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As part of our 14th triennial Congress, Liberation Road adopted our 2022 - 2025 Main Political Report on June 1st, 2025. We will release the sections of the report in six installments over the coming weeks, prior to publishing the full analysis as a single, integrated report. This is part five: “The Multiracial Pro-Democracy United Front.” Read on for our analysis of key developments among pro-democracy forces, including: the left, centrist and center-right factions of the pro-democracy front, their shifting balance of power before, during and after the Biden administration, and their differing visions for what will replace a faltering neoliberalism.
We will add links to the other sections as they are released:
The Multiracial Pro-Democracy United Front
State of the People’s Movements
SECTION 5: THE MULTIRACIAL PRO-DEMOCRACY UNITED FRONT
The Multiracial Pro-Democracy United Front comprises the totality of forces united by their opposition to the New Confederacy. We use the term “united front” to refer, not to a formal pact among organizations, but rather to an objective social phenomenon uniting all those opposed to a common enemy. As the New Confederacy has consolidated around an increasingly ethno-nationalist and fascist agenda, the front opposing it has broadened to include all those opposed to this project; simultaneously, its unstable unity has narrowed to a minimal commitment to pluralistic, democratic society and the defense of the “the three civils”: civil society, civil liberties, and civil rights.
This breadth is both a strength and weakness for the front. On the one hand, it suggests a latent anti-MAGA majority who can be mobilized to oppose the authoritarian project of the New Confederacy, which remains deeply unpopular. On the other hand, this is an extremely heterogeneous front that lacks a common politics or platform, precisely because the only thing uniting it is opposition to MAGA. Thus, the unity of this front does not extend beyond being “pro-democracy,” with several competing versions of what “democracy” means and for whom, and a wide range of positions on other social, political, and economic issues.
The heterogeneity of today’s pro-democracy front echoes the broad and often uneasy coalition that came together to oppose the Confederacy during the US Civil War and Reconstruction. That earlier front included radical abolitionists, moderate Republicans, free-soil farmers, pro-Union industrialists, Black people—both enslaved and free—who fought for their liberation, other people of color whose fates were bound up in the struggle, and even some former slaveholders who opposed secession. Though united primarily by their opposition to the Southern slave power, these forces held sharply divergent views on race, labor, and the meaning of democracy. Similarly, today’s pro-democracy coalition brings together forces who differ significantly on economic, social, and foreign policy questions but remain provisionally united against the authoritarian threat posed by the New Confederacy. As in the 19th century, the durability and direction of this front will depend not just on shared opposition, but on which vision of democracy ultimately leads.
5.1 Progressive, Establishment, and Center-Right factions
We can roughly group the Pro-Democracy United Front into three camps: progressive forces, establishment forces, and center-right forces—the latter at the rightmost end of our united front, but still “centrist” relative to the overall balance of power between our front and the New Confederacy. The electoral reflection and expression of these forces is represented by (respectively) the social-democratic, establishment, and Blue Dog factions of the Democratic Party, which like its Republican counterpart we conceive not as a singular entity but a multi-tendency coalition. However, in contrast to the Republican Party, which has largely consolidated into a party for fascism, the factions operating beneath the Democratic “umbrella” remain more deeply divided, with competing platforms and objectives.
Schematically, we can define these three social blocs by the extent of their opposition to the three pillars of the New Confederacy’s illiberal project: race, gender, and class hierarchy. To generalize:
Progressive forces within our front oppose all three of those pillars and are strongly committed to racial, gender, and economic justice. They include left and progressive oppressed nationality, women’s, and LGBTQ+ organizations with an intersectional analysis; progressive sections of labor committed to “social justice unionism”; independent political organizations like the Working Families Party; and the organized socialist left. The electoral expression of these forces is a social democratic bloc working within the Democratic Party coalition, but with an inside/outside orientation towards the Democratic Party narrowly and electoral politics broadly; at a federal level, examples include Bernie Sanders and “the Squad.”
Moderate forces are more weakly committed to racial, gender, and economic equality, or else strongly support some of these aims but do not support others. These include mainstream, middle-class women’s and LGBTQ+ organizations that lack a class and racial justice analysis; moderate sections of the oppressed nationality movements, such as the NAACP; and the majority of organized labor. Their electoral expression are the establishment Democrats who have long held leadership within the Democratic coalition; examples include Joe Biden, Chuck Shumer, and Nancy Pelosi.
