Anti-Government Groups On The Rise

According to a new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center, the number of militias and related anti-government groups in America shot up from 149 in 2008 to 512 in 2009. The report doesn't include figures on the membership in these groups, which I think we need to fully judge the importance of that increase--if 363 people have dubbed themselves one-man Liberation Armies, I don't know that that's a major trend or disturbing development. But if these organizations are big enough to be creating websites, showing up on law enforcement radar, or making the news (which is mostly how SPLC finds out about them, though they do field research of their own), that's a troubling rate of increase.

Anti-government extremists are dangerous for a lot of reasons. They murder people, of course. But even if they never escalate to violence, they encourage people to treat their problems as general rather than specific, and to turn away from actually trying to solve those specific problems. By extrapolating targeted problems into general ones, anti-government groups actually obscure specific things that are broken in government, making them harder to fix. And by convincing people not to even try to engage with government to fix their problems, militias allow people to blame government while absolving themselves of any role in making it better.

I understand that government is large, and has both functional and customer service problems. But it's not going away. Efforts to make it so will only end up with people dead.