The Button-Down Anarchist

This past September 11, a group of activists gathered at Bluestockings, a cooperatively owned bookstore in lower Manhattan, to learn about fighting fascism in Trump’s America. Some of them were members of “antifa,” a loose network of activists whom the president had just called out as a threat to the country.

Antifa members have been known for starting fires, punching Nazis, and donning balaclavas. At least one person at the bookstore wore a mask. Shelves bearing labels like “anarchism” and “feminist masculinity” were rolled out of the way to make room for the crowd, but there wasn’t enough space for all the people who wanted to hear Mark Bray speak.

Mr. Bray, a 35-year-old who looks even younger than that, is neither a fire-starter or a Nazi-puncher. He is a lecturer of history at Dartmouth College. His weapons of choice are logic and history, his crisp sentences delivered with the vaguest trace of a New Jersey accent.

He came here to give a lecture, not lead a rally. Yet the audience hung on his words, grateful to a man who has spent the better part of a year becoming a student and teacher of the antifascist movement — and a de facto translator for mainstream liberals wondering what kind of “resistance” they are willing to justify.

Bluestockings was Mr. Bray’s first appearance on a 35-stop tour to promote Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook (Melville House), a book he’d never planned to write. He had researched turn-of-the-century Spanish radicalism as a doctoral student at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, and seemed well on his way to a life of teaching undergraduates and writing about modern European history. Then Donald Trump won the presidency, white nationalists rejoiced, and 20th-century European fascism was suddenly on everyone’s mind.

An invitation to talk about antifascism on National Public Radio yielded the book deal — then more radio interviews, multiple appearances on Meet the Press, and a Washington Post op-ed. It also yielded death threats and a rebuke from Dartmouth’s president, who was asked why Mr. Bray had, in an interview with MSNBC, appeared to offer a defense of violent tactics while standing in front of a backdrop wallpapered with the Ivy League university’s name.

In many corners of academe, antifa has played a villain’s role. The collective has destroyed property on college campuses. One of its best-known tactics — attempting to shut down speakers it deems dangerous — has been criticized as trampling on freedom of speech. Yet many student activists share antifa’s stated goal of silencing white supremacists. Some of those students have sought not simply to protest speakers but to prevent them from appearing on campus altogether.

It’s not clear to most people precisely what “antifa” means, or how it overlaps with terms like “antifascism” and “black bloc.” But critics argue that it’s also not clear precisely what counts as fascism. They see antifa as a contributor to a dangerous turn away from free speech — and toward violence — on college campuses. “Almost anyone who is politically right of center can be labeled a racist or a fascist,” wrote Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business, in The Chronicle Review. When campus protests include “a mix of students and locals, some wearing masks,” he continued, “it is therefore no longer possible to assume that a crowd on a college campus will be nonviolent.”

Yet Mr. Bray points to the cultural currents that antifa deplores: white-supremacist marches in Charlottesville, Va., the reported outing of marginalized students, broader fears of a national drift toward fascism and authoritarianism. In the face of radicalism, he argues, radical responses must at least be considered.

Mr. Bray’s work, then, poses a challenge: Do you oppose fascism? If so, you have a duty to study it — and, once you’ve done so, to pick a side.

His appeal to reasoned debate, informed by history, may appear quaint at a time when partisanship, tribalism, and online flame wars seem to be driving politics. But perhaps there’s no better place to draw out the nuances of a phenomenon as controversial as antifa than on a college campus.

If Mr. Bray wins that argument, it wouldn’t be his first victory.

Mark Bray’s parents tell a story about their son. In Hebrew school, he took on the role of defense attorney in a mock trial. His client was a man who had been sentenced to death by God. To the teacher’s dismay, the class bought Mark Bray’s argument. They decided that God had been wrong to kill the man.

A few years later, he one-upped himself. In 2000 his high school scheduled a mock presidential debate, but, as in real life, Ralph Nader didn’t make the cut. Mr. Bray lobbied for a spot as Mr. Nader and prepared for weeks — memorizing the candidate’s talking points and researching dirt on Al Gore. The students at Pascack Valley High School, near Paramus, N.J., voted for Mr. Nader.

