{"id":14836,"date":"2026-05-18T13:52:19","date_gmt":"2026-05-18T17:52:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/?p=14836"},"modified":"2026-05-26T02:43:41","modified_gmt":"2026-05-26T06:43:41","slug":"the-coalition-that-swallows-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2026\/05\/the-coalition-that-swallows-you\/","title":{"rendered":"The coalition that swallows you"},"content":{"rendered":"<h4>Nobody thinks they\u2019re doing the popular front<\/h4>\n<p>Here\u2019s the problem with arguing against the popular front inside DSA: Nobody in this organization thinks they\u2019re doing it. That\u2019s not a rhetorical observation. It\u2019s the actual difficulty. Nobody wakes up and says, \u201cI think we should subordinate working-class politics to bourgeois democratic forces.\u201d That\u2019s not how popular frontism arrives. It doesn\u2019t announce itself. It accumulates through a hundred individual decisions, each looking reasonable until, at some point, the organization\u2019s political orientation has shifted into something that would have been recognizable as wrong if proposed directly.<\/p>\n<p>This document is not an accusation. Calling something popular frontism in DSA\u2019s context isn\u2019t a charge of bad faith; it\u2019s a structural observation about what happens to socialist organizations under conditions of intense conjunctural pressure. And the pressure right now is real. Trump\u2019s second term has produced a genuine emergency for millions of people. Immigrants are being deported. Civil liberties are being dismantled. Democratic institutions are being hollowed out or captured outright. People responding to this with urgency are not wrong about the urgency.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"pullquote\">Popular frontism doesn\u2019t announce itself. It accumulates through a hundred individual decisions, each looking reasonable until, at some point, the organization\u2019s political orientation has shifted into something that would have been recognizable as wrong if proposed directly.<\/aside>\n<p>The question is not whether to respond. The question is how, and specifically on what political basis. That question has a strategic answer and getting it wrong doesn\u2019t just produce ineffective politics. It reproduces the conditions that got us here.<\/p>\n<h4>What the popular front actually is<\/h4>\n<p>Before making the argument, we need precision about the target. The popular front gets used loosely, and that looseness lets people slide past the critique.<\/p>\n<p>The popular front is not coalition work. Socialists do coalition work all the time and should. It\u2019s not working alongside people we disagree with, and it\u2019s not even working in formations dominated by non-socialist forces. The popular front is specifically the <em>subordination<\/em> of working-class political independence to a cross-class coalition organized around bourgeois political goals. The test isn\u2019t whether DSA maintains formal independence\u2014whether we keep our name and publish our newsletter. The test is whether the political content of our work is determined by the coalition\u2019s framework or by an independent working-class program.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"pullquote\">The popular front is specifically the <em>subordination<\/em> of working-class political independence to a cross-class coalition organized around bourgeois political goals.<\/aside>\n<p>Leon Trotsky\u2019s <em>Struggle Against Fascism in Germany<\/em> makes this case: In the 1930s, the popular front meant communist parties entering electoral alliances with \u201cprogressive\u201d bourgeois parties, adopting their demands, deferring to their leadership, and bracketing socialist politics as divisive. The theory was that fascism posed such an extreme threat that the immediate task was to defend bourgeois democracy, with socialist demands to follow once the emergency had passed.<span title='The standard account of the 1930s debates remains Leon Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971), which collects the key documents from popular front. For the consequences of the Popular Front turn, see Felix Morrow, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Spain (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1938).' class='inline-footnote' style=''>1<span class='footnoteContent' style='display:none;'><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The standard account of the 1930s debates remains Leon Trotsky, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971), which collects the key documents from popular front. For the consequences of the Popular Front turn, see Felix Morrow, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Spain (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1938).<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p>The emergency never passed. Socialist demands never came back. The organizations that had disciplined themselves into becoming coalition partners emerged without the political independence they\u2019d begun with, in cases where they emerged at all.<\/p>\n<p>What is being proposed and, in some cases, practiced within DSA today has the same structural features, even if it goes by different names. Coalition partners are the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, liberal NGOs, and civil society organizations. The bracketed demands are socialist ones. The logic is identical: The emergency\u2013framed as either authoritarianism or fascism\u2013is too severe for the luxury of political independence.<\/p>\n<h4>How you get there without deciding to<\/h4>\n<p>Coalition gravity is real. It\u2019s not a character flaw\u2013it\u2019s a structural problem that operates on organizations, not just individuals.<\/p>\n<p>The Democratic-Party-aligned liberal-left is large, active, and well-resourced. When a crisis hits, that infrastructure mobilizes first and fastest. The coalitions form around it. The demands, the slogans, the framing, and the action calendar are set before socialist organizations have finished their internal discussions.