Mark Bray is in his early thirties and the recipient
of a Ph.D. in history from Rutgers in 2016. He is also rapidly becoming
antifa’s chief ideologue. Among his works describing or advocating for the
often violent demonstrators are Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook and Translating
Anarchy: The Anarchism of Occupy Wall Street.
Bray has yet to find a major commercial press for his tracts
and, so far as I can tell, remains a lowly lecturer at Dartmouth College. But he has
presented his case for antifa’s protest activities and the disruptive forms
they have taken in, among other venues, Foreign
Policy, The Washington Post, and Boston Review. Bray was also invited to voice his
views at the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C., an honor usually
reserved for intellectual and political celebrities. It was after watching
Bray’s Politics and Prose address and the remarks it elicited
from the mostly “antifascist” audience that my editor at Northern Illinois
University Press arrived at the idea that I should write a book on antifa’s
worldview.
After listening to the YouTube talk and then ordering
Bray’s Handbook, it occurred to me that there was nothing
particularly interesting about what I was encountering. Despite its obvious
incompatibility with the dominant political culture, the alt-right seems to have
rallied philosophically deeper thinkers than the slogan-chanting adolescents
who swarm around Bray. Alt-right publications regularly mention European rightist
intellectuals like Alexander Dugin, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Giulio Evola, and
however tendentiously those sources are used, their interpreters do give the
impression of having read something serious. By contrast, all that I took away
from Bray and his groupies were their attacks on “neo-Nazis” and “fascists,”
plus their habit of using both epithets to refer to Republicans and others who
disagree with them.
It’s not that Bray never tries to relate his incipient
movement to earlier traditions of thought and activism. He brings up the
communists and anarchists of the early 20th century and tries to extend a line
of continuity between them and antifa. He ritualistically denounces corporate
capitalism, a stand he may be using as the primary link between himself and an
older Left. Bray is also fond of comparing present-day America under President
Donald Trump to the European civil wars of the 1930s, between the “Left” and
“fascism.” When Richard Cohen of The Southern Poverty Law Center objected that
he was encouraging violence on Meet the Press, Bray responded:
During the ’30s and ’40s, there was no public opinion to
being leveraged by non-violent resistance. If you get fascist to be powerful
enough in government, they’re simply not gonna listen to the kind of public
opinion that non-violence can generate. That’s the argument for resistance to
Nazis…. [I]t’s a privileged position to be able to say that you never have to
defend yourself from these kinds of monsters.
To an intellectual historian like myself, the most striking
part of Bray’s advocacy is that his politics has zilch to do with the troubled
decade that he highlights. Pace Bray, Trump is neither Hitler nor Mussolini.
Moreover, Bray’s Left has nothing in common with the Left that existed in
interwar Europe. His field and passion are gender studies and “fighting
racism.” These were hardly the major interests of anarchists and Marxists in
the 1930s. Back then the Left was serious about a socio-economic revolution and
showed no noticeable interest in identity politics or LGBT self-expression. It
may even be a bit of a stretch to relate antifa activism to the protests in the
1960s that I personally witnessed. The demonstrators at that time opposed a
prolonged war in Vietnam into which they might be personally dragged; others
protested segregation, which really existed in some parts of the country. What
similarly deep cause is driving Bray and his allies? I can’t seem to find one
other than seizing power or simply letting off steam.
This is not to pick on Bray and the antifa in particular. As
with those who represent our current ideologies, e.g., conservatism and
liberalism, Bray calls to mind certain Mafia myth makers of years past in the
way he creates a desired pedigree for his enterprise. Cosa Nostra came into
existence in New Orleans after the Civil War. Although its members found
predecessors in gangs that had ravaged the
old country since the early 19th century, modern Mafiosi claim that
their fraternity goes back to the Middle Ages. According to Mafia legend,
its organization helped oust the French occupants of Sicily, an effort that
started during the Sicilian Vespers in 1282 and was memorialized in
Verdi’s opera “I Vesperi Siciliani.” The Mafia then supposedly rallied to King
Peter of Aragon, who, following the expulsion of the French, annexed Sicily to
his kingdom.
This genealogy is manufactured whole cloth, in the same way
that our political movements devise their own dubious pedigrees. Thus our
present-day liberals claim to be descended from Jefferson or, if pressed for a
20th-century progenitor, FDR. Similarly our conservatives claim a lineage going
back to Edmund Burke or to some other long dead figure. In point of fact, our
current ideologies are of recent origin and continue to change. But their
adherents like to imagine that their ideas extend back many generations, and so
their bearers exert themselves looking for usable but often invented histories.
What Bray is doing is inventing a pedigree for a
Johnny-come-lately movement that he is trying to link to the historic Left. He
has made a career out of doing this, and given the popularity of what he is
selling in both our media and universities, he has gone a long way with very
little. The question is how much longer can he pull this off.
No comments:
Post a Comment