Mr. Bray grew up in a comfortable suburb of New York. His father was a business administrator who taught some college classes; his mother worked for the school district. Their son rarely gave them any trouble. But the music of Rage Against the Machine, a thrashing rock band famous for its antimilitary and anticorporate songs, sparked a political awakening. Soon he was railing against sweatshops in front of Gap with other punk kids.

Eventually he soured on that scene. “While those kids were sewing circle-A patches,” he later wrote, “I was searching for tangible ways to change society.”

As an undergraduate at Wesleyan University, Mr. Bray studied Spanish revolutionaries and began to think of himself as an anarchist. “The struggles and sacrifices of workers and peasants to collectively shed generations of oppression and forge a truly equitable society were so beautiful,” he wrote. “I knew I had to continue their struggle.”

In Providence, R.I., after college, he got involved in several immigrants’-rights coalitions and helped organize immigrant taxi drivers in an effort to restart a branch of Industrial Workers of the World. He learned how to hone a message and communicate it to the public.

Mr. Bray was working on his Ph.D. in history at Rutgers in 2011 when, in the wake of the Arab Spring, protesters converged on lower Manhattan. At first, he considered Occupy Wall Street a naïve and weak imitation of the protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square that had galvanized Egypt’s revolution. Young marchers’ attempts to come up with a shortlist of demands — like repealing the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which effectively legalized unlimited election spending by corporations — discouraged him. He thought the real problems were structural.

But at a march that October on the Brooklyn Bridge, a sense of solidarity prevailed even as the police made hundreds of arrests. Mr. Bray became convinced this was more than just another protest. He decided to spend a week at the movement’s encampment in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park.

On October 3, Mr. Bray arrived with a sign: “THE CRISIS IS CAPITALISM” Later in the day, he got his face painted like a zombie and flailed behind a live NBC News broadcast with fake money falling out of his mouth. Within a few seconds, his mom called.

“I recognized a bag he was carrying,” Karen Melin recalls. Otherwise she would not have known it was him.

The week turned into almost a year. Mr. Bray worked as a press liaison for the movement, answering reporters’ questions, holding briefings, sending out news releases when big events were planned. He did the bare minimum to remain in his Ph.D. program, returning to Rutgers only to teach.

Zuccotti Park was full of academics. For some of them, Occupy was a disruption. Not for Mr. Bray. He’d been organized since kindergarten, when he was the only child in his class who, on the last day of school, still had the pencil he had been given on Day 1. He earned his Ph.D in 2016 and landed a job at Dartmouth, first as a visiting scholar, then as a lecturer.

Then came the election.

Of the many protests at Mr. Trump’s inauguration, one became especially well known. In Washington, as the white supremacist Richard Spencer gave an interview, a masked antifascist demonstrator punched him in the face. Video of the attack went viral. As the public debated the ethics of assaulting a neo-Nazi, antifa began to enter the national consciousness.

Mr. Bray was at that protest. After the inauguration, he worried that Mr. Trump’s victory would embolden overt racism and misogyny. In an article on “everyday antifascism beyond punching Nazis” for the leftist online magazine Roar, he laid out what he saw as the goal of antifascism: “to increase the social cost of oppressive behavior to the point where those who promote it see no option but to hide.”

Not long after the article was published, the far-right agitator Milo Yiannopoulos was scheduled to speak at the University of California at Berkeley. The event drew hundreds of protesters, including some dressed in black who ripped down police barricades and shot fireworks at the venue. The talk was canceled; the protesters were accused of using violence to undermine freedom of speech.

If the Berkeley episode was a sort of coming-out party for antifa, much of the public didn’t like what it saw. The Berkeley spokesman Dan Mogulof told The New York Times that the “university was essentially invaded by more than 100 individuals clad in ninja-like uniforms who were armed and engaged in paramilitary tactics.”

In the aftermath, NPR’s On the Media invited Mr. Bray to speak about the idea that some positions are too abhorrent to be given any kind of platform and should be shut down before they cause harm. The program aired a week after Mr. Yiannopoulos’s shuttered event.

