Toward a Useful Taxonomy of White Supremacist Attitudes

The recent presidential debate has once again dragged into view divided assessments regarding the threat possessed by White Supremacist groups in the United States. The mainstream media, left-wing research organizations and some elements of federal law enforcement insist that white supremacists represent the greatest possible threat to American domestic security.

Other analysts argue that the of political violence from white supremacist groups to U.S. security has been conflated with others types of criminal activity, which leads to incorrect estimates about the challenge.

The Center for Security Policy is pleased to publish a new report examining these and other important questions, Toward a Useful Taxonomy of White Supremacist Attitudes, by David Hines.

David Hines has a professional background in international human rights work with a focus on societal recovery from political violence such as forced disappearances and mass homicide. His interests include the study of history, community organizing, and fringe political movements.

The report’s key take-aways are:

1. White supremacists are genuine extremists who envision and hope to bring about a drastically different society than the American constitutional system founded on the bedrock principle that all Americans “are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights” and that “all men are created equal.”
2. As groups, white supremacists typically exhibit low membership numbers, and as individuals demonstrate generally weak organizing skills, poor discipline, worse operational security, and incompetent tradecraft.
3. Different types of white supremacist groups and individuals present different kinds and levels of challenges for citizens, political leaders, and law enforcement.
4. White supremacist groups that are explicitly opposed to violence and property destruction can and do still attract individual members who are very much interested in those things.
5. White supremacist groups explicitly in favor of violence and property destruction can be surprisingly reluctant to act on these fantasies and are often incompetent when they do.
6. White supremacy is overwhelmingly a magnet for impulsive incompetents and social outcasts, who cause headaches for the smaller numbers of more stable and organized members of the movement.
7. The more politically savvy white supremacists in the movement are actively interested in subverting mainstream groups and organizations to their own ends. While this is unlikely to result in the normalization of white supremacy as a cause or belief, it is potentially damaging for the mainstream groups they seek to exploit.
8. There are three types of white supremacist violence. In order of commonality, these are violence committed by criminal gangs; impulsive violence committed by individual adherents; and deliberate violence plotted with political intent.
9. White supremacists are most meaningfully differentiated not by ideology, affiliation, or goals, but rather by underlying attitudes.

The report studies these underlying attitudes, which Hines identifies in three categories: “The Pugnacious, the Square, and the Chaotic,” and features case studies to better demonstrate how these unique attitudes manifests different kinds of threats and challenges.

Toward a Useful Taxonomy of White Supremacist Attitudes should prove a useful resource for law enforcement, policy makers, the media, and the general public regarding how best to understand the threat from white supremacist groups and offers recommendations for how to better understand- and counter- this phenomenon.

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