Right-Wing Extremism and Alt-Right

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      Peter Thiel, the Right’s Would-Be Kingmaker

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      The wine flowed. Donald Trump Jr. mingled with the guests. And Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire and host of the event, had a message for the well-heeled crowd: It was time to clean house.The fund-raiser at Mr. Thiel’s Miami Beach compound last month was for a conservative candidate challenging Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming for a spot on the ballot in November’s midterm elections. Ms. Cheney, one of several Republicans who had voted to impeach President Donald J. Trump on charges of inciting the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol, was the face of “the traitorous 10,” Mr. Thiel said, according to two people with knowledge of the event, who were not authorized to speak publicly. All of them had to be replaced, he declared, by conservatives loyal to the former president.Mr. Thiel, who became known in 2016 as one of the biggest donors to Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign, has re-emerged as a key financier of the Make America Great Again movement. After sitting out the 2020 presidential race, the venture capitalist this year is backing 16 Senate and House candidates, many of whom have embraced the lie that Mr. Trump won the election.To get these candidates into office, Mr. Thiel has given more than $20.4 million. That essentially puts him and Kenneth Griffin, the chief executive of the hedge fund Citadel, in a tie as the largest individual donors to Republican politics this election cycle, according to the nonpartisan research organization OpenSecrets.What sets Mr. Thiel’s spending apart, though, is its focus on hard-right candidates who traffic in the conspiracy theories espoused by Mr. Trump and who cast themselves as rebels determined to overthrow the Republican establishment and even the broader American political order. These campaigns have raised millions in small-dollar donations, but Mr. Thiel’s wealth could accelerate the shift of views once considered fringe to the mainstream — while making himself a new power broker on the right.“When you have a funder who is actively elevating candidates who are denying the legitimacy of elections, that is a direct assault on the foundation of democracy,” said Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the left-leaning group New America, who studies campaign finance and hyperpartisanship.The candidates Mr. Thiel has funded offer a window into his ideology. While the investor has been something of a cipher, he is currently driven by a worldview that the establishment and globalization have failed, that current immigration policy pillages the middle class and that the country must dismantle federal institutions.Mr. Thiel has started articulating his thinking publicly, recently headlining at least six conservative and libertarian gatherings where he criticized the Chinese Communist Party and big tech companies and questioned climate science. He has taken issue with what he calls the “extreme dogmatism” within establishment institutions, which he said had sent the country backward.At an October dinner at Stanford University for the Federalist Society, he spoke about the “deranged society” that “a completely deranged government” had created, according to a recording of the event obtained by The New York Times. The United States was on the verge of a momentous correction, he said.“My somewhat apocalyptic, somewhat hopeful thought is that we are finally at a point where things are breaking,” Mr. Thiel said.Mr. Thiel, 54, has not publicly said what he believes about the 2020 election. But in Mr. Trump, he sees a vessel to push through his ideological goals, three people close to the investor said. The two men met recently in New York and at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla. Mr. Thiel also funded an app company run by John McEntee, one of Mr. Trump’s closest aides, two people with knowledge of the deal said.Unlike traditional Republican donors who have focused on their party’s winning control of Congress and the White House, Mr. Thiel has set his sights on reshaping the Republican agenda with his brand of anti-establishment contrarianism, said Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist.“I don’t think it’s just about flipping the Senate,” said Mr. Bannon, who has known Mr. Thiel since 2016. “I think Peter wants to change the direction of the country.”How Donald J. Trump Still LoomsGrip on G.O.P.: Mr. Trump remains the most powerful figure in the Republican Party. However, there are signs his control is loosening.Power Struggle: Led by Senator Mitch McConnell, a band of anti-Trump Republicans is maneuvering to thwart the ex-president.Midterms Effect: Mr. Trump has become a party kingmaker, but his involvement in state races worries many Republicans.Post-Presidency Profits: Mr. Trump is melding business with politics, capitalizing for personal gain.Just the Beginning: For many Trump supporters who marched on Jan. 6, the day was not a disgraced insurrection but the start of a movement.Mr. Thiel’s giving is expected to make up just a small fraction of the hundreds of millions of dollars that are likely to flow through campaigns this cycle. But the amounts he is pouring into individual races and the early nature of his primary donations have put him on the radar of Republican hopefuls.In the past, many courted the billionaire Koch brothers or Sheldon Adelson, the late casino magnate. This year, they have clamored for invitations to Mr. Thiel’s Los Angeles and Miami Beach homes, or debated how to at least get on the phone with him, political strategists said.Mr. Thiel personally vets the candidates he gives to, said three Republican strategists, who declined to be named for fear of retaliation. In addition to Harriet Hageman, the challenger to Ms. Cheney, he is backing Joe Kent and Loren Culp, both of whom are running against House Republicans in Washington State who voted to impeach Mr. Trump. He also gave to a political action committee associated with Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, who is not up for re-election this year. More

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      McConnell Denounces R.N.C. Censure of Jan. 6 Panel Members

