who had directed clerks to send absentee ballots to nursing homes. Former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, a prominent Trump surrogate, told a QAnon conference this fall that the next insurrection needs better planning. The conservative Claremont Institute, a think tank whose chairman believes that the U.S. is in a “cold civil war,” has launched a fellowship in which sheriffs discuss topics such as “today’s militant progressivism and multiculturalism.”

Jim Crow ended thanks to a federal government that worked assiduously—goaded by community leaders—to stop impunity, often against the will of local law enforcement and politicians who had gone rogue in states such as Mississippi. Biden’s administration is not quite there. As Republican and Democratic election officials face unprecedented death threats for refusing to bend to electoral conspiracy theories, the Justice Department has been slow to prosecute cases of intimidation and harassment.

But the Justice Department could get serious. The FBI could prioritize protection for secretaries of state and other officials. The Department of Homeland Security could fund proven techniques to help states and local governments reduce violent crime, whose rapid growth makes voters more likely to acquiesce to gang-backed government. Senators could rise to the historic moment and pass the Freedom to Vote Act, a moderate bill that would protect election officials and voting itself. They could remove some incentives for targeted violence by passing the John Lewis Act, which would restore voting-rights protections gutted by the Supreme Court, and reforms to the Electoral Count Act, which governs the vote-certification process that insurrectionists tried to thwart on January 6.

Without these and other steps, America may soon face varying levels of mobocracies supported by unfair balloting, police batons, and vigilante bullets. Activists who protest these dynamics may find themselves facing armed individuals, without protection from law enforcement. In the 16 months after George Floyd’s murder, more than 100 car rammings of protesters occurred; the drivers faced charges in less than half of those cases. The perception that police are taking sides is likely to fuel further polarization. Left-wing militias would form for protection, spurring backlash and calls for law and order.

Because of recent experience, nightmare scenarios are easy to imagine: Civic leaders find armed mobs at their home, and if they call 911—well, unsympathetic local police might respond a trifle too late. Elected officials trying to right these wrongs might find their children facing threats at school—and then be told that the intimidation just doesn’t quite meet actionable levels. Election officials who quit would be replaced by mob supporters. In winner-take-all elections like ours, modest changes to the rules or the composition of the electorate produce radical differences in outcomes.

If the mobocracy gains a foothold, laws and voting procedures could be changed legally to discourage opposition voters. If law enforcement becomes more politicized, good cops would find other work. Vigilantes would gain greater impunity. Dissidents in localities falling under mobocracy could keep fighting—or just move somewhere more welcoming. Many would. Over time, majorities would support the local system. Ironically, one danger of mobocracy is that it may not require much overt violence. Just an occasional reminder that the authorities and the extremists have become one and the same would be enough to keep the peace.

 

 

Rachel Kleinfeld is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of A Savage Order: How the World’s Deadliest Countries Can Forge a Path to Security.

 

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/mobocracy-january-6-riot-guidebook-gang-backed-government/621174/

trump is mostly responsible for this.i believe he emboldened and normalized hate groups in this country for votes. he is not a patriot. and on the sixth of last year was a small preview of folks sticking their foot in the pool to test the waters so to speak. the next time someone a little smarter might have better luck and succeed where trump failed. and for all you folks rolling your eyes you need to wake up. if you think trump would not have taken control of this country you just might not be very bright. i pray this country can rise above all this mess and some i bet think it is justified because they hate the left period. with all the money floating around now just makes it more attractive to some. and for the record if libs were trying this crap i would still feel the same way.

[jj3jordan 2,060]

10 hours ago, CoffeeTiger said:

 

Yes, we know. Education and information is bad.  

 

Republicans elect a mentally unstable, reality tv show host to be President,  and it's the Democrats fault that things all go to hell. 

classic. 

 

 

Well, to put it another way;  republicans and independents elected a first time politician ( who had a successful stint as a reality tv star), who when compared side by side to his opponent, is clearly NOT the one who is mentally unstable. Your timing is off.

The democrats ARE at fault, because beginning BEFORE the election, they proceeded to use the media, FBI, CIA, NSA, and doj as tools, and they literally DID drag the country into the abyss of hell.  Yes they did that. Nobody else.

[PUB78 1,362]

On 1/6/2022 at 4:11 PM, homersapien said:

January 6 was a warning: When public authority and private muscle join forces, democracy is in danger.

