Violence and the Alt Right
In a recent, excellent article Salon interviews three leading scholars of the right US right wing, asking them to set the alt right in the context of white supremacist organizations from the last forty to fifty years. Important insights include the recent deaths or arrests of many leaders of white supremacist organizations (while noting some young leaders), and contextualizing the alt right’s potential for violence with Timothy McVeigh's attack in Oklahoma, other than the attacks of September 11th the deadliest terrorist attack in US history. Understanding the right’s history of violence is vital to understanding their potential influence in the present.
However, the interviewees error in their assessment of the potential impact of the right’s violence today. They focus exclusively on the potential for “lone wolf” violence, like McVeigh’s or Anders Brevik in Norway. While they may arguably be correct in saying that attacks like these have the greatest potential to produce casualties, the danger of violence from the extreme right goes far beyond their capacity to kill. For the extreme right, violence is not only a means to produce casualties but a means to produce changes in political culture and to affect the political landscape. Violence is politics for the extreme right.

We can see this throughout history when looking at the rise of extreme right wing parties and movements, from Argentina to Germany. When politically ascendant right wing movements engage in violence not in an effort to cause the most deaths possible but as acts of propaganda and as means to achieve political ends. German Nazis and Italian fascists routinely attacked the bodies and offices of their political enemies, not for the purposes of extermination (this came later) but to harass and stymie their enemies during electoral political struggles. Only after achieving power can fascists hope to kill or silence all socialists and communists — while contesting power they used relatively petty forms of violence to reduce their enemy’s share in the polls.

Argentina’s Tacuara, a radical right movement of the early 1960’s, did much the same. While they didn’t field candidates in elections they too considered their violence to be a means to a political end, engaging in violence as principled hooligans rather than exterminators. Tacuaristas drove cars into rival’s protests, threw tar bombs at the British consulate, and picked fistfights with other youth organizations, such as the Jewish Boy Scouts. In total Tacuara killed fewer than a dozen in years of political violence, but the influence of that violence extended far beyond the body-count and reshaped Argentine politics, ushering in decades of political conflict in which street violence was as much a field of political struggle as were elections.
It is these smaller acts of violence — attacking political canvassers, threatening opponents’ demonstrations, vandalizing party offices — that reshape politics in ways that uniquely cater to the extreme right’s valorization of violence. These unspectacular attacks, one after another, shift the field of struggle in their favor.
