But what should be more troubling to Antifa is that its strategy of participating in violence provides a unique opening for right-wing extremists. We are hearing more and more about Antifa not because its anti-fascist message is being disseminated more effectively. Instead we are hearing about it as the bogeyman of white supremacists, the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, and other far-right groups.

Antifa is, in this context, the violent provocateur of the alt-right. Unless and until the left acknowledges this political vulnerability, being able to distinguish Antifa from its ideological opponents will increasingly become a blurry enterprise.

This was true back in the Sixties and Seventies when the Black Bloc provoked violence at otherwise peaceful demonstrations. There was a theory that the perpetrators of violence were was agent provocateurs, and there likely was some truth to that in cases. However, it was not true of all cases and perhaps most. The people perpetrating the violence were far left. They self-identified as anarchists. Later this became known as the black bloc.

I knew some of these people back then. They were predominantly anarchists, although it seemed to me that some were just thugs looking for a fight with The Man. This was a fringe group at the periphery of the much larger antiwar movement, when most demonstrations were organized as protests against the Vietnam War. This was the extent of their interest for some, but there were also a lot of people that were also peacefully protesting a system that they viewed as exploitive and corrupt. This can be viewed as a dialectical response to the status quo at the time that considered "normal" in America. A lot of younger people didn't want to sign up for that future.

Among the protesters were fringe groups of socialists and even a few communists, but they were also generally peaceful in my experience. It was the self-styled anarchists that were into bashing, and their target was the riot police. Most of the policing of the demonstrations was by regular forces, but there was also a contingent of riot police in the background and violence would work to draw them out. The mainstream media never reported on this, and the rest of the demonstrators mostly ignored it as an aberration, if they even encountered it at all. It was not a widespread phenomenon.

But now the media is on it, and it is also on the Internet. The peaceful opposition needs to be aware that this is an issue and not try to cover it up or deny it, or it will become toxic.

Fortune
Antifa Needs a New Way to Fight the Alt-Right

James Braxton Peterson is professor of English and director of Africana studies at Lehigh University