The Threat of Civil Breakdown Is Real

Coordination between federal agencies responsible for counterterrorism and their state and local counterparts — a crucial ingredient of the overall law-enforcement effort — is also a serious problem. There is no federal mandate for state and local authorities to report to federal authorities, so federal agencies must proactively elicit their cooperation. But non-federal agencies often have little interest in this work, because they entertain lower threat perceptions, contentious legal understandings or adverse conceptions of the role of government.

In exceptional cases, county law-enforcement officials may not regard a vocally anti-government gun owner as a present danger or even as ideological, and may consider the state government the highest one to which they are answerable. And while most state and local officers are duly concerned about employee grievances, which often do produce mass-casualty events, many of these officers are indifferent to ideological ones.

The net effect is that there is no nationwide structure that provides federal agencies with effective interlocutors at the state or local level. Some pockets of excellence exist, but they are not replicated at scale. Furthermore, while U.S. intelligence agencies have the capabilities needed to map far-right groups, for good constitutional reasons they can’t freely apply those capabilities at the domestic level.

The face of the state, therefore, is federal law enforcement — and this is no more conducive to winning hearts and minds in the U.S. hinterland than it is in the fight against Muslim extremism in Leeds or Molenbeek. At the same time, gaps in domestic counterterrorism arrangements leave space for far-right radicalism to continue to flourish.

By virtue of Jan. 6 and the increasing normalization of domestic political violence, senior U.S. officials already have strategic warning. That means they most value tactical warning, yet that’s harder to come by. In terms of combustibility, of course, the United States is not comparable to Bolshevik Russia and Enrique Tarrio is no Vladimir Lenin. U.S. militia groups do not appear to be strongly networked. Yet it would be imprudent to assume that the MAGA movement is still just an inchoate insurgency, as its grievances are widely shared. Law enforcement’s limitations suggest that the key factor in staving off civil breakdown is not state power but rather political dynamics.