The resurgence of far-right movements in the age of Trump has reignited the never-ending debate over free speech and its limits. While the issue was most prominent in the wake of last year’s violence in Charlottesville, when the ACLU was heavily criticized for defending the free speech rights of Nazis and other bigots, the issue continues to be explored on college panels, and calls for the the state to do something about hateful but perfectly legal words from racists have outlived the incident.

It’s important to have perspective: while the vast majority of political violence is carried out by members of the broad Right, today’s white supremacist organizing in many ways pales in comparison to that of the 1980s and certainly that of the 1920s and ’30s, when fifty thousand KKK members marched down the streets of DC and the pro-Nazi German American Bund brought out 20,000 people to a rally in Madison Square Garden. While far-right terrorism needs to be taken seriously, it’s not clear that it should give us any more reason to panic than incidents of Islamic terrorism.

More specifically, there are good historical reasons why the Left shouldn’t support illiberal government measures in the name of crushing fascism. As the examples of the UK’s Public Order Act and the “Brown Scare” in the US show, once the tools of repression are deployed against hateful groups, their targeting inevitably drifts leftward over time.