March 2025

Liberal democracy has never put down deep roots in the South in the way it did across the rest of the country. The region never really abandoned its warped electoral politics and inclination to single-party cronyism, a Southern political instinct that helps explain how Democratic dominance transformed so completely into Republican one-party rule following the civil rights era. Inequality continues to define economic life in the region. […]

Bourbon rule across the South is a good starting place for understanding the challenges facing the region. The Bourbons—Southern Democrats of the planter and professional classes who opposed Reconstruction—came to dramatically shape American politics from the 1870s into the early twentieth century. For decades, this small elite fomented discord among poor whites to keep their political energies focused on their peers rather than their de facto rulers. As Reconstruction began to falter in the mid-1870s, Bourbon power brokers gained control in Southern states like Alabama and Georgia. By the 1890s, the Old South was aggressively reasserting itself. In 1896, the Supreme Court enshrined the principle of “separate but equal.”

In 1898, America’s first coup d’etat took place as the Democrats of Wilmington, North Carolina issued a “White Declaration of Independence.” They were attacking the coalition of black Republicans and white Populists that had control of the local government in the 1890s, which the old Confederates of the city found intolerable. With their resentment and rage being fueled by white Democratic powerbrokers, two thousand armed men forced out the duly elected government. None were more pleased by this result than their Bourbon backers.

V.O. Key Jr., one of America’s greatest scholars of Southern politics, blames this “banker-planter-lawyer” class for the South’s political and economic underdevelopment. Ostensibly pro-business but viciously self-interested, the Bourbons not only defended the South’s racial apartheid but also exploited the region’s poor rural whites, as the Wilmington coup attests.

The consequences of this, as of the Civil War, are still being felt. In a 2024 essay for Aeon, academic and writer Keri Leigh Meritt laid out the many ways the South as a region lags economically—pinned down by poverty, hobbled by an absence of public investments, and choked by a miasma of disillusionment and isolation:

Southerners in general are isolated and lonely, and wealth and power are heavily concentrated: there are a few thousand incredibly wealthy families – almost all of them the direct descendants of the Confederacy’s wealthiest slaveholders – a smaller-than-average middle class, and masses of poor people, working class or not. The South, with few worker protections, prevents its working classes from earning a living wage. It’s virtually impossible to exist on the meagre income of a single, low-wage, 40-hour-a-week job, especially since the US has no social healthcare benefits.

Vance’s comments on the Bourbons place them in a national frame, which brings us to another important dimension of the post-Civil War South. Historian Heather Cox Richardson and others have argued that the South’s oligarchic power structures were not dismantled following the defeat of the Confederacy. A number of modern studies have shown that, in many places in the South, the self-styled aristocrat Bourbons recovered their wealth and status in the years following the Civil War.

Our research team at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), an international counter-extremism organisation, has examined al-Abdulmohsen’s online profile over the past eight years and found that he did in fact have a clear set of views—security services just didn’t spot them. Al-Abdulmohsen consistently expressed views inspired by the counter-jihad movement, a loose network of bloggers, thinktanks and organisations promoting anti-Muslim and often far-right ideas. He considered Islam to be a dangerous, violent and totalitarian ideology, not a religion. He described Muslims and Arabs as intellectually primitive, promoted conspiracy theories about the “Islamisation” of Europe and justified discrimination against Muslims. These posts are not outliers but rather part of a consistent pattern spanning more than eight years.

Despite the AfD’s attempt to use the Magdeburg attack as further evidence to support its anti-migration policies, the alleged attacker had supported the far-right party since 2016. In his view at that time, “I and the AfD were fighting the same enemy in order to protect Germany.” In December 2017, he even shared a post by Alice Weidel in which she blamed Islam for security threats to Christmas markets.

He also supported international far-right figures promoting counter-jihad ideology, including Dutch politician Geert Wilders. In April 2019, he retweeted a post in which Wilders justified revoking Muslims’ freedom of religion. In 2020, he shared multiple tweets by Wilders that said “Stop Islam” or “Stop Muhammadanism”. In August 2024, he shared a post calling Wilders a “hero”.

As early as December 2016, al-Abdulmohsen also expressed support for the British far-right and anti-Muslim activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the founder and former leader of the English Defence League who goes by the name Tommy Robinson. In May 2024, he retweeted Robinson stating that “using the word Islamism let’s [sic] Islam off the hook. The problem is Islam.” In October 2024, he shared a tweet by Robinson promoting his new book, which he claimed provided “all the evidence of the replacement of Europeans by the oligarchy”.

Given the remarkably consistent beliefs in the alleged attacker’s online activity over nearly nine years, why were authorities in Germany seemingly unable to link him to the far right?