If antifascist politics have been important to comprehending the course of US politics, it is crucial to understand their basis. What, in other words, is an antifascist? Simply put, an “antifascist” is not someone who merely dislikes fascism. Rather, they are a person who sees fascism as an immediate threat to their political environment and devotes a significant amount of energy to stopping it. An antifascist is one who sees “fascism” as a central issue of their time. Thus we agree with historian Nigel Copsey, who, in his work on the British context, sees antifascism as a matter of both thought and action—and action that takes a broad range of political forms, from physical confrontation to leafletting. We also agree with his “antifascist minimum”: what politically unites antifascist forms, to Copsey, is a genuine commitment to democracy, be it liberal democracy, social democracy, or the direct democracy of a workers’ state.
The “anti” status of the movement has tended to give its activities a self-defensive character; historically, antifascists have devoted much of their activity to thwarting mobilizations of the far right. But as a democratic movement, antifascism has generally been linked to positive programs as well: its bearers tend to fight not only against fascism, but also for racial justice, for socialist (or anarchist) transformation, and for gender equality. For this reason, antifascists historically have been involved in multiple organizations and forms of political action at the same time: for instance, participating in the American League against War and Fascism on one day and building a union on the next. In the United States, antifascism was at its height during the 1930s and 1940s, a time when it structured the very terms of the political for many people on the left. In those years, the US left made unprecedented gains in institutional power and influence through the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) unions, an emergent black public sphere, and the New Deal state.
Yet, for organizers on the left, fascism remained the all-too-real atavism that threatened to undo everything at a moment’s notice. For many liberals and leftists of this generation, “fascism” was less a concrete regime in Germany or Italy, and more a grammar to conceive the connectedness of seemingly divergent struggles. The labor question, the woman question, anti-imperialism, the fight against “race hate,” and the struggle for peace were often conjoined as a part of a common fight against “fascism,” a fight to preserve democratic gains while extending them into uncharted territory. This sensibility, moreover, guided both “popular front” and “united front” appeals. To be antifascist, then, was not only to collapse distances across continents, but to move toward what we now call intersectional thought and action.