Will the streets run red?

A student of political violence weighs in

As promised, today I have something a little different for you: A reply to my previous post on the conditions where we might talk meaningfully about fascism in the United States by Dan Trombly, a PhD candidate at the George Washington University researching political violence, far-right movements, and paramilitarism. I’ve long followed Dan on Twitter and appreciated his nuanced, detailed, and thoughtful threads on the fascism thesis, even though his views are quite different from my own. Basically, Dan says that there were fascistoid groups within MAGA that failed to turn the movement fascist, that there are some political dynamics in a second Trump administration that might turn in a fascist direction, but that we should also remember that street-level violence, one of the big features I said would be a warning sign of fascism, features in all sorts of regimes and political movements that perhaps are not radical enough to deserve that term. Dan also makes a good point: “I still believe the puzzle of U.S. (non-state) political violence, particularly far-right political violence, is not why is there so much,” but why, given our relative legal leniency towards violent speech, freedom of association for radicals, the widespread availability of firearms, and a long, violent history of rightist street action against racial minorities and leftists, is there still so little.”

Some readers might not have so much patience for fine-grained divisions between “authoritarian, illiberal far-right populism” that employs street thugs and fascism as such, but I still believe such analytical distinctions are important to consider. I’ll make one comment, too: Dan doesn’t think social media is the most important reason why paramilitarism isn’t more relevant, but concludes with a quote from an Azov guy deriding Western righties for being mere shitposters. Just sayin’

Anyway, take it away, Dan.—

---

To lay my cards on the table, I tend to focus on fascism in movement or group form rather than regime. I distinguish fascism from the broader family of far-right and syncretic illiberal movements by focusing on attributes generally discernible in a group or movement before the implementation of an actual fascist regime. To wit: fascism emphasizes violent national revolution and renewal, societal mobilization, and an aesthetic style of youth, vitality, and violence. Like other far-right movements operating in the context of democracy or a hybrid regime with democratic trappings, fascists are anti-system and promote a counter-elite, but distinguish themselves from far-right populism by connecting that counter-elite with loyalty, militancy, and self-sacrifice. In classical form this is Mussolini’s “aristocracy of the trenches” and the “aristocracy in action” reproduced in the streets, which endows fascism with its morbid passion and aesthetic archetypes, often appropriated but less often embodied: skulls grinning or with daggers in their teeth; our dead comrades march alongside us; I don’t give a fuck if I should die, long live death!

Failed fascists or failure to become fascist? MAGA’s streetfighting experiment

The cauldron of youth, militancy, and energy in this formulation is as volatile as it is vital, particularly when realized in organizational form, whether the proto-fascist leagues, the squads of the interwar activist-stormtroopers, or the postwar formations of militant rightist students or politicized skinheads and hooligans. I see the rise and decline of streetfighters as symptomatic of their failure to generate a dynamic fascist force within the MAGA movement.

Mass politics have changed: as believers in the party-form and electoralism have coalesced increasingly around far-right populism. On the other hand, more militant activists inclined towards fascism and its clear successor ideologies have opted for - or at least kept one boot planted in - the grittier world of the “groupuscular” right, a process many far-right movements underwent before or contemporaneously with their exposure to the world of online organization. Precisely because of the lack of a mass party to direct and discipline the streetfighters, the question of whether they are making themselves “useful” towards electoral parties is often beside the point. From the 1970s to the 1990s, it would be very hard to argue the Republican Party had more use for ultraviolent White Power groups and neo-Nazi skinhead gangs, with their brutality and unabashed aspirations for race war and mass murder, than it does for the Oath Keepers or Proud Boys today. But neither did these groups feel they had as much use for the Republican Party, and they were often prepared, or at least resigned, to operate on the fringes of an electoral system they despised.

The Oath Keepers and Proud Boys formed closer to the mainstream right, but were nevertheless the projects of aspiring political entrepreneurs exploiting areas where the right’s institutions had not taken the lead. The Oath Keepers formed as an effort to ensure armed agents of the state would not “obey in advance” unconstitutional orders issued by a far-fetched authoritarian Obama regime, before the 2014 Black Lives Matter protests provided a more concrete subject for rightist fears of a radicalized, racialized mob. The Proud Boys, with their Skrewdriver-fan founder and his aspirations of a “hard mod” Fred Perry polo aesthetic, demonstrated a more conscious effort to build an organization in the tradition of far-right streetfighting, becoming one of several groups to launder far-right politics and low-intensity violence by confronting the liberal and left-wing turns to street-level activism during Trump’s campaign and administration.

