In their new book Vigilante Nation: How State-Sponsored Terror Threatens our Democracy, legal scholars Jon Michaels and David Noll explain the resurgence of vigilantism within the far right, map the tactics it is using to destroy US democracy, and introduce a political program for how to tackle vigilantism by fighting fire with fire. The book provides a convincing analysis of what Michaels and Noll call the “legal vigilantism” of the contemporary far right, from pressuring school boards to using threats of civil suits to quash reproductive freedoms. By analyzing these legal tactics alongside the more visible and violent manifestations of right-wing politics, Michaels and Noll provide a complex picture of right-wing vigilantism.
However, it is in the explanation of the roots of this right-wing movement, and in the strategy for defeating it, that the book creates a stark contrast with a socialist perspective for fighting vigilante assaults on democracy. Reviewing the arguments of Vigilante Nation and contrasting it to DSA’s 2024 Workers Deserve More program highlights important contrasts between liberal-democratic and socialist approaches to diagnosing and fighting fascism. Such a political discussion seems even more important now, in the wake of the 2024 election and the vigilantes’ successful takeover of the federal government.
Vigilante Nation begins with the story of the January 6, 2021 insurrection, an event that conveys the scope and stakes of the vigilante threat. Michaels and Noll focus not just on the violent mob outside the Capitol Building but also the efforts of Republican elected officials like Utah Senator Mike Lee, who strategized about how to legitimize this attack on US democracy (p. xv). For these law professors, the legal vigilantism of Lee and other Republican officials, who tried to invalidate the election, are just as concerning as the extra-legal and violent vigilantism happening outside. Together this legal and extralegal vigilantism aims to destroy US democracy and grab political power for a white Christian minority (6).
Part 1 of the book, “Who We’ve Always Been,” traces the origins of vigilantism within US history. Contra much of the journalism and punditry on Trump and the contemporary Republican Party, Michaels and Noll acknowledge that vigilantism has a long history in the US, including in the violence that enforced racial slavery and then dismantled radical Reconstruction, and in the racial terror of Jim Crow. The Black Freedom Movement allowed “a maturing democracy” to begin to “swear off vigilantism” (32) by embracing the post-war liberal democratic consensus around civil rights. However, over the last several decades the Republican Party abandoned “the Establishment conservatism practiced by the likes of Gerald Ford, George H. W. Bush, and John McCain” and embraced the vigilantism and nativism of Donald Trump (50). Right-wing media and political figures like Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones fueled white male grievance politics and a culture of violence around guns, all of which came to a head in 2016. As they write, “”A small but passionate and heavily armed cohort of Americans believe they’re under siege by those who want to injure, bankrupt, oppress, or emasculate ‘real Americans. The right-wing media creates, validates, and amplifies these lies—and makes money by pushing more and more sensationalist and grotesque storylines. The GOP’s intraparty civil wars have turned off or pushed out all but the most extreme Republicans . . . And the emergence of Donald Trump and the subsequent deification of a man who champions a chaotic, violent, consequence-free approach to commerce and politics have emboldened tens of thousands of his restive enthusiasts to take it upon themselves to Make America Great Again (as they themselves understand that to mean)” (54).
