I'm not sure what these stats actually mean, though. During the same period, the total number of murders in the U.S. averaged about 15,000 per year (give or take). That would be (on average) 150,000 murders for the ten-year period. That would mean extremist-related killings amounted to around 0.2% of all killings. Not that I'm minimizing the value of human life, but in terms of numbers, this doesn't appear to be threatening of some massive upheaval or overthrow of the government.
Correct. Your chances of being murdered, in general, are pretty rare. The chances of you getting murdered for some sort of political reason is even lower. The stats are just illustration of the difference between the perception of various groups and their actual threat level. Given that, in the time period that an average person was 3x more likely to be killed by a white supremacist than an Islamic extremist, and far more likely to killed by a right-ringer than anything even remotely related to antifa. It's reasonable to come to the conclusion that it's not much of an issue due to rareness of this sort of violence, but society still very treats the notion of being attack about Islam/Leftists (including spending hundreds of millions of dollars to monitor these groups, etc.) incredibly out of proportion
I don't disagree your point that American Neo-Nazi's etc. have no real threat of... performing some sort of grassroots violent takeover. But then again, that's not how Nazi's came to power either.
But they could have been stopped if the powers that be at the time had improved the economic situation. That's the real tragedy of it all, mainly due to unchecked greed and ideological intransigence of the kind that appears evident in America today. The other factor is fear-mongering, which even liberals have been guilty of with their Russia-bashing rhetoric. So, if you combine class tensions/economic uncertainty with exaggerated fears of an external enemy (or enemies), then you move that much closer to an extremist type government.
It makes sense to me that poverty reduces social cohesion. However, given that the powers didn't improve the economic situation, then what were the people who weren't the powers suppose to do about the rise of fascism in their country. If you aren't in power of various economic institutions, which most people are not, then simply improving the economic situation is not an option available to you.
Also, I'm skeptical that poverty (while obviously it can be a contributory factor) is a necessary condition for a large movement to nationalistic, authoritarian and generally illiberal governments.