Dennis Johnson, co-publisher at Melville House, was driving when he heard the interview. “I almost had to pull the car off the road,” he says. “I was just so excited to hear someone speak rationally about this.”

Mr. Johnson had been dismayed by what he’d read and seen of the debates over freedom of speech on college campuses. He felt that college administrators were denying students the right to protest in order to make room for hate speech. By trying to prove to the far right that they weren’t liberal ivory towers, he thought, those colleges were stripping students’ sense of agency about what happened on their campuses.

The publisher found Mr. Bray’s contact information on Dartmouth’s website and contacted him immediately. Within a couple days, they’d worked out a plan for a book, figuring they needed to get it out as quickly as possible.

“It was a now story,” Mr. Johnson says. “Mark agreed that there was a real currency about this.”

From February to May, Mr. Bray interviewed 61 active and former antifascists. Some he knew from his own work as an activist, others he found on social media, and others were people he’d connected with on a tour for a book he had written about Occupy, Translating Anarchy (Zero Books, 2013). His “radical ‘credentials,’ " he wrote, gave him access to these activists, many of whom wished to remain anonymous.

The new book had been printed but not yet distributed in August when a white-supremacist rally started at the University of Virginia with torch-wielding marchers chanting “Jews will not replace us.” The rally continued the following day in Charlottesville, where a man drove his car into a group of counterprotesters, killing a 32-year-old woman, Heather Heyer, and injuring others.

Antifa groups were there, too. But after they were blamed for violence at the inauguration and at Berkeley, this time the discussion about them was not all negative.

“The police, for the most part, pulled back,” said Cornel West, who was in Charlottesville counterprotesting, on the TV show Democracy Now! “We would have been crushed like cockroaches if it were not for the anarchists and the antifascists.”

Melville House staff members were riveted by the news coming out of Charlottesville that weekend. Mr. Johnson couldn’t pull himself away from Twitter. On Monday morning, when they returned to their offices, in downtown Brooklyn, they decided to accelerate publication of the book.

“I knew Trump was going to latch onto it,” Mr. Johnson says. “You could just see it was going to happen, and I knew we had the only book on that word.”

The president did latch onto it. He blamed “both sides” for the violence in Charlottesville and decried antifa’s use of clubs, helmets, and black masks. Meanwhile, Melville House got to work getting Mr. Bray media interviews. He appeared on Democracy Now!, NPR’s 1A, WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show, and twice on Meet the Press. In The Washington Post, he reintroduced the collective on his terms.

“What is antifa?” the article asked.

Mr. Bray’s answer: not what the president had made it out to be.

Mr. Bray doesn’t pretend to explain antifa in a dispassionate way. He wants to give practical advice to activists resisting fascism and thinks their work should be taken seriously by the public and academe. Half of his earnings from the book will be given to a fund that supports antifascists to cover legal, medical, or personal costs.

Because The Anti-Fascist Handbook was written so quickly, Mr. Bray hesitates to call it a work of history. But historical scholarship is its bedrock. He documents organized, militant efforts to resist fascism throughout Europe before World War II. An important moment was the Battle of Cable Street, in October 1936, when thousands of protesters physically blocked a march that fascists had planned through a Jewish neighborhood in London. Antifascist groups emerged again in Europe in the 1970s, ‘80s, and ’90s after an influx of immigrants prompted a racist backlash, and more recently in the United States and Canada.

Connecting recent antifascist activism to the storied struggles of the past serves two purposes. First, it lends the movement legitimacy. Who’s going to demonize Jewish men and women who resisted the Nazis in the 1930s?

Second, lessons can be drawn from the past. Mr. Bray calls his book a handbook because it includes advice culled from antifascists. For example, he writes, fascist groups always start small. People should not rest easy just because they see only a small group of Nazis meeting in their local park. Mussolini had 100 members in 1919, he writes; the German Workers’ Party had 54 members when Hitler attended his first meeting.

Mr. Bray supplies a blueprint for how to deconstruct typical criticisms of antifascist tactics, such as the argument that shutting down a Nazi meeting makes you no better than a Nazi. His response: “If your main objection to Nazism is its suppression of the meetings of the opposition, then that says more about your politics than about those you are critiquing.”

