The recent far-right rallies in Charlottesville and Boston seem to offer two possible visions of the future. Will the resurgence of white supremacist organizing take us down a path of chaos and spiraling violence, as in Charlottesville? Or will the far right — a still relatively powerless, if vocal, minority — be outnumbered, humiliated, and beaten back with little fanfare, as in Boston?

At times it can seem like this dramatic reappearance of racist, far-right movements is a return to an uglier time. It’s harder to visualize such events as peaks in a long-running continuum.

But examined from the perch of history, this is precisely how they appear. In fact, one of the last major resurgences of white supremacist organizing occurred relatively recently — not way back amid the rise of fascism in the 1930s, but at the start of the 1980s. Examining this history not only provides some much-needed perspective — it may provide lessons for antifascists today.