By Attacking Anti-Fascism, Trump Defends Fascism as a Good Thing

Trump’s executive order designating Antifa a “domestic terrorist organization” has spurred widespread interest in the anti-fascist movement. Of course, it is well understood that Antifa is not a single organization but an umbrella term for loosely affiliated groups of activists scattered across the United States and parts of Europe that confront and combat fascism and racism. Antifa, however, is more of an idea than an actual organization, so Trump’s order calling on US authorities to act against “any person claiming to act on behalf of Antifa, or for which Antifa or any person claiming to act on behalf of Antifa provided material support" isn’t simply idiotic and unconstitutional but says a great deal about where the “beloved leader” stands on free speech and fascism itself.

Simply put, by vilifying anti-fascist struggles, Trump is defending fascism as a good thing. So is his “comrade-in-arms” Viktor Orbán who has also proposed taking similar action in Hungary while his Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó has gone even further by urging the European Union to follow Donald Trump’s lead and designate Antifa a terrorist organization.

In the age of right-wing authoritarianism and proto-fascist strongmen, it is understandable that Trump and Orban wish to ban anti-fascist struggles. Relying on repression to consolidate power is an obligatory measure for all authoritarian regimes. Netanyahu might be the next unhinged leader to take action against Antifa. Anti-fascists in Israel have long been the target of far-right Israeli extremists; moreover, there have been voices inside the country saying that “only an anti-fascist front” can stop Israel’s slide toward fascism. That’s dangerous talk in the current political climate in Israel.

Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, and Benjamin Netanyahu are central figures in the global far-right movement. Indeed, the holy trinity of neofascism is represented today by Israel, Hungary, and the United States. Far-right movements and parties are on the rise worldwide, and they are expanding beyond national borders, “engaging in cross-border networking to export their ideologies worldwide,” according to Thomas Greven from Freie Universität Berlin. What unites them are anti-immigrant politics, anti-leftism, traditional family values, Islamophobia, anti-LGBTQ, and rejection of the ideals and values of Western European Enlightenment.

Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, and Benjamin Netanyahu are central figures in the global far-right movement. Indeed, the holy trinity of neofascism is represented today by Israel, Hungary, and the United States.

Far-right movements and neofascist parties believe that cultural hegemony is as important as political influence. Hence the attack on “woke” culture, gender ideology, and secularism. Of course, the far right is not a monolith, but there are lots of overlaps among the far-right’s varied movements. However, in the pursuit of creating an ultranationalistic state and building a homogeneous society, crushing the forces of the left becomes nothing short of an urgent political necessity for far-right movements and neofascist parties because of their awareness that especially the so-called "radical left" represents the only real political resistance to their dystopian vision.

Whether there are parallels between the state of liberal democracies today and that of the 1930s is tricky business. Nonetheless, today’s left could learn vital lessons by studying the antifascist struggles of the 1930s and 1940s. For the main task today is, again, defeating the forces of reaction, most powerfully represented by an idiotic bully and wannabe dictator in Washington, DC, an autocrat in Budapest, and the “butcher of Gaza” in Jerusalem.

For starters, the left needs to be united and thus avoid infighting. Liberals must also be seen as potential allies in the fight against right-wing authoritarianism and “proto-fascism.” The ability of the Nazis in Germany to overpower the opposition prior to Hitler’s rise to power surely relied on a sustained campaign of terror against the labor movement, communists, and anti-fascist activists while the state looked the other way, but it was also due to the fact that the left was fractured while the right united behind Hitler. The left was also divided in Italy while the fascists marched through towns beating and killing hundreds of labor leaders, socialists, and communists. Sadly enough, a similar phenomenon was encountered in Spain, with the left struggling to unite both before and during the Spanish Civil War.

