Thread by @PaulJoosse

There has been renewed interest in the concept of "leaderless resistance" and the role it plays in fomenting attacks like what we saw on Wednesday at the #CapitolBuilding 1/

Properly understood, leaderless resistance is a strategy of opposition that was developed within the radical right to allow for and encourage individuals or small cells to engage in acts of political violence entirely independent of a direct command structure 2/

“Leaderless resistance” was actually an essay penned in '83 by Louis Beam, a Klansman and longstanding participant in the Aryan Nations. He republished it in 1992 in his magazine, The Seditionist, which has had an outsized impact within the racist far right since that time 3/

It is important to note that the “leaderlessless” here is and has always been somewhat of a misnomer, since it only refers to the *operational* aspects of leadership as typified by militia groups, seditionist political organizations, or formal social movement organizations. /4

Inspirational—and frequently charismatic—leadership still serves as the connective tissue for these groups, even if it isn’t traceable in an organizational chart 5/

Motivating Louis Beam’s attempts to popularize leaderless resistance was his assessment that the American radical right was losing support in terms of its popularity and strength 6/

He was depressed by the current state of his movement, and as someone who had faced charges of sedition himself, he worried that “anti-state, political organizations…are easy prey for government infiltration, entrapment, and destruction of the personnel involved.” 7/

Thus, he wrote "Leaderless Resistance" as a sort of Hail Mary pass to unseen fellow-travelers, with ‘‘the hope that, somehow, America can still produce the brave sons and daughters necessary to fight off ever increasing persecution and oppression.’’ /8

In the essay he writes, “What method is left for those resisting state tyranny? ... A system of organization that is based upon the cell organization, but does not have any central control or direction” /9

Again, it needs to be stressed that he is referring only to operational control or direction. He naively assumed that leaderless resisters would “have the same general outlook, [be] acquainted with the same philosophy, and generally react to given situations in similar ways.” /10

Odinist David Lane also contributed to the salience of leaderless resistance within the radical right, but he recognized that centrifugal forces of ideological drift would threaten the coherence of a movement that operated under the principle of leaderless resistance. /11

In his 1993 article ‘‘Wotan is Coming,’’ Lane therefore describes the need for an aboveground political arm that would disseminate propaganda to guide the clandestine operants whom he called WOTAN (for ‘‘Will of the Aryan nation’’) /12

He stressed that: “When a Wotan 'goes active' he severs all apparent or provable ties with the political arm. If he has been so foolish as to obtain 'membership' in such an organization, all records of such association must be destroyed or resignation submitted” /13

This strategic separation between operational and inspirational linkages therefore can be understood as a form of “security culture” that clandestine insurgent movements across the board will develop to cover themselves (see Cross and Snow, 2012, jstor.org/stable/26463914 )/14

And any student of social movements that produce terrorism will immediately recognize these dynamics as being common across all attempts at anti-state rebellion—there is nothing brilliantly new about the theorizing of Beam or Lane /15

But it is important to note that such strategizing and theory has a long history within the radical right, and that even seemingly “disorganized” manifestations are themselves to some degree foreseen and planned by movement progenitors /16

Trump has been a perfect vessel for this strategic separation—he is clear and explicit to those ‘who have ears to hear,’ but he still reserves plausible deniability for himself with respect to direct charges of incitement (the examples are well known and not worth repeating) /17

For this thread I have drawn from this past research: tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108… 18/

And this work @terpol that relates the “leaderless resistance” concept to the parallel “lone wolf” concept (also developed by a neo-Nazi, Tom Metzger): tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108… /19

And work on the charismatic connection Trump has with his base, there are these essays: doi.org/10.1093/bjc/az…

academic.oup.com/sf/article-abs…

Please DM me if you are interested and if paywalls are at all a problem 20/20

@kathleen_belew has done fantastic work on the history of the radical right as well as @JessicaEStern and Kathleen Blee. @xchatty, @Joseph_M_Brown, Betty Dobratz, and @djpressman have also done excellent work on leaderless resistance.

And of course I shouldn't forget @amhitchens's excellent book Incitement, which traces the dynamics of charismatic inspiration with respect to Anwar al-Awlaki.

@kjhealy has a great set of observations here that describe well this type of organized disorganization, or organization mixed in strategically with disorganization: kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/…