He is often asked about the use of violence. Does he endorse it? It’s complicated, he says. Antifascist groups often are formed as an act of self-defense, so in some contexts their use of clubs or shields might be justified, he argues. (In his antifa book, he points out that an antifascist demonstrator was shot outside the scene of a January speech by Mr. Yiannopoulos at the University of Washington.) Despite the public fascination with Nazi-punching, he writes, violence is “a small though vital sliver of antifascist activity.”

He doesn’t think the United States is on the verge of becoming a fascist state. The point, he says, is that fascism can be deadly “even in small doses.”

So what is a university leader to do when a small dose enters the campus bloodstream?

Beyond President Trump, most people saw Charlottesville as a black-and-white case — a march by literal white supremacists. And few people on college campuses feel ambivalent when white-identity groups post fliers in the student union. But sometimes it’s harder to tell whether there’s really any poison in the system. Campus conservative groups invite speakers with links to the far right. An ecosystem of right-leaning websites calls out leftist professors, putting pressure on institutions to censure them.

Universities can’t dodge politics. Besides, they’ve never been politically neutral. They have dismissed Holocaust deniers and condemned slavery. They have opposed wars, defended science, and divested from oil companies. Mr. Bray would add fascism to the list of evils that academics can safely be against.

Choosing to side against fascism is relatively easy. Choosing to proactively fight trace elements so they don’t metastasize, as Mr. Bray advocates, less so.

Antifa takes a straightforward position on its role when it comes to speech that it views as racist: Such speech is dangerous, incites violence against marginalized people, and should be shut down. On college campuses — which view themselves as marketplaces of ideas where the best ones, at least in theory, will rise to the top — that position runs counter to deeply held values. Many scholars and administrators think the best way to defeat the far-right speech of Richard Spencer is with better speech, not by preventing him from taking the podium.

Beyond that, there’s the question of violence. Images of protesters smashing windows at Berkeley remain etched in many campus administrators’ minds. Colleges are trying to appeal to students, family, alumni, donors, lawmakers. They don’t want to appear to be on the side of a movement that has been associated with what critics have called the “violent left.”

Some scholars are forcing the issue. Bill Mullen, a professor of English and American studies at Purdue University, has helped form a loose coalition called the Campus Antifascist Network, which defends leftist professors who have been censured by their institutions after making controversial public statements.

Mitch Daniels, Purdue’s president, told Mr. Mullen in a letter that he was committed to protecting the professor’s academic freedom. At the same time, he said that Mr. Mullen’s “defense of the so-called ‘Antifa’ organization, a group that has not only advocated but practiced violence, gave deep offense and embarrassment to many.”

Less than two weeks after the Charlottesville rally, Mr. Bray was in the news almost every day. On Meet the Press, he boiled down the case for antifa for the Sunday-morning audience: “When pushed,” he said, “self-defense is a legitimate response.”

The scholar appealed to history, invoking the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1920s and ’30s. “The way that white supremacy grows, the way that neo-Nazism grows,” he said, “is by becoming legitimate, becoming established, becoming everyday, family-friendly.” Antifa’s project, he argued, is to “pull the emergency brake and say, You can’t make this normal.”

After that appearance, Campus Reform, a website devoted to pillorying liberal excess in higher education, ran a story: “Dartmouth scholar endorses Antifa violence.” The author was a recent Dartmouth graduate, a former editor in chief of the college’s conservative newspaper.

The same day, the university’s president, Philip J. Hanlon, issued a statement. “Recent statements made by lecturer in history Mark Bray supporting violent protest do not represent the views of Dartmouth,” he said. “As an institution, we condemn anything but civil discourse in the exchange of opinions and ideas.”

In the marketplace of ideas, Mr. Hanlon seemed to be driving down the value of Mr. Bray’s work.

The professor didn’t catch wind of the president’s statement until he saw it on the Campus Reform website. He was troubled. He wondered why Mr. Hanlon hadn’t reached out to ask what he meant.

Mr. Bray had received a few threatening messages. Now the threats increased. Most were vague; some mentioned gas chambers. When a package was sent to him at the college, an administrator contacted the police. (It turned out to be a book.) Reddit users publicized details about him, as well as contact information for Melville House and information about its distributor and sales team, and about Mr. Bray’s book talks.

