Famed political theorist Hannah Arendt argued ideologies were modern inventions that began to manifest a significant political impact only with the arrival of figures like Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin.1 But that assertion (made in the context of totalitarianism) is belied by the history reviewed in the previous chapter. While far from complete, this review of identifiably extremist belief illustrates the daunting scope of a problem that has plagued humanity since almost the beginning of recorded history.
The objective study of extremism leads quickly to three crucial truths:
These stipulations open us up to a world of trouble. How do we begin to approach a challenge that is so diverse? Can we reasonably hope to defeat a problem that has endured throughout most of human history? And what is extremism, anyway?
Despite their diversity, extremist movements have common elements that provide a path to understanding. One of the most useful frames for discussing extremism is known as social identity theory, an approach to understanding intergroup dynamics pioneered by social psychologists Henri Tajfel and John C. Turner.2
Social identity theory stipulates that people categorize themselves and others as members of competing social groups. The in-group is a group of people who share an identity, such as religious, racial, or national. It is the group to which one belongs—the “us” in “us versus them.” The out-group is a group of people who are excluded from a specific in-group. They are part of “them.”
In this book, in-groups and out-groups each represent an identity—a set of qualities that are understood to make a person or group distinct from other persons or groups. People who share a common identity may form an identity collective, a group of people who are defined by nation, religion, race, or some other shared trait, interest or concern.
The in in in-group does not denote dominance, popularity, or a value judgment. In and out are relative statuses. My in-group may be your out-group, and my out-group may be your in-group. For any given identity, you are either in the group or out of it.
For most social movements, in-groups and out-groups are simply different, which is not and should not be a reflexive reason for hostility. Pluralistic societies accept and even celebrate differences between individuals and groups. Still, people have a natural tendency to admire and esteem their own in-groups in comparison to any out-group. For extremist movements, this tendency is vastly amplified. Loyalty to the in-group is all important, and certain out-groups are perceived as menacing enemies.
Identifying in-groups and out-groups is not a purely binary process. As we will see, an in-group is not always unitary, and it can be subdivided in meaningful ways. An in-group can also have more than one out-group. For instance, Sunni jihadists designate many different out-groups as part of an overlapping circle of enemies. Many white nationalists believe that each race has distinct qualities and represents a different kind of threat to their in-group. In such circumstances, extremists may prescribe different tactics for dealing with different out-groups.
In-groups and out-groups are not always obvious. They have to be defined. Categorization is the act of understanding yourself to be part of an in-group and determining whether others are part of your in-group or your out-group. Social identification is an act of self-categorization in which an individual decides that he or she is part of an in-group. Categorization has psychological consequences that shape how people and groups view themselves and others, which are discussed in the pages that follow.
Often, in-groups are perceived to have more legitimacy than out-groups. In this context, legitimacy can be defined as the belief that an identity collective has a right to exist and may be rightfully defined, maintained, and protected. The word has many dimensions in everyday use, most of which are not relevant to extremism. As we shall see, the quest for legitimacy is a key element in many extremist movements.
All extremist groups (and many nonextremist groups) have some sort of ideology. As with the word extremist, there are many definitions of ideology, and some are quite complex. These more expansive definitions may be necessary to encompass nonextremist political and religious groups.3 In the context of this book, however, an extremist ideology is a collection of texts that describe who is part of the in-group, who is part of an out-group, and how the in-group should interact with the out-group. Ideological texts can include a wide range of media types, including books, images, lectures, videos, and even conversations.
Many scholars prefer to define ideology chiefly in terms of ideas and concepts.4 I find this unnecessarily amorphous. Ideas and concepts are contained in texts, and a movement cannot adopt an ideology unless and until it is transmitted in a text. Without transmission and narrative, there would be no extremist groups, only individual extremists separately following their own self-designed beliefs. In addition to highlighting the importance of transmission, a focus on texts makes it easier to systematically analyze the contents of an ideology and track its evolution over time.
