As Savannah Guthrie grilled Donald Trump on QAnon at Trump’s town hall event, he did his usual lying and dodging and then whined to Guthrie about Antifa and asked her: “Why aren’t you asking Joe Biden questions about, why doesn’t he condemn Antifa?”
Let’s settle this. Joe Biden does not have to denounce Antifa. He’s done so, anyway, but even if he hadn’t, he has utterly no responsibility to do so, and since this appears to be an attack line Trump might amp up in these waning days, it’s important for people to understand why.
It’s important because it probably sounds to your average person like a fair equivalence. Okay. Trump has to denounce Proud Boys on the right. Fair enough. So Biden should also denounce Antifa on the left. Makes sense. Actually it doesn’t—and this is the kind of ideological sleight of hand the right pulls all time.
Why doesn’t Biden have to denounce Antifa? It’s very simple. Antifa doesn’t support him. Antifa, as you probably know, is not an organized, top-down outfit with a clear hierarchy. It’s a loose confederation of mostly far-left groups that believe left-wing violence is justified against racist and fascist groups on the right that use violence. They’re also, generally speaking, against capitalism and against police forces and what they’d call the violence of the state.
They don’t support Joe Biden. They don’t support the Democratic Party. Lots of of them can barely stand Bernie Sanders. For the most part, Antifa activists are on the far left. The far left despises the Democratic Party. In fact, people on the far left often hate the Democrats more than they hate the Republicans in this country, for the simple reason that the Democrats are part of a system that they fundamentally oppose and believe should be destroyed, and the Democrats, who make nice promises and talk pretty about race and justice and so on, are the smiling, benign face of a corrupt, violent system and are therefore more insidious than Republicans, who at least are honest about the inherently racist, oppressive nature of the system.
I can understand why your average person doesn’t understand this, because your average person in the United States has probably never knowingly encountered such a person. There aren’t very many of them, and you have to travel in rarefied circles even to meet such people. I used to travel in those circles, when I was young and lived in Manhattan, and my social circle ranged from liberal Democrats to Trotskyists.
If you could plot the American left on a line, it’s not a continuous line. There’s a rupture in the line, and the rupture is roughly the point at which the people who believe the system as it exists has value and can be reformed give way to the people who think the system is corrupted beyond redemption and must be overthrown. On the establishment side of the line are liberals, social democrats, and socialists. On the extreme side of the line are communists, anarchists, spartacists, and other smaller far-left tendencies.
If you could plot the American right on a line, however, there is no such break. There is no feud about capitalism, for one thing. Everybody from Maine Senator Susan Collins to Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes supports the free-enterprise system. Some far-rightists are anarcho-capitalists, who would abolish government pretty much entirely in favor of markets.
But more to the point, racism and xenophobia, the organizing principles of the American far right, have obviously seeped—with Trump, a lot more than seeped—their way into mainstream Republicanism. The Republican Party opened that door with Barry Goldwater and the opposition to civil rights.
Yes, it is possible for people to be nonracists personally but oppose civil rights or affirmative action or high levels of legal immigration on other grounds. But the fact is, any political party that endorses those positions is sending a message to racists and xenophobes that we’ll take your support, nudge nudge wink wink, unless that party openly denounces those racists and xenophobes.
So, for example, George H.W. Bush ran a campaign in 1988 that relied on pushing racist buttons, as Lee Atwater later acknowledged. But at least Bush did explicitly and loudly denounce open racist David Duke when Duke was running for governor of Louisiana in 1991.
Trump, who sometimes issues a boilerplate denunciation when asked, more often pretends not to know who they are, and occasionally calls them “fine people” or tells them to “stand by.” Hence, they love him. Duke himself said after Charlottesville: “Thank God for Trump! That’s why we love him!”
And that is what makes it incumbent upon Trump to denounce these people. They support him.
And the far-left groups don’t support Biden. So he has no responsibility to denounce them.
Even so, he has. “Do you condemn Antifa?” he was asked by a reporter in early September. “Yes, I do, violence no matter who it is,” he replied.
Trump “denounces” white supremacy like he’s swatting a pesky fly. Everyone watching can tell he doesn’t mean it. So as Trump presses this argument, don’t be fooled by it. It’s a bogus issue. A lot of people, even reasonable and well-meaning people, might fall for it because it sounds “fair.” But it’s a total false equivalence. Trump promotes white supremacists by retweeting them and giving them oxygen, so he is to a considerable degree responsible for their influence. Biden is not responsible for Antifa in any way. It’s just one more lie.
