Three Way Fight

Ben Lorber: For movements seeking to block the Right and build a better society, how can the three way fight model help sharpen our analysis and strategy?

Xtn Alexander and Matthew N. Lyons: The basic idea of three way fight politics is that there’s a struggle for liberatory change against the state and oppressive systems; there’s a struggle against fascists and the Far Right more broadly; and these two struggles are interconnected but also different from each other. Historically, some leftists have treated the struggle against the Far Right as unimportant or secondary—or worse, have given a platform to Far Rightists or made common cause with them in the name of fighting a common enemy. Meanwhile, some antifascists have said we need to put radical politics on the back burner and “defend democracy” against a common threat. But three way fight says that radical politics needs to be antifascist, and antifascist politics needs to be radical. Three way fight politics also means recognizing that political movements Right, Left, and center are made up of human beings and have all sorts of contradictions and contending interests and motivations. Political struggle is dynamic, and the categories and analyses that make sense at one time may not work ten years or even two weeks later. No one has all the answers, and debate and disagreement are an important part of what we need to do in order to work together more effectively and develop better politics.

In his essay in your book, “Fascism and Antifascism: A Decolonial Perspective,” Rowland “Ena͞emaehkiw” Keshena Robinson warned of a “new era of fascist entry into the mainstream of North American politics” inaugurated by the Trump movement.^[1] Since 2016, it seems the MAGA movement has continued to radicalize in notable ways, and with their return to the White House, they are poised to escalate their authoritarian agenda. Would you use the word “fascism” to describe today’s MAGA movement? What is at stake in these debates?

Some people use “fascism” to mean pretty much any kind of right-wing authoritarianism, or at least one that’s racist or nationalist. We think it’s more useful to use the term “fascism” in a more limited way, as an effort to build a mass-based movement that aims to gain power and systematically transform society based on a totalitarian, supremacist ideological vision. Since Trump started running for the 2016 presidential election, we’ve argued that his campaigns, his administration, and the MAGA movement contained important elements of fascist politics—and had a symbiotic relationship with organized far rightists including neonazis—but were not in themselves fully fascist, because Trump didn’t offer any real vision for transforming society, and he didn’t try to build an independent organizational base.

However, the MAGA movement’s fascistic aspects have continued to develop. First, the MAGA movement has brought a kind of system disloyalty into mainstream politics. They display a willingness to not recognize the existing state or political order as legitimate, and to challenge the legitimacy of other core institutions. Second, MAGA forces have gained much tighter control over the Republican Party than they held previously, and thus are a lot closer to having control over their own mass organization. Third, there’s been more of an effort to articulate an overall ideological vision, represented most notably in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Fourth, MAGA forces have spearheaded widespread efforts to make the U.S. political system more authoritarian, for example through systematic voter suppression and making control over the electoral process more partisan. These efforts are bolstered by the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision that presidents are immune from prosecution for official acts, and they will be further intensified in the second Trump administration. These are scary developments, and they make the MAGA movement more dangerous. We still wouldn’t describe this as fascism, because we don’t see it as representing a radical break with the existing order, but the gap has definitely narrowed.

It’s helpful to look at this in an international context. Over two decades there’s been a big upsurge of right-wing movements, parties, and governments that promote a kind of authoritarian populism with heavy ethnic or religious scapegoating. In some ways they look like fascism, but they continue to operate within the established political framework. There’s something important going on here in a number of countries, but the traditional category of fascism doesn’t really capture it. Yet a regime doesn’t have to be fascist to be a dictatorship or to carry out genocide.

At the same time, we need to be very critical of how the charge of fascism against MAGA Republicans has been used to gloss over or legitimize the Democratic Party’s own lurch to the right. Joe Biden didn’t use Trump’s racist rhetoric, but as president he essentially continued Trump’s anti-China policies and largely continued Trump’s anti-immigrant policies. The Biden administration also used the crackdown against January 6 rioters to expand the repressive apparatus, expanding use of the dangerous “seditious conspiracy” charge and publishing a counter-terrorism strategy that conflated “extremists” on the Left and the Right. And the Democrats’ rhetoric about defending democracy and freedom sounds like a sick joke, given that they were actively complicit in the mass killing of children and other civilians in Gaza—a genocide they could have stopped at any time by cutting off arms shipments to Israel.

In your book, you caution against some potential pitfalls of a Left strategy of partnering with Liberals or the State in order to block the Right. What should Leftists keep in mind when considering or navigating these partnerships moving forward?

