When the Terrorists Win

What happens to a nation when terrorist movements take power?

George W. Bush signing an abortion ban in 2003, surrounded by all male legislators. via Wiki Commons.

A defining feature of the American anti-abortion movement is terrorism. And that movement’s victory in overturning Roe v. Wade last week makes it one of the most successful terrorist movements in US history.

Organized abortion opponents have committed thousands of acts of violence since their movement was born out of efforts to maintain racial segregation. Anti-abortion terrorism sprung up not in the immediate wake of Roe, but in response to the rights women and minority groups gained in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. The more rights women secured, the more violent anti-abortion terrorists grew. The point of organized anti-abortion terror — and the point of much broader organized anti-abortion harassment, including picking clinics and antagonizing women going into them — was to extract a significant cost from every single person who tried to exercise her rights under the law: humiliation at best; one’s life at worst.

Since 1977, abortion opponents have, in the name of “pro-life” ideology and in the furtherance of their political goals, committed 11 murders, 26 attempted murders, 42 bombings, 196 arsons, 105 attempted bombings and arsons, 472 clinic and other invasions, 100 butyric acid attacks, 663 anthrax and other bioterrorism threats, 676 bomb threats, 491 assaults, four kidnappings, and 332 burglaries. These are not lone wolf attacks. Many were carried out by organized groups. Men who murdered abortion providers often relied on networks of fellow “pro-life” activists to hide them from law enforcement.

The anti-abortion movement paid virtually no long-term political price for its terrorist wing. The Supreme Court just rewarded them with a win, overturning Roe and feigning innocence about what happens next. The court claims it is simply sending this question back to the states, each of which will now have a right to make its own abortion laws.

But it’s worse than that. One primary tactic of anti-abortion terrorism was to target doctors and anyone who helped women get abortions — to put a bounty on their heads. That’s the exact tactic some new anti-abortion laws are emulating. Anti-abortion terrorism wasn’t rejected by mainstream conservatives; it was copied and made law.

That’s not only the case with abortion.

On June 20, Heather Cox Richardson wrote about James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, the young men in Mississippi who were doing the dangerous work of registering Black voters, and were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan for their efforts. The Klan, too, is a homegrown American terrorist organization, part of a broader and extremely violent white supremacist movement. Scholars are still tallying up the number of people killed by the Klan and other white supremacists, and we may never have exact numbers. But we know that between 1865 and 1950, nearly 6,500 African Americans were murdered by white supremacists in lynchings alone.

The Klan came into being in the wake of a move toward justice: The organization was founded after the Civil War and in response to slaves being freed; it grew in numbers and viciousness as African Americans gained greater freedoms, and as those freedoms were backed (at least somewhat) by federal authority. The Klan made sure that when African Americans tried to exercise their newly-recognized rights, they paid the price.

These terrorist movements were not focused on government targets. They aimed their violence at individuals. They sought to make the law irrelevant — whatever freedoms the law granted were made meaningless if exercising them meant taking unfathomable risks.

They also had their sympathizers in elected office. The Klan’s goals — to ensure that whites maintained vaunted status and to block Black participation in public, economic, and political life — were helped along by politicians who were happy to pass and enforce segregationist laws, and to prevent African Americans from voting so that they wouldn’t have the ability to change the trajectory of their own city, state, or country.

From PBS:

In the time leading up to the 1868 presidential election, the Klan's activities picked up in speed and brutality. The election, which pitted Republican Ulysses S. Grant against Democrat Horatio Seymour, was crucial. Republicans would continue programs that prevented Southern whites from gaining political control in their states. Klan members knew that given the chance, the blacks in their communities would vote Republican.

Across the South, the Klan and other terrorist groups used brutal violence to intimidate Republican voters. In Arkansas, over 2,000 murders were committed in connection with the election. In Georgia, the number of threats and beatings was even higher. And in Louisiana, 1000 blacks were killed as the election neared. In those three states, Democrats won decisive victories at the polls.

Grant won the national election, and Congress set about passing a series of laws that protected the rights of African Americas to vote, serve on juries, and hold office. And then, of course, there was the decades-long backlash; 1920 saw the worst act of Election Day violence in American history when a racist mob terrorized Black townspeople because one Black man tried to vote.

The Klan vested its authority in Christianity. They saw broad support from white Southern “redeemers” — the white supremacists who were determined, in the wake of the Civil War, to make the Confederacy great again. And they succeeded, at least partly. White supremacist leaders took over across the South. They instituted laws that disenfranchised African Americans, and pushed Blacks out of positions of economic influence, out of public office, and out of public life. This reign of political terror last roughly a century, and it, too, was an explicitly Christian project.

And it was one backed by politicians, businessmen, lawyers, police officers, and judges. At the heart of the public, respectable arguments against civil rights was the same “state’s rights” theory that the South clung to when justifying the enslavement of Blacks: That individual states, and not the federal government, should get to decide their own laws, including whether or not they are permitted to enslave human beings or discriminate against their own citizens.

In the 1950s and 1960s, American politics shifted. The Democratic coalition was becoming untenable, and the Republican Party embarked on its Southern Strategy to capture the votes of racist Southern whites increasingly dissatisfied by increasingly liberal Democratic politicians — primarily angry about civil rights, but also about feminism and secularism. When the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, it set off a wave of racist violence. In 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered.

