U.S. Faces a Type of Extremism It Doesn’t Know How To Stop, Says Expert | Amanpour and Company

the DHS has evolved to focus on a range of issues in the last few years it designated domestic violent extremism as a national priority Adrian La France executive editor of the Atlantic traces political violence here in the United States over the past Century in her latest article and she now joins Walter Isaacson to discuss what's different about the new Anarchy thank you Christian and Adrian LaFrance welcome to the show thank you for having me got this cover story in the Atlantic the new Anarchy and one reason you say it's new is that it's a little bit slow motion what do you mean by slow motion is that make it better or worse reporting is that people have a tendency to expect political violence to manifest maybe in the form of Civil War obviously the Civil War looms really large in our national memory and what what I'm arguing and what I'm concerned about is that really bad political violence is already here and it's just not taking the form we're used to and so you know you might be able to compartmentalize one event as random when in fact it's part of a larger pattern well a lot of them do seem random I mean we have you know what happened in Portland with on both sides but we also have an attack on Paul Pelosi or Justice Kavanaugh it seems like kind of Misfits and weird people doing things why do you say it's all connected so I think the term that law enforcement uses is uh salad bar extremism so there's this this emerging pattern of it rather than a cohesive ideology where you have a political party or an organized group carrying out acts of violence which you you do see in history that that sometimes how political violence manifests itself now we we have these sort of loose sometimes overlapping ideologies sometimes driven by hate sometimes seemingly random certainly carried out by um people of different profiles or beliefs or you know affiliations political affiliations but the larger pattern as you see increased threats against the public against members of Congress against journalists and and the pace of violence is increasing as well and so to look at it as it exists in culture you really have to see that it's part of this larger sort of trend that's going on you start the piece in Portland Oregon in 2020 when all those things on both sides were happening tell me what what spark that and what are the people who are making up that that political violence there are to have gotten really bad and and I was looking for the Contemporary example of sort of how close we've gotten sort of to the brink or to Breaking the social contract um and I also was drawn to Portland because there was so much uh it seemed uh disconnect among people in in terms of who was responsible for what was going wrong there in this sort of Street violence ongoing fighting and what I found was I mean you mentioned the term both sides I think um there was violence across many different groups but we have to be really careful about waiting it equally right and so the the sort of fascinating and and different Dynamic that played out in Portland was well two things one um was that a lot of people sort of assumed that this all just came out of sort of the protests related to the murder of George Floyd in fact the violence that that played out in Portland was brewing for many years and really started after Trump's election when you had right-wing provocateurs coming out and sort of ostentatiously you know trying to provoke a lot of the left-wing people in Portland and and they did so effectively and so then you had uh left-wing folks who were prone to violence as well coming out and fighting and then the police in The Fray as well and so you really had in some ways you had three contingencies between the police the left-wing extremists and right-wing extremists um and I think when you talk to a lot of portlanders uh most portlanders didn't go out in the streets fighting and most of them would say that all of those who did made a very bad choice to do so well one of the themes in your piece which goes back a century is uh Anarchy and Anarchist uh what do you mean by anarchists well looking a century ago I mean if you look at the 20th century in the United States were you you know you know anti-government anti-state maybe communist marxists like actual like Anarchy as a political Viewpoint and and when I talk about this the new Anarchy I'm not I don't mean an ideology as much as a new form of radicalism that interestingly takes the shape of some of the left-wing radicalism of a century ago while being ideologically more likely to be right wing and so and I think this is an important point back to your question about the both sides of them is when you talk to the scholars who who Focus most on political violence today the data shows again and again that the biggest threat it comes from the right wing um we certainly have incidents of of political violence carried out by people who espouse left-wing beliefs but the Anarchy today is not traditional Anarchy as it was 100 years ago because that was ideologically different but what about the anti-fascist uh protesters that you know certainly people point to them as the ones who were originally in the streets right and andify as anarchists in this sort of classical sense um you know I I don't think it's accurate to say that they were originally in the streets if you go back to sort of the root of this fight um you see people in Portland anyway you see people from um the right wing provocateur is coming protesting uh and that drawing