A Whimper, Not A Bang: Where Was Antifa After Trump’s Victory?

Authored by David Reaboi via Late Republic Nonsense,

Perhaps the only disappointment for those of us elated with the outcome of this month’s presidential election was the muted, downcast response from the Left at Donald Trump’s massive victory.

We’d expected angry riots from purple-haired Antifa goons; emotive demonstrations of impotent and self-righteous defiance by Handmaid’s Tale cosplayers; and, maybe best of all, delicious cable news highlight reels reminiscent of Hillary Clinton’s surprise defeat in 2016. The quiet sobbing we got instead came as somewhat of a surprise. 

For the Left, it all seemed to end, as it did at Kamala Harris’s victory party at Howard University, with a whimper. There was no defiant or fiery speech that night; in fact, the candidate wasn’t seen at all, unwilling to face even the dedicated supporters who had worked hardest for her candidacy. Over the next few days, while there was some hissing and a few entertaining misfiring synapses at MSNBC and CNN — including some angry denunciations of elements of the Democrat coalition — the emotion seemed forced and perfunctory. 

For many, though, the downbeat response to Trump’s victory seemed out of place, given the feverish severity of how Democrats had articulated the stakes of this election. In her final month, Harris’s campaign dispensed with messaging on any issues, leaning hard into explicit comparisons of Trump with Adolf Hitler, and of MAGA politics with fascism and Nazism, evoking the specter of American death camps in the event of the ex-president’s victory.

Using a strategically-timed news-hook from former Trump Chief of Staff John Kelly, Harris stared gravely into the camera outside her residence at the U.S. Naval Observatory, warning that her opponent was no longer simply a “threat to democracy” but, as a Hitlerian-Nazi-Fascist, was openly dedicated to its destruction. The setting, too, was significant: rather than simply reaching down into the rhetorical gutter at a campaign stop, she was using the trappings of her role as vice president to make an official pronouncement on a rival domestic political leader, using language usually reserved for foreign enemies with whom we are at war. The bloody result of a Trump victory, Harris and her media surrogates assured us, was certain.

While some in the press had never been shy of slandering Donald Trump as a “fascist,” the message coming from the candidate herself marked a serious escalation.

After all, when faced with an enemy that would extinguish all freedom in America and usher in a holocaust, procedural resistance in courtrooms or acts of civil disobedience are plainly inadequate. With the evil of a Hitler, there is no negotiation, comity, civility, or ordinary politics; only violent resistance is commensurate with the threat.

Some on the Left received the message clearly, as intended. Even before Harris herself began referring to him as a “fascist,” Trump had already been the attempted victim of two failed assassinations. Immediately following the first shooter’s very near miss, the New Republic all but endorsed this violent, final solution to the Trumpian problem, revealing a menacing, monochrome drawing of the former president on its cover complete with Hitler mustache. And below the image — subtle, in the color of dried blood — was the headline, “American Fascism: What It Would Look Like” in faux-Germanic typeface. Scandalously, law enforcement disappeared any information about the would-be assassins’ motives, saving the Democrats having to address the fact that their manifestos dovetailed too closely with the party’s messaging.

All this gathered momentum and intensity in the press until, on the evening of November 5, “our sacred democracy” simply ended. Donald Trump won the electoral college and the popular vote by wide margins, and his party was in control of every branch of the Federal government. The people had spoken with a clear and resounding voice. If you’d been following the speeches of Vice President Harris, you’d assume that what they wanted was Nazi Germany.

When the defeated Democrat finally emerged in public early the next evening, however, her tone had shifted. “Earlier today,” she told the crowd, “I spoke with President-elect Trump and congratulated him on his victory. I also told him that we will help him and his team with their transition…” Would she congratulate Hitler for his victory? Would she help Hitler’s team during their transition? 

The Democrats had gone to the very edge of American discourse — beyond which is the disintegration of normal political life — and then, when they’d been repudiated by the voters, meekly pulled back. By stubbornly denying us our riots and hoped-for schadenfreude, the Left had us confused. We on the Right weren’t the only ones expecting immediate rage from Antifa and aligned groups in the event of a Republican victory; after all, half of downtown Washington, D.C., was boarded up in anticipation of election night. Why did nothing happen?