<\/p>\n<p>For example, a DSA member shows up at an immigrant defense meeting. The meeting is mostly liberals, a few DSA members, and some NGO staff. The immediate task of supporting people facing deportation is urgent and correct. Nobody is going to walk out because politics aren\u2019t pure enough. That would be sectarian and wrong. So, you participate. You agree with the common statement. The common statement is framed around \u201cdefending American values\u201d and \u201cthe rule of law\u201d\u2014not around class power, not around the system that produces both Trump and the deportation regime he\u2019s intensifying. You table that argument because the meeting isn\u2019t the time. Next meeting, same dynamic.<\/p>\n<p>Over months of such activity, DSA\u2019s public face becomes indistinguishable from that of the progressive liberal opposition. The people being recruited come in through that political framework. New members\u2019 understanding of what this organization is gets shaped by what it visibly does, which is to background the socialist politics of working class power from below.<\/p>\n<p>There is nothing explicitly stated requiring anyone to abandon socialist politics. The abandonment happens through accumulation, through the logic of each individual situation. This is what conjunctural pressure does to small organizations without a consciously held, collectively maintained, regularly reasserted strategic orientation.<\/p>\n<p>The antidote isn\u2019t sectarian abstention. It\u2019s deliberate political clarity about what we\u2019re doing and why it&#8217;s maintained actively, not assumed.<\/p>\n<h4>The fascism question is doing all the work<\/h4>\n<p>The strategic argument for popular front practice in the current moment always rests, explicitly or implicitly, on a characterization of Trump as fascist. That characterization is doing more work than it should be trusted to do.<\/p>\n<p>In contrast to the popular front, Trotsky developed the united front strategy, which is often invoked imprecisely to justify current coalition practices, particularly in response to fascism. His argument was that fascism threatened to physically destroy working-class organizations, which required those organizations to act in common, despite political differences, to survive. Even then, he insisted on a united front among<em> labor organizations<\/em>, not a cross-class coalition with bourgeois democratic forces.<span title='Trotsky, \u201cFor a Workers\u2019 United Front Against Fascism\u201d (1931) and \u201cWhat Next? Vital Questions for the German Proletariat\u201d (1932), both in The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany. The key formulation: the united front is \u201ca practical agreement for struggle\u201d between organizations \u201cthat base themselves on the working class\u201d\u2014not with bourgeois parties.' class='inline-footnote' style=''>2<span class='footnoteContent' style='display:none;'><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Trotsky, \u201cFor a Workers\u2019 United Front Against Fascism\u201d (1931) and \u201cWhat Next? Vital Questions for the German Proletariat\u201d (1932), both in <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. The key formulation: the united front is \u201ca practical agreement for struggle\u201d between organizations \u201cthat base themselves on the working class\u201d\u2014not with bourgeois parties.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p>If Trump\u2019s second term represents a Bonapartist conjuncture rather than a fascist one, the entire strategic logic should shift. Bonapartism, in the classical Marxist sense, describes a regime in which the state achieves relative autonomy because the ruling class is politically paralyzed\u2014no fraction can establish stable hegemony\u2014while the working class lacks independent political expression to fill the vacuum. The executive floats above class conflict, presenting itself as a national solution to a political impasse. This describes the current situation with considerable precision.<span title='The Bonapartism framework originates in Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852). For its theoretical elaboration and relation to fascism, see Nicos Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship (London: New Left Books, 1974) and State, Power, Socialism (London: New Left Books, 1978). Poulantzas\u2019s critique of instrumentalist accounts of the state is particularly relevant to the question of regime characterization.' class='inline-footnote' style=''>3<span class='footnoteContent' style='display:none;'><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Bonapartism framework originates in Karl Marx, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (1852). For its theoretical elaboration and relation to fascism, see Nicos Poulantzas, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Fascism and Dictatorship<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (London: New Left Books, 1974) and <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">State, Power, Socialism<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (London: New Left Books, 1978). Poulantzas\u2019s critique of instrumentalist accounts of the state is particularly relevant to the question of regime characterization.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p>The distinction matters because Bonapartism and fascism call for different strategic responses. Fascism requires defensive mobilization to protect existing working-class organizational infrastructure from physical destruction. Bonapartism requires something harder: building independent working-class political capacity to fill the vacuum currently occupied by the Bonapartist solution.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"pullquote\">The \u201cno kings\u201d framing \u2026 is the ideological form of the popular front.