By Everett Acorn
The word “extremism,” much like the terms “common-sense gun control” or “assault weapon,” is a term thrown around quite causally these days, with a lot of assumptions about its meaning.
I spent some time online looking for definitions of “extremism” and at first didn’t have much luck; Merriam Webster defined extremism as: “the quality or state of being extreme…” not very helpful… while Oxford Languages stated that extremism is: “the holding of extreme political or religious views; fanaticism.” Because “extreme” by definition must be compared against a norm that is not extreme, other popular definitions seemed to evaluate extremism in a political context, which in our day & age would necessarily be the context of the state; thus, while clarifying that extremist groups do not necessarily perpetrate acts of terror, a UK government report says that extremism “is the vocal or active opposition to our fundamental values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and respect and tolerance for different faiths and beliefs.”
Fair enough. We live in the era of the state and its institutions and must generally accede to its context. In my encounters with liberal and centrist friends, I’ve found that they are happy to conflate extremism with the perpetration of not only violence – injury and death – but also with property destruction; to centrists, injury, death, and property destruction are all “violent” and generally perpetrated by “extremists.”
But can property destruction really be compared with death? Are people who perpetrate acts of property destruction, who prevent fascists from having a voice, or who stand ready to defend marginalized people with arms, really “extremists?”
A recent (April 20923) Atlantic article is titled The New Anarchy,* written by executive editor Adrienne LaFrance, begins by saying “for the past three years, I’ve been preoccupied with a question: How can America survive a period of mass delusion, deep division, and political violence without seeing the permanent dissolution of the ties that bind us?” I found in LaFrance’s paper the word “extremist” or variations thereof 31 times; 3 times when referring to left-wing groups or movements, 6 times when referring to right-wing groups like the Proud Boys, and 22 times in a general sense or one that might involve multiple sides. Focusing on conflicts in Portland, LaFrance assumes the same tone when lumping together left & right actions as “salad-bar extremism,” as if everyone reading should get this and agree; about Portland she writes “extremists on the left and on the right, each side inhabiting its own reality, had come to own a portion of downtown Portland,” and that “extremists on the left hijacked largely peaceful protests with their own violent tactics” during the anti-police protests of 2020. She goes on to compare Portland as a “concentrated manifestation of political violence” with the Capitol riot of January 6th 2021, neglecting the fact that antifascists had no role in the latter conflict… although Capitol intelligence predicted that “antifa” would be present on January 6th, antifascists in fact wisely stayed away in droves from the Capitol to let the far right and the state duke it out on their own.
Until Michael Reinoehl shot a far-right member of Patriot Prayer in 2020, there had not been a single death caused by an anti-fascist activist in 25 years. In 2022 the Anti Defamation League (ADL) documented that all extremist-related murders that year were committed by the right wing (25 people in the U.S. in 12 separate incidents, with 21 of the 25 murders linked to white supremacists), which, although marking a decline from 33 extremist-related murders documented in 2021, maintained an alarming increase in murders compared to 2010 and earlier. “Left-wing extremists,” they say, engage in assaults, fire-bombings, and arsons, “but since the late 1980s have not often targeted people with deadly violence… being far more likely to attack property.” The 2020 Michael Reinoehl incident was the first since the shooting of a racist skinhead by an anti-racist in Portland Oregon in 1993; because he was a leftist, unlike Kyle Rittenhouse, Reinoehl was apparently summarily executed by U.S. marshals.
LaFrance goes on: “I learned how cultures have managed to endure sustained political violence, and how they ultimately emerged with democracy still intact,” she says… yet the only culture she mentions outside of the U.S. is late 20th century Italy. Here she discusses the “Years of Lead” in 1969-1988 Italy to make the case that daily violence has creeping effect until either background situations, like the economy, greatly change, or until things end in a catastrophe; in Italy, apparently both things occurred, as the economy improved, but former prime minister Aldo Moro was brutally tortured and killed, his body left in a car on the street.
I think a lot of liberals thought that January 6th was just such the catastrophe to put an end to Trumpism, and that the election of a benevolent Joe Biden offered a post-catastrophic chance to “heal” (while people like me who disagreed were labeled as “pessimists”). A source for LaFrance’s article takes it further, though, and mentions that “if they had actually hanged Mike Pence or Nancy Pelosi on January 6… it would have ended it.” He adds “I don’t think it ends without some sort of cathartic cataclysm… absent that, it just boils along for a generation or two generations.”
It certainly seems true that, from the killings by Robert Matthews and the Order in the early 1980s, through the Oklahoma City Bombing, through Charlottesville, through January 6th, right-wing violence has “boiled along” in events over multiple generations, worsening each time. And here I have to agree with LaFrance; we are living inside a period of creeping, accumulating violence, from the right, that will get worse before it gets better; the ADL’s data on increasing right-wing murders since 2010 certainly confirm this. Barring a catasrophe that further shocks the public into action – apparently mass murders in synagogues, shopping centers, and schools, don’t shock enough – it will take a significant background shift in our economic and cultural situation to calm these people and put an end to their violence. I would argue further that the background shift needs to be an end to the globalism that creates riches by exploiting pockets of world-wide poverty while impoverishing domestic U.S. workers spiritually and economically and priming them for authoritarianism – and in its place the creation of a nurturing localism – but that’s a topic for a different column.
While LaFrance is careful to describe antifa as a movement rather than a group, it’s disconcerting that she goes no further to understand the basic motivations that distinguish far-right hate groups from antifascists; the first is motivated on hate and fear, while the other is based on compassion; the first is offensive and shows up to provoke, while the other is defensive and shows up to resist. When it comes to the topic of extremism and the other “T” word that typically creeps into these discussions – Terrorism – was it really “extreme” for Nat Turner or John Brown to abhor and fight slavery? Or did things only become extreme when they took up arms? From the American University in Cairo: “Not all terrorists are extremists… For example, in the case of the National Liberation Front in Algeria or the secessionist movement in Ireland, you may hold a relatively reasonable view on the entitlements of your people to self-determination but still commit an act of terrorism because you feel you don’t have any other means.”
In conclusion: when talking about extremism** or violence in society, let’s not conflate those who arrive in hate, to cause death, with those who show up to defend the hated… and yes, the latter defenders will resort to blows when necessary. Antifascists will show up in the streets when fascism rears its head, and yes, sometimes windows are broken, people are punched, and fires are set. But if you think that broken windows are the same level of “violence” as the killing of 11 Jewish people in a Pittsburgh synagogue or the 10 Black people in a Buffalo grocery store, maybe it’s time to reevaluate your notion of what “violence” really is. In the meantime, it appears that those of us who oppose fascism will have to get used to the idea of being called “extremist.”
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*In the title and throughout the article LaFrance frustratingly uses the colloquial meaning of the word “anarchy” to describe the chaos informing/ensuing from the phenomenon of violence she is addressing. The proper use of the word is to describe anarchism as a form of anti-state socialism that seeks the abolition of systems of domination and exploitation. She tries to clear this up somewhat in an interview on Amanpour & Co. but doesn’t seem to grasp that anarchism remains a vital movement informing arguably the largest swath of leftist activity and thought in the current day, especially since the 1999 WTO protests. Modern-day governments in Chiapas Mexico and North and East Syria owe much of their foundations to anarchism.
** John Brown Gun Clubs are listed by at least two think tanks as “extremist;” the Counter Extremism Project and InfluenceWatch.