Socially mobilized populations resist foreign intervention that illiterate peasants cannot

Evidence

In 2000 already, Putnam himself warned that social capital exhibited a “dark side.” “It was social capital, for example, that enabled Timothy McVeigh to bomb the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City,” he wrote. “McVeigh’s network of friends, bound together by a norm of reciprocity, enabled him to do what he could not have done alone.” Other scholars have followed suit. In their much-cited article “Bowling for Fascism,” Shanker Satyanath, Nico Voigtländer, and Hans-Joachim Voth marshal regression analyses to show that in the early phase—particularly in Länder (federal states) with unstable coalition governments—a higher density of social capital increased the likelihood that people would join the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP). — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 145 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Revolutionary movements fail when foreign allies restrain land reform that could win rural support; High social capital can enable rather than prevent authoritarian mobilization — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization…, 145; Revolution imposed from outside fails without support from the local population. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2296 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• High social capital can enable rather than prevent authoritarian mobilization #complicates (0.72) — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 145