 

By Rachel Kleinfeld

In the year since a mob invaded the Capitol, the trend lines for political violence in the United States have worsened. According to a new poll from The Washington Post and the University of Maryland, about one in three Americans believes that violence against the government is sometimes justified. But even more disturbing than the hardening of attitudes is the governing pattern coalescing—like an array of magnets pulling one another near—in pockets of the country. In some localities, conservative politicians and law-enforcement officials are melding with armed vigilantes who have similar politics. In Grand Traverse County, Michigan, last January, a citizen asked local officials at a virtual public meeting to denounce the Proud Boys, a right-wing gang that took part in the Capitol riot and had previously introduced a local gun-rights resolution. Instead of disavowing the group, the county commission’s vice chair stepped off-screen and returned brandishing his rifle. Closer to Michigan’s capital, Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf made news in August by speaking approvingly of militias and claiming the power to recruit posses to “suppress rioting.”

These officials’ beliefs might be shared by their constituents. Or not—the prospect of intimidation from violent citizens supported by governing powers makes dissenters less likely to speak up. Gang-backed governments fundamentally distort democracy. Public authority and private muscle collude to maintain power and narrow the range of people who can vote. In the resulting mobocracy, supporting policies, rights, or candidates outside accepted boundaries becomes difficult and in some cases dangerous.

These dynamics are familiar in countries such as Nicaragua and India, but they also represent the most serious realistic danger to the stability of American democracy. In fact, the United States also has considerable experience with such a system. To comparative-government scholars, the Jim Crow South was an authoritarian enclave, a bastion of one-party rule nestled within a broader democracy. In many states, laws kept a large fraction of the population from voting. Vigilante violence, backed by partisan police and judges, kept citizens from altering the situation through the political process.

The return of any such system may feel far-fetched. Fortunately, rifles remain a rare sight at local-government hearings. Modern America has 3,000-odd counties that appear to function in reassuring bureaucratic drabness. The U.S. also has about 800,000 law-enforcement officers, the majority of whom are, no doubt, committed to the rule of law. But January 6 and subsequent revelations should shift Americans’ understanding of what is possible. While commander in chief, Donald Trump chose to spur on a violent mob and let its riot continue long enough to disrupt congressional certification of the presidential vote. Rather than provoking revulsion from political elites, that day’s events may have offered a guidebook. Allen West, the chair of the Texas Republican Party, posed with militia members just days later, and in March he appeared with the leader of the Oath Keepers militia after the latter had been charged with involvement in the January 6 attack.

Our current moment has some commonalities with the period following the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling that the Constitution forbids official segregation in public schools. The intimacy of the federal government intruding on whom one’s children might sit next to in school drove a furious response. “Citizens councils” mushroomed across the South. Composed of white professionals, these groups normalized and sometimes abetted a revived Ku Klux Klan. Bloody extremism mingled with mainstream sentiment among white southerners. Perpetrators of violence enjoyed impunity because of the tacit or explicit support of local authorities.

In the Jim Crow South, mobocracies exercised tight control over state and local governments. Southern courts excused white vigilante justice. Murderers, such as those who killed Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955, went free. Politicians used state security to uphold their campaign of “massive resistance” to school integration. Arkansas’s governor ordered the state’s National Guard to block nine Black students from integrating a Little Rock high school. Law enforcement took a side. One notorious Mississippi sheriff, Neshoba County’s Lawrence Rainey, was suspected of playing a role in the murder of three civil-rights workers.

The mobocracy now unfurling has so far been less violent than its Jim Crow forebear. But it has a broader political and geographic base. Should it succeed, it will not be confined to the South, nor will it be based solely on race. Extremists use today’s mainstream causes—such as opposition to COVID-vaccine mandates and disputes about school curricula—as gateways for recruitment. Conspiracy theories, culture wars, and a generalized antipathy toward the concerns of women and people of color are fueling the growth of mobocracy in states such as Oklahoma and Iowa, where legislatures have already passed bills granting immunity to drivers who strike protesters with their cars.

In some ways, the left is feeding right-wing fears of tyranny. Especially in academia and other high-profile fields, the muzzling of dissent from progressive orthodoxies drives conservatives’ claims that they are the ones facing cultural autocracy. The enactment of COVID-related emergency measures, while necessary for public health, has abetted authoritarianism in other countries and fueled similar fears on America’s right.

Commentators, particularly on the right, have been chattering about civil war for some time. Since America’s founding, insurgency has been linked to patriotism. This framing taps into a strong mythos of patriots taking up arms against tyranny. Yet since 2013, the Global Terrorism Database has charted skyrocketing violence on the right and only a slight increase on the left. The left has no equivalent of an interlinked political, militia, and state-security infrastructure. The term civil war makes violence sound citizen-led, and it tends to confer blame on each competing camp. But a two-sided war is not what America is facing.

