The Popular Front Isn't Foreign—It's American

The most effective strategy — deeply rooted in American history — is to build a broad front across class, sector and ideology to isolate and defeat authoritarian power. The contemporary protest movement is growing fast but has not yet achieved this necessary solidarity. Many organizations and unions already see a broad front, across class and ideology, as essential but worry about the sacrifices it will require. But to be successful, doesn’t necessarily mean abandoning principles.

History offers instructive — if imperfect— lessons drawn from previous broad front efforts to challenge diverse right-wing or authoritarian threats. By taking today’s conditions seriously and learning from the past, we can compel the urgent formation of the broad front we need and answer questions about who is included, what actions to take and how to hold it together.

After the Civil War, the United States briefly experienced one of its most radical transformations: Reconstruction.

The battle lines of the Civil War and shifting global economic conditions shaped a constellation of groups committed to ending chattel slavery and building a new society. As the United States rose as an industrial power to replace the United Kingdom as ​“workshop of the world,” Radical Republicans and abolitionists aligned with Northern capital’s interest in industrial growth. Despite its deep entanglements with plantation slavery, Northern industry opposed the westward expansion of the Southern slave economy, not least because the expansion would threaten the dream of landholding independence it used to placate Northern workers.

W.E.B. Du Bois called this constellation ​“Abolition-Democracy,” a broad front of abolitionists and Radical Republicans with formerly enslaved Black people, free Black communities, and white Southerners betraying the planter class. Their sweeping agenda included Black enfranchisement, land redistribution, the creation of public education and other reforms.

It was hampered by two weaknesses: First, it was largely informal. There was no institutionalized alliance with the Black laboring classes that drove its success.

Second, white labor refused to join. Seduced by concessions and privileges handed down by white elites, most white workers withheld support. Without a multiracial, working-class base, the Abolition-Democracy constellation collapsed under violent assault from the planter class and its paramilitaries.

What Reconstruction proves is that broad fronts can deliver sweeping change — even against violent opposition — and that, unless racial divisions are faced, no front can withstand authoritarian backlash.

Reconstruction arose as the United States began its ascent on the global stage; the Popular Front and New Deal Coalition emerged as the United States cemented its dominance.

Facing the Great Depression — and under pressure from mass movements — President Franklin Roosevelt forged a coalition of labor unions, Southern Democrats, urban liberals and, eventually, parts of the Black electorate. Though rife with contradictions, the coalition delivered unprecedented reforms that reflected popular demands (to end widespread social misery) along with elite aims (to stabilize capitalism).

The Communist Party’s embrace of the Popular Front strategy, in 1935, helped scale efforts already underway by local social movements, built to address crises from the ground up through unexpected partnerships. Guided by international Communist strategy to combat fascism — not just in Italy and Germany, but in the United States — it created a mass left culture through its campaigns for civil liberties, racial justice and antifascism. And it linked the union militancy of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (briefly a committee within the American Federation of Labor, it eventually formed an independent labor federation which merged back in 1955 to create the AFL-CIO) with cultural workers and middle-class intellectuals.

The Popular Front was a decentralized movement, what Michael Denning calls an ​“unruly partner” of the broader New Deal coalition — an informal web of labor unions, urban political machines, Southern Democrats, a small fraction of economic elites, and diverse voter constituencies. Without the Popular Front, however, the New Deal lacked the vigorous popularity and militant unrest needed to act against economic crisis and fascist threat.

It came to an abrupt end with the signing of the Hitler – Stalin Pact in 1939, a doomed effort to prevent a Nazi military assault on the Soviet Union, which compelled Communist parties around the world to bring their anti-fascist strategies to a sudden halt. As the U.S. Communist Party aligned more closely with Roosevelt, it tamped down militancy and became vulnerable to the postwar, anti-Communist backlash.

The lesson for today’s front-builders isn’t to reject unity with broad front allies. Rather, it’s that broad fronts work while they maintain unity on core goals and allow disagreement and struggle on everything else.

The 1980s Rainbow Coalition, driven by Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns, demonstrates a rare attempt to build a broad, formal, multiracial front. Along with mayoral campaigns (like Harold Washington’s in Chicago), it consolidated a Black electoral tradition seeking to build on Civil Rights Movement victories and coalesce a broader progressive base.

This moment also saw the dawn of neoliberalism. As U.S. hegemony faltered, Reaganism rose and deindustrialization gutted the working class. The Rainbow had to offer an alternative to a collapsing economic order and a rising Right.

Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign marked the coalition’s peak. His 1984 run excited and mobilized a broad swathe of progressives, and organizers created an independent Rainbow organization in 1986 to build an independent movement coalition beyond a candidate-centered campaign. It brought together Black, Latino, Asian, labor and white progressive constituencies around an exciting platform, and it created state-level coalitions wielding local power.

But after Jackson’s 1988 loss, the coalition fell apart. Jackson asserted control, sidelining independent organizers. With neither electoral victory nor institutional independence, the coalition couldn’t endure. The Rainbow would only have fully come to fruition as a broad front had Jackson won the nomination and been forced to expand, but he wouldn’t have come so close without the movement-driven Rainbow Coalition.

There are three big lessons here about what worked: First, the Rainbow platform reflected its actual coalition — not just a wish list — including civil and labor rights, rural economic policy, antiwar planks and more.

Second, it showed that fronts must organize nationally and locally.

Third, to outlast an election, a front must be built as an independent organization.

Sprouts of hope abound — through inspired electoral campaigns and emboldened mass protest, from No Kings to Zohran Mamdani—but the challenge to authoritarianism hasn’t yet produced a broad front across class and ideology. Meanwhile, the Right has built a popular political bloc, and today’s terrain has unique challenges.

Our present-day conditions can appear unfriendly to mounting a serious challenge. Our movements are fragmented. Financialization, logistics and digitalization have reshaped the U.S. economy amid the decline of its global hegemony. Many of the great social reforms of the 20^th Century are being actively dismantled. There’s no powerful industrial working class, and labor institutions are weaker and less democratic after decades of neoliberal assault.

To win, movements must build the broadest possible front — including moderates, independents and disaffected conservatives — assembled around one goal: ending authoritarian rule.

To keep the front together through defeats and victories, we must make it mass-based and democratic — capable of engaging everyday people, not just institutions. To survive internal disagreements, this front must be focused and disciplined.

Taking a sober view of these challenges, front-builders might prioritize three core principles:

Unity and struggle. The front must agree on one essential task: defeating authoritarianism. All else is negotiable, but it must not break the front. Movements can leverage their strength by building an independent coalition while preparing for the longer-term fight.

Mass democracy, not just elite convergence. Rather than relying on professional leaders alone, today’s front must engage people where they live and work. That means drawing in community institutions, using cultural strategies to popularize democratic values, and linking workers’ struggles with those whose livelihoods are being ​“unmade” by technological, economic and climate upheaval.

Formality, not just fluidity. Informal coalitions will falter. Clear leadership, democratic participation and accountable strategy — organizational coherence — is necessary if the front is to sustain the fight against authoritarianism beyond one election.

When faced with authoritarianism, democracy’s best chance comes not from left purity and narrow coalitions, but from the discipline to build the biggest, broadest, most principled front we can.