The real “New Anarchy” is the damaging and untrue articles we met along the way.
My critical hate-read of Adrienne LaFrance’s “The New Anarchy: America faces a type of extremist violence it does not know how to stop” in the Atlantic (April 2023).
Let’s start from the cover, which features a black and white image of what appears to be an unarmed but protectively clothed protester, turning away from a cloud of what could be tear gas. What are we looking at? Why is this here? The only violence that one could rightfully infer from this picture is the violence implicit in the cloud of possible tear gas, which was almost certainly produced by the state. The figure seems to be running away.
I looked up the photographer, Nathan Howard, and his most recent images featuring protesters like this are from Portland, OR protests following the police murder of George Floyd in 2020. Violence did occur during Portland’s days of protest, perpetrated by multiple constituencies, mostly far right extremists, but that’s not what’s happening in this picture, and using it to illustrate the article makes it seem like street protestors of this were the primary perpetrators of that violence and that they are somehow the avatars of LaFrance’s “new anarchy” (which by the way is not a thing, as we will address later).
Moving on, the article starts with this indulgent two page illustrative spread. It seems like some graphic designer was tasked with cutting out pics of protestors in fun poses and overlaying red and blue filters so that the ten figures are half blue, half red. Half blue, half red — get it? Except it appears that the majority of these images are of right wing, Jan 6, or straight up neo-nazi protestors. A few are likely of left wing protestors (the guy with the press insignia on the far right is press). The figures I can identify as “leftist” are for the most part unarmed and wearing protective gear, likely to guard their bodies against police violence. No police are shown.
Next, at the top of page 24 we are given a quote from a letter Abraham Lincoln, that oft quoted guy, wrote to “Missouri abolitionist Charles D. Drake, 1863”. The quote contains some flowery rhetoric by Lincoln condemning violence, criminality, and suspicion. I found this quote immediately suspect. Like, why is Lincoln ranting about violence to a guy identified as an abolitionist? It’s 1863, the “let’s settle this disagreement like gentlemen” ship had sailed two years before in 1861, with the start of the war. And surely an abolitionist, almost by definition at this point ( with the possible exception of Quakers) would have resigned themselves to a necessary fight against the Confederacy? And why include this quote anyway? Is the author suggesting that Lincoln was right and the people fighting to free the millions of enslaved human beings should have been more chill? Wtf?
Now I’m not a civil war buff, but I like going deep on a primary source as much as the next guy, and so I found and read the referenced letter, and did a bit of background digging on Drake. Allow me to slightly digress.
Lincoln was replying to a request by Drake and others who were part of a Missouri State Convention and had rewritten the state constitution to outlaw slavery. The requests were as follows, from Lincoln’s response:
First: That General Schofield shall be relieved, and General Butler be appointed, as commander of the Military Department of Missouri.
Second: That the system of Enrolled Militia in Missouri may be broken up, and national forces be substituted for it, and
Third: That at elections, persons may not be allowed to vote who are not entitled by law to do so.
Missouri was one of the border states which originally had slavery, but had joined the Union. There were many slave owners in Missouri and they were big mad about this, and had formed groups of secessionist raiders to battle their Union neighbors. The state brought out its own militia to protect against these raids. These raider groups aligned with the formal Confederate army eventually, and at that point the Union provided federal troops to fight them.
At some point these official Confederate troops were pushed out of the state and the federal troops were removed (in the letter Lincoln says “When the organized rebel army left the state, the main federal force had to go also, leaving the Department commander at home relatively no stronger than before.”) following this, it appears that the existing state militia was put in charge of protecting the citizenry and guarding against confederate raids.
However, many of the militiamen were Confederate sympathizers, who had just been given the right to detain and search anyone they wanted, and they quickly became a corrupt force robbing and stealing and doing bad stuff. Drake and others felt that federal forces would be more loyal and more disciplined, and they were writing to Lincoln for help. Lincoln’s bit about “blood grows hot, etc. etc.” was basically him being like “yeah shit is crazy right now, my job is hard, I can’t spare troops and even if I could who knows if they’d be better than your militiamen, now stop bothering me”. So like, 1) what is the point of this quote from Lincoln in this article? Did the author just google “quotes from Lincoln on violence”?? And 2) what does this have to do with any supposed ‘anarchy’ going on, per the article’s supposed point?