Moreover, though many Americans distrust their government and bear arms at the highest per capita rate in the world, most political-science research suggests that weapons and grievances don’t correlate with combat. The U.S. does have serious risk factors for political violence, chief among them political parties defined by racial, geographic, and religious cleavages. But insurgents don’t attack wealthy democracies with the military strength of the United States. They seek to govern them.

Instead of worrying about the 1860s, Americans should consider how modern democracies disintegrate. In 1920s Italy, Benito Mussolini gained power legally after 25,000 of his Blackshirt paramilitary devotees marched on Rome and a co-opted establishment bowed to his leadership. In 1970s Chile, street skirmishes between the left and the right led to middle-class cries for law and order, ending in General Augusto Pinochet’s coup. India, long praised as the world’s largest democracy, recently dropped to “partly free” in Freedom House’s ranking after its popularly elected government—supported by riots and upheld by Hindu-nationalist police—passed too many laws that tilted elections, quelled protest, and stifled speech.

The United States, too, is dropping fast in rankings such as those compiled by Freedom House and the Economist Intelligence Unit. International experience suggests that centrist politicians aren’t capable of stopping the slide on their own. When the researcher David Solimini and I examined countries that had faced similar forms of democratic degradation, we found that ineffectiveness and infighting sidelined pro-democracy legislators, while populist or authoritarian leaders quickly transformed their parties into sycophantic amplifiers of their own demagoguery.

Far more important in upholding democracy is a neutral, nonpoliticized security sector. But retired American generals are so concerned about “turmoil in our armed forces” that they are writing op-eds to put the public on alert. In the past decade, the number of U.S.-military veterans arrested for extremist crimes was more than 300 percent higher than in the previous decade. One in 10 of the rioters who stormed the Capitol had served in the military. Twelve National Guardsmen sent to protect President Joe Biden at his inauguration had to be removed after a last-minute extremist screening. The anti-polarization organization More in Common found that more than half of Afghan War veterans feel like strangers in their own country, betrayed and humiliated by officers and civilian leaders for the pullout debacle. The military’s recent initiatives to curb radical behavior are at best a first step.

Still more worrying is the politicization of state National Guards. In November, Oklahoma’s governor fired the state’s top general in order to find someone willing to challenge federal authority. Most news coverage has framed this story as a fight over vaccine mandates enacted by the Biden administration. It is actually a contest for control of the military. National Guards are federally funded, although they are generally under gubernatorial leadership. They are subject to federal requirements for troop readiness, because they can be called for federal service at any time; Guard and Reserve units composed nearly half of the forces sent to Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet Texas, Alaska, Mississippi, Iowa, Nebraska, and Wyoming have joined Oklahoma in contesting the federal government’s authority over military forces.

The U.S. military, however, has a long tradition of disciplined political neutrality—a doctrine that should enable it to prioritize democratic civics if it chooses. Law-enforcement politicization is more advanced and a harder problem to solve.

The fear long harbored by some communities of color that local police sometimes choose not to uphold the rule of law is spreading. A lawsuit credibly alleges that officers in San Marcos, Texas, laughed off multiple calls for help as Trump supporters tried to force a Biden-campaign bus off the road in 2020. Despite sharp increases in far-right political violence and hate crimes, and evidence that right-wing protests are twice as likely as left-wing ones to turn violent, U.S. police intervened one-third as often in right-leaning protests as in left-leaning ones in 2020, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, an information-analysis nonprofit. In 2021, the group found that police intervention in far-right protests had decreased further, even as the Proud Boys in particular had become more violent.

Meanwhile, the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, which grew out of a 1970s white-supremacist movement and promotes the idea that law-enforcement officers can personally interpret the Constitution, has flourished since Trump’s pardon of its board member Joe Arpaio. One Michigan sheriff is refusing to uphold the secretary of state’s ban on guns at election sites. In Wisconsin, Racine County Sheriff Christopher Schmaling recommended criminal charges against members of a bipartisan election board who had directed clerks to send absentee ballots to nursing homes. Former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, a prominent Trump surrogate, told a QAnon conference this fall that the next insurrection needs better planning. The conservative Claremont Institute, a think tank whose chairman believes that the U.S. is in a “cold civil war,” has launched a fellowship in which sheriffs discuss topics such as “today’s militant progressivism and multiculturalism.”

