In 2017 everyone was like "antifa was just invented by Hillary to murder grandpas who want lower taxes" and I engaged at length in a symposium at C4SS to defend antifascists from their more reasonable critics. A few points might be worth revisiting 4 years out...

One of the critiques Jason Byas leveled at me was essentially "when you build a movement you can't control/plan how it'll develop."

Jason's concern was in part that as "antifa" spread beyond the original orgs there'd be runaway epistemic closure and normalization of violence.

It was the common conservative narrative at the time: "oh so now people think it's okay to punch nazis??? the only way this ends is the abolition of all political debate and every democrat immediately murdering anyone they consider slightly problematic."

Granted, this was the *better* conservative narrative of 2017 since the other two were "nazis don't exist & have never existed, the real nazis are anyone opposed to authoritarian hypernationalism" and "yes of course we're nazis, if you wanna kill libs come join our death squad!"

One of the central points I proactively admitted in my piece was that "antifascism" was indeed seguing from small tightly professional anarchist groups who historically secured our flank from nazis to a loosey-goosey "identity" grabbed by almost everyone on the left.

The Bray/Burley/Popmob model of "everyone's antifa!" was on the one hand clearly desperately necessary in order to secure the survival of the tiny professional crews (that we depend upon) from being isolated and repressed. But it also opened up the danger of further redefinition.

Now I have always taken the position that epistemic closure and ratcheting violence constitute real and important dangers. But in my opinion it's trivially the case that such risks were completely outweighed by the necessity of the *survival* of the anarchist movement.

If antifascist groups had been successfully legally suppressed and/or slaughtered by the fascist death squads that were in 2017 quite seriously building towards that, the remaining anarchist movement would have been left no protection & would be wiped off the streets / existence.

If the price to stop that is letting some labor doofuses and demsocs run around branding their bakesales "antifa" and being shitheads declaring "hey kids did you know the real antifascism is voting for bernie" I will enthusiastically make that trade every goddamn time.

We ducked the worst possibilities of a civil war and/or mass repression. I consider that an unbelievable win. Even if we've just kicked that can down the road a few years, it was a herculean accomplishment of infrastructure building. Narrative shifting. Factual reporting. Etc.

If we were to run a damage assessment of "normalizing antifa" however:

The prospect that tankies would hijack it has been defeated, which was likely. I knew there were too many inedible & resilient anarchist "wreckers" and existing antifa orgs too explicitly anti-tankie.

And the broader left that youthpastor'd "antifa" for a few seasons during Trump is now predictably either distancing itself or getting run the fuck off. Dirtbaggers, tankies, electoralists, celeb streamers, etc.

Antifascism is resuming its traditional role as a resented corner.

What has changed however is the *fraction* of the left or anarchism that is antifascist aligned or influenced. This is the main legacy of Trump era "mass antifascism" imo: pulling the left further into consistent anti-nationalism and normalizing certain critiques.

Folks will work very hard to undo these gains. And there IS damage that the "so you like antifa, well X is the real antifa" nonsense worked to inflict. Muddled definitions of fascism & people who will spend decades being like "I punched a chud at a protest; i can't be cryptofash"

As to the specific fears of feedbacking epistemic closure and violence, the fact that antifascists resisted marginalization and sidelining within "everyone's antifa" coalition helped suppress that too. But it's also a dynamic of the *limits* of said libs/socialists.

One thing conservatives, as outsiders, never grasped was that antifa are the LEAST epistemically closed folks on the left. They're the selfless nerds who spend their days reading every possible far-right blog or fb post. They more informed & attentive to nuance than anyone else.

It is absolutely the case that as "everyone's antifa" spread so too did slapdash "Jordan Peterson and Bill Maher are nazis" level discourse among the libs (the two are inane and dangerous hyper-reactionaries laughingstocks, but obviously leagues away from being nazis).

But such linguistic or discursive dynamics have always been the case. Conservatives spent decades calling everyone "feminazis." The supposed danger would be that the left would as a whole ratchet itself towards punching every moderate... something, something... civil war.

This never happened. Rather what happened was quite reasonable proportional responses to a conservative movement that exponentially spiraled in reaction to the point where its core is increasingly fascist in all but name in an unstoppable preference falsification collapse.

In contrast to the spiraling calls for civil war, death squads, genocide, etc on the right, the left/libs never escalated into bloodthirst and the old antifa core managed to restore accuracy and nuance, propagating factual pictures wider. Meanwhile conservatives lost all reality.