Nonetheless, the anti-fascist struggles of the pre-war period remain of paramount importance and have in fact shaped the left of today, as Joseph Fronczak has argued in his book Everything Is Possible: Antifascism and the Left in the Age of Fascism. The first antifascist organization was the Arditi del Popolo (People’s Shock Troops) in Italy, formed in 1921 by various militants (anarchists, left socialists, communists, and Republicans) who saw that the Socialist Party was either incapable or unwilling to take the fight to the fascists. Working-class defense organizations existed in Italy both before and after World War I, but the emergence of the Arditi del Popolo was driven by the urgent need to “defend the persons and institutions of the working class from fascist squadrism by openly confronting fascism on the same terrain of violence chosen by the Mussolini movement,” as the Italian scholar Antonio Sonnessa has pointed out.

The ultimate organized resistance to Italian fascism took place in August 1922 in the city of Parma when the Arditi del Popolo and their allies Formazioni di difesa proletaria (Proletarian Defense Formations), outnumbered and outgunned, repelled and totally humiliated thousands of fascists. This event represented a rare moment of unity among the different strands of the Italian left, although the fascists may not have been repelled if it wasn’t for the valiant support provided by the working-class people of Parma. As Guido Picelli, the head of the Arditi del Popolo of Parma later recalled:

Working-class people took to the streets—as bold as the waters of a river which is bursting its banks. With their shovels, pick-axes, iron bars and all sorts of tools, they helped the Arditi del Popolo to dig up the cobblestones and tram tracks, to dig trenches, and to erect barricades using carts, benches, timber, iron girders and anything else they could get their hands on. Men, women, old people, young people from all parties and from no party at all were all there, united in a single iron will: resist and fight.

Nevertheless, the main parties of the left went on afterwards to abandon the Arditi del Popolo and Mussolini was in power just ten weeks after his horde of fascist thugs were defeated in Parma.

In 1932, the German Communist Party (KPD) launched Antifaschistische Aktion (Antifascist Action), but the antifa movement failed to create antifascist unity as the KPD’s ideology and strategy was formed by Stalinism which had branded the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) as “social fascists.” That said, the SPD also had nothing but contempt and even hatred for the KPD and the party’s ideology, structure, and political culture, as Donna Harsch has argued in her path-breaking work German Social Democracy and the Rise of Nazism, left it incapable of taking on the Nazis and helping to avert the collapse of the Weimar Republic. In this sense, as David Karvala, one of the spokespeople of Unity Against Fascism and Racism Catalonia, has stressed, “The disastrous failure of the anti-fascist action strategy should serve as a warning to activists who want to stop fascism today.”

On October 4, 1936, an estimated 300,000 Londoners, socialists, trade unionists, communists, Jews (who had been told by the Jewish Chronicle to stay home), and Irish dockworkers, blocked a march through the East End of London, home to the city’s largest Jewish community, organized by Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF). As the British historian and author Martin Gilbert wrote, the BUFs’ “aim was to intimidate the local Jewish community and the local anti-Fascist working class.” The antifascist protesters erected barricades against the fascist march and engaged in hand-to-hand fighting with Mosley’s thugs and their police escorts in what became known as the Battle of Cable Street. Undoubtedly, the Battle of Cable Street was a major anti-fascist victory, but it also shows that a call to action against fascism, which is rooted in violence and intimidation, cannot be confined to passive demonstrations. When the march of fascism becomes an actual threat, “it has to be physically challenged.”

But let us not remain in the distant past. In early August 2024, a fascist pogrom was defeated in Bristol, England, when thousands of people, young and old, came together to counter an anti-immigration rally and to show that Bristol will not tolerate fascism.

Since then, there have been many other anti-fascist protests and demonstrations all across Europe and the United States, especially as the far right now feels empowered by Trump’s return to the White House and makes no bones about the fact that it is racist and sees neofascism as a political necessity in today’s world. This was all in display in London, for example, just a couple of weeks ago, in the protest organized by far-right activist Tommy Robinson and in which scores of police officers were injured while Elon Musk spoke to the fascists over a video link and urged them to use violence.

While there was little doubt before as to where Trump stood on democracy and human decency, he has made it clear with his decision to designate Antifa a “terrorist” organization that he and his coterie are clearly on the side of fascism. But if they really believe that antifascism is now dead, they are in for a rude awakening.