Jim Crow ended thanks to a federal government that worked assiduously—goaded by community leaders—to stop impunity, often against the will of local law enforcement and politicians who had gone rogue in states such as Mississippi. Biden’s administration is not quite there. As Republican and Democratic election officials face unprecedented death threats for refusing to bend to electoral conspiracy theories, the Justice Department has been slow to prosecute cases of intimidation and harassment.

But the Justice Department could get serious. The FBI could prioritize protection for secretaries of state and other officials. The Department of Homeland Security could fund proven techniques to help states and local governments reduce violent crime, whose rapid growth makes voters more likely to acquiesce to gang-backed government. Senators could rise to the historic moment and pass the Freedom to Vote Act, a moderate bill that would protect election officials and voting itself. They could remove some incentives for targeted violence by passing the John Lewis Act, which would restore voting-rights protections gutted by the Supreme Court, and reforms to the Electoral Count Act, which governs the vote-certification process that insurrectionists tried to thwart on January 6.

Without these and other steps, America may soon face varying levels of mobocracies supported by unfair balloting, police batons, and vigilante bullets. Activists who protest these dynamics may find themselves facing armed individuals, without protection from law enforcement. In the 16 months after George Floyd’s murder, more than 100 car rammings of protesters occurred; the drivers faced charges in less than half of those cases. The perception that police are taking sides is likely to fuel further polarization. Left-wing militias would form for protection, spurring backlash and calls for law and order.

Because of recent experience, nightmare scenarios are easy to imagine: Civic leaders find armed mobs at their home, and if they call 911—well, unsympathetic local police might respond a trifle too late. Elected officials trying to right these wrongs might find their children facing threats at school—and then be told that the intimidation just doesn’t quite meet actionable levels. Election officials who quit would be replaced by mob supporters. In winner-take-all elections like ours, modest changes to the rules or the composition of the electorate produce radical differences in outcomes.

If the mobocracy gains a foothold, laws and voting procedures could be changed legally to discourage opposition voters. If law enforcement becomes more politicized, good cops would find other work. Vigilantes would gain greater impunity. Dissidents in localities falling under mobocracy could keep fighting—or just move somewhere more welcoming. Many would. Over time, majorities would support the local system. Ironically, one danger of mobocracy is that it may not require much overt violence. Just an occasional reminder that the authorities and the extremists have become one and the same would be enough to keep the peace.

 

 

Rachel Kleinfeld is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of A Savage Order: How the World’s Deadliest Countries Can Forge a Path to Security.

 

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/mobocracy-january-6-riot-guidebook-gang-backed-government/621174/

Remember the line from Young Frankenstein. “ A riot is an ugly thing, but it’s  about time we had one”!!!

[homersapien 11,440]

4 hours ago, PUB78 said:

Remember the line from Young Frankenstein. “ A riot is an ugly thing, but it’s  about time we had one”!!!

Your support for rioting is duly noted.

[PUB78 1,362]

6 hours ago, homersapien said:

Your support for rioting is duly noted.

💥🔥☄️🪓🗡🇱🇷

[CoffeeTiger 5,169]

On 1/7/2022 at 7:55 PM, jj3jordan said:

Well, to put it another way;  republicans and independents elected a first time politician ( who had a successful stint as a reality tv star),

 

Oh, yea. Great Job! 

 

Following that logic, then Kim Kardashian would be one of the greatest US Presidents of all time!

 

"Never been a politician? Inherited your wealth? Good at creating stupid, fake tv shows? Great! Welcome to the Republican party...want to be the next President? "

 Absolute genius. 

 

On 1/7/2022 at 7:55 PM, jj3jordan said:

 

who when compared side by side to his opponent, is clearly NOT the one who is mentally unstable. Your timing is off.

 

 

Yeah, ok. All i know is that many actual aids and lifelong Republicans who worked along side Trump directly say the guy's as dumb as a sack of rocks. Dude had to be given intelligence briefings with pictures and graphs because he had the attention span of a 5 year old and couldn't process information to save his life. 

 

Yeah, I agree Biden isn't as mentally sharp as I think a US president should be, but he's miles better than Trump. Despite what Republicans say, Biden can actually form coherent sentences and thought when giving speeches which is more than we got from Trumps inane ramblings. 

 

On 1/7/2022 at 7:55 PM, jj3jordan said:

The democrats ARE at fault, because beginning BEFORE the election, they proceeded to use the media, FBI, CIA, NSA, and doj as tools, and they literally DID drag the country into the abyss of hell.  Yes they did that. Nobody else.

 

Yeah, we know...The Deep State.