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Kathleen Hennessey

David Halbfinger | The New York Times

Im thrilled to announce that Kathleen Hennessey, one of the most knowledgeable, skilled and gifted political editors around, will be our new deputy politics editor for enterprise.

Kathleen comes to The Times from The Associated Press, where she has served as a White House reporter and editor, deputy Washington bureau chief and, most recently, as regional politics editor, charged with surfacing and elevating the best political stories taking place outside of Washington.

In that role, as in earlier ones, Kathleen quickly established herself as a driver of news coverage, sharp-eyed trendspotter, exceptional story framer and loyalty-inspiring nurturer of talent. She spearheaded much of A.P.s coverage of the fight over democratic fundamentals like access to the ballot and the administration of elections, the forces behind school-board battles and the divisions within the G.O.P. During the 2020 campaign, she co-edited America Disrupted, a deep, data-driven series exploring the American electorate amid the turmoil of the pandemic.

She not only gets politics, she gets how politics is perceived outside the Acela corridor: After overhearing parents in her sons Little League complaining about mask rules and curriculum fights, she pushed for more political coverage of school boards and culture wars coverage that we and other major competitors often wound up following.

The word of mouth on Kathleen is a bit, well, beyond: Amy Fiscus called her hands-down the best framer of stories Ive ever worked with. Elizabeth Kennedy, who shared the title of A.P.s deputy Washington bureau chief with Kathleen, said she learned more from her about Washington, how to write about it, how to cover it, than from anyone else and said Kathleen knows politics better than anyone I know.

Thats no surprise, really, when you find out that Kathleen has politics in her genes. Her grandfather, Thomas Byrne, was the mayor of her hometown, St. Paul, Minn. Her parents met at a political convention. And her first job after graduating from Boston College was at a museum dedicated to Hubert H. Humphrey.

After journalism school at Berkeley, Kathleen went on to cover campaigns and government at every level, beginning at the statehouse in Carson City, Nev., where she owned coverage of the debate over taxing brothels. Her last reporting job was covering the Obama White House, first for the Los Angeles Times and Tribune newspapers and then for The A.P.

Shell start with us on Jan. 10. Please welcome her to The Times.

Originally posted here:
Kathleen Hennessey is joining The New York Times - Editor And Publisher Magazine

Far-right domestic extremists like those who attacked the US Capitol a year ago have faced criminal charges from law enforcement and crackdowns from social media companies. But they have not gone away.

On the contrary, they have evolved and adopted new strategies while regrouping, recruiting, and muscling their way into the mainstream with worrying success, experts say. And their ranks are growing.

Many of us thought these groups would splinter and fall apart and go underground after the FBI started going after them. But that hasnt really been the case, Heidi Beirich, cofounder and chief strategy officer of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, a nonprofit focused on transnational hate and far-right movements, told BuzzFeed News.

Indeed, as the country marks the anniversary of one of the darkest days in American history and prepares for the consequential midterm elections in the fall where extremists, such as MAGA supporters, could again try to undermine the will of voters extremism researchers and government officials are warning that homegrown extremists pose a greater threat to our democracy than they did before Jan. 6, 2021. They just look a bit different now.

The threat of domestic extremism today is perhaps less obvious. Were not seeing the Proud Boys organize massive marches in Washington, DC, or militias storming capitol buildings every weekend. But whats happening is gravely serious, Jared Holt, a resident fellow at the Atlantic Councils Digital Forensic Research Lab, told BuzzFeed News.

In a new report published Tuesday, Holt wrote that domestic extremists were battered by the blowback [they] faced after the Capitol riot, but not broken by it. In fact, the sentiments espoused by domestic extremist causes are as public and insidious as ever.

Far-right extremists, he told BuzzFeed News, are increasingly seeking legitimacy by latching onto mainstream conservative causes; they are taking a decentralized approach, preferring to operate in small groups or cells; and they are switching their focus from national actions to hyperlocal initiatives, like focusing on school board and city council meetings.

There have been several reports in recent months about far-right extremists and conspiracy theorists, including members of the neo-fascist street gang the Proud Boys, showing up and intimidating officials making decisions on health measures and school initiatives at community meetings.