<\/aside>\n<p>The popular front&#8217;s response to Bonapartism doesn\u2019t just fail strategically. It actively worsens the underlying condition. Bonapartism arises from two simultaneous problems: bourgeois political fragmentation and working-class political subordination to bourgeois politics. The popular front deepens the second problem by re-subordinating working-class politics to bourgeois democratic forces. You defeat this Bonaparte\u2014if you defeat him\u2014only to have reproduced exactly the conditions that made him possible.<\/p>\n<p>The \u201cno kings\u201d framing that dominates current opposition politics is not accidental. It is the ideological form of the popular front: The enemy is personal despotism, the solution is constitutional democracy, and the agent of change is a broad cross-class coalition of people who love freedom. Working-class power doesn\u2019t appear in this picture as a distinct force with distinct interests. It appears as part of the democratic people, whose political expression is progressive liberalism. Socialists who adopt this framing aren\u2019t just making a rhetorical concession. They\u2019re accepting a framework that makes independent working-class politics invisible by definition.<\/p>\n<h4>Trotsky against the Trotskyists<\/h4>\n<p>It\u2019s worth being direct about the theoretical tradition being invoked to justify current practice because the invocation is wrong, and demonstrating that it\u2019s wrong matters for the internal argument.<\/p>\n<p>When comrades say, \u201cunited front, not popular front,\u201d they\u2019re invoking a real and important distinction from Trotsky\u2019s work in the early 1930s. The problem is that what\u2019s being practiced in many cases <em>is<\/em> the popular front, not the united front\u2014and the distinction between them is precisely what Trotsky spent years insisting on.<\/p>\n<p>Trotsky\u2019s united front was between working-class organizations: German socialist and communist formations, acting in common against the Nazi threat, maintaining their distinct political programs and organizational independence, and striking together on specific, defined objectives. Political independence wasn\u2019t incidental to the strategy\u2014it was the whole point. A united front dissolves the moment participating organizations can no longer advance their own politics within it.<span title='Trotsky, \u201cThe United Front for Defense\u201d (1933), in The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany. The \u201cmarch separately, strike together\u201d formulation appears in several documents from this period. Its precondition\u2014that independent organizations capable of marching separately actually exist\u2014is rarely emphasized in contemporary invocations.' class='inline-footnote' style=''>4<span class='footnoteContent' style='display:none;'><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Trotsky, \u201cThe United Front for Defense\u201d (1933), in <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. The \u201cmarch separately, strike together\u201d formulation appears in several documents from this period. Its precondition\u2014that independent organizations capable of marching separately actually exist\u2014is rarely emphasized in contemporary invocations.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u201cMarch separately, strike together\u201d is frequently quoted. What\u2019s less frequently noted is that marching separately requires that you be marching and that there be an independent working-class political formation capable of entering a united front as a distinct pole. DSA joining a Democratic Party-led coalition isn\u2019t a united front. There is no independent march. There is a large march that has absorbed us.<\/p>\n<p>The Comintern\u2019s move to the popular front in 1935 was not an abandonment of the united front in favor of something obviously different. It was a collapse of the united front into a cross-class coalition, dressed in the language of anti-fascist necessity. Dimitrov\u2019s Congress speeches don\u2019t read like a capitulation\u2014they read like a strategic adaptation to overwhelming circumstances.<span title='Georgi Dimitrov, \u201cThe Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International,\u201d report to the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International (1935), in The United Front: The Struggle Against Fascism and War (New York: International Publishers, 1938). The rhetorical sophistication of the popular front turn is worth attending to: it was presented as a creative application of united front principles, not an abandonment of them.' class='inline-footnote' style=''>5<span class='footnoteContent' style='display:none;'><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Georgi Dimitrov, \u201cThe Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International,\u201d report to the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International (1935), in <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The United Front: The Struggle Against Fascism and War<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (New York: International Publishers, 1938). The rhetorical sophistication of the popular front turn is worth attending to: it was presented as a creative application of united front principles, not an abandonment of them.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p>The people who built the popular front thought they were being realistic, flexible, and responsive to conditions. They were wrong. The popular front delivered the Spanish Republic to Franco and the French Left to paralysis. The lesson isn\u2019t that unity is bad. It\u2019s that unity organized on bourgeois-democratic terms\u2014with socialist politics bracketed as divisive, and its socialist demands deferred as premature\u2014produces defeat even when it yields votes.<\/p>\n<h4>What independent politics actually looks like<\/h4>\n<p>The case against popular frontism is not a case for abstention, and saying so directly matters because the charge of sectarianism is always the first response.<\/p>\n<p>DSA members should be in immigrant defense work. We should be in the streets around May Day and every moment of mass mobilization. We should be in coalition with whoever is organizing working-class people. None of that is in question. What\u2019s in question is the political basis on which we\u2019re there and the organizational form we maintain within it.