out the the left-wing response when I was a young reporter covering uh the things down here in Louisiana for the Times picky and I was covering the various Ku Klux Klan and other groups weird groups and they would stand on the corner and hand out mimeograph sheets and so they were sort of self-contained it couldn't spread too much how do these groups use social media and the internet now to spread it differently right just the very architecture of the Social Web is designed for massive instantaneous global scale meaning you know if you put your beliefs in front of the Right audience or on the right Facebook group or the right telegram Channel whatever the distribution mechanism is it can instantly reach just a massive number of people everywhere and so that's different right you're not out on the street corner corner handing out uh something the physical piece of paper paper um and the geographic uh disaggregation I think is important too because it means that it's not contained to just one town or one place and so the threat is suddenly everywhere potentially and so you can kind of think of these platforms at their worst as being sort of anger machines that are sort of this this feedback loop of uh hateful content spread at global scale and instantaneously and and reinforcing some of the worst possible human impulses let me read a sentence from your uh piece that really struck me you said people build their political identities not around shared values you're talking about these days but around a hatred for their foes and I think you put the label on it which is negative partisanship is that different now it is I mean the scholars who study this are really disturbed by it too because you might previously I mean look like we should acknowledge that political violence has been part of American politics since the beginning uh and there have always been fights and and so but but at the same time even in past areas of ups and downs of violence you know people would hopefully you know come together around what their beliefs were were so so asserting here's what I believe here's what I believe the world should look like now you see more and more people saying you know not asserting the the policy they believe in or the vision of the world that they want to realize but more you know whatever it takes so that that the other guy doesn't get what he wants or um and and so and we're seeing a really dramatic rise in the way people are oriented politically being solely around uh hatred for the other or uh making sure that you know whatever it takes to defeat the political opponent rather than realize a vision of the world that someone might otherwise want politically you say that political violence is like an iceberg explain that to me this was a helpful vision visual that uh research at the University of Maryland terrorism database gave to me and and the way she put it was you know you have this Iceberg and at the tip the part that you can see are these awful acts of violence that are actually carried out you know whether it's a mass shooting or Street violence or the attack on speaker Pelosi's husband um and so there's a smaller group of people who actually are willing to commit acts of violence but then the rest of the iceberg is the culture in which this becomes more and more permissible so you have and this goes back to the Social Web you have a uh the spreading of these ideas at Mass global scale and only some people are going to see those ideas and run with them fortunately unfortunately it only takes very few actors to to exert tremendous damage and harm on society and so the tip of the iceberg is the violence itself the rest of the iceberg is the the sort of the conditions that make it possible you talk about the new Anarchist but you go back a hundred years to the old anarchist from around 1910 to 1920 which is a really bad period in the United States explain the difference of the old anarchism what was it all about so this was a movement that was sparked in large part I mean we're talking about an era where uh heads of state were being assassinated by anarchists in the United States uh you know President McKinley uh as well as elsewhere and really This Global movement that was anti-establishment anti-government just sort of the the dynamiting tear it down mentality um the true Anarchy in in the true sense of the word and uh it was motivated by some real issues in society including terrible working conditions for workers um and so it you know it's we see some of this if you look throughout history you do see sort of Echoes In the social conditions that prompt people to decide that they don't want to work within the system to solve systemic real systemic problems but rather want to burn the system down so that's certainly what you saw among anarchists in the United States in the early 20th century and you can see Echoes of that among some groups today when you talk about the anarchists of the early 20th century they were put down around 1919-1920 Attorney General Mitchell Palmer did famous Infamous in a way raids that I think 10 000 people at a time were arrested but let me read a sentence from your article you say sweeping action by law enforcement helped put an end to a generation of anarchist attacks and then you say holding perpetrators accountable is crucial do you think we need to be doing more of that now it gets really uncomfortable frankly because to your point the pomerades were unconstitutional but we should definitely not repeat that it's a notorious example of an overreaction in law enforcement at the same time Society had reached a