In the past few days, we have sadly learned another unfortunate term to help us understand our time: “stochastic terrorism”. It means the public demonisation of a person or group, resulting in the incitement of violent acts, which are statistically probable but whose specifics cannot be predicted. Accordingly, specific lone-wolf attacks are apparently influenced or triggered by rhetoric associated with stochastic terrorism.

Think of this stochastic terror as the geopolitical equivalent of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, or a routine chemical reaction in which you know the outcome, but without knowing which atoms and molecules will be the first to react.

Think, too, perhaps, of Northern Ireland during its “troubles”, and of the periodic spikes in acts of violence in troubled places in the Middle East, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, and elsewhere. In the US, so far in 2019, more than 30 mass killings have occurred, although not every one of those can be identified as an example of stochastic terror. (Just by the way, it has also been pointed out that in one week there were more than 40 killings in the Cape Town areas known as the Cape Flats, although none of those individual incidents has rivalled the carnage of, say, El Paso’s massacre.)

In the past week, the three latest eruptions of what we must call stochastic terrorism in the US have come at a food and music festival in the small town of Gilroy, California, in a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, and now, finally – at least until the next terrible one comes along – along the downtown entertainment district of Dayton, Ohio.

All three of these places are now linked indelibly with seemingly senseless massacres via the barrel of a rapidly fired weapon. None of these places had, heretofore, been seen as any kind of ground zero for white supremacist rhetoric or action, nor had they been the focal points for racial or ethnic strife. Now the three of them are joined at the hip to this plague of violence. Forever.

This stochastic terrorism – building on a reserve of corrosive white nativist nationalist thinking and its associated fiery rhetoric – draws its energy from the words that have been emanating from the US’s chief executive, right from the beginning of his presidency – and back during his unlikely but successful run for office in 2016. Of course, this is not entirely new territory.

More than two generations earlier, Richard Hofstadter had described it all in his seminal essay that appeared in Harpers in 1964, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”. While Donald Trump obviously did not invent most of these current messages, he has given them enormous currency and, importantly, he has helped normalise this discourse, thereby opening the door for others to give vent to their now-aroused passions and impulses – and to carry out their fatal assaults.

In those counties across the nation that have been the sites for his rallies, it has been reported that hate crimes have risen dramatically over the past several years. While the president had been unable to pronounce the words, “white nationalist terrorism” until today, choosing, rather, to call the killers hateful crazies affected by video games and the internet, in his Monday national message designed to console and lead the way forward towards a kind of healing, he was still unable to stand up for legislation to establish comprehensive, universal background checks before criminals and the mentally ill could purchase firearms and ammunition.

Or, as David Frum, writing in The Atlantic, noted, “There is one developed country — and only one — in which it is not only legal, but easy and convenient, to amass a private arsenal of mass slaughter. That country also happens to be the one — and the only one — regularly afflicted by mass slaughters perpetrated by aggrieved individuals.”

Yes, of course, such people are a particular kind of crazy, by definition; but they have also, far too often, had discernible and baleful political motives within their madness. (Just by the way, the president’s refusal to countenance comprehensive national background checks for gun buyers has been in spite of the fact that national polling has shown that nine out of 10 Americans support just such a measure. Of course, early in his time in office, Trump had rolled back Obama-era restrictions on those with psychological issues to make gun purchases, so his position has not, apparently, been much altered.)

But this current brand of stochastic terrorism has, of course, gained increasing potency through the impact of social media such as 8chan, giving those otherwise sorry lone wolves easier and easier avenues for broadcasting their ideas – and for taking on board ideas from others of their ilk, via a couple of mouse clicks. Moreover, so far, at least, in the aftermath of each prior mass killing, the National Rifle Association and the broader gun lobby, in tandem with legislators at the national and state levels, have resisted real, meaningful elements of greater gun control.

Yes, the gun lobby provides important campaign contributions to favoured elected officials in view of their anti-gun control stances. But perhaps even more important has been the chilling effect of the gun lobby’s willingness to threaten candidates who promise to tighten controls via vicious attacks against them in the media, online, and with vigorous financial support for their opponents. Taken together, these have had a chilling effect on possible gun control actions.

This absence of any actual, real, progress on gun control – no national, comprehensive, universal, thorough background check system, no limitations on ammunition magazine sizes, no closing down of those so-called private gun show sales but still within the broad protection of gun ownership rights guaranteed by the US Constitution – in the midst of a national massacres crisis, points to a still larger problem. This is the increasing inability of legislatures to implement the will of the citizenry. And that points to a still deeper political problem, the apparent growing inability of many democratic institutions to respond to citizens in the midst of crises, despite the desires by many others around the world for the right of democratic representation.

Let us take that last point first. Paradoxically, despite some strong evidence that representative democratic institutions are increasingly unable to act effectively or in a timely manner in a crisis, in just the past several weeks alone, people around the globe – in Hong Kong, in Moscow, in Khartoum – have been demanding the open, transparent, uncorrupted electoral politics that have long been the ideal, if not always the reality, in the US and Western Europe. There is the fervent belief among the people of countries with these demonstrations that such open politics can give the common, ordinary citizen their best chance to influence those who would govern them, in contrast to the diktats of authoritarianism, military rule, or the so-called state centralism (exercised at a distance in Hong Kong) of their current circumstances.

Or, as James Hohmann and Mariana Alfaro wrote for The Washington Post the other day in that paper’s The 202 blog, “Huge protests in capitals around the world are among the most important and underplayed stories of this summer, but pro-democracy movements on three continents are at risk of being squelched as surveillance states grow more adept at controlling the technologies that helped people liberate themselves during the Arab Spring at the start of the decade.”

Still, the current roadblock in the US on any forward progress on firearms legislation (a universal background checks bill passed the House of Representatives but Moscow Mitch, er Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, has refused to even bring such a proposal to the floor of the Senate for a vote), the continuing impasses on any immigration reforms, and a half dozen other important measures, all point to a pervasive governance crisis within representative democracy in the US.

In Britain, meanwhile, the multi-year debate about how to handle the proposed Brexit stumbles on into its third prime ministership, and in other parliaments across Europe (including the continent-spanning European Parliament), the more traditional moderate right, centrist, and moderate left parties are wrestling with their own respective ultra-nationalist parties. These governance crises, in turn, give rise to ever more cynicism on the part of citizens, numbers of whom even seem to be wondering if a new kind of governing compact, complete with a generous dose of “blood and soil” organic populism leadership – short-circuiting the cumbersome business of those useless legislatures and meaningless elections – may hold better answers to these questions than traditional representative democracy.

“At least the trains, planes, and buses will run on time,” you can almost hear the quiet muttering.

“And they’ll let us keep our guns, too,” some will add, worryingly. DM