Center-right forces in our front weakly support our position on some pillars but actively oppose our agenda on others. This includes socially conservative sectors of the labor movement (such as some building trades) and Democratic-leaning sections of the capitalist class. Within the Democratic coalition, the electoral expression of this bloc are Blue Dog Democrats; examples include Henry Cuellar and former senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. The right-wing radicalization of the New Confederacy has caused small sections of the (former) Republican establishment to decamp to this faction, although so far this has been restricted to former GOP leadership rather than the mass base.
5.2 Developments in the Factional Balance of Power
5.2.1 The Post–George Floyd Moment: Opening and Retrenchment
The initial phase of the Biden period reflected the heightened strength of the social-democratic wing of the united front, powered by the George Floyd uprisings, a youth-led climate movement, and rising electoral support for progressive candidates. This translated into an unprecedented opening for progressive influence on the early Biden administration. Early appointments and the sweeping “Build Back Better” legislative agenda reflected an attempt to forge a tentative alliance between progressives and the establishment that preserved the latter’s dominant position, but pivoted away from longstanding party orthodoxies. Astonishingly, establishment forces appeared willing, at least briefly, to consider breaking with key tenets of neoliberalism, and to attempt to consolidate a new long-term alternative.
But this early momentum quickly encountered structural limits—both internal and external. Legislative defeats—including the collapse of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and most of the original “Build Back Better” provisions—marked an early turning point. These setbacks revealed not just the limitations of progressive power within the Democratic coalition, but the constraints facing the entire front in a polarized and institutionally gridlocked system. With internal opposition from Manchin and Sinema, unified GOP obstruction, an emboldened far-right judiciary, and razor-thin Democratic margins in Congress, even modest reforms became vulnerable. These failures demoralized social movements, deepened mistrust between progressive and establishment forces, and disillusioned portions of the electorate—especially as the most tangible material benefits for working-class communities were the first to be sacrificed.
5.2.2 The Gaza Rupture: Fragmentation and Authoritarian Drift
The outbreak of the Israeli genocide in Gaza following the October 7 Hamas attacks widened these cracklines into serious fissures within the front. The Biden administration’s uncritical support for Israel—militarily, financially, and rhetorically—ignited widespread outrage across the progressive wing, particularly among Arab and Muslim communities, students, and the broader antiwar left. The administration’s backing of campus protest suppression, often with support from establishment Democrats, was perceived by many as a betrayal not just of progressive values, but of democratic principles themselves, creating a dangerous authoritarian precedent the Trump administration would later seize upon.
The backlash was swift and tangible. AIPAC-funded primary challenges targeted progressive incumbents, including key Squad members, further destabilizing the coalition. The Uncommitted movement, which emerged in Democratic primaries as a protest against Biden’s handling of Gaza, drew hundreds of thousands of votes in key states and signaled the scale of disaffection among progressive voters. The rupture was not only ideological but demographic, with Arab and Muslim voters deserting the Democratic Party in significant numbers. This rupture revealed the establishment wing’s willingness to prioritize longstanding geopolitical alliances over its tentative alliance with the progressive wing. By the end of the Harris campaign—which pivoted decisively toward the center and even the center-right in an effort to court swing voters and appease donor pressure—it appeared that the establishment had largely abandoned that alliance altogether.
5.2.3 The 2024 Electoral Fallout: Polarization and Realignment
The defeat of the Harris campaign unleashed a new wave of recriminations and strategic debate within the pro-democracy front. While many progressives pointed to disillusionment with Biden’s foreign policy and lack of tangible gains for working people as key reasons for voter demobilization, moderates countered that progressive “overreach” had alienated swing voters. These divergent diagnoses reflected deeper strategic fractures: whether to rebuild the coalition by mobilizing the base with bold, justice-oriented politics, or to recapture the center through triangulation and policy retrenchment.
