Why Americans Still Have to Fight for the Streets

“Whose streets? Our streets!” If you found it disturbing to hear white supremacists chanting these words as they marched last weekend through Charlottesville, Virginia, I’m about to make you feel worse. This blueprint for political rise comes directly from Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” where the would-be dictator advised his followers that “the road can be cleared for the movement … by the conquest of the streets.”

What’s particularly relevant about this translation of Hitler’s ideas into today’s America is that the U.S. Supreme Court has already analyzed it in depth -- in 1949, when struggling with violent street confrontations between far-rightists and far-leftists as the Cold War dawned. The lessons of that historical moment shaped the constitutional law that now governs confrontational, provocative free speech. And they are directly applicable to this moment of incipient street conflict.