Ok, getting into the actual article, which has (god help me) five parts.
Part 1 (“On The Brink”) begins with a description of the 2020 protests in Portland, which I guess at least validates the use of that protest imagery. LaFrance mentions the fatal shooting of Aaron Danielson by a “self-described anti-fascist” without mentioning that Danielson was a member of Patriot Prayer, a right wing terrorist group, or the fact that according to eyewitnesses Danielson had, moments before being shot, sprayed bear mace into the face of the shooter.
LaFrance also refers to the city of Portland as infatuated “with left wing ideas and performative politics” and suggests that the previous several years of coordinated right wing rallies by the Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer, and other right authoritarian and neo-nazi groups was “trolling”. Keep in mind that this is a city that in 2017 saw a neo-nazi on a city bus stab two men to death, and nearly murder a third, after they stepped in to protect a young woman the neo-nazi guy was harassing. The population has every right to be sensitive to local far right extremist organizing.
LaFrance then attempts to build an argument that increasing political violence is being perpetrated by “both sides” citing 1) the attempted kidnapping of Michigan’s Governor Whitmer, 2) the January 6 2021 storming of the Capitol, 3) the June 22 2022 arrest of an armed man near Justice Kavanaugh’s house (who, by the way, tuned himself in before perpetrating anything, a fact La France does not bother to mention) 4) the July arrest of a threatening guy outside Congresswoman Jaypal’s house, 5) a man who attempted to assail Lee Zeldin, the republican candidate for governor during a stump speech (a little digging reveals that the alleged assailant, a mentally ill and alcoholic Iraq war vet, did not know who Zeldin was, and thought he was insulting veterans), https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/22/nyregion/lee-zeldin-suspect-bail.html 6) the August arrest of a guy trying to breach the FBI field office in an attempt to vindicate Trump, 7) the October break in and assault at Speaker Pelosi’s house 8) in January ‘23 a series of attempted murders of Democratic officials by a republican candidate for office in NM.
Even using LaFrance’s own examples, which were surely cherry picked in an attempt to portray “both sides” as equally prone to political violence, only one of these attempts can rightfully be said to have come from the left (the Kavanaugh threatening guy, who, as I mentioned, turned himself in before doing anything).
Part 2 is titled “Salad Bar Extremism” and is for some reason sees our intrepid author in Barre, VT because early 1900s anarchist and propagandist-by-deed Luigi Galleani lived there. What does this guy have to do with anything? Who knows.
Galleani and his followers did indeed do a bunch of bombing of politicians and captains of industry in the 19-teens, but if the author is attempting to use this as a metaphor for contemporary political violence it is a poor comparison. The last example of leftist bombing in the US was Ted Kazininski (if he counts as left) in the early 90s, and he worked alone. The vast majority of coordinated political violence in the US comes from right wing mass shooters and plots by coordinated far-right groups and it’s not even a vaguely close race.
If the author’s point is that we are entering a similar period to the culture of political violence of 1919, which is pointed out as the apex of Galleanist violence, I would counter that we’re (luckily) far from that point. 1919 was a year of incredibly intense political violence, and the vast majority of it (as usual) came from the right, and agents of the state. The summer of 1919 was called “red summer” due to the white supremacist riots that occurred in dozens of cities across the US, resulting in thousands of murders of mostly Black citizens, and the destruction of millions of dollars of property. Much of this violence was coordinated by organized white supremacist groups, who were also during this time ramping up terror campaigns of lynching and neighborhood raids. There are at least 35 documented instances of torture and lynching, aside from the Red Summer riots, in 1919 alone.
