Brendan O’Connor’s look at “the antifascist question” for The Baffler is full of lots of good stuff but it’s also more than a little bit weird that O’Connor goes out of his way more than once to credit the Proud Boys for their “unusual discipline”, apparently having “acted strategically” in their “newfound ability to act as an organized collective” yet only glancingly mentions the “broad coalition of left-wing organizations, unions, and some liberal NGOs”.
It’s strange to mention that only in passing, almost an afterthought, given that O’Connor’s piece is about “the antifa question” not “the fascist question”, and especially when he goes on to list the things he thinks antifa needs to do in order to have broader success as a movement. How can you lecture antifa about what it should be doing without taking at least a paragraph or two to view that through the lens of what it is doing, for better or worse?
To read O’Connor’s rendition of August 17, you’d have no idea that Portland’s antifascist community was every bit as disciplined and organized as he credits the Proud Boys for being, or that they did so with a crowd three times larger than the Proud Boys managed to bus into town. You’d never know that the so-called “Spectacle” consisted of far more than “the kind of street-based antifascism that invocations of ”ANTIFA" usually conjure".
I’m not sure what, exactly, O’Connor was going for with this perspective that fluffs Proud Boy discipline but ignores the success of Portland’s “everyday antifascist” organizing, but if nothing else his article certainly helps the journal it in which it appears live up to its name.