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      Senator Mitch McConnell joined a chorus of Republicans distancing themselves from the committee’s action, describing the Capitol riot as “a violent insurrection.”WASHINGTON — Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, pushed back hard on Tuesday against the Republican Party’s censure of Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger and its characterization of the Jan. 6 riot as “legitimate political discourse,” saying the riot was a “violent insurrection.”The remarks from Mr. McConnell, the normally taciturn Kentucky Republican, added to a small but forceful chorus of G.O.P. lawmakers who have decried the action that the Republican National Committee took on Friday, when it officially rebuked Ms. Cheney and Mr. Kinzinger for participating in the House investigation of the Jan. 6 attack, accusing them of “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, said it was “not the job” of the Republican National Committee to censure Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, and called the attack on Jan. 6 a “violent insurrection.”Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesMr. McConnell repudiated that description, saying of the events of Jan. 6, 2021: “We saw it happen. It was a violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election, from one administration to the next. That’s what it was.”He made the remarks to reporters outside Senate Republicans’ closed-door weekly lunch, where his aides had signaled in advance that he was to make an important statement on the R.N.C.’s action.Mr. McConnell’s comments were a rebuke of how far the party has gone to deny the reality of the violence that unfolded during the bloody assault on the Capitol, sending lawmakers from both parties running for safety. More than 150 people were injured in the attack, which led to several deaths, and nearly 750 individuals have been criminally charged in connection with it.In the days since the Republican National Committee passed the resolution at its winter meeting in Salt Lake City, a handful of Republicans have criticized the move as everything from a political distraction to a shame on the party. Mr. McConnell, who orchestrated the impeachment acquittal of former President Donald J. Trump and blocked the naming of an independent, bipartisan commission to examine the attack, was among the most blunt in his defense of the only Republicans serving on the committee that rose from that proposal’s ashes.“Traditionally, the view of the national party committees is that we support all members of our party, regardless of their positions on some issues,” he said. “The issue is whether or not the R.N.C. should be sort of singling out members of our party who may have different views of the majority. That’s not the job of the R.N.C.”Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader, by contrast, defended the resolution on Tuesday, telling a CNN reporter that it was meant to condemn the House committee’s targeting of conservatives who were nowhere near Washington on Jan. 6 and had nothing to do with either the attack or the broader effort to overturn the 2020 election.Mr. McCarthy, who has refused to speak with the House inquiry about his conversations with Mr. Trump during and around the Jan. 6 attack, has been consulting with William A. Burck, a prominent Washington lawyer, about how to navigate the investigation as he braces for a possible subpoena.The censure, pushed by allies of former President Donald J. Trump, was just over one page long, but it has sent Republicans into turmoil, exposing the party’s fissures while underscoring how its fealty to Mr. Trump continues to define everything it does. It has disrupted efforts by congressional Republicans to turn the page from Jan. 6 and focus instead on what they see as the failings of President Biden and the Democratic Party in an election year.At a news conference on Tuesday, House Republicans wanted to spend their time blaming Mr. Biden for a worsening fentanyl crisis, but virtually every question was about the party’s resolution.Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, described the Jan. 6 commission as “political theater about punishing partisan opponents.”Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times“Republicans have been very clear, we condemn the violence on Jan. 6. We also condemn the violence in 2020 as violent criminals attacked federal buildings including parts of Washington, D.C.,” said Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the House Republican Conference chairwoman, equating racial justice protests with the deadly assault on the Capitol. She added that “we believe the Jan. 6 commission is political theater about punishing partisan opponents.”Some Republicans defended the resolution by noting that it encapsulated the party’s view of what had happened on Jan. 6.“Whatever you think about the R.N.C. vote, it reflects the view of most Republican voters,” said Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri. “In my state, it’s not helpful to have a bunch of D.C. Republicans commenting on the R.N.C.”Senator Mitt Romney of Utah was among a small but vocal group of Republicans who were outraged by the R.N.C. censure. Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesBut others were clearly appalled. Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, who castigated the resolution as shameful on Friday before the party vote, told reporters on Monday that he had exchanged texts about it with the Republican National Committee chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel, who is also his niece.“Anything that my party does that comes across as being stupid is not going to help us,” he said.Inside the Republican National Committee, the resolution has led to an intensive round of finger-pointing. Several members said they never intended to suggest that those who rioted on Jan. 6, 2021, were “engaged in legitimate political discourse,” even as they conceded the censure resolution’s language said just that.The resolution, which was drafted by David Bossie, a longtime conservative operative aligned with Mr. Trump, and Frank Eathorne, the Wyoming Republican Party chairman, started out as an effort to expel Ms. Cheney and Mr. Kinzinger from the House Republican Conference. But committee members decided against calling for such a move, and instead settled on a censure.An early draft condemned the two representatives for participating in “a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in nonviolent and legal political discourse,” but “nonviolent and legal” was ultimately taken out and replaced with “legitimate,” according to a person familiar with the drafting who attributed the revision to a routine editing decision.Latest DevelopmentsCard 1 of 3A G.O.P. resolution. More

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      Apathy and Anger in France’s Election Everytown