<\/p>\n<p>Independent politics in practice means several difficult things. It means being visibly, publicly socialist in coalition spaces, not as a condition of participation but as a contribution to it. The people being radicalized at this moment need to find a distinct pole. If DSA\u2019s presence is indistinguishable from progressive liberalism, we\u2019re not offering them an alternative; we\u2019re delivering them to the Democratic Party\u2019s orbit.<\/p>\n<p>It means framing every attack as class politics, not democratic politics. Deportations are not an assault on American values. They are an assault on working people by a capitalist state that serves ruling-class interests\u2014interests that the Democratic Party also represents, differently but genuinely. The distinction matters because it points toward a different solution. \u201cRestore democracy\u201d points toward the Democratic Party. \u201cBuild working-class power\u201d points to something that doesn\u2019t yet exist at the required scale, which means the task is to build it.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"pullquote\">Independent politics \u2026 means treating the conjuncture as a radicalization opportunity, which requires having a distinct socialist pole for people to find.<\/aside>\n<p>It means doing genuine united-front work where it is actually possible, with DSA\u2019s left currents, with socialist labor militants, with other genuine working-class formations, on terms that maintain political independence rather than dissolving into the lowest common denominator of anti-authoritarianism.<\/p>\n<p>And it means treating the conjuncture as a radicalization opportunity, which requires having a distinct socialist pole for people to find. People are moving right now. The question is where they move to. If socialist organizations are invisible as a distinct political force, if our public presence is liberal coalition work, then the people being radicalized by Trump\u2019s attacks get absorbed into the Democratic Party opposition. That is a long-term failure with consequences that will outlast the current crisis.<\/p>\n<h4>The organizational honesty problem<\/h4>\n<p>One more thing deserves to be said, even though it\u2019s uncomfortable.<\/p>\n<p>Organizations under pressure tend toward popular frontism in part because it solves an immediate organizational problem: isolation. Coalition work provides activity, visibility, a sense of mass connection, and recruiting opportunities that independent socialist politics can\u2019t provide. This is a real organizational need being met in a politically costly way. Naming it isn\u2019t an accusation of bad faith. It\u2019s an attempt at honesty about the pressures that drive political drift.<\/p>\n<p>The solution is not to pretend that the isolation problem doesn\u2019t exist; it does, and it\u2019s serious. The solution is to refuse to solve it through absorption into formations whose political gravity we need to escape. That means accepting that independent politics is harder, slower, and less immediately satisfying than coalition work. It has always been true. The organizations that maintained independence through the 1930s conjuncture were the ones that came out the other side with something to offer. The ones that dissolved into the popular front came out as smaller versions of the liberal parties, they\u2019d subordinated themselves to\u2014in the cases where they came out at all.<\/p>\n<h4>Conclusion: We\u2019ve been here before<\/h4>\n<p>The argument of this document is not that DSA should disengage from the current moment of political crisis. It is precisely the crisis\u2019s intensity that makes it necessary to be as clear as possible about our political orientation, not the reason to defer clarity until conditions are easier.<\/p>\n<p>Bonapartism won\u2019t fall to the Left that currently exists in the United States. The socialist movement is too small, too organizationally fragmented, and too politically subordinated to bourgeois parties for that. The question the conjuncture poses is not whether we can defeat Trump\u2019s regime directly. It is whether we can use this moment to build the organizational and political infrastructure that might, eventually, constitute a genuine working-class political force, or whether we will spend it as the left wing of a liberal coalition that will absorb our energy, recruit our cadre into its own formations, and leave us smaller and less politically distinct than we started.<\/p>\n<p>The popular front has always promised the second option while selling the first. We have enough history now to know how that story ends. The question is whether we\u2019ve learned from it.<\/p>\n<hr class=\"half\" \/>\n<p><small><em>Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/about\/\">About Tempest Collective<\/a>.\u201d<\/em><\/small><br \/>\n<small>Featured Image credit: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.deviantart.com\/osannachil\/art\/Daily-Sketch-Rose-10102021-Pencil-894768815\">OsannaChil<\/a>; modified by Tempest.<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>DSA member <strong>Anthony Teso<\/strong> observes that, although they might deny it, the Democratic Socialists of America are practicing popular frontism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":428,"featured_media":14839,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[556,28],"class_list":["post-14836","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-article","tag-democratic-socialists-of-america","tag-dsa"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Copy-of-tempest_feature_card-57-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14836","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/428"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14836"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14836\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}