Start Here: A Primer on the Three-Way Fight

This page explains the lens that shapes everything published on this site. By the end of it you'll be able to do three things: 1) read a news story about the far right and see which fights are actually happening in it, 2) understand why courts and elections keep failing to stop fascist movements, and 3) tell the difference between a reactionary who wants to run the system and a fascist who wants to burn it down.

An illustration: January 20, 2025

Four years of prosecutions. Roughly 1,600 people charged for the J6 attack on the Capitol—the largest investigation in Justice Department history. Seditious conspiracy convictions against the leadership of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. Then, on the first day of the new administration, one proclamation undid nearly all of it: about 1,500 full pardons and 14 commutations, with the seditious conspiracy leaders walking out of prison within days.

Nobody stormed anything to make that happen. It came through an ordinary, legitimate election. The most serious legal consequences ever imposed on the American far right lasted exactly as long as the political will behind them—and not one day longer.

If your mental map of politics has two sides on it, that sequence is hard to explain. A mob attacks the government; the government punishes them; then the government un-punishes them and hires some of them back. Which side is the state on?

It turns out that's the wrong question. There are three sides.

Three forces, not two

The three-way fight is a simple idea with a lot of reach: our political moment isn't a battle between two camps but a fight among three, each with its own goals, each in real conflict with the other two.

Liberal democratic institutions. The state, the parties, the courts, the corporations, the police. "Liberal" here in the old-fashioned sense—a system organized around elections, courts, individual rights, and private property—not the cable-news sense. Its defenders run from corporate Democrats to establishment conservatives; they disagree about plenty, but they share a commitment to keeping that system running.

The insurgent far right. Fascists, white nationalists, militia networks, Christian nationalists. The crucial point is that this force has its own engine. It isn't simply a puppet of the rich, and it isn't just the establishment's attack dog. It recruits on real anger, builds real institutions, and, when it's strong enough, attacks the system itself. January 6 was an assault on liberal democratic institutions, not an errand run for them. (That's why Mike Pence was as much a target as Nancy Pelosi.)

The liberatory left. Movements fighting for a freer, more equal world from the bottom up—labor, abolition, migrant-defense, Indigenous, feminist, antifascist, anarchist, anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist.

Any two of these may temporarily join forces, and the pairings shift. The state has teamed up with the left when fascists got dangerous enough—that's the Second World War—and with the far right. The third pairing barely exists: the far right periodically courts the left with anti-elite, anti-war talk—what older antifascists call a "red-brown" overture—but it's a recruitment trap, not an alliance. Still, the lens expects the pairings to move, so you're not shocked when they do.

Two frameworks that keep failing

Framework one: fascism is just a tool of the bosses. A century of left tradition says the far right is capital's puppet. The story goes like this: when ordinary politics stops protecting profits—when workers organize, when revolution looks possible—the wealthy bankroll fascists as a weapon against the left. Scary muscle, but hired muscle, with no agenda of its own; the official Communist definition of 1935 called fascism the "open terrorist dictatorship" of the most reactionary wing of finance capital. The theory isn't baseless—German industrialists did write checks to Hitler, and fascists in power did crush the unions. The problem is what it leaves out: fascist movements keep doing things no boss ordered. They build mass followings on grievances the establishment created and ignored. Some of their most dangerous currents—the ones that talk about banks, elites, and "globalism"—are explicitly anti-establishment, offering angry people a fake revolution so they don't find a real one. If you assume the far right takes orders from above, you'll keep aiming at the wrong target, and you'll never understand why it out-recruits the left in places the left abandoned.

Framework two: when fascists show up, we should side with the state. This one feels like common sense—the far right is dangerous, the government has courts and police, so let the professionals handle it. The January 6 pardons show what that protection is worth: it can be revoked at any moment. And the deeper problem is that the powers you cheer for when they're aimed at fascists don't stay aimed at fascists. The expanded "domestic terrorism" toolkit built after 2001 came down hardest not on neo-Nazi militias but on environmental activists—the FBI called ecological sabotage the top domestic terror threat while Klan-descended groups kept organizing in the open. The state fights the far right when, and only when, the far right threatens the state.

You can see the difference in what happened after two far-right riots. After January 6, thousands of volunteer "sedition hunters" did remarkable open-source detective work identifying rioters—and then handed all of it to the FBI, betting everything on federal prosecution. The pardons converted four years of that work into nothing but souvenirs. But after Unite the Right in Charlottesville, antifascist researchers took a different path: Unicorn Riot obtained and published the organizers' leaked Discord chats, keeping the evidence in movement hands—and those chats became core evidence in Sines v. Kessler, the civil suit in which a jury found the rally's organizers liable and awarded over $25 million in damages (later trimmed by a Virginia damages cap, partly reinstated on appeal). That judgment hounded its targets through bankruptcies and infighting for years, seriously disrupting their ability to organize—and no president can pardon a civil verdict. Research that the movement controls outlives the administration; research donated to prosecutors is only as durable as the prosecutor.