The Dartmouth faculty rallied around Mr. Bray. Two days after Mr. Hanlon’s statement, more than 100 professors there signed a letter urging the president to retract his remarks. By validating the idea that Mr. Bray blindly supports violent protest, they argued, the president was showing that outsiders can suppress Dartmouth scholarship that they disagree with.

At the height of the public attention, some colleagues invited him for dinner and brought him home-cooked meals. James Heffernan, an emeritus professor of English, wrote to a local newspaper, calling Mr. Bray “a leading voice against the virulent fascism of our own time.”

Mr. Hanlon responded once more, sending an email to the faculty explaining his statement. He wanted to make clear, he said, that Dartmouth supports everyone’s academic freedom and is opposed to violence, and that Mr. Bray did not speak for the college.

“Immediately following Mark’s appearance on Meet the Press, the College experienced a tremendous surge of phone, email, and social media inquiry, from students and families, alumni and friends of the College, and from people without a clear connection to Dartmouth,” he wrote. “These questions and comments came from viewers of the show who not only interpreted Mark Bray to be supporting violent protest, but also believed him to be speaking for the College.”

To many professors, that email only proved their point.

“President Hanlon’s response, rather than strengthening the College’s commitment to the free exchange of ideas, effectively chills research and public engagement,” they wrote in a second response.

Mr. Hanlon had meant to put some distance between Mr. Bray and Dartmouth. In the process, he drew the professor deeper into the community. “If anything, I feel more at home at Dartmouth than I did before this,” Mr. Bray says.

It’s hard to make sense of a movement that resists conventional characterizations. Is antifa a collective? A political orientation? An identity?

With so much misunderstanding about the basics of antifa, it’s tempting to fall back on narratives of good guys and bad guys. But Mr. Bray carefully pushes against that dichotomy.

He presents himself as a clean-cut professor type, about as far from a circle-A-patch-wearing punk as you can get. On Meet the Press he wore a three-piece suit, at Bluestockings a tucked-in button-down shirt.

“I learned the value of presenting my revolutionary ideas in an accessible format,” he wrote in his book on Occupy. “How I dress, the words I choose, and how I articulate them affect how I am received, so if my primary goal is to convince people of what I am saying, then it’s often useful to shed my ‘inessential weirdness.’ "

In interviews, Mr. Bray reveals little expression even when asked questions he admits he finds frustrating. His demeanor and the density of his arguments are disappointing to those who’d like an easy way to cast him aside.

“You open the little book expecting a how-to guide on violence and disruption,” said a Fox News review of The Anti-Fascist Handbook. “But instead of giving advice on how to shut people up with baseball bats, the handbook is really a rather dull lecture.”

“He doesn’t bring what Fox News wants,” says Daryle L. Jenkins, founder of the anti-racist organization One People’s Project, who is quoted in Mr. Bray’s book on antifa. “By that I mean the sensationalism of antifa. You still see conservatives using him as a way to advance their propaganda. But he doesn’t bring to the table the ruckus.”

Conversion will come not in the form of a hard push, Mr. Bray believes, but through many gentle taps. At his NYU talk, a professor who had marched in the 1960s made an impassioned case that freedom of speech and nonviolence are the truly radical positions. Mr. Bray thanked the professor. He said they would need to find a way to coexist without butting heads. Audience members clapped; the NYU professor introduced himself to Mr. Bray after the talk.

“I wouldn’t call him a firebrand,” says Mr. Johnson, the Melville House publisher. “He’s not getting up trying to make people cheer. He’s just trying to explain what antifa is and how we need to think seriously about it.”

In his book about Occupy, Mr. Bray described honing his approach as a way to deliver anarchist ideas to the public. The A-word, as he called anarchism in the book, is a misunderstood term. Using it may turn away would-be sympathizers.