Holts report highlights how extremists ideas are increasingly finding fertile ground among disaffected conservatives and leading voices in the Republican Party who are teaming with them to fight culture wars on topics like vaccines, race, and education.

Beirich said that shift is a serious cause for alarm.

When I look back at the last year, the thing that I find most astounding isnt really about the groups wed label extremist its about whats happened with the Republican party The infiltration of extremists into its ranks, she said.

She cited extremist and white supremacist ideas such as the great replacement theory the false idea that white people are being purposely replaced by nonwhite immigrants being peddled by GOP politicians and Fox News commentators as evidence of the radicalization of the conservative right and extremism going mainstream.

Im hard-pressed to even call them fringe ideas anymore, she said. Theyre not confined to extremists. You cant call it a fringe idea; its a mainstream idea among conservatives.

The experts concerns were backed Tuesday by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who said that authorities over the past year have improved and strengthened our approach to combating this dynamic, evolving threat.

In the wake of the pro-Trump mob attack on the Capitol, President Joe Biden made combating domestic violent extremism one of his top priorities and enlisted leaders across government agencies to help. Department of Justice and FBI officials, in particular, have led the charge. They have testified in front of Congress on several occasions about the threat posed by extremists, particularly those on the far-right side of the political spectrum. With Jan. 6, they are at the forefront of not only the festering extremist problem but also one of the largest criminal investigations in US history.

More than 700 people, including several with military experience and many associated with white supremacist and anti-government extremist groups like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Three Percenters, have been charged in the sweeping federal probe into the Capitol attack that was blamed for the deaths of five people and dozens more injuries. The images of the rioters stomping on Capitol police officers, crashing through barricades, bashing in windows with poles adorned with the American Flag, and storming the halls of Congress are seared into the American consciousness.

While the Biden administration has made some strides in the fight against domestic violent extremists, Mayorkas said the threat of them remains very grave.

Some experts think the US government was slow to respond and will have trouble tackling the problem of extremism.

Beirich said authorities should have taken steps a decade ago to quash the rise of far-right extremism and white nationalism, when this stuff really was on the fringe [and] it could have had a massive impact.

Now, with it so deeply entrenched in the mainstream political right and white supremacist and anti-government groups backing them up with threats of violence, she fears it may be too late to turn the tide.

If 2024 is contested like 2020 was, she added, referring to the upcoming midterm elections, were going to have major civil unrest in this country.

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The Threat Posed By Domestic Extremists Is Even Greater A Year After The Capitol Attack - BuzzFeed News

Coronavirus cases are once again exploding in the United Kingdom. Yet Prime Minister Boris Johnsons Conservative government, dominated by extremist ideologues who value their notion of individual freedom above the public good, is again unwilling to impose necessary measures a reluctance that has already cost innumerable lives in previous COVID-19 waves.

Last month, about a hundred Tory Members of Parliament voted against a very modest government plan that mandates the wearing of masks and vaccine certificates in some places. As hospitals fill up again with COVID-19 patients, they talk about an ancient British tradition of liberty. Were not a papers please society, Tory MP Marcus Fysh claimed, This is not Nazi Germany.

Given such anti-government rhetoric, you might not guess that Johnson, who has been dogged by reports he was partying at his official residence during a general lockdown last year, and has often appeared maskless in public spaces, matches Donald Trump in his disdain for public health regulations.

Or that the British media, overwhelmingly right wing, provides the background chorus for freedom from COVID-19 restrictions. In fact, it led the Tory celebrations of Freedom Day in July this year.

The celebrations were as foolish as they were premature. These days, the world watches again in appalled fascination as omicron spreads fast, and rowdy invocations of personal responsibility and individual choice delay preventive moves in the United Kingdom and, by extension, everywhere else.

Public-spiritedness is by no means alien to Britain; its present-day embodiment, the National Health Service, was widely applauded during the early weeks of the pandemic. Tory fanboys of Winston Churchill like to invoke his lonely defiance of Nazi Germany as they insist on their right to remain maskless. But there is no record of Tory freedom-lovers keeping their lights on at night during the blackout enforced by Churchills government in 1940.

