In a Q&A for The American Prospect, Nixonland author Rick Perlstein and David Neiwert, who has spent decades covering right-wing extremism, discuss “The Election Story Nobody Wants to Talk About.” Neiwert, in particular, thinks we’re in for a wave of domestic terrorism regardless of how November’s election turns out.
The key section:
So let’s talk scenarios. What if Trump wins?
There are two components. One is the immigrant front, the whole Minutemen ethos is going to come into play here, where these guys armed with AR-15s will claim we’re just supplementing the government; we’re just rounding people up and serving them up to the Border Patrol. Which is what they did in Arizona for quite a few years. But this will spread to the national scale.
The second component, it’s pretty obvious that Trump and his minions basically hope that they can work the electoral count to a point where they can force the outcome of the election to either go through the Republican Congress or the Republican Supreme Court. But either way, it will be a de facto installment of a dictator. Then there will be massive protests—I think quite deservedly so. And the Three Percenters, militias, the Proud Boys, who have all been gearing up for this, are going to come out to play, not just defending the Trump administration but attacking the protesters. And doing so with reckless abandon. They’ll just call them “antifa”—[they] have a ready-made excuse.
If we’re talking about the kind of rhetoric we’re seeing in right-wing Telegram spaces, they’re basically talking about how it will be “decided by the bullet box, not the ballot box.”
What happens if the Democrats win?
Even a Joe Biden–sized victory, I think, could lead to instability. There will be contested states, like we saw in Arizona as well as Georgia. These actors will show up at ballot-counting centers, as well as at any other sort of body involved in counting and certifying the votes. We certainly saw in the spring of 2020, these armed bodies of men entering state legislatures. I think that this is their hope: that they can create a lot of chaos in places like Arizona and Georgia so that they can’t actually carry out their votes, can’t actually certify the votes. Then they will say, “Well, we’ll now throw it to the state legislatures.”
Do you see any coordination on that between officeholders and paramilitary actors?
I don’t know that there is any communication. A lot of it is just that they’re all swimming in the same soup.
And if Harris is inaugurated? Are we in the clear?
No. I think that we’ll have at least a year or two of dedicated domestic terrorism against various government entities, as well as liberal figures, including stepped-up attacks against drag queens. They’ll lean quite heavily into the Christian nationalist authoritarian agenda, against anyone supporting the, um, “demonic liberal agenda” …
Do you think appropriate law enforcement preparations are being made?
No. Nobody even talks about it, Rick. That’s why this is a problem. Nobody is even recognizing that this is building.
To counter this effectively, obviously you want to have the DOJ tuned in and ready, and I’m not sure that they are. Certainly, the FBI has shown itself to be extremely problematic under Christopher Wray in terms of the ongoing presence of dedicated Trumpists within the FBI. That’s the wild card. Law enforcement is our main guardrail for these kinds of things, and we have Trumpist cops working on the local level, we have them working on the state level, and we have them working on the federal level.
I think they actually played a large role in our failure to prosecute these January 6th insurrectionists adequately. Just think about how the Secret Service deleted all their freaking texts. And likewise, the FBI was not particularly forthcoming about their own internal communication regarding Proud Boys and Oath Keepers prior to January 6th, but we know that they were looking entirely in the wrong direction. They were planning on antifa showing up in Washington and creating these riots! And that was part of Trump’s plan, too: That was going to enable him to unleash the Insurrection Act. And then they didn’t show up. So they were just left to fight with the cops, right. But they will continue to throw that bogeyman out there.
The problem is that affects law enforcement, because we have a lot of law enforcement who fall for this stuff! Who watch Fox News, and believe that antifa is this deep, dark threat to America.
Is the media ready?
No. None of them are considering it as a factor. I think it’s amazing that someone like Amanda Moore, who did this incredible undercover work exposing these neo-Nazis’ connections to the Republican Party, she can’t even get an editor to pick up her work. All these editors and all these producers are all like, “That’s not interesting anymore, we don’t care about that stuff.” They are basically dismissing the problem: “We don’t need to keep talking about that sort of thing.”
Is this overwrought? Perhaps. Both men are clearly on the left and have made careers out of diagnosing conservative ideology as a dangerous pathology.
Doing a bit of background work, I came across George Will’s 2008 review of Nixonland for the New York Times. It’s critical, of course, but quite laudatory in parts and, I think, fair. This passage, toward the end of the review, stands out with the advantage of hindsight:
“How did Nixonland end?” Perlstein asks in the book’s last line. “It has not ended yet.” But almost every page of Perlstein’s book illustrates the sharp contrast rather than a continuity with America today. It almost seems as though Perlstein, who was born in 1969, is reluctant to let go of the excitement he has experienced secondhand through the archives he has ransacked to such riveting effect.
“We Americans,” he says, “are not killing or trying to kill one another anymore for reasons of ideology, or at least for now. Remember this: This war has ratcheted down considerably. But it still simmers on.”
Not really. America has long since gone off the boil. The nation portrayed in Perlstein’s compulsively readable chronicle, the America of Spiro Agnew inciting “positive polarization” and the New Left laboring to “heighten the contradictions,” is long gone.
So exquisitely sensitive are Americans today, they worked themselves into a lather of disapproval when Hillary Clinton said that Lyndon Johnson as well as Martin Luther King was important in enacting civil rights legislation. There has not been a white male secretary of state for 11 years. Today a woman and an African-American are competing relatively civilly for the right to run for president against the center-right—more center than right—senator who occupies the seat once held by Goldwater. Whoever wins will not be president of Nixonland.
It turns out, both Perlstein and Will were right. From the standpoint of 2008, the notion that the nation was anywhere near as polarized as it was in 1972, much less 1968, seemed absurd. But that election (and the Great Recession that would mark its decisive turning point) presaged a turn to radicalization. Donald Trump was a central figure in pushing the insidious idea that Obama wasn’t really an American. While there was certainly astroturfing at work, the bipartisan bailouts to mitigate the economic disaster helped drive the rise of the Tea Party (and the less sustained Occupy Wall Street movement) which raged that the elites of both parties were in the thrall of Big Business at the expense of the Little Man.
While we’re still not at 1968 levels of violence, we’re closer to it than we’ve been in decades.
