Radical right accelerationist ideology: hell-bent on taking democracy down and replacing it with utopia

Prepping for doomsday, which is right now, not next week, month or year 

In my humble opinion, the election of the last president, a fascist, crook, traitor and liar, and his 1/6 coup attempt finally and fully opened Pandora’s box. The evil it and the complicit fascist GOP (FGOP) unleashed is still gushing out. The Democratic Party remains paralyzed, clueless and stymied by staunch FGOP, non-compromise opposition to any Democratic defense of democracy or the rule of law. The New York Times writes:

For QAnon it is “The Storm,” when mass violence will topple the elite cabal of pedophiles who they imagine to be running the government. White-power groups in the United States have long promised a catastrophic race war. And in Germany and Austria, neo-Nazis herald an imagined putsch on “Day X” — when the democratic order collapses and they take over.

All are examples of “accelerationist” ideologies, which promise a moment when the institutions of government, society and the economy will be wiped out in a wave of catastrophic violence, clearing the way for a utopia that will supposedly follow.

Accelerationism has long been a feature of white-power groups and other far-right militias. But now, experts say, accelerationist thinking is proliferating in ways that could threaten not just public safety, but the stability of democracy itself.

“In many ways we can see how Jan. 6 was a kind of loosely formed coalition around this idea of accelerationism,” said Cynthia Miller-Idriss, the director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University, said of the attack on the U.S. Capitol Building last January.  

Mainstream leaders, she believes, are failing to heed the risk that coalition could pose. “My fear is that we are, as a country, starting to treat that like a one-time fluke rather than as a potential turning point.”

“I have thought a lot about the parallels with the Weimar Republic,” the fragile period of democracy in Germany whose collapse allowed the Nazis to take power, she said. It was marked by a series of attacks, failed coups and other efforts to undermine democracy. And even though actions like Hitler’s beer-hall putsch failed, German democracy was ultimately not strong enough to withstand the chaos.
“For me, the parallel is that I think a lot of people want to see Jan. 6 as the end of something,” she said. “I think we have to consider the possibility that this was the beginning of something.” 

Neo-Nazi groups and other extremists have long spoken of Day X — a moment of crisis, both feared and longed for, when Germany’s social order would collapse, requiring committed far-right extremists, in their telling, to save the nation.

The NYT goes on to write that preparing for Day X and precipitating it is increasingly blurred. One expert on violence, democracy and civil society in Germany points out that accelerationism sanctifies violence. The radical right’s mythic days of reckoning are a call to action and an excuse for terrorism.
The expert asserts that “When Day X doesn’t come and people get frustrated, they might start plotting terrorist attacks, something to trigger Day X or just to act.”

Kathleen Belew, a University of Chicago historian and one of the foremost experts on the white-power movement in the United States asserts that one must understand that this kind of apocalyptic fantasy for believers is that a violent overthrow of democracy like Day X is not the thing what begins the apocalypse. It is what ends the apocalypse. Most of these radical right crackpots hate democracy and pluralism, and for some, maybe even secularism.

Belew comments that “all of this activism is already in a state of encounter with the end of the world.” The fear and hate-driven radicals point to immigration, intermarriage and falling birthrates as leading to a time when countries like the United States will no longer be majority white. She asserts that “for people in this ideology, that’s already the end of the world. That sense of emergency is really important to understand, because I think without that, the degree of — both the degree of fear and the degree of violence don’t make a lot of sense.”

The NYT goes on:

The bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, which killed 168 people, including 19 children, was carried out by far-right militants who took inspiration from “The Turner Diaries,” a 1978 novel that depicts a violent revolution in the United States, followed by a mass genocide of nonwhite people. And in 2015, a white supremacist gunman cited the desire to start a “race war” as his reason for killing nine Black people in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. (emphasis added)

Americans who still believe in democracy and the rule of law, need to understand this threat. There are tens of millions of Americans and Europeans who believe the radical right and fascist lies and share the fears of White Supremacists, racists and bigots throughout the world. It's not clear to me how far this toxic rot and fear has settled into democratic societies and governments in Canada, Australia and elsewhere. 

I blame the ex-president and the FGOP for a significant slice of the blame for this toxic moral rot and bigotry-racism, maybe ~35% worldwide and ~80% in the US. The US has fallen as a moral force in defense of democracy, the rule of law and truth. Biden has yet to be able to restore US influence and restraint on radical right extremism. Maybe he won't be able to do that in his four years in office, given the all-out FGOP opposition and dissent in his own party he has to try to deal with.

Or is that assessment of culpability by the US federal government, and toxic two-party politics, over the top hyperbole, unjustifiable and/or not supported by facts and/or sound reasoning?