What made these organizations more relevant in the first Trump term than the Biden interregnum, even with these qualifications to their use and function in mass politics, was the growth of anti-Trump and leftist activism, and Trump’s inability to subjugate political institutions to his will. Depending on how generously you want to apply the label, amateur and semi-pro streetfighters were a minority in the hundreds to low thousands during the Stop the Steal protests and on January 6, but they had already won admiration and legitimacy from the right for their role in countering the “leftist mobs” in the streets of the Pacific Northwest and riot-scorched city streets in 2020, providing the muscle behind a campaign of legal, extralegal, and outright illegal machinations that, in many respects, drew as much from the tradition of Color Revolution as national revolution. Decrying a stolen election, bussing in disgruntled supporters to rally against the scheming rival party and disloyal elites, roughing up counterprotesters, attempting to win over or at least demoralize the security services - many of these tactics resemble the largely-nonviolent “urban siege” that has come to characterize late 20th-century and early 21st-century revolution. Although scholars and practitioners of strategic nonviolence have sought to downplay the role of “unarmed collective violence” (among other tactics) in the practice of such revolutions, beating up cops and trashing government buildings are a frequent part of the process. When raw numbers are not enough, or oppositionists lack a sufficiently broad and deep coalition to maximize the power of nonviolent tactics, streetfighters have an opportunity to step into the breach.

The way J6 failed is also instructive, and helps us understand the reason far-rightist streetfighters declined in relevance as of January 7. Yes, many people brought guns to the Capitol. Yes, many hoped their victory would result in the invocation of the Insurrection Act or some other signal to begin massive retribution against traitors and subversives. But nobody shot at the cops, and exactly one person was willing to stare into a cop’s loaded handgun and step forward. The kitted-up tactical team that emerged from a stairwell in the wake of Ashli Babbit’s death encountered a crowd shocked and demoralized, not energized, by the presence of death and the blood of martyrs. The J6 insurrectionists largely returned to their hotel rooms - some full of firearms - and then their homes, to be later arrested by the FBI. There was no need to shoot or shell holdouts at the legislature, no attempts by sympathetic actors to seize control of other government or media institutions, no militia revolts in the countryside, no effort to sustain or capture the momentum. The J6 prosecutions knocked these organizations back to actions of primarily local relevance as the far-right almost immediately began making gains on more favorable institutional terrains, efforts to mobilize on a national scale, and in DC especially, elicited paranoid theories of false flags and FBI machinations. Neither did hardcore subsets of these groups successfully build violent underground organizations - there were no cagoulards carrying on the leagues’ struggles against the victorious left wing government.

Street-fighters became liabilities to classic fascist movements because they became too powerful, and arguably, too fascist. The fascist squads became their own bases of power within the classic fascist movements, capable of threatening party officials and even the leadership cult. There is no Trumpian equivalent to the Pact of Pacification or Stennes Revolt because streetfighters wielded no similar political power within the Trump coalition and advanced no coherent agenda with which to discipline Trump. Nor did the public square - largely demobilized after January 6 - offer much of an opportunity for streetfighters to demonstrate their relevance to the Trump coalition outside of localized demonstrations and confrontations.

While the Proud Boys (more so than the Oath Keepers) may have sought to build a kind of neofascist élan, with their vague gestures towards uniform, hazing rituals, and the relative centrality of physical force confrontation to their identity, these efforts largely failed. Contrast with the streetfighters of the interwar era: the old fascist squads, especially the most militant ones, were useful organizational cages for younger members whose belief in force, revolution, and disillusionment with the system left them uninterested in conventional politics and who in many cases saw more to admire, or at least imitate, in revolutionary Communist structures than bourgeois right-wing parties. While the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers certainly attracted a cast of characters ill-suited for conventional politics, they were (and are) more likely to be relatively older men with families, truck payments, and decent jobs; the kind of people you would expect to react to a defeat in the streets and government repression by spending more time harassing people at school board meetings, rather than uncompromising radicals willing to give their lives for a doomed cause (and let alone radicals willing to find a new cause if the old one proves too inclined to compromise).

Nor did the decline in right-wing street action under the Biden administration seem to have worried the Trumpist movement very much. Far more effort was spent shoring up the GOP’s advantages in institutional and legal arenas in order to contest the 2024 election than attempting to reconstitute a right-wing street force. Despite anxieties about the potential for another “stolen” election, until the brief burst of enthusiasm surrounding Biden’s replacement as the 2024 Democratic candidate most right-wingers seemed convinced, obviously not without reason, that they would run away with it. With these expectations of victory, Trump’s charismatic, personalist, and ideologically infirm style of illiberal, authoritarian populism had room for every far-right and rightist faction to project their hopes onto his second term. While individuals and cliques with fascist worldviews are certainly among that coalition, the absence of dynamic, organized fascist activity - and its failure to even suggest a liability that Trump needed to personally manage under the Biden administration - distinguishes the Trump movement not just from fascist movements, but from other members of the far-right family that needed to co-opt fascist tendencies to maintain power. This combination of streetfighters in disarray and the absence of a serious militant base to push Trump or the Republicans further than they were willing to go contributed to the non-factor of organized political violence in the 2024 elections.