Contemporary Tory libertarianism derives from the American ideologue Ayn Rand more than any ancient British tradition of liberty. And the present-day contempt for collective welfare is largely a legacy of the revolution launched by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. Thatcher notoriously doubted the existence of society; Reagan claimed that the nine most terrifying words are Im from the government, and Im here to help.

The strange thing is that the battles launched by Reaganites and Thatcherites against tax rates, protectionist industry and labor union privilege were won a long time ago. Libertarians in the United States even managed to discredit major government involvement in health care.

So, what makes Anglo-American individualists so dangerously inflexible, even self-destructively fanatical, today?

Two recent events have spoiled the show for them. First, the rise of China, which proved again after the previous successes of Japan and the East Asian countries that government intervention is crucial to national success in education and health care as well as industrial growth and technological innovation.

The other, arguably more unnerving event, which has occurred right at home, is the increasing assertiveness of historically silent, often disenfranchised peoples: women, non-white immigrant populations, and sexual minorities.

During two centuries of Western expansion and hegemony, a minority of white men enjoyed a relative freedom to do and say whatever they wanted without much regard for the rights and sensitivities of others. Unsurprisingly, many of them loathe the demand from previously voiceless peoples that old attitudes ranging from the narcissistic to the selfish and cruel be re-examined and, preferably, abandoned. The demand is frequently and unfairly derided as woke.

Those still clinging to political power and cultural capital would rather stoke conflict and polarization than admit that their societies are irrevocably diverse, and ought to acknowledge the dignity of people who were once systematically degraded by the gender and racial hierarchies erected by white men.

They naturally fear and loathe scholarship that underlines long-established facts: that the unique wealth and power of a male minority in the West was built on slavery and imperialism rather than any innate superiority, and that the white mans burden was actually carried by black, brown and yellow men.

Instead, faced with the smallest challenges to their moral and intellectual authority, many historically advantaged males have chosen to double down, accusing activists and intellectuals of promoting cancel culture and historical revisionism.

Johnsons government has prosecuted its war on woke with remarkable zeal and clinical efficiency throughout the pandemic. Indeed, rightwingers talking of freedom are shriller than ever before in Europe and America. Their battle against COVID-19 restrictions has become part of their larger, and very desperate, war against political correctness an existential struggle, no less, something as urgent as the existential struggle of many today against severe illness and premature death caused by COVID-19.

The consequences for the rest of us are incalculable. While freedom-loving Tories make their last stand, the mounting evidence from elsewhere is that coordinated action by governments and solidarity among citizens are what will contain the pandemic.

Indeed, the lesson from the U.K. epicenter of delta and now omicron, and home to a dysfunctional government and failed ideology is profoundly ominous: That in societies deliberately divided by culture wars, trust and confidence in an unscrupulous ruling class will inevitably run low, and the pandemic is what will enjoy true freedom.

Pankaj Mishra is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. His books include Age of Anger: A History of the Present, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia, and Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond.

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Boris Johnson and the woeful and costly Tory war on woke - The Japan Times

I moved to Hull in 1971 because it was the most unlikely place in the world to start an experimental theatre company plus rents were cheap and social security were unlikely to find us any proper jobs. I was 23 and I believed that theatre could change the world. I still do.

I wanted to make uncompromising, provocative, funny, tough, sexy plays about people you didnt see in plays, for people who didnt go to the theatre. I wanted Hull Truck to be a nuisance.

Number 71 Coltman Street was cold and dark. On the ground floor was a room full of broken furniture and feral cats. We lived and rehearsed upstairs. The play Children of the Lost Planet was devised over 12 weeks. It was about a bunch of young people of our age living in Hull and trying to negotiate their way through the minefield of sex and drugs and rocknroll always write what you know about.

The winter of 1972 was freezing. We only had a small fan heater and rehearsed under a tent of blankets. The heater blew up so we burnt the broken chairs from downstairs. We bought a clapped-out Morris van for 35 and a lad from the youth theatre stole us a tax disc.

We didnt have many bookings, possibly because the administration office was the phone box outside.

When we performed Children of the Lost Planet in York, the local paper wondered why we wanted to bring such disgusting people to the stage. On the way to our first London show the van broke down and we abandoned it in a pig farm in Gilberdyke. We hitched to the gig with the props and costumes.

