ABSTRACT
Despite the fact that thousands of political scientists study US politics, US political science has been caught off-guard by every single right-wing phenomenon of the past decades. Whether it was neoconservatism or Trumpism, the Tea Party or the so-called "alt-right", US political science did not see it coming and devoted precious few resources to understanding it. This chapter focuses on far right terrorism, which is considered to be "the most severe threat of political violence" by US law enforcement agencies, but is hardly studied by US political scientists. To be fair, while the situation is not much better with regard to the radical left, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter and particularly Occupy Wall Street have drawn much more interest from American political scientists. Perhaps the rise of Trump will finally lead to some critical introspection and, wishful thinking, structural change within US political science in general, and the study of American politics in particular.
