The Social Production of Counterprotest: The Dynamics of Anti-Racist and Anti-Fascist Contestation, 2016 to 2020

• In Event: 30480 - Mobilization and Contemporary Democratic Elections: Coping with Violence & Extremism

Abstract

Between the 2016 and 2020 elections, white power protest events proliferated across the United States. While these developments have been widely discussed, the processes and practices whereby such events are successfully contested within the context of contemporary American politics remain largely understudied and relatively little understood. The present paper draws on an extended ethnographic study of twenty-three cases of organized resistance -- involving a constellation of self-described "anti-racist" and "anti-fascist" countermovements scattered across eight US states -- to develop a series of falsifiable propositions as to the conditions of possibility for the production of successful anti-racist and anti-fascist contestation. From the larger population of US protest events, I constructed a sample of twenty-three cases of counterprotest. In order to directly observe the relevant actors and objects of analysis from the ground up, I personally attended a total of eleven of these events over a period of more than four years from 2016 to 2020. For the remaining thirteen cases, I engaged in digital ethnography at a physical distance from the events of interest, following the digital paper trail of posts on social media platforms, as well as content from private correspondence that was subsequently made public. Additionally, I compiled a running archive of media coverage of the events of interest. My findings suggest that successful anti-racist and anti-fascist contestation has distinctive conditions of possibility, including the modes of solidarity formation necessary to sustain multiracial, intergenerational, and intercommunal coalitions; the forms of self-organization specific to organizing in virtual as space; the means of resource generation required to meet the needs of counterprotesters; and, importantly, the relative demobilization of law enforcement. Each of these conditions had to be in place for white power events to be effectively disrupted.

Author

• Michael Gould-Wartofsky, Columbia University