Another Occupy organizer who worked with the press, Patrick Bruner, told Mr. Bray that he didn’t use certain words, substituting more-palatable terms. “He wrote up a list of polarizing political terms to avoid using with the press, including ‘capitalism,’ ‘anarchism,’ ‘communism,’ ‘free market,’ " Mr. Bray wrote in his book. “Patrick added that ‘when we talk about this movement, we talk about a post-political, directly democratic, people-powered, egalitarian movement. When you put all those words together, it means anarchism.’ "

There’s an irony in Mr. Bray’s approach: To argue that some points of view are so dangerous that they cannot be fought with reasoned debate, Mr. Bray uses reasoned debate.

“He doesn’t use the word ‘must’ ever; it’s not a word in his lexicon,” says Temma Kaplan, a professor of history emerita who was his adviser at Rutgers. “It’s a temperament. He’d like people to think about what they do.”

“He thinks if you talk to people enough, you can come to some sort of agreement,” she says. “He’s not a proselytizer, he’s a teacher.”

Despite the attention he’s earned by talking about antifa on TV, Mr. Bray is ready to get on with a career as a scholar of European history. He hopes to return to the work of turning his dissertation into a book on the repression of anarchists and other leftists in turn-of-the-20th-century France and Spain, arguing that widespread efforts to free them amounted to early human-rights campaigns. He has also translated of the writings of Francisco Ferrer, a Spanish educator and anarchist, for a reader that is scheduled to be published next year.

Several graduate students have written to him to ask about antifa. He hopes they will take up the subject. He doesn’t rule out writing about it again, but he’d like the attention to end with the book tour.

“Writing stuff about contemporary politics can be very draining,” Mr. Bray says. “Sometimes it’s nice to take recourse in the history.”

His current position at Dartmouth will end in the spring, so he’s on the job market. It remains to be seen whether hiring committees will see his high-profile public scholarship as a boon or a liability.

“He has an intellectual project and a social project that’s a life-long project,” Ms. Kaplan says. She writes his letters of recommendation. “The question is, Who will count what?”

In the Occupy days, a debate emerged over the black bloc. Was it a pernicious force? Chris Hedges, a reporter and activist, thought so. He wrote on the online news site Truthdig that black-bloc anarchists “are the cancer of the Occupy movement,” arguing that their tendency to destroy property would be used “to justify draconian forms of control and frighten the wider population away from supporting the Occupy movement.”

David Graeber, an anthropology professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, who was an Occupy organizer and who participated in black blocs, disagrees with that assessment. The black bloc is not a group or an ideology but a tactic, he wrote in the magazine n+1. While self-defense is sometimes appropriate, he argues, the Occupy movement decided to “adopt a strategy of Gandhian nonviolence and eschew acts of property damage.”

William Scott, another Occupy organizer, wasn’t sure what to believe. He had a good impression of Mr. Hedges, who had donated some books to the Occupy movement’s library, but he thought Mr. Graeber made good points.

Internal debates of this nature are not new to leftist activism. Eric Larson, an assistant professor of crime and justice studies at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, who was a labor organizer with Mr. Bray in Rhode Island, recalled the antiglobalization movement in the 1990s, which hit a flash point in 1999 at the World Trade Organization protest in Seattle. Black-bloc tactics were used then, he says, but they were not well understood.

“There was no Mark Bray,” he says, “no person who could explain the historical significance of the black bloc to the general public.”

This time, as Mr. Scott was pondering Occupy, he turned to Mr. Bray. “Mark had this historical knowledge of where the black bloc came from,” he says. “He understood what was motivating them.”

Mr. Bray described earlier debates about whether it is appropriate to use violence in activism; he laid out “the back story,” as Mr. Scott recalls. “By the end of that conversation,” says Mr. Scott, an associate professor of literature at the University of Pittsburgh, “I knew what I thought of it all.”

Mr. Scott has paid attention to the rising interest in antifa, and he has watched his friend on TV. He finds himself relying on Mr. Bray once again.

In fact, there’s a point Mr. Bray made in an interview that Mr. Scott often finds himself citing. “We don’t look back at the Weimar Republic today and celebrate them for allowing Nazis to have their free-speech rights,” he says. “We look back and say, Why didn’t they do something?”

Nell Gluckman writes about faculty issues and other topics in higher education. You can follow her on Twitter @nellgluckman, or email her at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com.