At the time of writing, the internal balance of power within the pro-democracy front remains uncertain and contested. One revealing indicator of the front’s internal alignment was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s bid to chair the House Oversight Committee, which was defeated by a vote of 131 to 84. More than just a symbolic contest, the vote revealed the balance of influence and internal discipline within the Democratic Party apparatus: establishment forces retained majority control (with about 60% of House Democrats), but the progressive bloc commanded a sizable and increasingly cohesive minority. Meanwhile, with Manchin and Sinema gone from the Senate and the Blue Dog Caucus down to just eight members in the House, the center-right faction has virtually disappeared at the federal level—though it remains potent in some state legislatures.
5.2.4 Lessons in Fragile Unity—and Left Opportunity
The onslaughts of the incoming Trump administration may minimize those divisions or widen them, depending on the extent to which forces within the front unite in opposition to the New Confederate agenda or fracture amid different approaches to resistance and accommodation. Yet in this moment of crisis, the relative quiescence of the Democratic establishment has created a notable opening for the progressive wing to assert greater leadership. With many establishment figures demoralized, disoriented, or politically cautious in the early days of Trump’s return, progressives have stepped into the breach. High-profile rallies organized by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders across the country signal a growing appetite, not just among progressives, but also among moderates, for a bold, principled alternative.
This is not new terrain. The progressive wing has historically played a leading role when the Democratic Party is in opposition, drawing on deeper experience in protest, movement-building, and crisis response. The challenge, however, will be to build that oppositional energy into durable infrastructure and governing capacity. The Biden era revealed the limits of progressive influence when our front holds power, especially in the absence of sufficient leverage, mass mobilization, and a unified strategic vision. If the progressive bloc is to lead the Multiracial Pro-Democracy United Front not only in moments of resistance, but also in moments of governance, it must develop the organizational strength and political clarity to avoid repeating the pitfalls of the past period—and to anchor a more transformative vision of democratic renewal in the face of rising authoritarianism.
5.3 Social Composition
The social base of the Pro-Democracy United Front remains demographically broad and ideologically diverse, anchored by oppressed nationality communities of all classes, organized sections of white workers, and college-educated white professionals and semi-professionals. Within each of these bases of support, its strongest and most consistent support comes from oppressed gender people who are often the first to feel the threat of authoritarian rollback and the most mobilized to resist it. That is, among any given demographic group, more women and LGBTQ+ people will support our front than will cis straight men, and will support it more strongly.
Oppressed nationality communities continue to form the front’s most reliable base of support. This is especially true for Black communities, which remain the most consistently Democratic-aligned demographic across class lines. Majorities of Native, Latine, Asian American, Arab American, and Pacific Islander communities also remain within the front, though 2024 revealed both volatility and unevenness. Arab and Muslim voters, in particular, defected in significant numbers in protest of Biden’s support for Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza—though this likely represents a tactical rupture rather than a durable realignment. More lasting may be the rightward drift of at least some segments of the Latine electorate—especially some male Latino voters—a shift that underscores how racial and ethnic identity interacts with class, gender, and geography in complex and sometimes contradictory ways.
The class composition of the front has been significantly reshaped by the long-term decline of the industrial working class. As unionized manufacturing jobs disappeared, seniority rules intended to check management power and provide a measure of job security also intensified contradictions between white and oppressed nationality workers. Black and brown workers in basic industry, “last-hired and first fired,” were the first to feel the impact of mass layoffs. In the past, strong industrial unions did not eliminate divisions among workers of different nationalities, but it did provide a common cause and organizational power that delivered generations of voters in Midwestern states like Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania reliably into the Democratic column. The decline of these unions dramatically shifted the political landscape, sharpened divisions within the working class, and brought new challenges to the struggle for a united front.
As Chris Maisano has pointed out, post-industrial economic restructuring has splintered the working class into distinct occupational blocs. These are defined by demographics no less than by income and skill level. One bloc—centered in logistics, construction, extractive industries, and some sectors of manufacturing—has become increasingly drawn into the New Confederacy, especially where union power has declined and racialized narratives fill the political vacuum. But other blocs, such as social “semi-professionals”—composed of nurses, teachers, nonprofit workers, social service providers, and other public- or care-sector workers—are now central to the base of the pro-democracy front. Nursing and teaching in particular are skilled jobs requiring years of training that have become increasingly proletarianized and seen the rise of militant unionism in response.