The first chapter of this book provides anecdotal examples of the diversity of extremist movements, drawn from history in a roughly chronological order. This section attempts to organize these examples into categories for the most common and consequential types of extremism. Some extremist movements are a hybrid of the categories listed below, and others are highly particularized subsets.
Not all violence is extremist, and not all extremists are violent. Many crimes and wars involve violence to promote or protect individual or group interests, such as profit or legitimate self-defense. While extremist sentiments often overlap with crime and war, the mere act of violence—even horrific, evil violence—is not inherently extremist.
This can lead to some murky and unclear situations that require significant unpacking, and some questions may never be cleanly resolved. For instance, ethnicity plays a significant role in the Mafia and other ethnic criminal gangs, but promotion of that ethnic identity is often secondary to other considerations, such as profit.
Similar ambiguities pertain to hate crimes, discussed in more detail in chapter 4. Some hate crimes are clearly driven by extremist ideologies (for example, an attack by a group of neo-Nazi skinheads on an African American). But others may be examples of what I call “pedestrian” hate—the simple dislike of people who are different.
An example might be a drunken heterosexual man attacking a gay man in a bar, motivated by fear, anger, or simple bigotry. The attacker may not rely on an articulated ideological belief to justify his violence. The lack of ideology does not lessen the seriousness of such attacks, but it does raise questions about whether all hate crimes should be considered extremism. My own inclination is to classify pedestrian hate as distinct from ideological extremism, but there is plenty of room for debate. For instance, the attacker’s attitude may have its roots in an ideological concept that has been widely diffused in society, obscuring its origins. Government data on hate crimes is often deficient with respect to detailed motives and potential ideological influences, and focused study might help clarify this question.
Relatedly, terrorism must be disentangled from extremism. Although they often travel in tandem, the two are not the same thing. Terrorism is a tactic, whereas extremism is a belief system. Because extremist movements are often small, they are motivated to adopt asymmetric tactics such as terrorism. When extremists do use terrorism, they usually create ideological justifications to support that decision. But many extremists eschew terrorism, and not everyone who employs the tactic of terrorism is necessarily an extremist.
The major categories of extremism include racial/ethnic, religious, nationalist, anti-government, anarchist, classist, single-issue movements, and gender, sexual orientation, and sexual identity. These categories often overlap, sometimes in self-reinforcing ways, such as the pairing of a religion with a national identity, or the adoption of antigovernment tenets by racists. At times, such fused ideologies can be more complex and toxic than the sum of their parts.
Racial extremist movements promote a racial or ethnic in-group and call for hostile acts targeting one or more racial or ethnic out-groups. Race is sometimes used as a synonym for ethnicity. At other times, race is a socially constructed concept that incorporates ethnic distinctions. The most obvious example of the latter is the distinction between white and black. Each of these terms has been defined in different ways at different times. For instance, Polish, Irish, and Italian immigrants to the United States are now considered white but were not always.5
Racial extremism is one of the most intractable problems in the world. Unlike other forms of extremism, such as those based on religious or political identities, someone who has been assigned to a racial out-group generally cannot opt to join the in-group in order to escape persecution.
Members of the in-group are the sole authority in determining who belongs to the out-group, and they spend considerable intellectual capital in trying to create impassable boundaries between the “races.” Perhaps most infamously, the Nazis crafted detailed laws defining who could be considered German (and therefore entitled to the privileges of citizenship) and who was a Jew (and therefore subject to persecution). They criminalized intermarriage in order to prevent Jews from “becoming” German, even through generations of assimilation.6
Despite such efforts to freeze racial definitions irrevocably, the boundaries do shift for both mainstream and extremist racial identities, but the process of change typically requires generations. Short of hiding one’s ancestry in order to enter an in-group (known as passing), out-group members have no option to become a full member of the in-group.
The character of a racial extremist movement is influenced somewhat by whether the racial in-group is a majority or a minority in its host society, but both types exist. For instance, a variety of white and black nationalist movements can be found in the United States.
Extremism requires an unwavering commitment to hostile actions against an out-group, discussed in more detail later in this chapter. Majority in-groups may incorrectly characterize minority groups as extremist for seeking equal protection under the law or the redress of legitimate grievances. For instance, some right-wing extremists in the United States accuse the Black Lives Matter movement of extremism, but there is nothing inherently extremist about campaigning for equal protection under the law.