In Part 2, the longest and most impressive section, Michaels and Noll meticulously explain and document with extensive examples the four tactics that comprise modern day “legal vigilantism.” These are dissenter vigilantism, courthouse vigilantism, street vigilantism, and electoral vigilantism. Dissenter vigilantism describes how individuals are increasingly empowered to use legal avenues of dissent to undermine democratically-decided laws or measures and to attack vulnerable groups. Some of the most resonant examples here are the many successful efforts to undermine COVID health mandates like masking, social distancing and other remote public health measures, which were demonized and targeted by right wing vigilantes at city councils, school boards, and businesses. Courthouse vigilantism is exemplified in laws like Texas’ SB 8, which empowers individuals to surveil and sue individuals who are trying to exercise reproductive freedoms, or in Florida’s Stop WOKE Act, allowing parents to legally challenge materials in school libraries or curricula that discuss topics such as racism, sexuality, or gender identity. Street vigilantism is the most visible and shocking type, exemplified not only in the January 6 insurrection but in other moments of right wing vigilante violence such as the 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, VA or Kyle Rittenhouse’s gun violence during protests in Kenosha, WI. Importantly, Michaels and Noll acknowledge and document that this vigilante violence often has the implicit sanction of law enforcement. Finally, electoral vigilantism describes efforts to manipulate and purge voter rolls, invalidate ballots, and pressure poll workers to change the outcomes of elections to take political power. Each of these forms of vigilantism has historical antecedents–for example the links between street vigilantism and the racial terror of Jim Crow or the murder of civil rights activists–but also unique features specific to the modern, Trump-fueled, social media age.
A brief discussion of “The Stakes” makes up part 3 of the book. When considered together, these many cases of contemporary vigilantism indeed suggest a broader political strategy that threatens US democracy. The bottom line is that, “If democracy can no longer be made to bend to the will of Christian nationalism, then Christian nationalism is going to first impede and then blow up democracy” (169-70). Thus in part four, “First Responders,” the authors discuss how we should and shouldn’t fight vigilante democracy. Michaels and Noll reject simple paeans that the fascist right can be defeated simply by voting blue, by supporting progressive candidates, or waging cultural battles. These democratic measures, like voting, cannot defeat vigilantism because the right disdains and is trying to rig or invalidate democracy.
Unsurprisingly, then, the two legal scholars see a legislative strategy as the most likely way to fight fascism. This “Blue State counter-strike” is focused on hunkering down within Democrat-majority states and trying to undercut vigilantism’s reach through a combination of economic and political sanctions and legal challenges. In a sense, the idea is for Democratic-majority states to band together and use similar legislation and legal maneuvering as is used in red states—to fight right wing vigilantism on its own terms. This includes passing laws that establish and protect liberal rights such as abortion, supporting red state “refugees” who move to Democratic cities and states, and “reinforcing” efforts to fight vigilantism in Republican states, such as by funding reproductive clinics or progressive journalism. Just as important are offensive measures, including “retaliation” laws that prohibit investment or procurement in Republican states or companies until they change their policies. The strategy is akin to putting international sanctions on “rogue” states, hoping that the political and economic pressure will cause regime change. Blue states like California could also provide “resistance” against vigilantes by, for example, using interstate commerce powers to make it illegal to impede anyone from traveling to California to access services such as abortions, or by allowing out-of-state individuals to sue in California courts when such rights are interfered with by individuals in Republican states. This would use the same tactics of right wing vigilantes—state-level preemption and civil suits—against them. Finally, blue states can shift the balance of power by shunning Red States and passing laws that favor economic and political cooperation amongst each other. Social and political isolation can force Republican states like Texas and Florida to moderate their attacks on democracy and rejoin the union.
If this “Blue state counter-attack” sounds like a mix of 2000’s era culture war talk with Ken Burns’s The Civil War, that’s because the authors seem to see it this way. They note several times that the current moment is “more like 1850 than 1950” (209). As a result, grassroots political movements and international pressure won’t defeat vigilantism alone. To preserve the Union, it will take Democrat-majority states banding together and fighting the right wing. “The strategies and tactics we prescribe by way of conclusion don’t weigh lightly on our shoulders,” Michaels and Noll reflect. “They challenge many of our long-held political and legal commitments, not to mention our social, cultural, and psychic attachments to the indivisibility of the United States, its shared goals, and its collective strengths. But, we ask, again, what’s the alternative?”
And for socialists, this is the perennial question: What is to be done? Despite its excellent analysis of the tactics of contemporary vigilantism, it’s here, in diagnosing causes and prescribing a solution, that Vigilante Nation falls short when compared to a socialist perspective on fighting fascism. In fact, these shortcomings seem even more obvious now, after the sweeping victory of Trump’s vigilante movement.
