Bill V. Mullen - The US Antifascism Reader

The US Antifascism Reader

The US Antifascism Reader

Edited by
Bill V. Mullen and Christopher Vials

First published by Verso 2020
Collection Bill V. Mullen and Christopher Vials 2020
Contributions The Contributors 2020

Excerpt from The Authoritarian Personality reprinted with permission. New York:
American Jewish Committee 1950. www.ajc.org All rights reserved.

Pieces from Avedis Derounian republished with permission of Elyse Derounian Rogers.

Barbara Ehrenreich, Foreword, in Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, Volume 1: Women, Floods,
Bodies, History was reprinted with permission of The University of Minnesota Press 1987.

Excerpts from It Cant Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis 1935 by
Sinclair Lewis, renewed 1963 by Michael Lewis. Used by permission of Signet, an imprint of
Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

The McCarthy Falange 1954 by the Christian Century. Reprinted by permission from
the Dec 29, 1954, issue of the Christian Century. www.christiancentury.org.

Enzo Traverso, Trumps Savage Capitalism: The Nightmare is Real, in World Policy Journal,
Volume 34, no. 1, pp. 1317. 2017, World Policy Institute. All rights reserved. Republished
by permission of the copyright holder, and the present publisher, Duke University Press.

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the authors and editors have been asserted

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Contents

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All books are collective, this one more than most. It reflects learning from, and organizing with, a wide range of people committed to the analysis of and fight against fascism. These would include: Joe Allen, Maximillian Alvarez, Megha Anwer, Chip Berlet, Tithi Bhattacharya, Will Biel, Marcel Bois, Jason Chang, Nigel Copsey, Mathew Dittman, Nada Elia, Amy Fehr, Sue Ferguson, Meleiza Figueroa, Evan Fritz, Hugo Garca, Micah Goodrich, Jane Gordon, Todd Gordon, Kate Doyle Griffiths, Albeta Hjkov, Rebecca Hill, Aaron Jaffe, Alaina Kaus, Bre Leake, Fred Lee, Holly Lewis, Grant Mandarino, David McNally, Dana Mills, Adam Miyashiro, Wyatt Mund, Mimi Nguyen, David Palumbo-Liu, Ian Alan Paul, Jerry Phillips, Clayton Plake, Charlie Post, David Renton, Cathy Schlund-Vials, Malini Schueller, Dan Siegel, Hayley Stefan, G. M. Tams, Enzo Traverso, Jarred Wiehe, and Anna Ziering.

We would especially like to thank the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut, particularly Michael Lynch and Alexis Boylan, for awarding us a grant to cover the permissions and copyright costs associated with this book. Without this crucial support, the scope of the book would have been very limited. We would also like to thank Alan Wald for his mentorship in helping us to find crucial individuals and artifacts of the antifascist left and to Benjamin Balthaser for his scholarly assistance. Jim Baggett at the Birmingham Public Library was also quite generous in helping us locate material on Asa Carter, and Jen Hoyer and Michelle Hardesty were true comrades for getting us the material on Anti-Racist Action from the Interference Archive in Brooklyn, New York. We owe a real debt of gratitude to Elyse Derounian Rogers for allowing us to use her fathers writings, as well as to Marc Mamigonian at the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research for all his support with the Avedis Derounian Papers. A special thanks also to the American Studies Writing Group at the University of Connecticut, which provided valuable feedback on the introduction (Peter Baldwin, Kate Capshaw, Martha Cutter, Nina Dayton, Jeff Dudas, Clare Eby, Kathy Knapp, Shawn Salvant, Nancy Shoemaker, Manisha Sinha, David Yalof). Last but certainly not least, we would like to thank the living antifascists in this collection, not only for their contributions to real democracy, but for generously allowing us to use their work: Mark Bray, Kathleen Cleaver, Les Evans, Ken Lawrence, Sam Miller, Penny Nakatsu and Enzo Traverso.

A special shout-out goes to members of the Campus Antifascist Network (CAN). We helped found the group in June of 2017 after American fascists marched through Bay Area streets. Since then, a founding group of forty grew to include more than 2,000 people. The Network built chapters at more than a dozen campuses in the United States, the UK, and Canada. CAN organizers have helped build rallies against eugenics proponent Charles Murray at the University of Michigan, neo-Nazi Richard Spencer at Michigan State University, and alt-right hack Lucian Wintrich at the University of Connecticut. Those protests have slowed the momentum of a small but nascent fascist and neofascist movement. They have demonstrated a theory and practice of popular antifascism that this book seeks to remember, commemorate, and keep alive.

Introduction: Anti/Fascism
and the United States

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We assembled this collection because of fascisms loud return to the world stage as an animating political idea and an aspirant mode of political rule. Its return results from a complex weave of epochal shifts: the global economic slump of the 1970s and the attendant rise of neoliberal market ideologies; wide-scale attacks by elites and global financial institutions on working-class lives and social welfare; continuing deracination of workers organizations, including trade unions; the collapse of official state communism in the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc countries; 9/11, myriad Wars on Terror and Islamophobic panics generated across the capitalist West; population displacement from Middle Eastern, predominantly Muslim countries like Syria into Western Europe precipitated by the US invasion of Iraq and subsequent rise of ISIS into the resultant political vacuums; and the second global financial collapse of 20072008. In many traditionally democratic and capitalist Western states, these events have combined to erode lateral affiliations necessary for left-democratic politics and helped actuate a political third space, beyond conservativism and social democracy, a predominantly white, racist, nationalist, middle-class backlash that finds expression in a politics of resentment, victimhood, xenophobia and anti-leftism traditionally associated with classical fascism. In the United States, the return of fascist appeals relies on foundations much deeper in scope: namely, a history of white racial identification and settler colonial militarism, centuries in the making, without which the specter of an American fascism would be nearly unthinkable.

These historical coordinates are more durable in significance than the individual far-right figures and movements they have so far produced: individuals like Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Marine Le Pen in France, and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, or movements such as CasaPound in Italy and Golden Dawn in Greece. They overwhelm in importance the dog whistle US politician of aspirant fascistsDonald Trumpwhose election in 2016 was a tenuous constellation of the global currents enumerated above: a candidate who unconsciously rediscovered a fascist rhetorical style, rather than building a fascist-like movement. Yet Trumps election to the highest office of the worlds most powerful militarized and capitalist state