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  In Charlottesville, the already-flimsy veil of plausible deniability about the racist fascism of the so-called alt-right had been ripped away. Faced with the spectacle of Charlottesville, liberal commentators who had written baseless screeds comparing the threat of far-left anti-fascists to that of white nationalism would surely think twice about such a false equivalency.

  Upon hearing the “two sides” argument from the puckered, impossible mouth of the president, I was sure the mainstream narrative equating far-left and far-right violence would shift. Instead, it doubled down. In the month that followed the intolerable events in Charlottesville, America’s six top broadsheet newspapers ran twenty-eight opinion pieces condemning anti-fascist action, but only twenty-seven condemning neo-Nazis, white supremacists and Trump’s failure to disavow them.

  Meanwhile, magazines and news outlets—only a year ago lousy with warnings against the “normalization” of hate—have published a string of profiles platforming white supremacists and neo-Nazis as if they were now an accepted part of the social fabric (thus interpellating them as such). The “polite” Midwestern Hitler fan with a Twin Peaks tattoo whose manners “would please anyone’s mother.” The “dapper” white nationalist. The description of right extremist rallies drenched in dog whistle and foghorn neo-Nazi symbolism as mere “pro-Trump” gatherings—or worse, as “free speech” rallies.

  What changed? In truth, nothing. We are observing a phenomenon that Martin Luther King Jr. noted well in his 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” We are dealing with “the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action.’” There is no shortage of irony in the invocation of MLK by today’s white moderates in order to decry Antifa tactics as violent; in fact, I believe (if one can so speculate) that these same commentators would have been critical of his radical nonviolence, predicated as it was on the provocation of violent spectacle. It is a great liberal tradition to stand on the wrong side of history until that history is comfortably in the past.

  We’re seeing a liberal aversion to violence, but it is one that fails to locate violence in the right places.

  Any discussion about violence and Antifa must note that since 1990, there have been 450 deaths caused by white supremacist violence in the United States, compared to only one believed to be related to far-left activity. While property damage, minor clashes and a few neo-Nazi black eyes drew cries of leftist extremism in the last year, an active white supremacist traveled to New York with the precise aim of murdering black men. He succeeded in stabbing and killing a homeless man. In Portland, Oregon, another white supremacist killed two men who were standing up for two Muslim women on a train. Outside a talk by right-wing commentator Milo Yiannopoulos in Seattle, one of his fans, wearing a “Make America Great Again” cap, shot and wounded an anti-fascist counterprotester in the stomach. To name but a few examples. In the ten days that followed Trump’s election alone, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported 900 separate incidents of bias and violence against immigrants, Latinos, African Americans, women, LGBTQ people, Muslims and Jews.

  Centrist liberals criticize Antifa activists for responding with counterviolence, urging instead that we follow Michelle Obama’s gracious direction: “When they go low, we go high.” Insisting on the importance of debate with fascists, they decry violent or confrontational intervention.

  Some see tactical and moral value in allowing the likes of Richard Spencer to speak publicly and rally, believing that the fallacies of their hateful views are best made visible and therefore subject to debate and reason. The idea, then, is that the best way to defeat hate speech, such as vile arguments for race realism, would be to listen to it and thus allow its internal contradictions and idiocy to thwart itself.

  This is wishful thinking, proven false by the actual state of things—tantamount to telling a patient with a pus-seeping wound that sunlight is the best disinfectant. The alt-right might be a fumbling fractured mess, and the white supremacists in the White House make their buffoonery clear. But support for racist ideology and its mainstream normalization are not dwindling by virtue of this—quite the opposite. This is not a fringe group whose unreasoned racism, if articulated and forcefully debated, will lose traction and self-implode.

  In a recent video that earned a lot of liberal praise, Guardian journalist Gary Younge interviewed Richard Spencer. Younge recounted the encounter as follows: “In the course of our exchange he claims that Africans contributed nothing to civilisation (they started it), that Africans benefited from white supremacy (they didn’t) and that, since I’m black I cannot be British (I am).” His retelling is accurate, and Spencer’s facade equally paper thin, but this did nothing to impede Spencer’s bluster. In the video, a flustered Younge tells Spencer, “You’re really proud of your racism, aren’t you … you’re talking nonsense.” Spencer, unmoved, continues, “You’ll never be an Englishman.” A racist for whom the tenets of white supremacy are foundational will not be swayed by Younge’s correctness. This was neither interlocution, nor a particularly revelatory exposure of Spencer’s well-publicized views; this was the incommensurability of a white supremacist Weltanschauung with one of tolerance.

  Liberal appeals to Truth will not break through to a fascist epistemology of power and domination—these are Spencer and his ilk’s first principles. And it is this aspect of fascism that needs to be grasped to understand the necessity of Antifa’s confrontational tactics.

  There is no one uniting ideology between those—across history and geography—who see Antifa practices as the best means to combat certain fascist iterations. I say “certain” because neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups, public figures, and (in our case) presidents are not the sum total of fascism. Even their total obliteration would not rid us of fascism.