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      Auxerre has backed the winner in every French presidential race for 40 years. This time, the town’s politics are drifting right, and many struggling residents see little to vote for.AUXERRE, France — With its magnificent 13th-century Gothic cathedral and its prominent statue of Paul Bert, one of the founders of France’s secular school system, Auxerre seems to encapsulate French history. Half-timbered houses line picturesque riverbanks. Vines roll across the surrounding countryside.“Auxerre is the typical French provincial town,” said Crescent Marault, the mayor.So typical, in fact, that for the past 40 years the Burgundy town has consistently voted for the winning presidential candidate, mirroring results at the national level and making the town a political bellwether of sorts.Today, like much of France, Auxerre has experienced a shift to the right, the result of a malaise that stems in part from the difficulties of getting a job in the provincial town, and stagnant earnings for those who are employed — as well as from less tangible fears over immigration and crime.Mr. Marault, the right-wing mayor, came to office in 2020 by beating the former socialist mayor of 19 years. He said insecurity was a growing concern for his constituents.Walking along the Yonne River in Auxerre. The town’s mayor said insecurity was a growing concern for his constituents.Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times“It’s as if some people let themselves be intoxicated by the comments on a national scale,” he said. “But frankly, we cannot consider that Auxerre is a city where there is insecurity.” The crime rate in Auxerre is higher than the national average but far below that in Paris.This drift rightward has been accompanied by growing disillusionment with politics as a whole. Many people seem to have given up on the idea that political change can make any difference to their lives.“The presidential election is a moment of polarization of media attention, but is not found in people’s daily lives,” said Benoît Coquard, a sociologist who specializes in rural life. “It’s important to see this gap between the media bubble and what is actually happening in the lives of people who are uninterested in it.”Valentine Souyri, 38, a bus driver who was watching her children at a playground, said that “the problem is not immigration.”“The problem is that the people who want power don’t know what it’s like to be down here,” said Ms. Souyri, who never fails to vote in elections. But this time, she’s unsure.“Nothing is changing for us here, for the people” Kader Djemaa, an unemployed father of three, said.Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times“None of them talks about what we are really interested in,” she said. “I’ve been looking for an ophthalmologist for my son for a year, I haven’t had a dentist for two years. Here we have nothing, it’s a desert.”“My parents were minimum-wage earners too, but they got by more,” Ms. Souyri added, echoing persistent concerns in France that social mobility is broken and social protections are diminishing.She once told her son, who wanted to become a member of the National Assembly, that “you are a child of a minimum-wage earner, you will be one, your children and grandchildren will too. Welcome to France!”Such frustration over a future perceived as bleak explains some of the shift toward political extremes. In the 2020 first round of regional elections, the far-right National Rally party was second in Auxerre, with 20 percent of the votes — up from 9.3 percent in the first round of the 2007 presidential election.Some businesses in the center of Auxerre have closed.Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York TimesÉmilie Pauron, 37, also a bus driver in Auxerre, has voted for Marine Le Pen, the National Rally’s leader, in every presidential election since 2012.“The state has no money, and there are French people in the countryside who are starving,” Ms. Pauron said as she watched over her daughter — whose father is Congolese — at the same playground on the outskirts of town. “And those who arrive,” she added, alluding to immigrants, “we give them everything. We must stop.”Many in Auxerre mentioned the rising cost of living as their main concern. A recent poll shows a similar feeling at the national level, with 51 percent of French rating purchasing power as their main source of concern, well before immigration.Like in many medium-sized towns of so-called “peripheral France,” Auxerre suffered from the closing of a factory in 1990s — in this case, one that made woodworking tools and used to be among the area’s main employers. Now cut off from the main centers of population and employment, the town is experiencing the disconnect from the governing elite in Paris that drove the Yellow Vest movement three years ago.Many in Auxerre mentioned the rising cost of living as their main concern.Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York TimesWith less than three months to go before the April vote, the presidential campaign is feverishly discussed in the French media.On the right, polls show between 12 and 18 percent support for Ms. Le Pen; a far-right rival, Éric Zemmour; and Valérie Pécresse, the candidate of France’s established conservative party, Les Républicains. They are fighting to unseat President Emmanuel Macron, a centrist, who is leading the polls with 24 percent. The left, hopelessly splintered, has no candidate with more than 10 percent.In the 2007 presidential election, a majority in Auxerre voted for Nicolas Sarkozy — 31 percent in the first round and around 52 percent in the second one, matching the nationwide figures.In the first round of the 2012 election, too, Auxerre voted in the same proportions for the main candidates as at the national level. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, from the hard left, won 11 percent, Ms. Le Pen 17 percent and François Hollande, the socialist who would be elected, roughly 30. In 2017, Mr. Macron came out on top in Auxerre in the first round with 25 percent.A teenager waiting on the street near a high school. Frustration over a future perceived as bleak explains some of the shift toward political extremes in the town.Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York TimesIf Auxerre is a bellwether, it seem curiously detached in this election. For many people, the vote seems to feel as distant and irrelevant as Paris and the elites who live there.Learn More About France’s Presidential ElectionCard 1 of 6The campaign begins. More

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      Macron’s Comments on Algeria Resonate as Elections Loom