Most religions stipulate that their beliefs and practices are objectively superior to all others. Members of religious out-groups usually suffer some penalty for their wrong beliefs, but the penalty is often intangible, whether it is exclusion from a paradise in the afterlife, reincarnation in an inferior position, or an expectation that out-group members will fail to achieve enlightenment and peace.
In contrast, religious extremists impose penalties on out-groups here in the temporal world. As with racial extremism, these penalties can include shunning, discriminatory practices, and even extermination. The establishment of a theocratic state typically falls somewhere on the extremist spectrum because most theocracies penalize nonbelievers by forcing them to adhere to values and practices they do not share or subjecting them to discrimination or oppression.
Unlike racial extremists, religious extremists usually include some established mechanism whereby members of the out-group can join the in-group through conversion, whether voluntarily or under threat, using a relatively consistent procedure. Indeed, extremist groups often contain disproportionate numbers of converts. In this sense, religious extremism can be seen as slightly less intractable than racial extremism, although religious extremists are nevertheless capable of the same extraordinary violence and intolerance.
Nationalism is typically understood as promoting the interests of one’s own nation over the interests of others or the world at large, typically joined with a feeling of superiority to other nations. It is normal and even healthy for an engaged citizen to experience a certain amount of nationalist sentiment—such as feeling proud or grateful to be an American.
Nationalist extremism takes this to a different level, arguing that the nation must be protected by taking hostile action against out-groups. Sometimes this means taking action against other nations or the world at large, but nationalist extremism is frequently concerned with immigration—how citizenship is defined and bestowed.
Because of this, nationalist extremism is often paired, implicitly or explicitly, with the idea of racial or religious restrictions on who can become a citizen. Over the course of its history, the United States has experienced several such waves of nationalist extremism, manifesting in hostility toward immigrants from a variety of ethnic and religious backgrounds.
Today, many American nationalist extremists are fixated primarily on Muslims, arguing that they cannot truly be Americans because their first loyalty is to Islam. A similar debate took place earlier in American history regarding Roman Catholics and their perceived allegiance to the pope.7 Although many anti-Muslim extremists are Christian and believe they are defending America’s identity as a Christian nation, there are notable exceptions, including Jews and atheists who oppose Muslim immigration for other reasons. This results in a sort of hybrid nationalism, with a somewhat amorphous national identity in-group standing in opposition to a specific religious or racial out-group.
As with religion, there are established procedures for members of the out-group to join the in-group and acquire citizenship. But although religious conversion is often accepted and even embraced by religious extremists, nationalists often aim their ire and political activism at the procedures surrounding citizenship, seeking to restrict or even eliminate them.
However, not all conversations about establishing orderly rules for citizenship and the enforcement of immigration laws are extremist in nature. Extremism becomes an issue when those conversations revolve around targeting current and prospective immigrants for hostile measures.
For antigovernment extremists, the out-group is the government of the country in which they live. Often but not always, antigovernment ideologies are tied to a belief that a country’s founding values or principles have been corrupted. The government and those who support it are enemy out-groups. In-groups are less clearly defined. For some, the in-groups are an archetype of the ordinary citizen. For others, the in-group consists only of other people who share specific values or recognize the illegitimacy of the existing government. As with nationalist extremism, the government out-group may be tied to a racial or religious dimension. For instance, many American antigovernment extremists believe that the corruption of the United States government is the result of a Jewish conspiracy.8
Anarchists differ from antigovernment extremists in that they are opposed to all forms of compulsory government rather than only a specific existing regime. Instead, anarchists believe that people should participate in society on a voluntary and spontaneously organized basis. Simply holding this belief does not make people extremists unless they also believe that they must take hostile action against existing governments and political participants.
