Today’s far-right networks include many middle-class and wealthy participants, and their coalitions are complex. Neo-Nazi groups (Traditionalist Workers Party, Vanguard America, National Socialist Movement), followers of web-based far-right platforms (The Daily Stormer, National Policy Institute, Nationalist Front), white supremacist groups (Ku Klux Klan, Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights, Identity Evropa), and various armed militia groups (Oath Keepers, 3 Percenters, Virginia Minutemen Militia, Light Foot Militia)28 are often able to subordinate their differences in the interest of building a unified movement.
Today’s anti-racist and anti-fascist organizers face the same challenges as their political ancestors in terms of building and maintaining diverse coalitions. Typically, those willing to confront white supremacists in the streets include students, clergy, and local community members. In Charlottesville, national organizations such as the broad, chapter-based Showing Up for Racial Justice, and Redneck Revolt, which advocates armed self-defense, worked to find common ground on the frontlines. Strategies to confront white nationalists are mixed. For instance, some groups in Charlottesville were determined to remain nonviolent under any circumstance, and sang songs like “This Little Light of Mine” to counter white nationalists’ chants of the “Our Blood, Our Soil!”29 Others came prepared to defend themselves in the event that they or other counter-protesters were attacked, and arrived equipped with face-masks, first-aid plans, and shields.
The confrontations in Charlottesville ripped open many of the tensions simmering just under the surface of the anti-racist coalitions. Internet pundits and media commentators suggested that the violence could have been avoided had counter-protesters remained peaceful or chosen to not directly confront the racists. Professor and theologian Cornel West, a well-known adherent of nonviolence who was present in Charlottesville, had a very different take: “Those twenty of us who were standing, many of them clergy, we would have been crushed like cockroaches if it were not for the anarchists and the anti-fascists who approached, over 300, 350 anti-fascists. We just had twenty. And we’re singing ‘This Little light of Mine,’ you know what I mean?”30
The role of the police comes into question. In Charlottesville, the police stationed around the corner did nothing to prevent white nationalists from using sticks to severely beat DeAndre Harris, a twenty-year-old Black man, in a parking garage. As the police “stood to the side and did not try to prevent” skirmishes, a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of anti-fascists, injuring nineteen people and killing Heather Heyer.31 President Donald Trump weighed in on the violence by saying, “I think there is blame on both sides.”
In addition to the president, plenty of news outlets were also unwilling to pick sides. Adam Johnson, an analyst with the nonprofit watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, studied six national newspapers—the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, San Jose Mercury News, and Washington Post—in the month following Charlottesville. According to Johnson’s report, these papers “published 28 op-eds or editorials condemning the anti-fascist movement known as antifa, or calling on politicians to do so, and 27 condemning neo-Nazis and white supremacists, or calling on politicians—namely Donald Trump—to do so.”32 Johnson’s study concluded that while most “both sides” columns added a qualifier clarifying that there was no moral equivalency between antifa and neo-Nazis, this framing could not help but imply that there was. And a few explicitly argued, yes, anti-fascism was just as bad as fascism.33
When alt-right leaders spread racist messages at college campuses nationwide, those who opposed them often argued bitterly against each other over tactics and strategy. What role should militancy play when confronting the far right? Should those who espouse a rhetoric of racial subjugation and genocide be given platforms to spread their views and enlist new recruits? To what degree are the state and commercial media complicit in spreading the messages of the far right?
These are old questions that harken back to another time when the far right was on the march in the United States—the 1980s. Then, as now, far-right aggression was emboldened by a friend in the Oval Office. And during Reagan’s time, the Klan was not the only racist organization on the scene either. The Aryan Nation’s recruitment efforts targeted those influenced by Christian Identity teachings and the view that a race war was imminent. The White Aryan Resistance cleverly operated within youth culture in a concerted effort to expand its ranks with young people. The National Association for the Advancement of White People used a polite middle-class veneer in an attempt to make notions of white supremacy appear more approachable. The era leading up to Reagan’s election saw increased collaboration between traditional patriotic racist organizations such as the Klan, and neo-Nazi groups advocating armed revolution against the U.S. government. This resulted in the “Nazification of the Klan,” the formation of the “United Racist Front,” and increased outbreaks of violence such as the Greensboro massacre that took place on November 3, 1979.
Fascist movements have played a role in U.S. politics since the 1930s. In Right Wing Populism in America, Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons describe fascist activities as building “national, racial, or cultural unity and collective rebirth while seeking to purge imagined enemies.”34 While most fascist organizations have not had the direct access to state power that other right-wing groups have historically enjoyed, they still have played a pivotal role in influencing U.S. politics. Even when such organizations have been in a lull, their fascist tactics, cultural cues, and ideology have been able to influence forces across the political spectrum, including dominant discourses.
The call to uphold the rights of white people was notably popularized by Klansman David Duke in the attempt to rebrand the Klan’s image in the late 1970s. In his revival of the National Association for the Advancement of White People, Duke gave the Klan’s agenda a new face. He described his group as “primarily a white rights lobby organization, a racialist movement, mainly middle-class people.”35 This preceded the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, which codified a precedent for “reverse racism.”36 This marked a shift toward retrenchment in the courts, and created alliance-building opportunities between street-based reactionaries and mainstream politicians.
Today’s white supremacist networks build upon the rhetorical foundation laid by Duke. A 2017 report by Daniel Kreiss and Kelsey Mason in the Washington Post argued that the right reinforces racial affiliation as a basis for political power. Inequality, in the white nationalist imagination, has little to do with economics or the distribution of rights and resources. As Duke did, today’s far right argues that white pride does not equal white supremacy. This allows proponents to sideline discussions of structural inequalities and trumpet the idea that people naturally prefer the company of their own group. Kreiss and Mason argue that, despite the fact that, “the alt-right seemingly eschews white supremacist language, at least in some public forums, to broaden the movement’s appeal, its racially pure vision of a white America is as racist, exclusionary and anti-democratic as that of the segregationist ‘authoritarian enclaves’ of the Jim Crow era.”37
CONTESTED HISTORIES
No Fascist USA! is a collection of stories from the underexplored history of anti-fascist activity in the United States. The book follows the formation of the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee, its dedication to movements for self-determination, and its confrontations with organized white supremacy in the streets and within the state. Chapter One traces the deep shifts in the political terrain of the radical left in the United States from the 1960s to the 1980s. It begins in New York with political prisoner support networks and the John Brown Book Club, and examines the impact of Black Liberation Army member Assata Shakur’s escape from prison and the Greensboro massacre. Chapter Two explains how Reagan’s election gave the green light for racist vigilante mobilizations and raised the stakes in the politics of confrontation for the Committee and groups across the country. Chapter Three maps the Committee’s place in relationship to the larger anti-Klan movement. Chapter Four explores the evolution of the organization’s approach by examining the deployment of cultural politics from both the left and right. Chapter Five traces the paths that key activists took after the dissolution of the Committee. Chapter Six offers lessons for continuing