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      The French president acknowledged the suffering of colonists who fled Algeria after the war of independence, a group that has long voted heavily in favor of the right in France.PARIS — President Emmanuel Macron of France, addressing a community that has been fertile ground for the far right ahead of presidential elections this spring, on Wednesday acknowledged the suffering of the French and European colonists who fled Algeria after the 1954-62 war of independence and of their descendants.“The 1962 exodus is a tragic page of our national history,” he said, adding that the colonists and their descendants “were not listened to” and “were not welcomed with the affection that every French citizen deserves.”Mr. Macron’s speech was the latest step in a yearlong effort to resolve painful memories of France’s colonial past in Algeria. Following proposals made in a government-commissioned report, he acknowledged crimes committed by the French military and police and the state’s lack of regard for those who fled Algeria and had fought for France.But it also came as Mr. Macron enters the final stretch of a bruising campaign to serve a second five-year term in which his government has moved increasingly to the right on issues prominent in far-right campaigning such as immigration and the place of Islam in France.People fleeing Algeria on a boat, waiting to be taken back to France in 1962.Gamma-Keystone, via Getty ImagesOver the past year, Mr. Macron has recognized the suffering of nearly every community affected by France’s colonial history in Algeria, including independence fighters and immigrants, and Algerians who fought on the French side during the war of independence.“He achieved in six months what had not been done for 60 years,” said Benjamin Stora, a leading historian of the Algerian War and the author of the government-commissioned report.But Mr. Macron’s speech Wednesday recognizing the suffering of the colonists, known as Pieds-Noirs, and their descendants, was notable for its timing three months before an election in a political environment marked by heated debates over immigration and Islam that have echoes of the French colonial past in Algeria.Mr. Macron, right, received the report on colonization and the Algerian war from the historian Benjamin Stora in 2021.Pool photo by Christian HartmannThe trauma of that history continues to shape modern France, with nostalgia on the right and resentment among the country’s large Muslim population.The long shadow of France’s defeat in Algeria looms large in the rhetoric of Éric Zemmour, a far-right candidate for president whose parents left the country in the 1950s and who speaks of “reconquering” a France he says is being colonized by Islam and immigration. His message has resonated with many voters on the far right, leading to a jump in the polls last year that has gradually dissipated in recent months as Mr. Zemmour has struggled to broaden his base of support and attract working-class voters.Mr. Macron last year started addressing the recommendations in the Stora report by acknowledging the brutal killing of a leading Algerian lawyer, Ali Boumendjel, by French soldiers. He also facilitated access to sensitive archives of the Algerian War and was the first French head of state to commemorate the mass killing of Algerian independence protesters by the Paris police 60 years ago.The moves were widely criticized by the French right, which is still reluctant to openly criticize colonization, particularly the party of the far-right leader Marine Le Pen, the National Rally, whose origins are rooted in popular opposition to the end of colonial Algeria.France’s National Archives near Paris. Mr. Macron facilitated access to sensitive archives of the Algerian War.Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York TimesMr. Macron then asked “forgiveness” for the abandonment of Harkis, Algerians who fought for France during the war and have often shown strong support for Ms. Le Pen, his main challenger in the presidential elections in April.The Pieds-Noirs emigrated to Algeria from France and European countries, often as laborers and farmers, while the nation was under French rule, for about 130 years. After Algeria won its independence in 1962, about 800,000 of the colonists fled to France and many others who stayed were massacred. Their fate has long fueled resentment, and nostalgia for the colonial past, feelings that have often translated into support for the far right.In 2017, while campaigning for the French presidency, Mr. Macron called the colonization of Algeria a “crime against humanity,” infuriating Pied-Noir organizations. His words on Wednesday struck a very different tone.French troops in Algiers in 1956.Associated PressFrench paratroopers questioning a captive in Saint Eugene, Algeria, in 1957.Jacques Grevin/Agence France-Presse, via IntercontinentaleResponding to one of the main demands of the Pieds-Noirs, Mr. Macron officially recognized that French soldiers in March 1962 killed dozens of supporters of French Algeria. He also called for the mass killing of Pieds-Noirs by Algerian independence supporters to be “faced and recognized.”Learn More About France’s Presidential ElectionCard 1 of 6The campaign begins. More

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      We Need to Think the Unthinkable About Our Country