point where you know you you can't live with domestic terrorists trying to assassinate political leaders all the time and and effectively you know and actually assassinating them so they're a lot of the lessons of earlier eras of political violence lead to very uncomfortable places we very frequently see that with necessary law enforcement you have overreach and encroachment of civil liberties and so I think the the lesson for us today is we absolutely need strong Swift law enforcement I think the reaction and and the indictments after January 6th are an example of what's needed but we at the same time as citizens have to be really cognizant of the potential for government overreach and corruption in the course of that law enforcement which is troubling talking about political violence in general in order to have it stop or have some crisis you would have thought we need just some big event that was so horrible we'd all say okay enough of this well we had that we had January 6. what happened one of the things that I was thinking about as I was reporting this was the the Patriot movement of the 1990s so you had a this militia movement your viewers will remember Waco and Ruby Ridge and this sort of surge of militia movement in the early 1990s um and extremist militia movement as well and I had in in thinking back to that time I was reflecting on how that sort of went away and maybe there was a lesson for us there what did we do right in that era that we could replicate today what what someone I interviewed reminded me of was it wasn't that we did anything right actually it was that Oklahoma City the Oklahoma City bombing happened and that cataclysmic event and the law enforcement that followed is what didn't make extremism go away but sort of pushed it underground and so um I I think that's an important point because uh these movements last for Generations sometimes Generations or longer um and so with regard to January 6th and even with Trump having lost the election I think there was an expectation among some people that sort of perhaps the fever would break the the um just the tenor of of the political the sort of portioning of political discourse and and obviously the hope that after January 6 that the nation's leaders would come together and say this is not acceptable this is not what we're about and and you have that maybe for I don't know 24 or 48 hours but we've seen that Republicans very quickly uh went back to defending Trump and trumpism and and uh and so it's really I mean this is one of the big conclusions of my story is that we need unified leadership in this country against political violence for leaders of any background and every party to say this is not acceptable in America you just mentioned Trump and trumpism as being a cause here to what extent is that a motivating force behind this Rising political violence yeah so I think it in some ways uh I think that his presidency help sort of give permission to the mainstreaming of a lot of these extremist views I mean people will recall the debate where he said he addressed the proud Boys on national television and said stand back and stand by so you know perfect example of a mainstream endorsement of political violence of course the stop the steel rhetoric leading up to January 6th as an example so I would characterize Trump as an accelerant but not the root cause so after looking at More Than A Century of this type of political violence and looking at what's the same and what's new about the political violence now what do you think we as a nation should be doing the two most distressing things that I Come Away with are what's new and what's different uh because those are the things that we have to newly account for and trying to address this and so I I think the Social Web we talked about the other piece which we talked a little bit about is we haven't before in America had such a movement of people denying the accurate outcome of Elections and that's new for us in America and very dangerous and so I think as we think about what we need to do to stop political violence in our country we need to focus our energies largely on those two new Dynamic sort of really dangerous phenomenon but there's also sort of you know what I might call like the boring work of a democracy boring but essential you know making sure that we're encouraging people who should be in leadership positions to run for office making sure that we're protecting free and fair access to Collections and again going back to the leadership Point demanding that the leadership of this country not just on the national level but in every level of elected office that they are people who reject political violence is acceptable and and that's certainly not the case right now and so you know one way to think about this is if voters in America treated stopping political violence as their sort of single issue like the most important thing that we can do um in a in a world of many many many other important issues we would ultimately end up demanding I think stronger leadership that could help us get through this adrenal France thank you so much for joining us thank you for having me [Music] foreign

Channel: Amanpour and Company

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Keywords: interview, CNN, PBS, Christiane Amanpour, world news, news anchor, news show, news, public affairs, late-night TV, journalist, Chief International Correspondent, The New Anarchy, Adrienne LaFrance, The Atlantic, political violence, extremism

Id: WUPkoMsAtLI

Length: 17min 53sec (1073 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 07 2023