News sources like the Washington Post and others often exacerbated these violent situations by blaming the victims of racist violence, suggesting that they were communists or anarchists, and encouraging vigilante groups to aggressively “put down” ongoing street fighting, which was self defense by Black citizens.
And that’s not even getting into the violence that was being meted out to organized labor by Pinkertons and agents of the state! In 1919 alone there were dozens of labor union battles, during which striking workers were attacked by police and hired thugs. Hundreds of union men and women died.
1919 was also, not incidentally, the height of what’s now known as “the First Red Scare”. Following the 1917 Russian Revolution, American elites became concerned about the growing left: the movements for labor rights, economic reform, women’s suffrage, and racial equality were seen as threats to be suppressed. In particular, Black WWI veterans returning from Europe, having fought for their country and seen greater equality in service, were considered a “Bolshevik risk”. Anarchists, mostly from immigrant communities, were also targeted for unconstitutional arrest and deportation. Over 10,000 individuals were arrested. Some were put in concentration camps.
The Palmer Raids were themselves described (justifiably, i think) as terrorism in the labor press.
Newspapers and magazines of the time furthered this ideology by focusing on sensational stories of anarchist violence and hand wringing over Bolshevism, rather than writing about the far greater threat of state sanctioned white supremacist and anti-labor violence. Sound familiar? In 1919, as now, the vast majority, nearly all, of domestic violence and terror comes from the right, yet somehow the avatar of the black clad anarchist is on the cover of the Atlantic in a story about political violence.
If LaFrance was looking for a historical metaphor for today’s political climate, she unwittingly (?) created one by blaming the left for what the right continues to do.
To conclude this section, she suggests that the Palmer Raids were a success and that to quell political violence, “holding perpetrators accountable is crucial”. Considering that not even the FBI thinks that the Palmer raids were a good idea in retrospect, that’s a questionable take. For one thing, even in LaFrance’s bizarrely positive take on the unconstitutional Palmer raids, the “perpetrators” were notably NOT held accountable, and instead many innocent (mostly immigrant) families and individuals had their lives destroyed.
The Palmer raids in fact did the opposite of quelling violence — by red-baiting and illegally targeting leftists, immigrants, and labor organizers instead of targeting white supremacist incidents and rhetoric or attempting to peaceably negotiate labor unrest, the state paved the way for the hundreds of racist mass murders that were to follow (like the 1921 Tulsa massacre) as well as the state sanctioned anti-labor violence like the 1920 Battle of Matewan and the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain.
Finally, why is this section called “salad bar extremism”? LaFrance states, “violence doesn’t need a clear or consistent ideology and often borrows from several. Federal law enforcement officials use the term salad bar extremism to describe what worries them most today and it applies just as aptly to the extremism of a century ago.”
This makes no sense. Say what you like about Galleani, but the guy had about as clear and consistent an ideology as it is possible to have. “Salad bar extremism” is a coinage of FBI director Christopher Wray, and its usage is criticized and contested (rightfully so, this is an incredibly vague and weird term) even within the state security sector.
Part 3. For some reason this section is about Italy’s late 1970s and early 80s “years of lead”. Why Italy? There was plenty of political violence elsewhere in Europe and the US in the 70s. Was the author attempting to retrace the ideological footprints of Galleani to their his cultural roots? Maybe just cashing in on a research junket to Bologna? Again, unclear.
Out of this decade long spate of political violence LaFrance selects two notable incidents: the kidnapping and subsequent murder of Christian democrat middle left politician by leftist radicals the Red Brigade and the bombing of the bologna train station in 1980. This section is decorated with several archival (again red and blue filtered) photos of Red Brigade murders and graffiti.
Despite the detail on the Red Brigade the author never mentions in this section that the train bombing, which killed 80 and injured hundreds, was perpetrated by a neo-fascist cell that was part of a secret mason sect and probably associated with the Italian secret police. Odd. The premise of this section seems to be that the end of political violence requires a shocking event. But in the last section LaFrance was claiming that resolving political unrest required “severe consequences” in the style of the Palmer raids! Which is it?!? The world may never know.
