Why Antifa Isn’t About Communism — It’s About Alienation
Every generation breeds its rebels, and they look different on the surface each time.
Today’s Antifa youth — masked, angry, proclaiming anti-fascism — aren’t so different from the radicals of the 1930s or the 1960s. Strip away the slogans and you’ll see the same crouched creature of history: hungry, wounded, suffering a cornered-cat syndrome.
The Cause of Its Snarl
Most Antifa activists are young — eighteen to thirty-five — the age when idealism is raw and injustice feels personal. They’ve watched institutions falter and fail in both church and state: debt-ridden universities, evaporated job security, religious hypocrisy, political theater, and hollow leadership.
They were promised adult belonging — a good job, home, and family — but ended up receiving only social protocols and handouts. That alienation ferments into anger. Anger demands a moral cause to fight for. And the cause arrives pre-packaged: fight fascism, fight capitalism, fight something.
They call it anti-fascism, but beneath the slogans lies a primal cry: Notice me. I’m still here. I will not be erased. I’m important too.
Beneath that cry runs a deeper ache — the widening canyon between the uber-rich and the dirt-poor. The American dream, once a ladder, now feels like a rigged game where the rungs have been sawed off. The young see billionaires buying planets while they can’t afford rent. That humiliation hardens into fury. It’s not Marx they follow but math: the simple subtraction of hope.
Echoes of Earlier Uprisings
The pattern is ancient — back to the Spartacus rebellion of slaves and beyond. Here are a few modern echoes in American history:
1930s: Disillusioned youth joined Communist parties and labor brigades, convinced they were defending humanity against fascism and depression.
1960s: The Weather Underground and Students for a Democratic Society waged “revolution” against Vietnam and corporate power. They burned draft cards, occupied campuses, and sometimes crossed into violence — from protest to Patty Hearst.
2020s: Black-clad Antifa blocs clash with police and right-wing rallies beneath the same banner of resistance.
Each generation believes the existing order is collapsing — and often it is, from human corruption within. Each faces a choice between despair and defiance, and many choose militancy.
The Cornered-Cat Reflex
A cornered cat doesn’t calculate ideology; it strikes because there’s nowhere else to run. Much of Antifa’s energy springs from that same survival reflex. Theirs isn’t a push for political power like the old Marxist revolutions, but a desperate bid for agency — to influence events, assert competence, and be seen as capable actors in a system that renders them invisible.
That’s why their politics feel incoherent — part anarchist, part socialist, part nihilist. Their coherence is emotional, not doctrinal. They fight to survive because they feel cornered, not because they know what to build afterward.
In recent years, that desperation has often been misread. When President Trump branded Antifa as a single umbrella organization, he mistook a swarming mob for a unified army. Antifa has no central command — only scattered cells, impulses, and digital tribes. Yet even chaos breeds opportunists: a few self-proclaimed leaders have indeed fled prosecution, deporting themselves abroad — proof that confusion can still produce pretenders.
https://acleddata.com/qa/qa-antifa-not-single-group-so-what-it
I Was One of Them
I understand this rage — because I lived it to the hilt, my red armband signaling rebellion.
In the 1960s, I was a long-haired drifter, a true hippie, convinced the world was rigged and my rebellion was noble and pure. I called it freedom, but it was really flight — from discipline, from responsibility, from commitment, from myself.
For ten years I lived on the road — penniless, hungry, and searching. I called it my pilgrimage, but it was more a wandering exile through the wilderness of my own illusions. I sought God and love in every open sky, on every back road, in every stranger’s kindness — convinced that somewhere the universe owed me an answer.
It took time to learn that my real enemy wasn’t “the system” or “the corporate CEO.” It was me. Once I faced that fact — truly faced it — my life began to turn. Sobriety, clarity, faith, and purpose didn’t come easily, but they came — in the severe birth pangs of a new self.
The Missing Quest
What’s missing in today’s spiritual landscape is that same Vision Quest — the ancient ritual of solitude in the wilderness that strips away the false outer narrative and restores the forgotten purpose of life. Not through outward conformity, but by inward transfiguration.
No slogans. No hashtags. No crowds. No friends. No guitar. No car. Only my backpack.
Just myself, naked before the Infinite — praying and fasting, waiting for that still inner voice whispering from eternity beneath all my shouting protests of righteous indignation.
The more I raged against the world, the more I became distracted by its noise, avoiding the truth within. Without that stripping naked — that sacred phase of the old self dying to illusion and becoming the new — rebellion merely changes costume and mask.
I learned the hard way that the only revolution worth dying for is the one fought inwardly — where the false self surrenders its idealistic illusions and begins to see hard reality.
The Quiet Alternative
The cure for alienation isn’t repression, nor utopia by revolution. It’s the patient rebuilding of life from the ground up — through spiritual mentorship, sage reading, disciplined conduct, high moral purpose, and the unshakable conviction that a lone voice still matters.
Every generation needs its young dissenters — but it also needs experienced elders who remember what the struggle is really about and are willing to share their hard-won wisdom.
Otherwise, the cornered cats of every age will keep hissing in different masked uniforms, angry for resolution to the puzzle of their lives. What they truly seek is not a fight, but a vision that brings peace of soul.
About the memoir-in-progress, tracing his own Vision Quest from rebellion to revelation, nearing publication:
Path Perilous: My Search for God and the Miraculous
—a spiritual epic for truth-seekers, contemplative mystics, and all who long for God.
Visit www.RMDellOrfanoAuthor.com
THE TRIQUETRA OF LIFE: Wisdom, Wealth, and Wellness 
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