Tag: Anti-Fascism

The Jan. 6 coup blared an alarm about rising fascism. Will we hear it? (WaPo Article)

On the two year anniversary of the attempted Jan. 6 coup, I published a new piece on fascism, anti-fascism, and Anti-Racist Action in the Washington Post:

Two years after the failed Jan. 6, 2021, coup, the far right continues to escalate threats against marginalized groups and to our democratic system more broadly. The mass killing at Club Q in Colorado Springs, followed soon after by an attack on an electrical grid, which some suspect might have been motivated by a desire to disrupt a drag show in North Carolina, offer a grim foreshadowing of more violence to come. This is particularly worrying given Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) recent statement to the New York Young Republican Club that if she and Stephen K. Bannon had been in charge on Jan. 6, the mob “would have been armed” and “we would have won.”

This movement has many of the elements we recognize as fascism. Fascism is a far-right political approach that offers what the historian Robert Paxton calls “compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity” to people obsessed with perceived humiliation and social decline. Historically, fascist movements have taken the form of militant nationalist parties that turn against democracy in alliance with elements of the conservative elite. They engage in “redemptive violence” to pursue “goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.” Although it may seem to have come out of nowhere, today’s American fascism has roots in a surge of far-right violence in the late 20th century. We have much to learn from the recent evolution of fascism — and from anti-fascist responses — to help understand far right violence today. . .

You can read the whole article in the Washington Post here: The Jan. 6 coup blared an alarm about rising fascism. Will we hear it?

Or you can read it without a paywall here at the Anchorage Daily News.

Fascism and Anti-Fascism in the Post-War United States

I haven’t posted anything in a little while, in part because I’ve been working on a few proposals for academic panels and fellowships as well as revising a chapter for the Anarchism and Punk book project. I want to share some of what I’ve been writing, so here is the proposal that I submitted to the American Historical Association for a panel I am organizing on fascism and anti-fascism in the post-war United States. Fingers crossed that it is accepted and that we can present in person at the conference, which is in Philly in January 2023.

Anti-fascism exploded into the public spotlight after Donald Trump’s electoral victory in 2016. Spectacular street battles between fascists and anti-fascists in the heart of liberal cities like Berkeley and Portland led to antifa becoming a widely discussed phenomenon and a new bogeyman of the far right. Yet despite their meteoric rise to popular consciousness in the past decade, neither fascism nor anti-fascism came out of nowhere. In the United States, fascists continued to mobilize after World War II in the American Nazi Party, the Ku Klux Klan, the Christian far right, and beyond. In turn, antifascists have long fought to disrupt their organizing, in part by drawing on the experience of past generations who fought the rise of fascism in Europe. As the far right spreads across the globe today, it is critical to explore the history of post-war anti-fascism and use it to inform contemporary struggles against fascism.

This panel offers new historical perspectives on the development of fascism and anti-fascism in the United States in the post-war period. Panelists argue that, far from marginal or anachronistic political phenomena, fascism and anti-fascism substantively shaped the development of American politics in the second half of the twentieth century. Christopher Vials opens the conversation by providing an explanatory framework for understanding post-war fascism before turning to a case study of the Christian far right. Anna Duensing then shows how the Black anti-fascist tradition shaped Black organizing and coalition-building in the classical civil rights era of the 1950s-60s. Next, Montse Feu discusses the use of humor in US-based solidarity work to undermine Francisco Franco’s “imperial will” in fascist Spain. Finally, Spencer Beswick explores how the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation contributed to the development of contemporary antifa by situating anti-fascism within a broader revolutionary strategy. Mark Bray, the author of Antifa: The Antifascist Handbook, will provide commentary before the floor is opened to audience discussion and questions.

The importance of this history has only grown more urgent in the wake of the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol Building in an attempt to reinstate Donald Trump as president. Given the tumultuous contemporary political situation, we anticipate a broad audience of scholars seeking to understand (and debate) the legacy of post-war fascism and anti-fascism.