Extremist Ideology Is Hard to Pin Down

Editor’s Note: As Jacob Ware wrote recently in the Foreign Policy Essay, “election violence is already in full swing,” and other forms of political violence are rife as well. The threat, however, is not usually from a coherent set of groups or actors. The University of Texas’s Benjamin Allison describes how many violent actors have confusing (and confused) motives that mix a range of ideologies and personal grievances.

Daniel Byman

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The two attempts on former President Donald Trump’s life have generated a tremendous amount of speculation regarding the motives and ideology of the would-be assassins, Thomas Matthew Crooks and Ryan Wesley Routh. Beyond their apparent mental instability and failed attempts to kill the former president, the two men had little in common: Crooks left bafflingly little evidence regarding his motives, whereas Routh posted extensively on X and Facebook, self-published a book in which he called on Iran to assassinate both Trump and himself, and left a letter in which he claimed responsibility for the assassination attempt.

But for all the hubbub, it is difficult to say what specific ideologies, if any, motivated these men to try to kill the former president. Crooks appears to have been seeking to make a name for himself by killing a major politician, regardless of party. Routh’s political ideology is muddled, to put it mildly. The best distillation seems to be that Routh conceived of himself as pro-democracy, anti-tyranny, and anti-Trump, viewing the former president as a threat to democracy and international order.

This lack of ideological clarity is not uncommon. Even if more information is forthcoming, it is not likely that Crooks’s or Routh’s beliefs will fit nicely into the general public’s—or even terrorism analysts’—preconceived notions of what motivates extremists. Classifying perpetrator ideology often poses numerous problems for scholars and analysts because their beliefs are unclear due to a lack of information or the unusual or incoherent cocktail of ideas they espouse. This clashes with public and political desires for explanations that fit into straightforward narratives about why attacks occurred—and who is to blame.

The first challenge is the information handicap. Often there is not much information available about the perpetrator. Some of the most helpful materials in this regard can be social media posts, messages, and—ideally—manifestos. But not every politically violent individual leaves these behind; as a matter of fact, investigators seem to be stumped by the apparent lack of a digital paper trail from Crooks.

Second, individuals’ ideologies can be unclear or contain elements from multiple ideological movements. For instance, in 2010, Andrew Joseph Stack III flew his single-engine plane into the IRS building in Austin, Texas. He left behind a manifesto that expressed a vast range of views defying easy classification, raving against the Roman Catholic Church, corporations, the U.S. legal system, and the U.S. tax code, all of which were, he argued, “the real American nightmare.” This hybrid set of ideas defies easy categorization.

Another example is the case of involuntary celibates (incels) and ideological misogynists. Some violent incels leave behind manifestos containing rage against both women and minorities (including, sometimes, their own racial group). Their attacks have been motivated by both racist and anti-women ideologies.

Third, individuals may engage in what looks like political violence without holding to a specific ideology. Bruce Ivins, the alleged perpetrator of the 2001 “Amerithrax” attacks, did not display any ideological motivation for his purported (but unproven) crimes, which seemed to be motivated by anxieties about his research on an anthrax vaccine being defunded; others postulate he may have been motivated by greed, since he had a share of the patent for the vaccine. Either way, if Ivins was the perpetrator—itself a matter of debate—he seemingly lacked an ideological reason for mailing anthrax spores to government officials and media outlets.

In 2019, Connor Betts conducted a mass killing in Dayton, Ohio, killing nine, including his transgender sibling. Betts was open about his Leftist views but was also tremendously misogynistic, allegedly maintaining a “hit list” and a “rape list” and singing about sexual violence in a pornogrind band. While conservatives were quick to seize on Betts’s support for antifa as an explanation for his violence, the FBI ultimately concluded that he was not motivated by ideology but, rather, by a mix of mental illness and violent fantasies. His and other cases underscore the difficulties of understanding the link (or lack thereof) between ideology and violent action.

There is also the question of whether there is such a link. Some scholars argue that ideology is simply cover for pursuing strictly materialistic aims, or galvanizing people to take violent action. Others hold that ideology simply obscures more important factors like psychology or sociology. For instance, in 2013, Jeremy and Christine Moody, a neo-Nazi couple in South Carolina, killed a convicted sex offender and his wife. The year prior, Jeremy self-published a manifesto in which he wrote that “[t]he only cure for child abusers and molesters is to have every member of their immediate family killed. These nefarious crimes and people should not be allowed to procreate. By destroying their immediate family members, you purify the blood line.” He and Christine’s beliefs about sex predators stemmed in large part from being victims of childhood sexual abuse themselves and a cocktail of mental illnesses that led them to believe they had been called by God to kill all sexual predators.

This raises the question: If a white supremacist kills a sexual predator, is it political violence? Did they do it because they believe it will further their cause or for internal moral or psychological reasons? These threads can be difficult to untangle, and they highlight the challenges of determining where ideology begins and mental illness and a disposition toward violence end.

Indeed, in targeting former President Trump, it is possible that Crooks had no ideology at all, but simply sought infamy, as have so many others throughout U.S. history. Routh, by contrast, seemingly saw Trump as a threat to democracy and decided he had to take action, apparently after realizing that his various other futile attempts to defend democracy the world over were never going to amount to anything. But again, Routh did not appear to adhere to a specific ideology.

When news of Crooks’s assassination attempt broke, many rushed to say he was a Leftist, despite the utter lack of evidence that Crooks professed any clear ideology. Of course, the impulse to deduce perpetrator ideology from the target of an attack is understandable, but it can be extremely dangerous.

Rushing to ascribe an ideology to a violent actor not only is injudicious but also can create an environment in which calls for retribution against those holding the same purported ideology can worsen the situation and create a spiral of misinformation, fear, and violence.

So even if either man wrote a manifesto, we might not get a fully satisfactory answer to why Thomas Crooks and Ryan Routh tried to kill the 45th president, though the fact that Routh is still alive might make determining his motive a little easier. While classifying ideology is an inherently political exercise, it should not be a partisan one. This will be important to keep in mind if it turns out that Crooks or Routh left anything explicitly laying out their reasoning for targeting the former president (which it appears Routh did). When it comes to extremist motivations for political violence, their varied sources and the role of mental health make it difficult to attribute a root cause and who might have been responsible for leading them down that road. Reflexively pointing fingers will do nothing to bring the United States back from the precipice of political violence on which it is teetering.