To Beat Fascism, We Have to Move Beyond Finite Games

A few years ago, I was walking through our local park when I stumbled upon a game of pickup basketball.

The group assembled was looking for two more players, so my friend and I joined in. It was a warm, sunny day and there was nothing on the calendar: a perfect moment for some spontaneity!

But as we got going, I realized pretty quick: I was playing a different game than the rest of the guys on the court. The energy was off and before long, my smile and goofy “here we are playing in the park!” energy faded completely.

I had been playing to play; they were playing to win.

I think this kind of disconnect also happens in our approach to politics and activism.

Because political life has developed around our two-party system, questions of activism tend to gravitate solely toward elections and how to win now.

What can we do to counter fascism?

Just elect more Democrats!

In other words, we’ve been trained to see change-making as a finite game: a scenario where the players are known, the rules are clear, there is an endpoint (each election day), and the purpose is to win.

And while elections certainly matter and this approach to change-making lines up well with them (with their obvious participants, rules and regulations, short timeline, and clear success criteria), activism doesn’t really work like this in the long-run.

Because effective activism is an infinite game.

The players change, the context shifts, there is no clear timeline, and the purpose isn’t to win or lose: it’s to keep making things better.

Examples of infinite games:

• Reducing the power of fascism and illiberalism

• The ongoing push for human and civil rights

• Building relationship-based communities

• Working for a healthy environment

By keeping our attention on the finite games (election cycles, individual campaigns, who won the debate, etc.) our system conditions us to accept losses as overwhelmingly catastrophic, stop pushing after perceived wins, and focus only on a few specific players rather than the whole field.

It’s important to play the finite games, but they always exist within infinite games. When we approach change-making only through finite games, we severely diminished the likelihood of long-term change.

So here’s a question I’m sitting with this week and if you have your own reflections, I’d love to hear them:

If we approach countering fascism as an infinite game, how does that change the type of actions we need to take?