Educational polarization reflects, but also distorts, this occupational divide. While voters with college degrees now form a majority of the Democratic coalition, education is an imperfect proxy for class. Among college-educated voters, support for Democrats is consistent across income levels. Among non–college educated voters, however, a clearer class split emerges according to income: lower-income voters lean Democratic, while middle- and upper-income non-degree holders—often found in small business, sales, law enforcement, and the trades—are more likely to support the GOP. This divide helps explain the differing bases of support for the front’s progressive and center-right factions, as each draws from distinct layers of a splintered class structure.
The non–college educated workers most likely to vote Democratic include those in low-wage, low-autonomy service-sector jobs—such as home health aides, childcare workers, food service workers, custodians, retail clerks, and warehouse employees. Women, oppressed nationalities, and immigrant workers menaced by Trump’s policy of mass deportations are heavily represented in these jobs and often find themselves pitted against capital at its most predatory. An aging population, in a society whose social safety net for seniors is woefully inadequate, has made the nursing home industry a magnet for private investors attracted by lax regulation and a pool of low-wage workers drawn largely from the ranks of women, immigrants. and oppressed nationalities. The explosive growth of the health care sector, characterized by a large and parasitic insurance industry and the steady replacement of public and charity hospitals with market-driven corporate hospital chains, has likewise given rise to a highly exploited workforce pitted against some of the nation’s wealthiest corporations.The economic precarity of low-wage service workers, and their daily exposure to exploitation, often heighten receptivity to redistributive and rights-based politics. These voters form a crucial—if often overlooked—component of the working-class base for progressive politics.
This complicates claims that the party’s progressive wing is “out of touch” with the working class. Without denying real fault lines and fissures, it is clear that progressive politics resonate with significant sectors of the working class—particularly those whose labor is undervalued, care-oriented, and structurally precarious. These workers often share material interests around wages, housing, healthcare, and public investment, as well as lived experiences of exploitation that shape a collective, if uneven, consciousness around social justice. The progressive wing’s challenge is not a lack of relevance to working-class life, but the need to deepen its organizing presence among disorganized sectors, translate moral alignment into durable political infrastructure, and overcome barriers of geography, race, and narrative that have been skillfully exploited by the right.
Generational and gender divides further shape this terrain. Young voters are the most progressive generation in US history, but the 2024 election revealed a growing gender divide: while young women continued to move left, a majority of young men under 30 voted for Trump. This reflects a global trend of anti-feminist backlash among young men in response to gains by women and queer people, compounded by economic insecurity and cultural alienation. For the pro-democracy front, this is both a danger and an opportunity: building a durable coalition will require explicitly addressing the alienation of young men without capitulating to reactionary tropes, and developing organizing models that offer belonging and dignity without hierarchy or scapegoating.
5.4 Ideology and Program: Competing Responses to the Crisis of Neoliberalism
At the heart of the pro-democracy front lies not only a shared opposition to the New Confederacy, but an unresolved contest over what should replace the collapsing neoliberal consensus. While the right has largely consolidated around a clear, authoritarian project rooted in patriarchal racial capitalism, the pro-democracy front remains ideologically heterogeneous. These differences reflect not only factional competition, but deeper strategic tensions among competing views about the meaning of democracy itself, the role of the state, and the future of the US political economy.
5.4.1 Center-Right: Soft Nationalism and Neoliberalism
On the front’s rightmost flank, Blue Dog Democrats and other center-right actors represent the forces most ideologically adjacent to the New Confederacy. Though they have generally shifted to the left on certain social issues like gun control and LGBTQ+ rights in response to changes in public opinion, they continue to uphold many of the core economic tenets of neoliberalism, particularly in their skepticism of public investment and redistributive policy. At times, especially at the local level, this faction supports limited forms of economic populism—but often in the form of culturally conservative, nationalist welfare chauvinism. They have veered sharply right on immigration—as has a significant section of the moderate centrist establishment—and are the most likely within the front to move rightward on trans rights and other emerging cultural fault lines. These actors remain the most likely within the front to pursue compromise or accommodation with the authoritarian right. In essence, their program reflects a desire to preserve or restore the neoliberal status quo.