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      A year after the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol, the United States seems perhaps even more alarmingly fractious and divided. Regrettably, the right has sustained its support for Donald Trump and continued its assault on American democratic norms.The next national election will almost inevitably be viciously (perhaps violently) contested. It is fair to say that the right-wing threat to the United States — and its apparent goal of laying the groundwork for a power grab, if necessary, in 2024 — is politically existential.Yet many Americans seem to be whistling past the graveyard of American democracy. In particular, there seems to have been little effort so far at think tanks, professional military institutions and universities to build and contemplate the dire scenarios that have become increasingly plausible. And the worst-case scenario is this: The United States as we know it could come apart at the seams.The worst case isn’t necessarily the most likely, but there’s a natural tendency to assign a vanishingly low probability to events that appear to pose insoluble problems and catastrophic outcomes and thus to dismiss them as fanciful.In the 20th century, constructive doomsaying helped prevent the Cold War from becoming a shooting war. It was ultimately worst-case thinking that stabilized nuclear deterrence and staved off nuclear Armageddon. Herman Kahn’s clinical projections of nuclear devastation dazzled and horrified a growing audience — his warnings began with a series of Princeton lectures and eventually became the basis of his best seller “Thinking About the Unthinkable.” The eventual Nobel Prize-winning economist Thomas C. Schelling used game theory to explore the risk that conventional conflict could escalate to the use of nuclear weapons; his work demonstrated the value of arms control and helped establish nuclear deterrence based, however perversely, on mutual assured destruction.In the 1980s, Jonathan Schell’s series of New Yorker essays (and subsequent book), “The Fate of the Earth,” reinvigorated popular alarm about nuclear war and stimulated calls for nuclear disarmament on both sides of the Atlantic. In line with dystopic novels like “On the Beach” by Nevil Shute and movies like “Fail-Safe,” “Dr. Strangelove,” “The Bedford Incident” and “The Day After,” worst-case thinking kept the prospect of nuclear holocaust real and the need to avoid it urgent. Clearly it influenced Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, who seriously contemplated nuclear disarmament in 1986.This urgent brand of collective cultural alertness receded after the Cold War. On the left, worst-casing thinking was blamed for the expansive growth of nuclear arsenals and the ill-fated U.S. war in Vietnam. Now the Republican Party’s embrace of “alternative facts,” aided by the growth of conservative media, has effectively created a separate domestic reality for millions of Americans. Since Jan. 6, 2021, comedians, partisan journalists and public intellectuals have recognized, ridiculed and lamented the state of our democracy and raised the possibility of a “slow-moving coup” (Bill Maher) or a “worst-case scenario” for our politics (Robert Crawford in The Nation). Other columnists and historians (Chauncey DeVega and Max Hastings, for example) have casually mooted the possibility of secession or large-scale political violence in the wake of the 2024 presidential election. A few recent books, like the political scientist Barbara F. Walter’s “How Civil Wars Start” and the journalist Stephen Marche’s “The Next Civil War,” have been discussed.But systematic and dispassionate analysis of such possibilities has not widely emerged. In June 2020, the bipartisan Transition Integrity Project — comprising over 100 former and serving government officials, academics, research analysts, journalists and other experts — held tabletop exercises on four different 2020 election crisis scenarios. Selected teams hypothesized moves and countermoves, responses and counter-responses, and in August 2020 published a broadly prescient report — which suggested that the election could be contested into 2021 and the transition process disrupted. It also included several preventive measures with an eye to 2024-25. Perhaps understandably, given the political climate, most participants were reluctant to identify themselves publicly and only a few talked to the media about the exercise. Two conservative outfits, the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the Claremont Institute, jointly gamed out similar scenarios, concluding that the constitutional order would hold. But these projects were short term and situationally limited and have not generated sustained open-source consideration of the more dire possibilities that have surfaced since Jan. 6.Predictably, far-right groups mobilized to dismiss the Transition Integrity Project’s activities as leftist “psychological warfare,” and some branded it a blueprint for a left-wing coup. That should not stop a reprise of the project’s efforts with respect to the 2024 election. In light of the lack of contingency planning for major violence on Jan. 6 by the Capitol Police and the Department of Homeland Security, such planning is presumably underway at federal law-enforcement agencies and the Pentagon. But that’s not enough.A right-wing minority — including many elected politicians — is now practicing a form of brinkmanship by threatening to unilaterally destroy American democracy, daring what they hope is a timid and somnolent majority to resist them. But that majority has the benefit of warning ahead of 2024.It behooves us to prepare our defenses for the worst. Understandably, the policy focus is now on pre-empting a right-wing steal in the next national election. But success will depend crucially on factors that are beyond control — the midterm elections this year and the identity of the Republican candidate in 2024 — which suggest that focus is misplaced. And even if a steal is thwarted, success might not preclude a coercive challenge of the election results; quite to the contrary, it would provoke one.War games, tabletop exercises, operations research, campaign analyses, conferences and seminars on the prospect of American political conflagration — including insurrection, secession, insurgency and civil war — should be proceeding at a higher tempo and intensity. Scholars of American politics need to pick up the torch from experts on the democratic decline in Europe, who first raised the alarm about growing dangers to American politics. The very process of intellectual interaction and collaboration among influential analysts of different political stripes could reconcile many of them to the undesirability of political upheaval, and thus decrease its likelihood.The overarching idea is, publicly and thoroughly, to probe just how bad things could get precisely to ensure that they never do, and that America’s abject political decay is averted.Jonathan Stevenson, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies and managing editor of Survival, served on the National Security Council staff in the Obama administration and is the author of “Thinking Beyond the Unthinkable.” Steven Simon is a fellow at M.I.T. and a senior analyst at the Quincy Institute. He served in the State Department and on the National Security Council staff in the Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton and Obama administrations.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Let’s Not Invent a Civil War