As one might expect, the anti-organizational nature of anarchism makes it difficult to mount large and cohesive movements, but anarchist extremism was a violent force to be reckoned with in the late nineteenth century and throughout much of the twentieth, credited with assassinating many leaders of major Western powers, including Russian tsar Alexander II, French president Marie François Sadi Carnot, U.S. president William McKinley, Spanish king Umberto I and Austrian empress Elisabeth.9
Most people have heard the phrase class warfare, and many have probably rolled their eyes at it. Conflicts over class are not typically classified as extremism, although class is often a crucial part of conflicts among other identity types.
However, class is a highly fungible commodity, volatile and significantly dependent on perception and relative status. People move in and out of classes far more easily than other identities, and a class-based movement is difficult to sustain, in part because successful movements result in a sweeping redefinition of in-groups and out-groups. Although serious class-based conflicts can overturn the class structure entirely, as in the Russian Revolution, they are often about moving groups of people from one class to another or adjusting their relative status, which does not lend itself to an unwavering need for hostile action based on clear categories, a component of the definition of extremism presented later in this chapter.
Certain ideologies, such as Communism, are explicitly class-based and may take on an extremist dimension, as in the case of Marxist or Maoist terrorism, which (in principle, at least) seek to eliminate the existence of an upper class.10 Class-based ideologies may also be hybridized with other ideologies, as in the case of anarchist socialism and anarcho-syndicalism11 or in racial extremist movements in societies where race and class are closely related categories.
A variety of movements carry out terrorist attacks or other violence on the basis of single issues. These groups may formulate an identity construct as part of their ideology but may not be fully formed as extremist movements. Generally, for these movements, the in-group is made up of people who are on the right side of the single issue, and the out-group is made up of people who are on the wrong side. In some cases, these movements may be an ambiguous fit with the definition offered later in this chapter.
For instance, some anti-abortion violence is motivated in a relatively simple way by the belief that a fetus is fully human and alive. It is not surprising that people who hold that belief would turn to violence to prevent what they see as murder. But other people who carry out violence around abortion and reproductive rights are motivated by wider ideologies related to religion or the role of women in society.
Although less common, pro- and antitechnology extremists surface from time to time. Most famously, Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, carried out a series of parcel bombings to advance his view that technology is bad for society and human happiness. Kaczynski’s case is unusual in that he represented a one-man movement, but he still identified an out-group—leftists, a word that appears in Kaczynski’s manifesto 126 times as both contributor to and manifestation of technology’s ill effects.
Other examples of single-issue or limited-scope movements include tax protestors and antifascists (known as antifa), although adherents of these movements may adopt additional out-group categories and incorporate elements of other ideologies. For tax protestors, this usually includes antigovernment extremism, whereas antifa adherents often embrace some form of anarchism.
Environmental and animal rights movements are among the most prolific users of terrorism in pursuit of a political goal, although their attacks have typically been far less lethal than those of other extremists. Generally speaking, in recent years left-wing extremists have produced far fewer fatalities than right-wing and jihadist extremists, although that has not always been true from a historical perspective.12
Perhaps the most intimate and powerful identities in human experience revolve around gender and sexual orientation. It is not surprising, therefore, that these identities are often a central focus for extremists. Some extremist movements center on these specific identities—such as so-called Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs) who promote an agenda that is distinctly antiwoman or advocates of “conversion therapy” who use fraudulent and torturous techniques to “cure” gay people.13
In addition to movements that are centrally concerned with gender and sexual identity, many extremist movements rely on these issues incidentally or as part of a wider ideology. Gender and sexual identity are often featured as an add-on component to some other form of ideological extremism.