5.4.2 Establishment Moderates: State-Managed Rainbow Capitalism
The dominant ideological current within the pro-democracy front is that of the establishment bloc. Previously, we called this the “Third Way” bloc, referring to a brand of politics that emerged among center-left parties around the world in the 1990s to triangulate between traditional center-left policies and the rightward pull of neoliberalism. In recent years, however, this faction has distanced itself from some core neoliberal doctrines, embracing a more active role for government in infrastructure, climate adaptation, and industrial policy. This shift—driven by both electoral necessity and grassroots pressure—has not produced a full rupture with neoliberalism, but rather a still-uneven hybrid model in which the state plays a larger role in managing and subsidizing private enterprise, without significantly expanding the public sector.
Under Biden, this still-uneven “hybrid” shifted from initial aggressive action against corporate monopolies towards forms of accommodationism. That said, the Biden administration did take notable steps to empower organized labor—through pro-labor NLRB appointments, vocal support for union drives, and investment programs that favored unionized and domestic manufacturing. These measures marked a meaningful break from the anti-labor posture of previous Democratic administrations, even if they stopped short of directly confronting capital or shifting structural power toward labor.
Often described as a return to New Deal-era Keynesianism, this orientation is better understood as a hybrid between neoliberalism and a technocratic, state-managed capitalism. It seeks to restore faith in US leadership through selective state intervention, protectionist industrial policy, and renewed investment in national infrastructure—while remaining firmly committed to US imperial leadership abroad. In this emerging consensus, we can see the outlines of a “multicultural nationalism”: a pluralist but bounded vision of American identity, paired with a market-friendly welfare state and continued commitment to global capital dominance.
5.4.3 Progressive Left: Third Reconstruction and Democratic Transformation
On the front’s left flank are progressive and social-democratic forces seeking a much deeper transformation. This wing calls for a decisive break from neoliberalism in favor of a "Third Reconstruction"— a bold, transformative agenda to tackle corporate power; rebuild the social welfare state; expand the rights of workers, women, LGBQT+ people, and people of color; and complete the unfinished work of American democracy.
We call this a “Third Reconstruction” because it builds on the unfinished work of America’s First (1865-1877) and Second (1954-1971) Reconstructions, each of which represented a period of dramatic expansion of rights and freedoms for the oppressed. Like those earlier periods, today’s Third Reconstruction vision links racial, social, and gender justice to economic transformation, and insists that democratic reform cannot succeed without both.
But it also goes further—calling for a reconstruction of US democracy itself, from its foundational structures to its global role. That includes overhauling an undemocratic electoral system, reining in judicial supremacy, demilitarizing public life, and replacing US imperialism with a foreign policy grounded in justice, peace, and global solidarity. It envisions an economy where democratic ownership and public goods replace corporate monopolies, and a state accountable to the many, not the few.
5.4.4 Strategic Implications: The Struggle for Leadership within our Front
These ideological divisions within the pro-democracy front are not simply matters of policy—they reflect competing answers to the central political question of our moment: What new hegemonic order will replace a faltering neoliberalism? Whether the front can move from resistance to renewal depends in part on which of these visions gains strategic coherence and political leadership. The establishment’s hybrid “compromise” may offer institutional continuity, but risks reproducing the very conditions that enabled the rise of the New Confederacy domestically, while also attempting to shore up US imperial hegemony globally, while the center-right's drift is a gateway to authoritarian capitulation. Only a Third Reconstruction led by the front’s progressive wing can address the root causes of democratic decline—and offer a transformative social, political, and economic alternative capable of defeating authoritarianism not just at the ballot box, but at the level of structure, culture, and power.
The stakes are high. What’s at issue is not just who governs, but how we govern—and whether democracy itself will be redefined, rebuilt, or rolled back. But even as we debate, challenge, and organize around these different visions, we do so within the context of a shared existential threat: the rise of the New Confederacy and its open assault on multiracial democracy. The ability of the front to hold together—and to grow in clarity, coherence, and collective power—will depend on our capacity to balance principled struggle within our front, with unshakable unity against the authoritarian right.
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