Q: How Should We Respond to the Rise of the Far Right?
MARK BRAY
Historian of human rights, terrorism, and politics in modern Europe at Rutgers University, and author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook (Melville House, 2017).
Mark Bray
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 REID
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).
Shannon Reid
Responding to the far right—and its seeming rise in popularity and mainstreaming—requires a multi-step approach. As we have seen with concerns around the growth of traditional street gangs that flourished in the 1980s and 1990s, reduction in group-oriented youth violence requires focus on prevention, intervention, and suppression.
While much of the focus on responding to far-right groups has focused on suppression, through deplatforming, large-scale arrests, and increased sentencing, these responses deal with only a small portion of the far-right problem.
Refocusing resources toward prevention and intervention has helped reduce street gang violence, and similar policies and programs can and should be used to help keep youth and young adults out of far-right groups or pull them out early enough to prevent long-term consequences of trauma and incarceration.
Parents and teachers are the best first line of defense for individuals at risk for membership or indoctrination into far-right groups. As with gang membership, these youths should be identified early so that resources, such as school or family services, can be provided and reduce the long-term risk for criminality.