On January 6th, Congresswoman Mary Miller started her morning by invoking Hitler as part of a speech to a crowd in view of the capitol. A mix of white supremacists, conspiracy theorists, and accelerationists made a violent insurrection attempt on the capital later that day. To say that any of this was unexpected is an act of ignorance: ignorance of America’s institutional ties to white supremacy, ignorance of open planning by the insurrectionists, and ignorance of systemic failure to prevent an environment ripe for violent radicalization. It is going to take structural changes to prevent more people from turning to violence.
The racialized slavery on which America was built has indefinitely tied America to white supremacy. America’s law enforcement is historically tied to slave patrols, our carceral system is the single exception to the 13th amendment’s ban on slavery, and the US military has continued to work with the prison system to exploit minority labor in the name of globally upholding white supremacy even after ending blatantly racist policies. America’s treatment of indigenous populations served as inspiration for Nazi genocide. America is the country of Japanese internment camps and of Grant’s expulsion of the Jews under General Order No.11. This does not even begin to touch on the white saviorism embedded in America’s foreign interventions across the globe, from the war in Vietnam to Operation Condor throughout Latin America. These are things America has not taught its children, and which people must learn if they are to know their country honestly.
This is America, not as an ideal but as a state. Too many times throughout 2020 we saw police permit fascists and white supremacists to turn violent against fellow citizens, but such is the long history of police brutality. Nonviolence has long been a strategy of antiracists because the apparatus of the state would swiftly turn against them otherwise, but racists have seen the state turn a blind eye to their violence time and again. Police fight movements for progress but treat gently those persons upholding their dark ideological underpinnings. Security guards let through the doors of congress each day people like Congressman Madison Cawthorn who defended his visits to Nazi sites, so perhaps it is not unusual to see a “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirt in the same building.
The fight for racial equality in America is centuries long, and the past few years have seen it return to the front of public discourse. People previously uneducated in structural racism have had to weigh the benefit they derive from problematic institutions against the harm those institutions cause. Combine this panicked confrontation of one’s place in society with direct access to unedited opinions of just about anyone thanks to an internet algorithmically designed to push users further down rabbit holes and one starts to understand how people take comfort in the far right.
Whether from elected officials identified as fascist over 15 years ago like Josh Hawley or from unnamed strangers on the internet, people will take their affirmations where they can. Why struggle to improve society when it is easier to call any critique of America a globalist plot to destroy your way of life, claim all politicians are pedophiles (overlooking the child abuse in your own community), and say that anyone accusing you of upholding racism is the real racist? The people generating these lies may be die-hards, but the periphery is made up of people desperately searching for absolution. The rise of conspiracy theories and extremist punditry is so pervasive that 45% of Republicans approve of storming the capitol.
Ethically, white supremacy is intolerable in all its forms. Legally, one has an absolute right to be an outspoken white supremacist. America prides itself on the Skokie case, where a Jewish lawyer defended the rights of Nazis to parade. This may bring a joyful tear to the eyes of free speech absolutists, but it takes censorship off the table for preventing violent radicalization. We should be wary of approaches creating a war of the state against an idea, as approaches centered on stomping out an ideology rather than reducing the cause for violent action produced anti-Muslim policies post-9/11 and McCarthyism. Even moderate censorship measures like those imposed in Germany to combat Nazism fall short in the long term, with active neo-nazis still acting as police today. The problems we face are not solved with arrests and felony charges either. Expanding institutions based in white supremacy, like the American criminal system, fails to combat white supremacy. Incarcerating people who hold extreme beliefs fails to solve the structural issues which lead to the mass spread of hate and turn malicious beliefs into action.
Along with clear indicators of radicalization such as expressing intent to cause harm, research has identified risk factors which can be acted on: unemployment, sporadic work, having a lower socioeconomic status, and having less education. Material conditions can and must change in order to prevent extreme beliefs from spreading and turning into violence.
Unsurprisingly, these material risk factors are all growing problems in America. This year unemployment reached its worst point since the Great Depression. Poor Americans suffered the highest rate of unemployment with 39% unemployment for people living in households earning less than $40,000. The growth of the gig economy has led to an increasing number of people working sporadically over the past decade. Legislation reducing the harm of gig work has been undermined by corporate interests through measures like California Prop. 22. The middle class has stagnated for decades against rising prices while the upper echelons have continued to see their wealth rise. The pressures placed on everyday Americans and the lack of support from centrist politics pushes many towards the fringes. These economic push factors may be less important to what we have seen recently when compared to education.
American civics education has been failing for decades, with effects getting worse every generation. This lack of civics education undeniably played a large role in people buying into conspiracies around the government which led to attempted insurrection. Historian Timothy Snyder made the case this weekend that history education, particularly history around the rise of fascism in the past, must play a key part in moving past the post-truth era. Despite improving holocaust education, we still face rising antisemitic hate crimes and over 39% of Americans still agree with antisemitic beliefs, making it time to rethink how effective lessons on the Jewish experience of fascism are. Just three days before the attack on the capitol, David Suissa argued in the Jewish Journal for positive Jewish education as a way of combating antisemitism, a case which has been argued before as more young Jews come to define their identity as a reaction to antisemitism.
What we may be most in need of as a country is anti-racist education. Against Trump’s efforts to further institutionalize the teaching of white supremacist history, 2020 and Black Lives Matter saw movement towards combating systemic racism in education. These efforts still need support if they are to create meaningful change as most have yet to be implemented. Changes in K-12 need to be supplemented with public education efforts for adults if effects are to be seen immediately (the capitol wasn’t stormed by schoolchildren afterall). Research on strategic administration of programs aimed at countering racism has existed for decades and failure to implement it at even a point like this will only further the crisis.
By improving the conditions people live under and by ensuring better education for all people on social issues we can stop the mass spread of extremism. Antiracist action requires more than protests; it requires community education, eliminating poverty & inequality, and abolishing those institutions which perpetuate racism and cannot be reformed. Deplatforming twisted ideologues is of immediate importance for preventing another insurrection attempt next week, but structural changes prevent the rise of fascism for years to come.