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      “How Civil Wars Start,” a new book by the political scientist Barbara F. Walter, was cited all over the place in the days around the anniversary of last winter’s riot at the Capitol. The New Yorker’s David Remnick, Vox’s Zack Beauchamp and my colleague Michelle Goldberg all invoked Walter’s work in essays discussing the possibility that the United States stands on the edge of an abyss, with years of civil strife ahead.The book begins with a story from the fall of 2020: the kidnapping plot against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, hatched by a group of right-wing militiamen who opposed Whitmer’s pandemic restrictions. Fortunately “the F.B.I. was on to them” and foiled the plot — but the alleged kidnapping conspiracy, Walter argues, is a harbinger of worse to come. Periods of civil war often “start with vigilantes just like these — armed militants who take violence directly to the people.”Here’s a skeptical question, though: When we say the F.B.I. was “on to” to the plotters, what exactly does that mean? Because at the moment the government’s case against them is a remarkable tangle. Fourteen men have been charged with crimes, based in part on evidence reportedly supplied by at least 12 confidential informants — meaning that the F.B.I. had almost one informant involved for every defendant.And according to reporting from BuzzFeed’s Jessica Garrison and Ken Bensinger, one of these informants, an extremely colorful convicted felon named Stephen Robeson, appears to have been a crucial instigator of the plot. He is alleged to have used government funds to pay for meals and hotel rooms, encouraged people “to vent their anger about governors who enacted Covid-19 restrictions” and “to plan violent actions against elected officials and to acquire weapons and bomb-making materials,” and followed up aggressively, calling potential plotters “nearly every day.”Robeson’s role has become enough of a headache for the prosecution, in fact, that they recently disowned him, declaring that he was actually a “double agent” (meaning triple agent, I think) who betrayed his obligations as an informant by trying to destroy evidence and seeking to warn one of the accused conspirators ahead of his arrest. Prosecutors had already ruled out testimony from an agent who ran one of their key informants, probably because he spent much of 2019 trying to drum up business for his private security firm by touting his F.B.I. casework.Presumably we’ll find out more about all this when the case comes to trial, but for now it’s reasonable to wonder whether Whitmer’s would-be kidnappers would have been prepared to go all the way with their vigilante fantasies, absent some prodding from the feds.And those doubts, in turn, might be reasonably extended to the entire theory of looming American civil war, which assumes something not yet entirely in evidence — a large number of Americans willing to actually put their lives, not just their Twitter rhetoric, on the line for the causes that currently divide our country.Overall, the academic and journalistic literature on America’s divisions offers a reasonably accurate description of increasing American division. The country is definitely more ideologically polarized than it was 20 or 40 years ago; indeed, with organized Christianity’s decline, you could say that it’s more metaphysically polarized as well. We are more likely to hate and fear members of the rival party, more likely to sort ourselves into ideologically homogeneous communities, more likely to be deeply skeptical about public institutions and more likely to hold conspiratorial beliefs — like the belief that Joe Biden and the Democrats stole the 2020 election — that undercut the basic legitimacy of the opposition party’s governance.At the same time, the literature suffers from a serious liberal-bias problem, a consistent naïveté about the left and center’s roles in deepening polarization. For instance, in the Bush and Obama eras there were a lot of takes on the dangers of “asymmetric polarization” — the supposed ideological radicalization of the Republicans relative to the Democrats. Across most of the 2010s, though, it was clearly liberals who moved leftward much more rapidly, while Republicans basically stayed put — and yet somehow the perils of that kind of asymmetry get much less expert attention.Likewise the drama of protest politics in 2020 is often analyzed in a way that minimizes the revolutionary symbolism of the left’s protests — the iconoclasm and the toppled statues, the mayhem around federal buildings and the White House, the zeal to rename and rewrite — and focuses intensely on the right’s response, treating conservative backlash as though it emerges from the reactionary ether rather than as a cyclical response.The other bias in the civil-war literature is toward two related forms of exaggeration. First, an exaggerated emphasis on what Americans say they believe, rather than what (so far, at least) they actually do. It’s absolutely true that if you just look at polling data, you see a lot of beliefs that would seem to license not just occasional protest but some sort of continuing insurrection. This includes not only the Trumpist stolen-election theories but also popular beliefs about recent Republican presidents — that George W. Bush had foreknowledge and allowed Sept. 11 to happen or that the Russians manipulated vote tallies in order to place Donald Trump, their cat’s-paw, in the White House.However, an overwhelming majority of people who hold those kinds of beliefs show no signs of being radicalized into actual violence. For all the talk of liberal “resistance” under Trump, the characteristic left-wing response to the Trump administration was not to join Antifa but to mobilize to elect Democrats; it took the weird conditions of the pandemic and the lockdowns, and the spark of the George Floyd killing, to transmute anti-Trumpism into national protests that actually turned violent.Likewise, despite fears that Jan. 6 was going to birth a “Hezbollah wing” of the Republican Party, there has been no major far-right follow-up to the event, no dramatic surge in Proud Boys or Oath Keepers visibility, no campaign of anti-Biden terrorism. Instead, Republicans who believe in the stolen-election thesis seem mostly excited by the prospect of thumping Democrats in the midterms, and the truest believers are doing the extremely characteristic American thing of running for local office.This has prompted a different liberal fear — that these new officeholders could help precipitate a constitutional crisis by refusing to do their duty in a close election in 2024. But that fear is an example of the other problem of exaggeration in the imminent-civil-war literature, the way the goal posts seem to shift when you question the evocations of Fort Sumter or 1930s Europe.Thus we are told that some kind of major democratic breakdown is likely “absent some radical development” (as Beauchamp puts it); that we are already “suspended between democracy and autocracy” (as Remnick writes); that “the United States is coming to an end” and the only question “is how,” to quote the beginning of Stephen Marche’s new book, “The Next Civil War.” But then it turns out that the most obvious danger is an extremely contingent one, involving a cascade of events in 2024 — a very specific sort of election outcome, followed by a series of very high-risk, unusual radical choices by state legislators and Republican senators and the Supreme Court — that are worth worrying about but not at all the likeliest scenario, let alone one that’s somehow structurally inevitable.Similarly, we are first told that “civil war” is coming, but then it turns out that the term is being used to mean something other than an actual war, that the relevant analogies are periods of political violence like the Irish Troubles or Italy’s “Years of Lead.” And then if you question whether we’re destined to reach even that point, you may be informed that actually the civil war is practically here already — because, Marche writes, “the definition of civil strife starts at twenty-five deaths within a year,” and acts of anti-government violence killed more people than that annually in the later 2010s.That kind of claim strikes me as a ridiculous abuse of language. The United States is a vast empire of more than 330 million people in which at any given time some handful of unhinged people will be committing deadly crimes. And we are also a country with a long history of sporadic armed conflict — mob violence, labor violence, terrorism and riots — interwoven with the normal operation of our politics. If your definition of civil war implies that we are always just a few mass shootings or violent protests away from the brink, then you don’t have a definition at all: You just have a license for perpetual alarmism.I am very aware that I’m always the columnist making some version of this calm-down argument, sometimes to a fault. So I want to stress that the problems that undergird the civil-war hypothesis are serious problems, the divisions in our country are considerable and dangerous, the specific perils associated with a Trump resurgence in 2024 entirely real.But there are also lots of countervailing and complicating forces, and the overall picture is genuinely complex — at least as complex, let’s say, as the informant-riddled plot against Gretchen Whitmer. And as with that conspiracy, it’s worth asking whether the people who see potential insurrection lurking everywhere are seeing a danger rising entirely on its own — or in their alarm are helping to invent it.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram. More