  Rather, each is simply a dangerous locus of what I want to call “fascistic habit”—formed of fascistic desire to dominate, oppress and obliterate the nameable “other.” (I don’t use the word “habit” lightly; I mean no less than the modes by which we live). Their fascism is not a perversion of our society’s business as usual, but an outgrowth. I won’t talk of “neo-fascism” any more than I will talk of “neo-Antifa”; for fascism never disappeared but simply reiterates, sometimes with greater force. Antifa, as I see it, is one aspect of a broader abolitionist project, which would see all racist policing, prisons and oppressive hierarchies abolished. As German Social Democrat and playwright Bertolt Brecht wrote in 1935, “How can anyone tell the truth about Fascism, unless he is willing to speak out against capitalism, which brings it forth?”

  Also writing in Germany during the early 1930s, Freudian acolyte Wilhelm Reich wrestled with the operations by which a society chooses a fascist, authoritarian system. Rejecting narratives in which ignorant masses are duped or led into supporting a system they do not in fact want, he instead insisted that if we are to explain the rise of fascism, we must account for the fact that people, en masse, choose and desire fascism, and that we must understand their desire as genuine. Reich’s diagnosis—that the fascist subject is the product of societally enforced sexual repression, and can be thus treated with psychoanalysis—is biologically essentialist, overly general and totally out of date. Nevertheless, his reckoning with fascistic desire is something sorely lacking in this moment of Trump-emboldened fascism and the battle against it.

  Certain lines from Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933) get regurgitated more than others in moments like this—moments in which a media cottage industry seems dedicated to defining fascism in order to prove that we are, or are not, faced with it. “Fascist mentality is the mentality of the subjugated ‘little man’ who craves authority and rebels against it at the same time”—that’s a popular one, and apt. So is the reflection that it is “not by accident th
at all fascist dictators stem from the milieu of the little reactionary man.” However, I’m more interested in some of his less-cited observations, in particular those that describe the everyday forms of fascism: that “there is today not a single individual who does not have the elements of fascist feeling and thinking in his structure”; and that “one cannot make the Fascist harmless if, according to the politics of the day, one looks for him only in the German or Italian, or the American or the Chinese; if one does not look for him in oneself; if one does not know the social institutions which hatch him every day.”

  Reich’s insight is not restricted to Germany during Hitler’s rise. The problem of everyday fascisms—micro-fascisms with and by which we live—is real and complicates the fascist/anti-fascist dichotomy; indeed, there is a certain impossibility to “anti-fascist” as an identity. Among the twentieth-century thinkers who have built on Reich’s idea of a perverted desire for fascism, perhaps most notable are the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guatarri. They wrote that it is “too easy to be anti-fascist on the molar level, and not even see the fascist inside of you.” In his famed introduction to their 1972 text Anti-Oedipus, theorist Michel Foucault noted, “The fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behaviour, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.”

  So if in this sense we are all somehow possessed of fascism, how can we speak of anti-fascism, and how can we name and delineate the fascists of our political targeting? It is precisely through the recognition of fascism as a developed tendency. The fascism Deleuze and Guattari are talking about is not some innate disease or pathology that we can’t shake, but rather a perversion of desire produced through forms of life under capitalism and modernity: practices of authoritarianism and domination and exploitation that form us, such that we can’t just “decide” our way out of them. But not everyone becomes a neo-Nazi; only a few people seek the white supremacy that grimly organizes society as it stands. This, too, takes fascist practice, fascist habit; a nurturance and constant reaffirmation of that fascistic desire to oppress and live in an oppressive world. And, to be sure, the world provides that pernicious affirmation: Donald Trump is president, after all.

  How to break a habit? Thought, therapy, or reasoning may sometimes prove useful. Sometimes. There are rare stories of neo-Nazis who left the movement that way. On the other hand, the introduction of serious consequences, if not breaking the habit entirely, may redirect it such that its practices cannot be continued, fed or maintained. When “serious consequences” are taken to mean brushes with criminal justice and the carceral system, that simply introduces state-sanctioned fascistic practices into the mix (not to mention the unlikelihood of the US criminal justice system treating white supremacy as an enemy). This is the importance of anti-fascism also as practice and habit: if desire for fascism is not something that happens out of reason, then we cannot break it with reason. So our interventions must instead make the entertainment and maintenance of fascist living intolerable. The desire for fascism will not be thus undone: it is by its nature self-destructive. But at least the spaces for it to be nurtured and further normalized will be withdrawn.

  And what of the fascisms in each of us who would be anti-fascist? “Kill the cop inside your head!” goes the anarchist dictum. As philosopher John Protevi noted in his 2000 essay, following Deleuze and Guatarri, “A thousand independent and self-appointed policemen do not make a Gestapo, though they may be a necessary condition for one.” How do we remove ourselves as participants in such a condition? Easier said than done. We cannot simply be anti-fascist; we must also practice and make better habits, forms of life. Rather than as a noun or adjective, anti-fascist as a gerund verb: a constant effort of anti-fascisting against the fascisms that even we ourselves uphold. Working to create nonhierarchical ways of living, working to undo our own privileges and desires for power. The individualized and detached Self, the over-codings of family-unit normativity, the authoritarian tendency of careerism—all of them paranoiac sites of micro-fascism in need of anti-fascist care. Again, easier said than done. But better than a faulty approach to anti-fascism that frames it as some pure position, when it is anything but. We act against fascists in the knowledge we need to act against ourselves, too. The strategy is always to create consequences for living a fascist life and seek anti-fascist departures.