In order to fight vigilantism, we have to understand its causes. Michaels and Noll suggest that the United States had begun to “swear off vigilantism” by building a democratic consensus in the post-Civil Rights era, but that the establishment, small government conservatism of an Eisenhower or McCain soon was overtaken by the return of the formerly-repressed vigilante right. However, the truth is much closer to the statement that this is “who we’ve always been.” In other words, the United States has always been a vigilante nation, even during the most celebrated time of a democratic liberal consensus of the 1960s-1980s. At the very same time that Michaels and Noll claim that the US was “maturing” and “swearing off vigilantism,” the nation was also militarizing the border and building systems of crimmigration; constructing the modern prison industrial complex; and engaging in imperialist interventions throughout Latin America.
In comparison to the vigilantism of the current GOP, the authors pine for the “establishment conservatism” of the mid-twentieth century. However, and as rhetorical scholar Paul Elliot Johnson showed in his recent book I, The People, it was these establishment Republicans that sowed the seeds of modern-day vigilante nationalism, including through their commitment to racial capitalism, demonization of government, and scapegoating of minorities as threats to white “autonomous selfhood, power, and property ownership.” Furthermore, Democrats as much as Republicans played a role in this shift. While Michaels and Noll see the post-civil rights era as the last bastion of liberal democracy, we should see it instead as the ascendancy of a new order of racial capitalism. Theorist Jodi Melamed calls this the era of “racial liberalism,” where white supremacy was rearticulated within a liberal frame in which “the content of the American Creed—equal opportunity, abstract equality, possessive individualism, and market liberties—came to define the substantive meaning of antiracism, thereby naturalizing racialized capitalism.” In short, fascism is not an aberration that undermines bourgeois democracy but rather a racialized process of differentiation that is integral to it.
If it is true that this is “who we’ve always been,” then the plan for fighting vigilantism has to be more than a blue state counter-attack. This is especially the case when many blue states and candidates seem more committed to undermining democracy than expanding it. Democrats compete with Republicans in demonizing immigrants and calling for more border militarization and caging of refugees. The Governor of California commits millions to clear encampments of houseless and displaced people. Biden prioritizes contributing billions of dollars of aid to Israel’s genocide in Gaza while blue mayors crack down on student protestors. Ironically, the strategies of economic boycott proposed in Vigilante Nation are increasingly outlawed by blue states when they target Israel as part of the BDS movement. Over the last few weeks, we are actually seeing the seeds of such a blue state counter-attack developing in collaborations amongst several Democratic governors. However, after the 2024 election pointed to the multiplying contradictions and failures of the Democratic Party, is this the best and last strategy we have to fight the vigilante right?
Compare this with the plan proposed in DSA’s 2024 Workers Deserve More program, which reads, in part:
Workers are realizing that we deserve more from our political parties. As socialists, our goal is to defeat the right and build a real democracy. We stand against the capitalist class and the politicians that serve their interests at the expense of the rest of us. We recognize that a second Trump victory would be catastrophic for the international working class. Relying on the Democrats to defeat Republicans isn’t working. An independent political party, rooted in the working-class majority is necessary to build a future free from exploitation and oppression.
Rather than focusing on blue state governors and legislators, this program focuses on the millions of people across all states who are organizing to fight fascism and to win a more expansive democracy. Central to this socialist strategy are not just the state houses and state courts but also the working folks struggling through “labor and tenant unions, out in the streets, and at the ballot box” to defeat vigilantism both legal and extra-legal. The goal here goes beyond returning to the most celebrated moments of the post-war liberal consensus. Truly defeating fascism means building “a government by, for, and of the working class.”
Vigilante Nation provides a comprehensive discussion of the ways that dissenter, courthouse, street, and electoral vigilantism are expressed by Republicans and the MAGA movement. But in spite of its many strengths, it also underscores the significant difference that a socialist perspective makes in both diagnosing the depth of the fascist threat and in providing a strategy to fight it on all fronts.