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      Why Republicans Keep Falling for Trump’s Lies

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      When called upon to believe that Barack Obama was really born in Kenya, millions got in line. When encouraged to believe that the 2012 Sandy Hook murder of twenty children and six adults was a hoax, too many stepped up. When urged to believe that Hillary Clinton was trafficking children in the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor with no basement, they bought it, and one of them showed up in the pizza place with a rifle to protect the kids. The fictions fed the frenzies, and the frenzies shaped the crises of 2020 and 2021. The delusions are legion: Secret Democratic cabals of child abusers, millions of undocumented voters, falsehoods about the Covid-19 pandemic and the vaccine.While much has been said about the moral and political stance of people who support right-wing conspiracy theories, their gullibility is itself alarming. Gullibility means malleability and manipulability. We don’t know if the people who believed the prevailing 2012 conspiracy theories believed the 2016 or 2020 versions, but we do know that a swath of the conservative population is available for the next delusion and the one after that. And on Jan. 6, 2021, we saw that a lot of them were willing to act on those beliefs.The adjective gullible comes from the verb to gull, which used to mean to cram yourself with something as well as to cheat or dupe, to cram someone else full of fictions. “Not doubting I could gull the Government,” wrote Daniel Defoe in 1701, and Hannah Arendt used the word gullible repeatedly in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” published in 1951. “A mixture of gullibility and cynicism is prevalent in all ranks of totalitarian movements, and the higher the rank the more cynicism weighs down gullibility,” she wrote. That is, among those gulling the public, cynicism is a stronger force; among those being gulled, gullibility is, but the two are not so separate as they might seem.Distinctions between believable and unbelievable, true and false, are not relevant for people who have found that taking up outrageous and disprovable ideas is instead an admission ticket to a community or an identity. Without the yoke of truthfulness around their necks, they can choose beliefs that flatter their worldview or justify their aggression. I sometimes think of this straying into fiction as a kind of libertarianism run amok — we used to say “you’re entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts.” Too many Americans now feel entitled to their own facts. In this too-free marketplace of ideas, they can select or reject ideas, facts or histories to match their goals, because meaning has become transactional.But gullibility means you believe something because someone else wants you to. You’re buying what they’re selling. It’s often said that the joiners of cults and subscribers to delusions are driven by their hatred of elites. But in the present situation, the snake oil salesmen are not just Alex Jones, QAnon’s master manipulators and evangelical hucksters. They are senators, powerful white Christian men, prominent media figures, billionaires and their foundations, even a president. (Maybe the belief that these figures are not an elite is itself a noteworthy delusion.)It’s true that these leading lights of the right often portray themselves as embattled outsiders. But they’re not; they’re the status quo gone rogue. They are still powerful, still insiders, but something even more potent is changing — you could call it the zeitgeist or the arc of justice or historical momentum or just demographic reality. The world is moving on; those who’d rather it stand still are eager to push narratives depicting these shifts as degeneration and white Christian heterosexual America as profoundly imperiled.A lot of conspiracy theories are organic or at least emerge from true believers on the margins when it comes to topics like extraterrestrials, but those at the top of conservative America have preached falsehoods that further the interest of elites, and those at the bottom have embraced them devoutly. Though when we talk about cults and conspiracies we usually look to more outlandish beliefs, climate denial and gun obsessions both fit this template.Both originated as industry agendas that were then embraced by both right-wing politicians and the right-leaning public. For decades, the fossil fuel industry pumped out ads and reports, and supported lobbyists and front groups misleading the public on the science and import of climate change. The current gun cult is likewise the result of the National Rifle Association and the gun industry pushing battlefield-style weapons and a new white male identity — more paramilitary than rural hunter — along with fear, rage and racist dog whistles. I think of it as a cult, because guns serve first as totems of identity and belonging, and because the beliefs seem counterfactual about guns as sources of safety rather than danger when roughly 60 percent of gun deaths are suicides and self-defense by gun is a surpassingly rare phenomenon.Right-wing political fictions have a long history, from Joe McCarthy’s bluffs about communists in the government to the United Nations’ black helicopters of 1990s paranoia to an endless stream of stories portraying immigrants, Jews, Muslims, gay men then and trans people now as sinister threats. The digital age and then the pandemic caused many of us to withdraw further from contact with people unlike ourselves, and pundits and social media offered those “others” back as phantasms and gargoyles leering at us through the filters.We all have confirmation biases, and of course leftists and moderates have also entertained delusions and paranoia — about extraterrestrials, vaccines and political assassinations, for instance. But mainstream figures in the center and the left are not pushing radically counterfactual stuff akin to the conservative lies about Covid-19, let alone trying to instigate or whitewash the kind of violence we saw on Jan. 6. Democrats operate on the basis of reasonably factual premises and usually accept the authority of science, law and history, while Republicans uninhibitedly push whatever’s most convenient for their goals and incendiary for their base. More

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      Another Far-Right Group Is Scrutinized in Effort to Aid Trump