But we carried on. After Children of the Lost Planet came The Weekend After Next, The Knowledge, Oh What!, Bridgets House, Ooh La La! and Still Crazy After All These Years. We performed countless kids shows, pub shows and musical cabarets. Our quest for always telling the uncomfortable truth often got us into trouble. Ironically The Knowledge getting banned in Manchester proved to be our biggest break. The theatre took exception to a rude line spoken by the ex-biker dope dealer Dooley. The day the show was pulled off there was a rave review in the Guardian, which the next day printed a piece about the ridiculous ban. We loaded up the van and headed straight for the Bush theatre in London where we performed an impromptu showcase gig. The word had got round, and we got a standing ovation. The theatre immediately booked us for a month in November. The run was a sellout.

After that followed grants, wages, a proper van, rave reviews and a telephone.

We toured the length of the country garnering accolades and abuse in equal measure. One particular scene from Bridgets House in 1976 caused a lot of fuss. Bridget (Rachel Bell) and Mo (Cass Patton) are discussing their sex lives. At one point Bridget observes that most men wouldnt know what a clitoris was if it jumped up and bit them on the leg.

One night in Gainsborough a couple in the audience split up during the scene. He stormed out and drove off into the night. We had to give her a lift home in the truck. That same year we were invited to perform Bridgets House at the new National Theatre.

One of the few people who saw those early plays was a very young Richard Bean. When he told me he was going to write 71 Coltman Street, a dramatised story of Hull Truck, he said I would hate it. I dont. Richard has written a terrific show. Not a word of it is actually true of course, but he has captured the spirit of what he thinks the spirit of Hull Truck was. Thats not an easy thing to do when most theatres seem to be giving in to neo-puritan censorship and politically confected culture wars.

The bargain of real, proper theatre is when a group of human beings on stage get together with a group of human beings in the audience to fearlessly celebrate their human being-ness. Pass it on.

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I wanted to be a nuisance: the riotous rise of Hull Truck - The Guardian

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 coalescinglike an array of magnets pulling one another nearin 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 commissions vice chair stepped off-screen and returned brandishing his rifle. Closer to Michigans 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 notthe 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.

David Frum: Dont let anyone normalize January 6

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 days 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 Courts 1954 ruling that the Constitution forbids official segregation in public schools. The intimacy of the federal government intruding on whom ones 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. Arkansass governor ordered the states National Guard to block nine Black students from integrating a Little Rock high school. Law enforcement took a side. One notorious Mississippi sheriff, Neshoba Countys Lawrence Rainey, was suspected of playing a role in the murder of three civil-rights workers.

From the September 2021 issue: His name was Emmett Till

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 todays mainstream causessuch as opposition to COVID-vaccine mandates and disputes about school curriculaas 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 Americas right.

Anne Applebaum: The people in charge see an opportunity

Commentators, particularly on the right, have been chattering about civil war for some time. Since Americas 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 dont 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 dont 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 Pinochets coup. India, long praised as the worlds largest democracy, recently dropped to partly free in Freedom Houses ranking after its popularly elected governmentsupported by riots and upheld by Hindu-nationalist policepassed 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 arent 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.

Robert A. Pape and Keven Ruby: The Capitol rioters arent like other extremists

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 militarys recent initiatives to curb radical behavior are at best a first step.

Still more worrying is the politicization of state National Guards. In November, Oklahomas governor fired the states 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 governments authority over military forces.

The U.S. military, however, has a long tradition of disciplined political neutralitya 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 Trumps pardon of its board member Joe Arpaio. One Michigan sheriff is refusing to uphold the secretary of states 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 todays militant progressivism and multiculturalism.

Read: Trumps next coup has already begun

Jim Crow ended thanks to a federal government that worked assiduouslygoaded by community leadersto stop impunity, often against the will of local law enforcement and politicians who had gone rogue in states such as Mississippi. Bidens 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 Floyds 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 911well, unsympathetic local police might respond a trifle too late. Elected officials trying to right these wrongs might find their children facing threats at schooland then be told that the intimidation just doesnt 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 fightingor 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.

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What Gang-Backed Government Could Do to America - The Atlantic