Q: How Should We Respond to the Rise of the Far Right?

• Author: Bray, Mark
• Position: ONE QUESTION

MARK BRAY

Historian of human rights, terrorism, and politics in modern Europe at Rutgers University, and author of Antifa: The AntiFascist Handbook (Melville House, 2017).

We should continue to build a broad-based, diverse, and militant movement against racism and fascism. Our movement must deny bigots the opportunity to establish platforms in our communities and counterprotest the far right whenever possible.

Ignoring fascism is not an option. Since fascism has always been aggressively violent, we must defend the legitimacy of collective self-defense and acknowledge a diversity of tactics across our multifaceted movement.

We cannot count on the police to protect us when they disproportionately identify with far-right politics, generally support the new fascism of "blue lives matter" Trumpism, and embody a thoroughly white supremacist institution.

We must understand that the far right is not an outlier in U.S. politics and history, but rather an acute manifestation of deep-seated and longstanding white supremacy, hetero-patriarchy, ableism, authoritarianism, and capitalism.

Therefore, our antifascism must point beyond merely squelching the far right and toward building a new world in which the root causes of fascism have been stamped out.

SHANNON REED

Associate professor of criminal justice at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and co-author of Alt-Right Gangs: A Hazy Shade of White (University of California Press, 2020).

Responding to the far right--and its seeming rise in popularity and...