The Second Trump administration and possibilities for a “critique from the right”

Unlike some other critics of the fascism thesis, however, I do not think the possibilities of fascism and its successor ideologies are exhausted, even if, like all other revolutionary ideologies, their ability to seize and wield power is considerably diminished. In some ways, the second Trump administration may offer a more favorable environment for their development than the first. This owes, in part, to the unusual circumstances of Trump’s second victory. He has simultaneously confirmed that the Trump movement is here to stay while also putting a nominal expiration date on his ability to directly wield power - meaning that intra-right struggle is baked into his term. Reflecting Trump’s ability to sell himself as almost anything to almost anyone, there is no clear consensus on what the core of “Trumpism” ought to be post-Trump, nor a clear consensus on who ought to lead such a movement. Trump himself does not currently seem particularly keen on grooming and anointing a successor and his mercurial style is at odds with his ability to credibly designate one.

Under these circumstances, conditions are arguably more auspicious for the generation of a more organized, powerful fascist-indebted movement within the Trumpist camp than in the 2016-2024 period. Those tendencies within Trumpism most directly influenced by classic and postwar fascist thought, or at least the movement family it came from - such as “vitalists,” white identitarians, esoteric traditionalists, neo-reactionaries, Caesarists, integralists, dreamers of a “protestant Franco,” et cetera - have enjoyed significant intellectual and metapolitical success within the U.S. “dissident right.” They have already registered their dissatisfaction not only with the mainstream pre-Trumpian right, but also elements of the current MAGA movement and many self-described “national conservatives.” These tendencies seem more cognizant than others on the right and far-right that elevating their preferred counter-elite and their policies will come with significant resistance not only from the left and liberals, but from the right and entrenched power structures, including members of Trump’s own coalition. The incoming Vice President is aware of these dissident tendencies and their critiques, and with his own calculations in mind about the 2028 elections, may be more sensitive to them than the President himself. More importantly, these dissident rightists tend to have a “thicker,” more future-oriented and revisionist concept of their own historical mission. In their appeal to younger rightists, often those from (primarily online) subcultural spaces, they are generally more inclined towards provocative, subversive, and anti-gerontocratic endeavors than many other rightist factions. Solidifying the role of a new, more radical generation of right-wing activists beyond Trump’s personal political horizon will underscore their need to create an ideology or organizational form outside of Trump himself.

In my estimation, the best prospects for a Trump-era fascist movement lies with some element of this dissident, semi-loyal clique, which will likely emerge and attempt to assert itself to push through those aspects of Trump’s agenda that are most reckless, unpopular, and potentially hazardous to other major power centers within the U.S. right. Immigration and mass deportations seem like a potentially fruitful area for such an approach - it is an issue area where far-rightists feel they have made a major political breakthrough and have a mandate for dramatic, harsh action, but many Republican officials and constituencies will be wary of the economic and social consequences. As right-wing fear-mongering about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio demonstrated, immigration is also an area where even groups at the extreme fringe of the right can attract attention from the mainstream and create rallying points that solve the more disorganized sectors of the far-right’s collective action problems of where and when to mobilize. Furthermore, mass deportations, attacks on birthright citizenship, and other hardline anti-immigration measures are more likely than many other Trumpist agenda items to elicit grassroots, street-level backlash to administration policy and its implementation.

Will the streets run red?

Despite my belief that there is increased danger of something resembling a fascist or fascist successor movement in U.S. politics coalescing under the second Trump administration, repressive political violence and state-tolerated or encouraged street violence is very common, but fascist regimes not so much. For rhetorical purposes I hardly expect this distinction to matter, but for understanding the dynamics of the 2nd Trump administration and political violence in the U.S., the distinction matters to better understand how such violence might be incited, sustained, or hopefully prevented.

Delegated or grassroots violence against opponents and internal critics is more common to democratic or anocratic (or “hybrid,” or “competitive authoritarian”) regimes than we generally like to think. One can also find political structures that combine many of the characteristics associated with fascist violence in non-fascist movements and regimes. De Gaulle’s idiosyncratic, quasi-strongman politics of national renewal had their complement in the Service d’Action Civique, an amalgamation of anticommunist militants, organized criminals, and political operatives who repressed demonstrators and strong-armed dissident Gaullists, to the point of engaging in outright murder even after de Gaulle himself had left the scene. The “Years of Lead” across Europe saw many state security services and political elites make sordid arrangements with ultra-militant groupuscules. These activities were certainly indicators of danger and sometimes crisis, but fared poorly for the strength of neo-fascist movements, who remained in the dissident fringes while far-right populists increasingly focused on successful electoral programs of coalition-building.