Coalitions are important, but they need to respect political differences and organizational autonomy. Radicals often get pressured to keep quiet about our politics in the name of unity. That helps the state use antifascism to bolster its legitimacy and gloss over its role as defender of an oppressive, exploitative system. But muffling radical voices also strengthens the Far Right, because if radicals are seen as protecting the status quo, that makes it easier for fascists to say they’re the only ones serious about change. We need to offer people a radical alternative that calls for systemic change based on liberatory principles rather than scapegoating and supremacism.

How can a three way fight strategy inform our resistance under the Trump administration?

The situation we’re facing is extremely serious. The second Trump administration is likely to be a lot more repressive and effective than the first administration. As we expected, we are seeing them move quickly in several key areas, including mass round-ups and deportations of immigrants and refugees, intensified attacks on trans and nonbinary people, and an intensified crackdown against the Palestine solidarity movement, which will function as a vehicle for intensified repression against the Left on a scale going back to the 1950s at least. In each of these areas, we expect a synergistic interplay between state repression and non-state repression, including both vigilante physical attacks and enforced conformity in workplaces, schools, etc.

At the same time, the Trump administration is going to have significant weaknesses, contradictions, and points of vulnerability, including internal factional conflicts, structural limits on its ability to impose its will, and tensions brought about by its failure to improve people’s lives in the ways Trump voters are expecting. There will be lots of potential for opponents of Trump/MAGA to engage in counterattacks and counter-organizing.

In this context, there’s going to be tremendous pressure on all Trump/MAGA opponents to rally around the Democratic Party based on defensive, lowest-common-denominator, “democracy versus fascism” politics. It’s crucial that people resist this pressure and instead build militant, grassroots-based oppositional forces. The Democrats tried to defeat Trump by appealing to Republicans and offering slightly watered down versions of Trumpist policies on immigration, etc. This strategy utterly failed and is a large part of why Harris lost, but they’ll keep doing it, they’ll keep caving to far-right politics, unless there’s a strong, independent countervailing force that stands for real opposition and a real alternative vision.

The Right is growing and changing fast, and we need to pay attention instead of assuming that we already know what they think and what they’re going to do. For example, Christian nationalism puts religion and gender and sexuality at the center of its politics, not race, and although it promotes racist policies it has also built a movement that is genuinely multiethnic and multiracial, with people of color in some significant leadership positions. Unless we pay attention we will miss that, and that hurts our ability to organize and fight back effectively.

This book contains an incredible time capsule both of antifascist movement strategy in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as live antifascist debates during the first Trump and the early Biden presidency decades later. As you write in the introduction, the terrain of antifascist struggle changed dramatically during that time, and it continues to change today. How can studying the movement history preserved in Three Way Fight prepare us for the work ahead?

First, our work demonstrates a need for organizational autonomy from the Democratic Party and its adjuncts, and also autonomy from the various so-called vanguard leftist organizations that want to corral antifascist activism for their own agendas. Second, we need to build a movement that’s both militant and inclusive. Sometimes community self-defense against the Far Right involves physical confrontation, but this is ultimately a political struggle, and it needs to prioritize organizing, education, and dialogue in and with communities. We need to recognize and honor the many different kinds of people and the many different kinds of work that build a movement, most of which are not glamorous.^[2] Third, movement building requires us to be aware of and engage with new arenas of struggle, rather than get stuck doing the same thing over and over. Political struggle is continually in flux. It doesn’t stand still.      

Studying movement history, in a three way fight context, means being honest about our shortcomings, as rowan emphasizes in the interview titled “A Demand That Radicals Tell the Truth.”^[3] It also means recognizing our successes and the moments of radical possibility when they do happen. The Alt-Right eventually fell apart, in large part, due to a series of mass antifascist mobilizations, often premised on independent organizing from below. Our movements did that.

For all the rightward shifts of recent years, we need to remember that the U.S.’s largest radical upsurge in half a century happened just five years ago, with the George Floyd uprising. A Black-led, multi-racial, working-class-based mass rebellion against racist police violence and a lot more. Like all mass radical upsurges, it was messy and complicated and had some real problems and contradictions, and it didn’t last, but it called cops and prisons into question, called the foundations of the capitalist state into question in a new way, and we saw people in motion from big cities to small towns. The George Floyd rebellion gets at a lot of what three way fight politics is about—again, recognizing and being honest about complexity, and looking not just at militant antifascism, but how does that struggle relate to the struggle for systemic, liberatory change.