Strict enforcement of gender and sexual mores often features prominently in extremist ideologies that are chiefly concerned with some other primary identity. Although both men and women take part in extremism, men are overwhelmingly overrepresented in extremist populations, especially where the commission of acts of violence are concerned. Women do participate in extremist movements at many levels, but they are sharply underrepresented in leadership and violent action roles.14 This has at times led scholars and policymakers to underplay women’s involvement, but the overrepresentation of males (usually cisgender heterosexual males) as active participants is clear and persistent.15
Some extremist ideologies, particularly on the far right and in jihadist circles, relegate women to nonviolent roles and emphasize their reproductive function as a core contribution to the movement. In other words, they urge women to bear and raise children as a way to propagate the in-group. Male extremists’ control over women may be explicit or implicit, but it is rarely invisible. This often results in various forms of fetishization of women, as seen in white nationalist propaganda claiming “white women are magic” and featuring stylized pictures of white mothers with many white children.16
Islamic State has featured women in its propaganda and employed them as recruiters on social media, encouraging women to migrate to territories under its control in order to marry the organization’s fighters. Within its territory, Islamic State has established women’s brigades to violently enforce extreme social mores against other women.17 Even more disturbingly, Islamic State has openly institutionalized sexual slavery and rape against members of the Yazidi minority group in Iraq, as an incentive for male in-group members.18
Conversely, one of the most ubiquitous themes in extremist propaganda is the threat of rape—real or imagined—by out-group males against in-group females. This is a powerful emotional manipulation tactic for mobilizing male in-group extremists, who are most likely to commit violence. This theme is repeated endlessly by extremist propagandists, often in stark and emotionally evocative terms.19
Attitudes toward sexual identity in right-wing and jihadist circles are similarly conscribed. Islamic State punished homosexuality in its circles by stoning gay men or throwing them from the tops of buildings.20 Within right-wing circles, deviations from cisgender heterosexuality are usually shunned or persecuted, with the most extreme example being Nazi campaigns that sent thousands of gay men to concentration camps, with some being castrated and others subjected to medical experiments in search of a “cure.”21
During the 1980s, American right-wing extremists operated a dial-in computerized bulletin board to maintain a list of gay men who would be targeted during a future uprising.22 Others defined homosexuality as a “mental illness.” But by the 1990s, some ambiguity began to surface in white nationalist prescriptions for how to deal with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) individuals, with views ranging violent suppression to viewing homosexuality as a minor vice comparable to prostitution, “tolerated but not accepted.”23
There are important exceptions, especially in recent years. During the 2010s, the rise of the extremist alt-right movement brought with it a notable trend toward conditional acceptance of some LGBTQ community members—so long as they shared the movement’s signature anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant views. However, most within the movement continued to support strict antigay and antitrans policies.24
Extremism is incredibly diverse, even though most extremist movements attempt to suppress diversity on racial, religious, or ideological grounds. Given the range of movements that differ so much from each other, how do we approach the study of extremism as a discrete discipline? How do we do better than “we know it we see it”?
The answer lies in distinguishing between the structure and the content of extremist ideologies. The contents of different extremist ideologies are wildly inconsistent. Pro-Muslim and anti-Muslim extremists, for example, are diametrically opposed with respect to the content of their beliefs, yet they are remarkably similar with respect to the structure of what they believe and how they justify their views.
The chapters that follow describe that structure, which consists of two symbiotic notions. First, formulaic in-group and out-group definitions flesh out identities, and second, a crisis-solution construct prescribes action based on those identity definitions. The structure allows for a significant amount of variation, while also providing for relatively succinct definitions of extremism and radicalization that encompass most of the examples discussed so far.25 For purposes of this book, the following definitions apply.
Extremism refers to the belief that an in-group’s success or survival can never be separated from the need for hostile action against an out-group. The hostile action must be part of the in-group’s definition of success. Hostile acts can range from verbal attacks and diminishment to discriminatory behavior, violence, and even genocide. This is obviously a very wide spectrum of activity, which will be discussed in more detail in the following chapters.
Extremism can be the province of state or nonstate actors, unlike terrorism, which after years of similar debate and ambiguity, has come to be understood primarily as a nonstate phenomenon.26
Each component of this definition is important, since not every harmful or violent act is necessarily extremist. Competition according to a set of negotiated rules is not usually extremist, because in-group success (winning) can be separated from harmful, out-of-bounds acts against competitors (such as persecution, sabotage or assassination). This applies to such pursuits as politics, sports, or business. The need for harmful activity must be unconditional and inseparable from the in-group’s understanding of success in order to qualify as extremist.
