Why So Little Terrorism?

[Valin]

NY Times:

Ross Douthat

4/17/13

 

With ricin-laced letters suddenly showing up in Washington D.C., I worry a little that I’m tempting fate by writing about the rarity of organized terrorism in early 21st century America. But hopefully one more post won’t hurt. So, picking up where my last one left off, here are three theories about why our culture seems to be producing relatively few people with the combination of ideological commitment, organizational competence and zeal that has sparked and sustained terrorist campaigns in other times and places:

 

(Snip)

 

I find all of these ideas persuasive, but they still feel a little bit incomplete. Like Saletan I fear that we’ll see more Boston-style atrocities in the near future, but even his examples of failed and foiled plots don’t add up to anything like the kind of sustained campaign that everyone feared we’d face, understandably, after 9/11. The Pape thesis explains why America would face more suicide attacks overseas than domestically, but in a nation with so many immigrant communities it’s easy to imagine the logic of suicide terrorism taking hold among groups with ties to Iraq or Saudi Arabia or Palestine in ways that happily haven’t actually happened.

 

And yes, the collapse of Communism as both a reality and an ideal has removed one of the most powerful drivers of revolutionary violence. But there are still plenty of issues that inspire deep, near-irreconcilable disagreements in ways that are directly linked to matters of life and death. The debates over American wars and foreign policy, abortion, and (at least from the vantage of some greens) environmentalism all fall into this category, and these issues have all inspired some sort of violent fringe either today or in the relatively recent past. Yet on all of them the center has mostly held of late: There was no Iraq-era equivalent of the Weathermen, the number of abortion-related murders spiked in the 1990s and then fell, and eco-terrorism remains a fairly minor phenomenon despite the recent political setbacks for mainstream environmentalism. Similarly, the Great Recession led to spasms of populism and protest … but no real organized violence, whether on the left or on the right.

 

This is all a blessing, obviously. Given human nature and human history, though, I still think it’s a bit of a surprise.