Existential Fret
(posted by Jim Henley)
Megan McArdle has a useful summary of the reasons that terrorism is not an “existential threat” to the United States. My call-out:
Terrorism is not, as many have pointed out, a product of poverty; it is a product of lack of opportunity + limited political rights. Immigrants here have full political rights and plenty of economic opportunity. The United States does not, as France does, ban their hijabs; nor deny them citizenship like “guest workers” in any number of countries; nor deny them employment like Scandinavia; nor does it (AFAIK) wink, as Britain does, at practices like fourteen-year-old cousin marriage that prevent assimilation. We just don’t seem to have a critical mass of disaffected immigrants with extreme religious views. It’s telling that 9/11 relied on visitors, while bombings in Europe and Bali tend to employ local talent.
The above is why the Islamophobic elements of the Right - the David Horowitzes and LGF types - are not just evil but stupid. They’re evil because they want to make entire groups of people eat dirt for the violent actions of a few individuals. The term for this is “massive injustice.” But they’re stupid because if we followed their social and political proposals and ramped up ethno-religious profiling and began treating our Muslim neighbors and co-workers with more disdain, we would actually be increasing the risk of terrorism within the US. We’d help create a few more perpetrators, and push a lot more potential informants away from any sense of stake in a common society.
June 26th, 2008 at 8:53 am
As was observed in the comments section there, terrorists cannot destroy us but they could get us to destroy ourselves. I’m not sure what it would take to provoke us into self-destruction, but my fear is that the answer would be “Not very much.” I look at what we did in response to 9/11, and then I wonder what we would do if there was, say, a wave of car-bombings. And I get scared.
June 26th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
I don’t think the U.K is more intolerant of Muslims. I think it just has a lot more of them and they haven’t been screened like the immigrants to the U.S. It is a simple problem to solve regardless of the motivations of the terrorists if we simply stop immigration from terrorist producing countries.
June 26th, 2008 at 4:22 pm
I would also add that authoritarian countries are quite good at clamping down on violent dissent. It’s one of the few things they’re good at. There have been a number of successful communist revolutions, but once they seize power despite all their abuses no counter-revolution is viable.
June 26th, 2008 at 6:30 pm
I remember hearing Dutch native Ian Buruma speak about his view of the difference between Holland and the US with regard to immigrants. In the US, they’ve got to assimilate (to a degree after all, religious freedom and autonomy are typical here) into the “melting pot” of the market place. The extended order of discrete individuals interacting to inadvertently extend tolerance within a frame of property rights. (My wordy and optimistic classical liberal way of putting it.)
In Holland, on the other hand, they’ve got state sponsored religious institutions and generational welfare/non-citizens which prevents them from a feeling of being on the “inside”, as opposed to “outside”. A perceived sense of difference and aloofness is made official.
Also noteworthy, Muslims in the US tend to be wealthier than their European counterparts.
June 27th, 2008 at 7:29 am
Terrorism is not, as many have pointed out, a product of poverty; it is a product of lack of opportunity + limited political rights…
A hypothesis that completely fails to explain most of the terrorist attacks in US history. Timothy McVeigh? Eric Rudolph? The Ku Klux Klan? Did they really have “limited political rights”?
June 27th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
Well actually wasn’t the KKK initially a collection of rag tag ex-confederate soldiers, poverty stricken after a war they lost (and were probably drafted into)? Certainly today the KKK hardly represents the ruling class, but relatively poor rural folks with, yes, limited opportunities and political voice.
A friend of mine worked with troubled youth here in northern California. One of the more popular symbols to draw by poor, abused, neglected white kids was the swastika.
The “creative synthesizers” of terrorism are indeed often middle class educated folks with lots of opportunity, but due to their idealism they shun this in order to harp on grievances that are often justified. The “rabble”, however, is attracted to these folks because they seem to, though perhaps incorrectly, provide an explanation for the poverty and limited opportunities the ordinary person confronts. The actual recruitment of lesser terrorists depends on certain actions at the margin - foreign occupation in the case of Al Qaeda - that actually push people to act on terrorist sympathy rather than simply provide widespread passive or rhetorical support.
June 29th, 2008 at 2:06 pm
Well said, sir. There is no existential threat to the U.S. from terrorists. Taking out a city or two, while horrible, is not the end of the U.S. - we have cold war contingency plans for that. No terrorist has access to weapons on the scale of the USSR. It’s not an existential threat, but a psychological one - and, therefore, one where our response is everything.
August 28th, 2008 at 11:45 am
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