Broad Fronts Under Authoritarian Threats: A Reflexive History of Social Movement Coalition-Building in the United States

• In Event: Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 6: Movements in the Face of Authoritarianism

Abstract

The present authoritarian turn in the United States has generated an extraordinary wave of protest. Yet protest alone does not prevent authoritarian consolidation. This paper argues that earlier moments of escalating rightwing threat in U.S. history required something more ambitious: the formation of broad fronts—coalitional formations that stretched across race, class, ideology, and organizational divides in order to isolate reactionary forces seeking governing power. Using a non-positivist historical comparison, I examine three such efforts: Reconstruction’s “abolition democracy,” the New Deal coalition and its militant Popular Front wing in the 1930s, and the Rainbow Coalition experiments of the 1980s during the rise of the New Right. In each case, movements confronted authoritarian or proto-authoritarian threats under distinct configurations of global political economy and U.S. hegemonic position. Across cases, three dynamics recur: the importance of an organized and disruptive mass base; the tension between unity and struggle when movements align with centrist political actors; and the vulnerability of informal coalitions to demobilization or repression. Earlier fronts emerged when enslaved labor, industrial workers, or civil rights insurgencies possessed forms of structural leverage. Under contemporary financialized capitalism, that leverage is weaker, and movements are often shaped by professionalized organizational models that limit participatory democracy. A reflexive account of these historical fronts suggests that durable resistance to authoritarian consolidation requires more than episodic protest or temporary electoral alliances. It requires building democratic, organized, and more formalized fronts capable of sustaining broad participation while maintaining strategic independence from the political center.

Author

• Rishi Awatramani, University of Southern California