This keeps happening

The pardons weren't a freak event; there's historical precedence for all of this.

1877. For a decade after the Civil War, federal troops in the South were the only thing standing between freedpeople and paramilitary terror. Then a disputed election got settled by a deal that withdrew the troops, and the same armed networks the state had briefly suppressed took power, with many of the gunmen becoming sheriffs, legislators, and governors. State protection, revoked by ordinary politics.

1933. In Weimar Germany, the two big left parties each picked one of the failed frameworks. The Communists insisted the Nazis were merely capitalism's tool, no more dangerous than the liberal parties, doomed to burn out. The Social Democrats trusted the courts, the constitution, and the police. Both were wrong, and both were destroyed within months of Hitler taking office—legally.

1979. In Greensboro, North Carolina, Klansmen and neo-Nazis shot five anti-Klan demonstrators dead in a public street, on camera. The police, who had an informant in the Klan caravan, were conspicuously absent; all-white juries acquitted every shooter, twice. The city's own Truth and Reconciliation Commission later found the police absence was likely intentional. The people who survived did so because they defended themselves. The state was not coming to help them.

Different decades, same shape: the far right acts on its own initiative. The state's opposition to it is conditional, temporary, and reversible. And the left gets hurt worst when it forgets either fact.

What the lens is for

The "three-way fight" lens is a tool. In practice:

It changes how you read the news. Every story about the far right becomes a question: which corners of the triangle are fighting here, and which are cooperating? A crackdown on militias and a "domestic extremism" bill aimed at protesters are the same corner doing two different things. The lens keeps you from cheering the second because you wanted the first.

It explains the recruits. People join far-right movements out of real abandonment—wrecked towns, humiliating work, no future. The establishment won't speak to that anger and the far right will, albeit dishonestly. The left's job is to compete for those grievances with something true, not to write off everyone the fascists are courting.

It makes self-defense non-negotiable. If the state's protection can be revoked—and 1877, 1979, and 2025 say it can—then communities in the far right's crosshairs need their own capacity to stay safe: networks, preparation, each other. Greensboro's survivors didn't get to choose whether that was necessary.

It keeps two fights in view at once. Fighting the far right without fighting the system that produces it just resets the clock. Fighting the system while ignoring the far right leaves your neighbors exposed. The three-way fight says: both, at the same time, because they are not the same enemy.

A few terms, quickly

Far right — the whole family of movements that want a more hierarchical order than the current system delivers, from fascists to Christian nationalists. Not a synonym for "conservative."

Fascism — not a synonym for "very right-wing" or "authoritarian." A revolutionary far-right politics: a mass movement that aims to tear down the existing order — liberal institutions included — and replace it with a far more brutal hierarchy, usually wrapped in a story of national or racial rebirth. The revolutionary part is exactly what the puppet theory discussed above misses.

Third position — far-right currents that reject both capitalism-as-it-exists and the left, pitching themselves as a revolutionary alternative to each. This is why some fascists sound anti-elite, anti-bank, even anti-war. A mainstream reactionary wants to run the existing machine harder; a third-positionist wants to tear it out and install a darker one.

Liberal democratic institutions — the machinery of the existing system: elections, courts, individual rights, private property, and the state that maintains them. "Liberal" in the classical sense—invested in individual freedom—no matter which party is administering it. A structure and/or a system.

Liberatory left — movements aimed at dismantling hierarchy rather than capturing it.

Where to go next

This way of understanding antifascism comes out of decades of movement debate, most of it collected at the Three Way Fight blog, which has been developing the idea since 2004. The book Three Way Fight: Revolutionary Politics and Antifascism (PM Press, 2024) gathers the key essays. Political Research Associates has an excerpt worth reading.

Once you have the frame, history you thought you knew starts reading differently. The Spanish Civil War, for example, is remembered as democracy versus fascism—a conflict with two sides. But inside the antifascist camp, the liberal Republic and a workers' revolution were also fighting each other, sometimes with guns in the streets of Barcelona, even as Franco advanced. Three forces, not two, all the way down. It's part of why this publication carries the name it does: the Hotel Florida housed the correspondents who covered that war from inside besieged Madrid, on a side, filing dispatches anyway.

On this site, the framework runs through everything: the deep history of hate and antifascism in Tarrant County and around the world, the state's prosecution of leftists at close range, and the long story of how property and violence shaped the ground we're standing on. You can find those stories and more in the archive.

Ideas for further discussion: (1) Find a news story from this week about the far right. Which of the three forces appear in it, and which two are in conflict? (2) When has state protection worked for a community you're part of, and what were its limits? (3) Where in your own area does the far right recruit on grievances the left hasn't answered?