More CVE for White People: The Radicalization Process Revisited

[Guno צְבִי]

Less than a week before Donald Trump’s election, we wrote a piece provocatively entitled “CVE for White People: The Trumpist Movement and the Radicalization Process.” The article, whose title referenced the approach of “countering violent extremism” or CVE, argued that the Trump movement should be understood in a fashion roughly similar to the way scholars of extremism understand the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood—that is, as an illiberal movement embedded in a country’s electoral system that has an ambiguous relationship to violence and an overtly violent fringe. “Trumpism, like the Brotherhood, is a political movement built on the mass mobilization of faith—in the one case religious faith and in the other case faith in a single charismatic individual,” we wrote. “Like the Brotherhood, it is a movement that exists within an electoral system but which has a deeply ambivalent relationship with the democratic norms of that system, a movement which both formally rejects violence yet manages also to tolerate or encourage it.” On “the fringes of both movements are radicals, some of whom are violent,” we argued. “The line between the Brotherhood and certain ultra-conservative Salafist and even violent Islamist groups in Egypt is a somewhat fuzzy one. This is more similar to than different from the Trump campaign which has, and often cheerfully accepts, the overt support of domestic white supremacists and members of the so-called ‘alt-right’ movement.” And, of course, “Both movements have also spawned terrorists.”

https://www.lawfareblog.com/more-cve-white-people-radicalization-process-revisited