For instance, most white nationalists believe that white people can never be successful unless and until nonwhites are removed from in-group society by means of segregation or extermination. This demand is definitional, non-negotiable and unconditional. To abandon the demand would be to abandon white nationalism.
In contrast, conditional conflicts are not necessarily extremist. For instance, if a nation is attacked through an act of war, hostile action may become a legitimate necessity in order to ensure the survival of the in-group, but that necessity can be conditional. The in-group becomes extremist if it insists that hostile action must continue unconditionally, for instance by insisting on the extermination of out-group members after they have surrendered.
The call to action is inherent to this definition. For instance, it is not extremist to disapprove of a religion based on its tenets. But it is extremist to demand that all adherents of a religion be arrested or deported.
Finally, the definition is dependent on an assertion of identity. Societies are entitled to craft laws regulating behavior, for instance by establishing a minimum age for marriage, and these rules may conflict with the rules of some group identities. It is not extremist to differ over values. But laws crafted specifically to target an out-group identity—for instance, Jim Crow laws enforcing segregation, or laws restricting religious belief—are extremist under this definition. The question of intent leads to some unavoidable gray areas, but evaluating legal and political decisions against the other components of this definition can help clarify the question in many cases.
Violent extremism is the belief that an in-group’s success or survival can never be separated from the need for violent action against an out-group (as opposed to less harmful acts such as discrimination or shunning). A violent extremist ideology may characterize its violence as defensive, offensive, or preemptive. Here again, inseparability is the key element—a stipulation that the need for violence against an out-group is not conditional or situational. War is not automatically extremist, but a genocidal war is.
Radicalization into extremism is the escalation of an in-group’s extremist orientation in the form of increasingly negative views about an out-group or the endorsement of increasingly hostile or violent actions against an out-group. Radicalization is a process of change, not outcome.
The lack of scholarly consensus about what extremism and radicalization mean virtually guarantees that these definitions will prove controversial in some quarters. These definitions are less subjective than most that preceded them, but it is impossible to eliminate all gray areas. In my view, these definitions combine the flexibility to cross ideological lines with enough specificity to counter the often subjective use of the terms.
As the definition of radicalization into extremism suggests, extremism represents a spectrum of beliefs rather than a fixed destination. With good reason, policymakers and activists most often focus on violent extremism. Violence is the most destructive, escalatory, and irrevocable expression of the extremist paradigm. But not all extremist movements begin and end with violence.
Extremism emerges from social ecosystems in a manner analogous to weather. No two hurricanes are exactly alike, but we can recognize them when they form, follow them through stages, and estimate their future behavior—imperfectly. But we cannot understand hurricanes if we do not understand tropical storms, and we cannot understand storms if we do not understand wind and water. In the same way, we need to understand the component elements that make up extremist ideologies in order to understand how extremist movements work.
Few movements are born extreme. Most emerge from mainstream identities that affirm the merits of an in-group—pride in a heritage or the values of a religion—without stipulating that the in-group must take hostile action against an out-group. Out-group definitions evolve over time, starting with categorization (exclusion from the in-group) and escalating as the in-group develops a more and more negative view of the out-group.
Chapter 3 examines how identity movements define and subdivide in-groups and out-groups. Chapter 4 examines how these elements are forged into a crisis-solution narrative that drives violence and other hostile interactions among collectives.
As part of the MIT Press’s Essential Knowledge series, which is intended to offer concise, accessible overviews of compelling topics, this book is relatively brief and focuses on broad concepts. Some readers, particularly academics and those working in the fields of counterterrorism and countering violent extremism, may be interested in exploring more thorough explanations of this framework for extremism and how it was developed.
While this text includes case studies to illustrate various aspects of the framework, they are necessarily brief. Therefore, a detailed bibliography is included at the end of the book with guidance for finding more comprehensive explanations and grounded theory explorations tied to sections of the book. The bibliography includes significant books and papers that explain the origins of concepts discussed here and provide detailed evidence from primary sources (extremist ideological and propaganda texts). I will continue to publish new research and analysis regarding this framework, and an up-to-date list of my work, with links, can always be found at www.jmberger.com.