After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed, affirming the rights of all Americans to live free of discrimination on the basis of race, making the right to vote a reality for long-disenfranchised African Americans, and invalidating a variety of laws that disenfranchised Black voters, conservative backlash to the Democratic Party grew stronger, and the Republican Party’s strength in the South surged. By 1968, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was dead, assassinated by a white supremacist.

By 1980, the political realignment — racist and anti-feminist whites aligned with Republicans, Black voters overwhelmingly supporting Democrats — was complete. That year, Ronald Reagan held a campaign event in the same place in Mississippi where James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman for murdered for the crime of registering Black voters. “I still believe the answer to any problem lies with the people. I believe in states' rights,” Reagan proclaimed at the event. “I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level, and I believe we've distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the Constitution to that federal establishment.”

He won the election. And Reagan, once a pro-choice governor of California, became a staunch abortion opponent — a move of political convenience in order to secure the support of the religious right, which was fueling an increasingly misogynist and grievance-driven Republican Party.

By the early 1990s, the anti-abortion movement had grown in both violence and political strength. As the Supreme Court was set to hear a major challenge to Roe, and in the aftermath of Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings wherein an all-white and all-male Senate Judiciary Committee grilled a stoic Anita Hill about the disgusting harassment she endured while working for him, American women rallied, electing a record number of women to the US Senate (three, bringing the total number of female senators to five). The press deemed 1992 “The Year of the Woman.” By the end of 1994, Dr. David Gunn, an abortion provider in Pensacola, Florida long targeted by anti-choice terrorists, was dead, gunned down after his face appeared on Wild-West-style “wanted” posters handed out by “pro-life” protesters. Within just six years, at least eight more people would be murdered by anti-abortion terrorists.

Fast-forward to the 2010s, and a conservative Supreme Court overturns key provisions of the Voting Rights Act, opening the door for a new era of racist voter suppression — a door Republicans immediately surge through. A single Black president after 200 years of unbroken white male rule is enough for the Supreme Court, and many conservatives, to claim that racism is over — and then institute a series of racist laws intended to block Black voters from casting a ballot.

Just a few years later, the specter of the first female president following the first Black president was enough to hand a vastly unqualified unrepentant racist and misogynist the presidency.

Four years later, a largely white mob stormed the Capitol, deeming an election invalid simply because their guy lost. People died. Congress had to pause its election certification process because rioters broke into the building and were threatening the lives of everyone from prominent Democratic politicians to Vice President Mike Pence. When Congress reconvened hours later to carry out its election certification, 147 Republican members of Congress sided with the insurrectionists — giving credence to what they knew was a lie, and casting their votes against certifying the results of a free and fair American election. No office holder, including those who inflamed the mob and those who continue to justify a treasonous attack on the nation, has faced any sort of legal penalty; none have even faced significant penalties from their own party. Instead, supporters of the mob’s goals have enjoyed generous support from the GOP, are sweeping primary elections, and are poised to win a slew of elections this November. The Republican Party itself is planning a repeat of one of the most sordid moments in American history, scheming to contest any election they don’t win, and steal as much power as possible.

A little more than a year after that, an even-more-conservative Supreme Court has stripped away the civil rights of American women, asserting it is a state’s right to decide if our bodies are ours or if refusing to continue a pregnancy is a criminal act.

Just a few days after that, the same Court upheld a badly gerrymandered, intentionally racist electoral map in Louisiana, drawn to disenfranchise Black voters.

This history is hard to face, and the truth it tells hard to fathom, because it fundamentally flies in the face of the American narratives we are taught in school: That while there are ebbs and flows, history generally moves toward justice, and that the good guys usually win. In America, it is more complicated. Our most violent, home-grown, terroristic movements have achieved incredible successes. They have managed to assimilate many of their radical views into the conservative mainstream and legislate not just their radical aims, but their strategies: the Klan and the segregationist politicians who did their bidding correctly saw voting as a key inflection point for civil rights; anti-abortion terrorists and, later, the Texas state legislature correctly realized that bounty-hunting for anyone who “aids and abets” abortion was a highly effective terror campaign.

They have played the long game. Sometimes, they have been set back on their heels, but they have never disappeared. Without fail, in the wake of significant progress, they roared back, angrier than ever. Without fail, there were people in elected office, in law enforcement, and on the courts who supported them and tried to implement their agenda. The question wasn’t the existence of that ecosystem; it was how many people who sympathized with the views of racist and misogynist terrorists were in power, how much they sympathized, and how much power they had.

Right now, there are a lot of them. They have a lot of sympathy. Their power is only growing.

That does not mean the rest of us give up. The long arc of history will indeed bend toward justice if enough of us add our weight. Part of that process is telling the truth, and not shying away from recognizing things for what they are. And the movement to strip women of our bodily autonomy is a movement that has embraced terrorism as a tactic. In that, it is quite similar to the segregationist movement from which it sprung, which simply could not have seen the successes it did without its reliance on white supremacist terror. The aims and tactics of both of these movements have been folded into laws passed by the modern Republican Party.

The ongoing victories of racist and misogynist terrorist movements are a shame and stain on the United States. Friday’s Supreme Court decision overturning Roe is one of the most significant and blatant yet: The highest court in the land just carried out the ultimate goal of some of the last half-century’s most violent extremists.

Terrorists sometimes win. But they don’t just win because they intimidate the public. They win because people in power support their aims, normalize them, and carry out their desires.

xx Jill