The surface explanation, of course, is that the Democrats didn’t really believe any of it; all that rhetorical venom was merely cynical election year politics at the final crunch of a close election. That theory certainly has some merit, based on the warm, smiling welcome with which Joe Biden received the victorious former president at the White House. And, while corrosive to social cohesion, the gambit made strategic sense: as Trump was gaining momentum in the final weeks, Democrats began to grow despondent. Harris’s campaign needed to raise the temperature to make sure her most committed voters got to the polls. 

Even if the leadership of the Democratic Party and its surrogates in the media were simply generating outrage, millions of Americans in their audiences now believe, with conviction, that the long night of fascism has finally descended on America. The rhetoric naturally calls to mind Antifa, the bands of militant “Antifascists” who inflicted so much disorder on the country during the first Trump administration. For many on the Right, the trauma of the Black Lives Matter riots on the heels of Covid in 2020 — followed by Trump being turned out of the White House the next January — has made us understandably jumpy about black-blocs and cities ablaze in destructive, ideological rage.

Harris’s scurrilous rhetoric about Trump’s alleged fondness for Hitler, however, wasn’t aimed at bringing Antifa’s violent shock troops into the streets, but at radicalizing the far larger cohort of mainstream Democrats. (After all, Antifa believes both Biden and Harris qualify as “fascists” and, for good measure, “war criminals.”) But Antifa has always been more strategic than it is reactive, and it’s far more concerned with revolutionary politics than with the electoral variety.

For many of the senior Antifa thinkers and organizers, the model of 1968 continues to resonate: even as the protests against the Vietnam War had been gaining strength for a half-decade, it wasn’t until the election of Richard Nixon that the Left’s mass-movement exploded. Presented with the foil of a “law-and-order” Republican hate-object, the intensity of the anti-war protest movement ballooned, leading to the radicalization of militant groups like the Weather Underground into outright terrorism.

This was only achievable with the assistance of the media; unencumbered by the balancing act of having to defend a Democrat president, print and television journalists created a roar of grassroots anger that provided far-Left radicals with new recruits, funding, and energy. The parallels to Trump’s return to the White House are significant, and the opportunity for a replay of this dynamic has certainly not escaped Antifa’s strategic thinkers.

It’s a common misconception that Left-wing violent protest is a spasm of powerlessness. While a David and Goliath narrative is useful in many overseas conflicts, in the United States, violent protest is most useful when it can be used as an expression of majority frustration against an easily identifiable (and beatable) tyrannical minority. Regardless of income bracket, Americans like to think of themselves as middle-class, have a bourgeois investment in the continuance of society, and resent violent revolutionaries and anarchists. 

Unlike in Europe, significant Left-wing violent riots in America don’t appear spontaneously in response to lost elections; they exist in the context of more sweeping political mobilizations that can plausibly be described by allied media as “largely peaceful.” As with Nixon and the anti-war movement, the media is the essential element in creating conditions for justifying the cause of unrest and ignoring or contextualizing violent excesses.

In this way, Antifa is useful as a fearsome tip of the spear, then melting away into a grander social justice narrative that is, on its surface, familiar and sympathetic rather than threatening. As such, all successful modern Left-wing movements in this country are framed in the language of civil rights. The successes of the Left’s modern race-oriented protest movements — Trayvon Martin (2012), Michael Brown (2014), and George Floyd (2020) — illustrate that the Left learned valuable lessons about the kind of topical triggers that work, and those that fail. The coming mass mobilization in response to Trump’s promises on immigration and deportation will be an obvious inciting event, and law enforcement needs to be prepared, especially in blue states.

In short, we didn’t see post-election violence or mass protests because the scale of Trump’s victory meant that such rioting would appear — at least temporarily — as the angry self-indulgence of a minority that had been legitimately beaten at the ballot box. But the riots will come soon enough, and Antifa will menace the streets once again. While it wouldn’t have served to activate them during or after the 2024 campaign, the Democrats’ rhetoric about fascism and Nazism is a boon to Antifa, which looks forward to being presented again (as it was memorably in 2020, storming the beach at Normandy) as “freedom fighters” in the media’s next just cause.

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