MICHAEL MCCANNE: In response to white supremacist organizing in our own time, radical voices on the left, notably Antifa, have drawn on the tradition of European resistance to fascists to declare that the appropriate response to racist organizing is physical opposition, doxing (publicly “outing” racists), and violent retaliation. Liberal critics, on the other hand, have argued that Antifa tactics break with U.S. traditions of free speech, open debate, and civility. For the most part, both sides of the debate fail to note that the United States has a long history of homegrown militant resistance to racist organizing. In the 1920s, when the Klan sought to secure a place in the U.S. political mainstream by organizing large public demonstrations and mounting electoral campaigns, anti-Klan organizers confronted the KKK using a range of techniques that included open ridicule and violence. Their goals were similar to anti-racists of today: expose the bigots and deny them the ability to march or rally in public. This all-but-forgotten story serves to remind that as long as racist and xenophobic movements have mobilized in this country, Americans have struggled to confront and expose them using every option at hand.
[…] The number of white supremacists organizing today is nowhere near that of the 1920s. But their ranks have increased since the 2016 election, and they are gaining influence in the government and at the margins of electoral politics, riding high on a wave of xenophobia and perceived white victimization. Opposition to them is also growing, but so far only on the hard left. This history reminds us, though, that firm and sometimes violent opposition to racists is a time-honored American tradition, one that has in the past enjoyed support from across the political spectrum, by citizens who may have agreed on little else. More here.