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      The organization, called 1st Amendment Praetorian, is not as well known as the Oath Keepers or the Proud Boys, but it worked closely with pro-Trump forces in the months after the 2020 election.Days after a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 last year, federal law enforcement officials pursued two high-profile extremist groups: the far-right nationalist Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers militia. Members of both organizations were quickly arrested on attention-grabbing charges, accused of plotting to interfere with the certification of the 2020 vote count.Now congressional investigators are examining the role of another right-wing paramilitary group that was involved in a less publicly visible yet still expansive effort to keep President Donald J. Trump in power: the 1st Amendment Praetorian.Known in shorthand as 1AP, the group spent much of the postelection period working in the shadows with pro-Trump lawyers, activists, business executives and military veterans to undermine public confidence in the election and to bolster Mr. Trump’s hopes of remaining in the White House.By their own account, members of the 1st Amendment Praetorian helped to funnel data on purported election fraud to lawyers suing to overturn the vote count. They guarded celebrities like Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, at “Stop the Steal” rallies, where huge crowds gathered to demand that Mr. Trump remain in office. And they supported an explosive proposal to persuade the president to declare an emergency and seize the country’s voting machines in a bid to stay in power.None of 1AP’s top operatives have been arrested in connection with the Capitol riot, and it remains unclear how much influence they exerted or how seriously criminal investigators are focused on them. Still, the group had men on the ground outside the building on Jan. 6 and others at the Willard Hotel, near some of Mr. Trump’s chief allies. And in the days leading up to the assault, 1AP’s Twitter account posted messages suggesting that the group knew violence was imminent.“There may be some young National Guard captains facing some very, very tough choices in the next 48 hours,” read one message posted by the group on Jan. 4.Last month, citing some of these concerns, the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack issued a subpoena to Robert Patrick Lewis, the leader of 1AP. On the same day, it sent similar requests to Enrique Tarrio, the chairman of the Proud Boys, and Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers.Understand the U.S. Capitol RiotOn Jan. 6, 2021, a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol.What Happened: Here’s the most complete picture to date of what happened — and why.Timeline of Jan. 6: A presidential rally turned into a Capitol rampage in a critical two-hour time period. Here’s how.Key Takeaways: Here are some of the major revelations from The Times’s riot footage analysis.Death Toll: Five people died in the riot. Here’s what we know about them.Decoding the Riot Iconography: What do the symbols, slogans and images on display during the violence really mean?As part of their inquiry, congressional investigators have obtained numerous audio recordings of 1AP members and are trying to determine how they fit into the broader investigation. Mr. Lewis did not respond to multiple requests for comment, but in recent months he has told parts of his story in online videos and podcasts.Made up largely of Special Forces veterans and former intelligence officials, 1AP was founded in September 2020 to protect Trump supporters from harassment at rallies and to safeguard free speech rights from “tyrannical, Marxist subversive groups,” Mr. Lewis wrote in a thread of tweets announcing the creation of the group. In a video attached to the thread, he said it would be “a tactical mistake” to discuss how many members 1AP had, noting only that it was several times more than the dozen in a standard Special Forces operational unit.By the time he founded 1st Amendment Praetorian, Mr. Lewis, who once served as a medic for a Special Forces team, had been out of the Army for a decade and reinvented himself as an author and commentator with an interest in military issues and right-wing politics. Among his works were two action novels describing how the Green Berets saved the American homeland from a fictional invasion and a memoir depicting his rise from poverty and adoption to success in the 10th Special Forces Group, an elite unit stationed in Germany.1AP’s first “mission” — protecting conservative V.I.P.s — came in October 2020, when the group provided security at a march in Washington led by the Walk Away Foundation, an organization that seeks to persuade Democratic voters to leave the party, Mr. Lewis said in a YouTube video posted that December. The foundation’s leader, Brandon Straka, a former hairstylist in New York, was among those arrested in the Capitol attack. Court papers suggest that he recently began to cooperate with the government.At least one member of the 1st Amendment Praetorian was on the ground outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, while the group’s leader said he was at the Willard Hotel.Jason Andrew for The New York TimesAt that event and others, 1AP provided more than bodyguards, Mr. Lewis said. Its protective detail also included “low-viz operators” dressed in plainclothes moving in the crowd. “We had eyes and ears everywhere,” he added.As the presidential election drew closer, Mr. Lewis branched out beyond personal protection and started giving interviews, casting himself as a security expert, to right-wing news outlets, including those connected to the QAnon conspiracy theory. Among his claims — so far unsubstantiated — was that “professional analysts” working for 1AP had infiltrated “encrypted forums” visited by members of the loose left-wing collective known as antifa and had discovered plans for a nationwide attack.“Our intelligence shows that no matter who wins the election, they are planning a massive ‘antifa Tet offensive’ bent on destroying the global order,” he told Fox News two days before Election Day.Once the votes were cast, Mr. Lewis turned his attention back toward guarding pro-Trump luminaries at rallies in Washington, where throngs of people showed up in support of the lie that the election had been rigged. One of his clients was Ali Alexander, a prominent “Stop the Steal” organizer, who was a featured speaker at the so-called Million MAGA March on Nov. 14, 2020. (Mr. Alexander has since given testimony to the House select committee.)Around the same time, 1AP became involved in another project connected to challenging the election. Members of the group, as Mr. Lewis put it in his video in December, began to scour the internet for “OSINT” — or open source intelligence — about allegations of election fraud. Whatever evidence they found, he said, they sent to Sidney Powell, a Dallas-based lawyer who filed four federal lawsuits in late 2020 contesting the results of the presidential vote.The lawsuits, which ultimately failed and resulted in a federal judge imposing sanctions on Ms. Powell, described without any credible evidence a plot by a cabal of international powers to hack U.S. voting machines and flip the count away from Mr. Trump.Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 10The House investigation. More