For a more contemporary example of the limits of street violence as solid indicator of a burgeoning fascist political program, consider the tumultuous days of 2013-2014 Ukraine, when the state-sponsored muscle of the titushki helped Viktor Yanukovych’s attempts to repress the Euromaidan protests, while the coalition of militant organizations under the Right Sector umbrella transitioned from harassing progressive elements within the Maidan to self-appointment as the vanguard of the militant resistance that ultimately broke the Yanukovych government’s will. Neither before nor after the Euromaidan protests would a dispassionate analyst describe the Ukrainian regime as fascist. Even as political elites found use on the battlefield and streets for activists who formerly upheld the ideology of “social nationalism,” these militants could not generate the wider social mobilization necessary to complete their visions of “national revolution” or assert primacy in elite decision-making in the 2010s. A different dynamic occurred across the border in Russia, where, even after Putin began an authoritarian consolidation of the 1990s bull market for violence specialists, delegated and tolerated violence remained a useful political technology for managing social conflict and political opposition. Prioritizing their neutralization as a potential nationalist base of opposition to the Kremlin, the Russian Federation and its agents often proved willing to tolerate ultraviolent National Socialist attacks on immigrants, non-ethnic Russian citizens of the Federation, and the LGBT community in some instances; repress them in others; and co-opt their ideas and activists where feasible (preferring, for example, to see National Bolsheviks living out their fantasies of revolutionary warlordism in the Donbas rather than against cops in Primorsky), all without delivering the mobilized society or displacing the oligarchic elite as desired by the most ardent fascists.

This may simply sound like a plea to understand the trivial distinction between getting beaten up by a bunch of reactionary goons versus a disciplined squad of stormtroopers, or getting beaten up by a disciplined squad of stormtroopers in a dysfunctional democracy versus an emergent fascist regime. I still think, though, that the kinds of violence Trump and other figures and factions within his movement encourage or tolerate, and the characteristics of those who wield it, matter for how we understand the ideological trajectory of the second Trump administration and a post-Trump right. I still believe the puzzle of U.S. (non-state) political violence, particularly far-right political violence, is not “why is there so much,” but why, given our relative legal leniency towards violent speech, freedom of association for radicals, the widespread availability of firearms, and a long, violent history of rightist street action against racial minorities and leftists, is there still so little. The absence of substantive organizations and subcultures to effectively direct violent specialists and promote an élan of action and sacrifice is a problem not just for fascist organizing but for far-right organizing generally, a problem that far-right intellectual and electoral successes have not necessarily solved. If Trump’s second term emboldens far-right activists and restores a sense of impunity, that could certainly restore street-level or other forms of political violence to levels we saw in the first - but as we saw in the first term, it does not necessarily mean that we will see these groups transition into an effective and durable fascist movement.

Even in the social media age, the organization of violence still matters. Despite the addictive strategic “copium” of leaderless resistance and sometimes breathless counterterrorism analysis fixated on the omnipresent threat of lone wolves, it is still better to hunt in a pack. An effective fascist group - one with a substantial core of motivated combatants willing to sacrifice life, limb, or freedom for the cause - has advantages that other kinds of political muscle do not. They can help elites not only overcome institutional or procedural resistance, but become a dynamic force that constrains and compels elites themselves. In articulating a cause and binding together militants outside Trump’s direct personal authority, they would also pose a greater challenge for a post-Trump administration than the more loosely organized and ideologically underbaked militant tendencies that struggled to find their way in the aftermath of J6.

Again, there is no doubt that far-right activists and intellectuals have learned from the experiences of the past eight years, and as a matter of metapolitics, fascistic ideas and referents have indisputably become more widespread in right-wing intellectual spaces and discourses. Efforts such as the Active Club network show a conscious effort to create a cohesive milieu and resilient organizational structures that could contribute to more concrete forms of fascist subject-formation than is possible in irony-drenched online fora or insular intellectual circles, although tellingly it is one that has deliberately avoided testing itself in battle or engaging much with mainstream politics. It is a reminder that there is a wide gulf between a herd of aspiring fascists and a fascist organization. Take it from a real activist-stormtrooper of the radical traditionalist persuasion from the Azov-linked Avangard movement, commenting on Bronze Age Pervert’s mixed feelings about his unit’s “Defend Dharma” patch:

Funny Western alt-rightists are trying to find tradition. For dumbfucks, whose OCD, unfulfillment and paranoia bring increased testosterone, diet issues and how to get a pump to the center of their thought processes - it is incomprehensible that all this is not enough to be real. A kshatriya must fight, and fighting the system is not shitposting on Twitter. The same applies to spiritual pursuits…. Do those Western right-wing morons understand that symbols are only worth something when they are washed in blood? Hardly, because they are not ready to shed their own.

Let’s hope his analysis remains correct.