Following the Trump administration’s deployment of unidentified federal troops in unmarked vans in Portland, liberal commentators raised the issue of whether Trump is a force for fascism. It is a good question. Given the long history of overlap between law enforcement and overtly racist and fascist groups, however, the same question should be asked about police departments across the country.
Ideological and personnel overlap between police and white supremacist groups is as old as policing itself. After the Civil War, the first Ku Klux Klan took up where existing slave patrols—one of the earliest forms of policing in the United States—had left off. The first KKK would not only create a template for racist groups in the United States, but arguably was also the world’s first proto-fascist organization. “The Klan constituted an alternate civic authority, parallel to the legal state,” writes Robert Paxton, in The Anatomy of Fascism. “By adopting a uniform (white robe and hood), as well as by their techniques of intimidation and their conviction that violence was justified … the first version of the Klan in the defeated American South was arguably a remarkable preview of the way fascist movements were to function in interwar Europe.”
Through the end of the 19th century and into the 20th, police were not only complicit in white terrorism, but were often instigators and participants in both lynchings and anti-Black pogroms. Sociologist Arthur Raper estimated cops were directly involved in half of all lynchings.
By the 1920s, the Klan was in its second generation, arrayed against not just Blacks but also Catholics and Jews. It was deeply embedded in political institutions: elected offices, the courts, and law enforcement. “Police chiefs and sheriffs were particularly likely to join, which encouraged their subordinates to follow,” writes Linda Gordon in The Second Coming of the KKK. “Often whole police forces were in or allied with the Klan.”
Other far-right groups from the time counted police among their ranks as well. Although the German American Bund was the most well-known fascist organization of the 1930s, the Father Coughlin–aligned Christian Front was also one of the vanguards of fascist action. Their platform was anti-Semitic, anti-communist, and pro-Franco in the Spanish Civil War. The Front, and their fellow travelers the Christian Mobilizers, were successful at recruiting police into their ranks, especially in New York City.