Well the neo- and retro-WNs showed they don’t have their shit together enough to be a self-contained motive force.

They couldn’t discipline their own forces on the march – the “are they saying ‘you will not replace us’ or ‘Jews will not replace us’?” thing isn’t meaningless, it shows them falling down on something the left had down a century ago – coordinating chants to be rhythmic and legible, a bare minimum of coherence for mass action.

And unlike the first or even second KKK with the Democrats, or the (P)IRA with Sinn Fein, they aren’t properly articulated with a political party or even an existing memory of a social order to reestablish. So I’m discounting them as vanguardists.

There’s another way the “vanguard” metaphor might work though and it’s to think of them as skirmishers. In classical warfare skirmishers were irregular troops – poorly equipped, expendable outsiders – who deployed before (in position and time) the main battle troops. Their purpose wasn’t to defeat the enemy on their own but to harass, pushing or drawing them out of position before the main encounter.

And I suspect they did that, that before this the system was coming together to grit its teeth and pass Trump through intact and resume normal operations afterwards without giving too much ground, and that’s been blown open.

There’ll be some sort of revenge attacks somewhere that remind conservatives that any force that tolerates antifa is existentially unacceptable; all the lefties wearily settling in to grind him down will insist something be done now! now! now! and they’ll overplay their hands. At the intersection some of the backlash will fall on formal government institutions – there’ll be plots on Trump, ICE, Republican electeds – that are ringed with existing, pre-legitimized defenses.

People were already like “we need to bring crowds into the street to depose the elected president”, and like, that is (or can be read as) revolution, and at that point they get to use the army against you, etc.