A Tale of Two Divergent Approaches to American Right-Wing Extremism

With the election less than two months away, at rallies, in interviews, and on social media Trump continues to reiterate old complaints: the 2020 election was stolen from him; the deep state is out to get him—and, he has implied, he will respond by jailing those deep state opponents; disloyal civil servants stabbed him in the back—and, he has intimated, he will repay them by firing thousands of non-partisan bureaucrats; undocumented immigrants are stealing jobs, illegally voting, slaughtering innocent Americans. And so on. During the September 10 debate with Harris, he leaned into the debunked notion that immigrants in Ohio were stealing pets to eat. He refuses to commit to accepting the election result if he loses (though he recently announced that he will not be running in 2028 if he does). He reposts on social media other users’ comments about televised military tribunals for his enemies.

Time and again, Trump has ramped up the language of violence and intimidation. And in recent months, some of that anger and violence has boomeranged back at Trump—witness the most recent assassination attempt on September 15, 2024. Each day that Trump inflames the national discourse, so, as was the case with George Wallace’s hateful campaigns more than a half century ago, violence becomes more normalized within the political process.

Having written about Trump and the cult-like MAGA movement for the past nine years, I wish I could say that the fever has broken and that the combination of extremist and irrationalist rhetoric the GOP presidential candidate relentlessly pumps out into the ether no longer holds sway with enough people to propel him back into the White House. But, according to a rash of recent polls that show Trump’s popularity remains stable and that he is still competitive in the presidential election (for the more than 45% of the voting public that tell pollsters they plan to vote for Trump come November), MAGA’s appeal remains potent, or at the very least, palatable.

All of this is wearing, normalized even—and that’s a problem. Eight years after Trump’s shock election victory in 2016, four and a half years on from the pandemic’s onset, much of the non-MAGA electorate is exhausted. Many Americans, faced with the possibility of another Trump presidency, have opted to simply tune out. Astoundingly, in May, a PBS poll found that 55% of respondents weren’t paying close attention to Trump’s trials. In 2023, a Mood of the Nation survey found that among 18-25-year-olds half agreed either that it “makes no difference” whether they live in a democracy or a dictatorship or that “dictatorship could be good in certain circumstances.” For these surprisingly cynical young people, the American political system has degenerated into an ugly game that fails to deliver tangible benefits in their daily lives.

Read More: How Trump Weaponized White Rural America’s Shame

However understandable political passivity in the face of the relentless barrage of crude, violent rhetoric and of dysfunctional governing institutions may be, at the end of the day, it’s the wrong response. Because the truth is that when decent people tune out, bad actors end up winning.

That lesson was driven home to me during reporting trips for my book Chaos Comes Calling. In the fall of 2020, the little town of Sequim, on Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula, found itself at the center of a media frenzy. The COVID-19 pandemic was raging and the conservative mayor, William Armacost, a local hair salon owner, had been forced to substitute out his weekly meeting with constituents for a call-in radio show. It was during one of these broadcasts that Armacost urged his listeners to lend an ear to what QAnon had to say. It was, the mayor indicated, a movement of truth-seekers, and it was being unfairly denigrated by opponents.

Some of the mayor’s listeners were overjoyed, believing they finally had a local politician willing to speak truth to power. Many others, however, at a time when public health officials were being attacked by conspiracy-minded, QAnon-sympathizing mobs, and when the president himself was leaning into attacks on public health mandates and mocking his own public health officials, were horrified.

Armacost’s opponents started to organize so as to provide an alternative fulchrum for local power. They formed into a local Good Governance League. They knocked on doors and held community meetings. And they fielded political candidates to challenge the mayor and his allies on the city council, in county government, on local school boards. Their persistence won out. In 2022, and again in the primaries in 2024, they succeeded in turning back the far-right tide.

Today, Sequim is again governed by moderates, including Republicans who preferred competent government—the sort that could address local issues such as repairing roads and stimulating the development of affordable housing. The amped-up, rageful politics of the early pandemic era has been replaced by a calmer and kinder local politics.

By contrast, in California’s Shasta County, where a hard-right faction opposed to most public health restrictions had coalesced into a potent political force during the first year of the pandemic, a good governance league did not emerge, and local Christian Nationalists, militias, and anti-vaxxers went from strength to strength. They drove out the moderate Republican county leaders and replaced them with absolutists who wanted total non-cooperation with public health mandates. They fired the public health officer, after failing to issue even tokenistic statements of support for her when she was bombarded by death threats. They expended huge amounts of energy trying to turn the county into a “Second Amendment sanctuary.” And, in preparation for upending their county’s election system by scrapping their contract with Dominion Voting, they invited nationally known election deniers such as Douglas Frank into board of supervisors’ meetings to expound on theories about how the 2020 election had been stolen from Trump.

As Shasta swung rightward, local government became more and more dysfunctional, and meetings of the Board of Supervisors and of School Boards around the county became loud, crude, vulgar spectacles where people vied with each other as to how many insults they could hurl or how many outrageous claims they could make.

For many ordinary Shasta residents, it was easier to turn a blind eye than to stand up and confront the extremism in their midst. It was an entirely understandable response – it just happened to be the wrong one, ceding evermore of the county’s political ground to people who only a few years earlier would have been considered on the fringe right of the political spectrum.

Given the extraordinary threats to democracy now emerging in the political system, the stories of these two counties, and of the disparate responses to extremism, have huge resonance for American politics. In Sequim, commonsense and moderation ultimately prevailed. In Shasta, the anger-politics has continued apace, with dismal implications for the quality of local governance and for the ability of neighbors to disagree civilly without resorting to intimidation.

In neither 2016 nor 2020 did Trump come close to winning a majority of the popular vote. It’s highly likely that, this time around as well, he will fail to cross the 50%  threshold. Team Trump’s peculiarly cynical gambit seems to be that they can grubify the process so much that, instead of coming out in opposition, large numbers of people simply tune the whole thing out. And in swing states in which Democrats need very high levels of turnout in order to have a chance at winning, this will be enough to tip the scales in Trump’s favor even with a minority of the votes cast nationally.

It would be a truly American tragedy if, come November 5, that strategy was to work.