The Strategy of Violent White Supremacy Is Evolving

Just over 27 years ago, the prominent white supremacist Louis Beam Jr. published a now-infamous essay titled “Leaderless Resistance.” Extremist organizations, Beam argued, were too vulnerable to government disruption. The future of white supremacy was individual—lone actors and small, self-organized groups that could take action at their own initiative.

You might be forgiven for thinking this was a brilliant and lethal idea; certainly, many security analysts and policy makers believed as much. But the truth is that leaderless resistance was a bad strategy, based on overly optimistic assumptions. Reports of its success were greatly exaggerated, usually because of a false perception that most individual actors were not receiving direction.

But a rapidly changing social and technological environment may have rescued leaderless resistance from the dustbin of history—as the strategy was originally conceived, rather than as it has come to be understood.

The story of what Louis Beam got right, and what he got wrong, can help us understand the challenge presented by lone-actor terrorists, as the United States and the world grapple with a growing number of terrorist attacks by lone extremists, including this weekend’s carnage in El Paso, where 22 people were  killed, allegedly by a white-supremacist gunman.

[Max Abrahms: Let’s not redo the War on Terror at home]

Terrorism and extremism are inherently social activities, usually carried out by individuals because they dramatically overvalue their membership in a . Because of this social quality, it has been relatively rare to see terrorists who carry out violent attacks without any sort of strong social context. For many years, the exemplar of the lone-wolf terrorist