  But if we continue to reject outright such anti-fascist consequences for explicit neo-Nazis, the effort, which has no obvious end, will be stymied from the outset.

  Fascism is un-bannable. Last summer I was in Berlin when German neo-Nazis planned an authorized march in the western reaches of the city. “Do you know anything about this march in Spandau on Saturday?” an American friend who’d recently moved to Berlin emailed to ask. “I thought neo-Nazi demonstrations weren’t even allowed here?”

  They aren’t, and they are. In statutes that made German speech no less free than ours, the display or reproduction of Hitler-era symbols like the swastika or the Nazi-salute is banned; the legal concept of Volksverhetzung—literally “incitement of the masses,” actually “incitement of hatred”—criminalizes Holocaust denial and an array of hate speech. But on August 17, 2017, over 500 neo-Nazis in their own makeshift uniforms of white T-shirts and khakis attempted to march to mark the anniversary of the death of high-ranking Nazi official Rudolf Hess. Five days after Charlottesville I went to the counterprotest with my partner—a born and raised Berliner—a few friends, and a hope to see the rally disrupted, but no experience with or close connections to Berlin Antifa.

  Before they could amass, the Nazis—great lunking gobs of pink-white flesh and bile in white cotton—passed through police tents to be checked for weapons and contraband symbols. Some emerged with black tape over verboten tattoos. They stood in phalanx formation, some waving the black, white and red flag of the German Empire, the early Weimar Republic and the Nazi regime until 1935. A particular tranche of the German extremist right: not the Islamophobic thugs of Pegida (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident), or the polished Alternative for Deutschland (founded by conservative elites in 2013, and by 2017 the third-largest political party in Germany), but traditional Third Reich–nostalgic neo-Nazis marching in Berlin. Rows and rows of cops in Robocop riot gear protected them as they prepared to march. (Police protect Nazi marches in America with equal vigor; by contrast, one Black Lives Matter march I attended was shut down even before it could leave New York’s Union Square.)

  We few hundred counterprotesters couldn’t get close, so we instead sat in the street, blocking the march route to the site of the prison where Hess was once held. The police moved in, dragging the seated crowd out of the street one by one, with visible sadism. Fingers pressed on eye sockets; faces pushed against gravel; young, small bodies dragged by the neck. As more and more of us sat, the police gave up. So we remained there, and the Nazis remained there. Eventually they turned around, briefly marched in the wrong direction, and dispersed. None of my Jewish family died in the Holocaust; they left Russia for England in the 1890s. I’m white, endowed with that privilege, and I never felt Jewish until I was in Berlin, where the little Stolpersteine (stumbling stones) of brass, bearing the names and life dates of Jewish victims of the Nazis dot the pavement in front of where they had lived or worked. You notice them, and then you don’t. They don’t trip you up. I’ve never felt more Jewish than I did when standing feet away from red-faced Nazis paying homage to Rudolf Hess. I also felt sick. They deserve a fiercer consequence than a blocked street and a taped-up swastika tattoo. Last year, Germany saw nearly 22,000 attacks motivated by far-right sentiment, a 42 percent increase from 2015. This is what a state ban on neo-Nazis looks like.

  After I left Berlin, I visited my elderly grandfather in southern Spain. He’s a British expat with a vast repertoire of embellished anecdotes, a purpling tan and the occasional reactionary bent. Once at lunch, I asked him, “Do you think it’
s okay to punch neo-Nazis?”

  I asked him, in particular, because I was seeking a certain response, from a certain generation, at a certain distance. I wanted an incredulous “yes” and a confused expression, as if I’d asked whether fire burns or if he’d like another drink. He’s the sort of man who sees the world as if moral facts were just there, as obvious and immovable as mountains. While I recognized this is not the constant ethical navigation of anti-fascisting we need, I nevertheless wanted my grandfather—whose politics are not my own—to place neo-Nazi-punching in his blunt taxonomy of Right and Wrong. I wanted to beg my own question.

  He replied without pause, as I had hoped: “Who could have a problem with that?” He told me that his father, my great-grandfather, had joined the 43 Group—the network of Jewish ex-servicemen and their allies who, in the streets of postwar England, fought bloody battles against supporters of Oswald Mosley, the former leader of the British Union of Fascists (BUF). My great-grandfather’s involvement in the group is an unverified note of family folklore, but one I choose to maintain. It’s feasible: he was a Jewish Londoner who served in the British Army, and at its height around 1,000 people were involved in 43 Group activity. But Grandpa gave no further details; we finished lunch and he retired from the veranda sun to sleep. I presume he felt the comment about his father’s involvement bore a self-contained sufficiency—as if the 43 Group were not merely a historic point of reference, but a moral fact, such that the invocation of the name alone was enough to assert that this was a Good.