17 January 2017

From 9am this Sunday, anti-fascist groups began gathering on the streets surrounding the capitol. There were people flying banners with traditional civil rights and anti-hate messages; individuals flying gay-pride banners; representatives from immigrant-rights organizations; and student activists from the local community colleges and California State University campus. But there were also an array of sectarian groups—masked anarchists, waving their black-and-red flag, many carrying sticks and makeshift Plexiglas shields—through to revolutionary organizations like the Marxist-Leninist Progressive Labor Party. These groups had come from as far afield as San Diego and Portland—and they weren’t aiming for a simple statement of disgust at the Nazis; rather, they were pledged to shut them down.

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The neo-Nazis started making their way into the capitol grounds at about 11:30. Within minutes, the beautiful park surrounding the soaring, domed capitol was a bloodbath.

Every time the crowd spotted a skinhead or other white nationalist trying to move toward the steps, they surged forward, north, south, east, west, chasing down and beating the skinhead. But the Nazis had also come armed and prepared. Wielding knives and sticks, they hurled themselves into the enraged crowd. A 46-year-old anti-Nazi, Yvette Felarea, was wounded, her left arm and head streaming with blood. As she was being attended by fellow demonstrators, she was defiant and somewhat jubilant. “Let them know they got worse,” she said of the Nazis, who had been run off somewhere to the south of the capitol. “I’m proud we made this happen. And I’d do it again. The Nazis were scared, and they needed to be. They stabbed someone.”

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The brawl was savage, elemental, horribly akin to a lynch-mob atmosphere. The violence continued for hours. Hundreds of anti-fascists claimed the three staircases on the south, west, and north sides of the statehouse as their own. Every so often, a white nationalist would try to storm through but, time and again, would be beaten down. The police lines held; they didn’t move forward to rescue the Nazis, but waited until they managed to stumble back, their faces bloodied and swollen, into the police line, and only then offered them a semblance of protection from the furious crowd.

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This is the poison now coursing through our body politic. As in Britain, with Brexit and the anti-immigrant populism behind it, here Trump’s moment is unleashing demons. This happened in Anaheim last month, with the KKK violently rallying and being met with a street-fighting response. It happened in San Jose at a Trump event. There have been violent white nationalist rallies in Georgia and elsewhere that have also sparked violent reaction.

We haven’t seen this sort of street-fighting politics in America for nearly half a century. A horrifying growl is rumbling to the surface, the sort of growl that, on the right, led to cross burnings, church bombings, and lynchings in the 1960s; and that, on the left, led to the insanity of the Weather Underground. It’s the sort of growl that led to savage street brawls in early 1930s Europe as the old order collapsed.