Executive Summary: Liberation Road's 2022-2025 Main Political Report

Our official triennial report on key political developments of this period

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 one, our Executive Summary of the key assessments of the 2022 - 2025 Main Political Report. We will add links to the other sections as they are released:

1. Executive Summary

2. International Developments

3. Balance of Power in the US Political Context

4. The New Confederate Front

5. The Multiracial Pro-Democracy United Front

6. State of the People’s Movements

I. Executive Summary: Liberation Road’s 2022 - 2025 Main Political Report

1. Purpose and Focus of this Report

We are living through a period of profound danger and possibility. The New Confederacy is advancing a coordinated authoritarian project, while the forces defending and expanding multiracial democracy remain fragmented and uneven, but in motion. This report offers Liberation Road’s analysis of the current balance of forces as a foundation for our Strategic Orientation, where we outline the strategic tasks required to block authoritarian rule and build toward a Third Reconstruction.

In the political reports that we prepare before each of our triennial congresses, Liberation Road attempts to outline the major societal contradictions and developments of the political moment. The purpose is both to provide a retroactive assessment of the preceding period and to identify key developments that will impact the strategic orientation of our organization and the broader socialist, labor, and social movement left for the coming years.

Our last MPR was written in December 2021, in advance of Liberation Road’s 13th triennial Congress in April 2022. This report seeks to assess developments from early 2022 through approximately March of 2025. While the Biden era already feels like it is rapidly receding into the distance, we think it is important to retroactively assess its contradictions. They provide key insights about the road that brought us here, and key lessons that we must wrestle with if we are to successfully resist and ultimately defeat the New Confederacy. In addition to outlining the emerging contours of our current moment, this report thus tries to provide a relatively comprehensive assessment of key developments over the preceding three years—both domestically and internationally.

Who this Document is For

This is a work of revolutionary theory, not agitation. Its purpose is to explain many ideas to (comparatively) few people, rather than a single idea to a large number of people. Its audience is active revolutionaries of three sorts:

1. For cadre and members: This is an orientation guide—providing shared analysis to align our work across mass work units, geographic districts, and movement sectors.

2. For close allies and partners: This is an invitation—to engage deeply with our strategic perspective, sharpen collective understanding, and identify points of alignment.

3. For the broader movements: While written from within a cadre organization, we hope this document can contribute to wider strategic conversations among our movements.

The rest of this executive summary outlines the key arguments of our Main Political Report. Each subsection of the summary corresponds to a full section of the more detailed analysis that follows. For the fuller analysis, see the corresponding sections of the full report, which will be released over the coming weeks.

2. International Developments

Globally, the past three years saw soaring inequality, populist discontent, and a world at war, with a record 59 simultaneous state conflicts. After briefly rebounding from the 2020-2021 COVID crash, global GDP growth declined to historic lows, while record inflation led to a worldwide cost-of-living squeeze. These dynamics contributed to a heterogeneous populist backlash, with voters around the world revolting against sitting governments to the benefit of both left- and right-wing populist parties.

These global trends both occurred within and contributed to an ongoing three-fold crisis of “economy, ecology, and empire.” Economically, neoliberalism continued to unravel, yet no other economic paradigm has assumed its place. Geopolitically, the US-led international order has foundered, but no new order has emerged. Environmentally, the current “solutions” to the climate crisis fail more deeply by the day, but no alternatives have secured consensus.

The simultaneity of these three intersecting crises of ecology, economy, and empire have produced a deep threat, not just to the world’s people, but also to the ruling class’s ability to secure stability. We are in an interregnum, where the old hegemonic order has been shattered, but no new one has been born. The defining characteristic of this period is thus its volatility, as differing factions and forces struggled to establish a new hegemonic order under conditions of deep uncertainty.

Amid this flux, multiple imperial projects and emerging alternatives vie for position in a global order increasingly marked by instability, contradiction, and opportunity. In the Middle East, Israel continues a genocidal war on Gaza, abetted by US military and financial support, that threatens to spiral into a broader regional conflict. In Europe, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has begun the largest military conflict on the continent since World War II. In Mexico, the deepening transformation under Morena offers a rare example of progressive national development in the Global South, positioning itself against both neoliberalism and US domination. In Asia, China’s economic power makes it a cautious challenger to US influence.

In the US, the election of Donald Trump has upended a longstanding US foreign policy consensus, with major consequences that are still playing out. Trump envisions a multipolar world divided among rival empires—each controlling its own sphere of influence. His approach prioritizes resource acquisition and sovereign power, discarding any moral or legal pretense to promote democracy or global stability. Trump’s admiration for authoritarian leaders, calls to dismantle global institutions, and proposals to double military spending reflect a vision of the US as the most powerful empire in a world of empires, unbound by international norms and accountable only to itself.

3. Balance of Power in the US Political Context

In the US, the 2024 elections swept the New Confederacy back into power at the national level. This victory, while wide, was shallow; rather than a dramatic realignment of the electorate, it represented a reactionary backlash in the context of a society that remains deeply polarized. However, the New Confederacy’s trifecta control of federal government has dramatically shifted the balance of power, increasing the risk that they will consolidate an authoritarian regime. Trump now seeks to replace US democracy with patronal autocracy—an intermediary regime between democracy and dictatorship, in which a corrupt “patron” governs the country as an extension of his business interests. This project does not have a popular mandate, and can be resisted through coordinated defensive and counter-offensive social and political struggles, which we will discuss further in our Strategic Orientation.

Prior to the 2024 elections, the Biden era had witnessed an intensifying stalemate at the federal level, as both sides attempted major advances, with contradictory results. Biden’s attempt to chart a post-neoliberal economic course—initially ambitious and redistributive—was steadily narrowed into a more corporate-friendly framework under the pressures of inflation, corporate opposition, and intra-party conflict, all compounded by the weakness of organized labor and the social movements. At the same time, the Supreme Court pursued an aggressive, MAGA-aligned agenda to “repeal” the 20th century, overturning Roe v. Wade and attacking other longstanding civic, social, and workers’ rights. This volatile and inconclusive period set the stage for Trump’s return to power.

At the state level, this period saw widening divides between red and blue states, with regional polarization hitting its highest levels since 1932. The New Confederacy doubled down on its state power strategy qualitatively but hit a limit quantitatively, moving an aggressive policy agenda in states under its control but holding steady at 23 state government trifectas (a slight decrease from a pre-2020 high-water mark of 26). Democrats began to catch up on state government trifectas, rising from a low of six to a brief high of 17 before dropping to 16 after losing Michigan, and likewise pursued a bolder policy agenda in states under their control. Increasingly, Americans living in red and blue states experienced fundamentally different social, political, and economic realities.

At the local level, this period saw an intensification of struggle over electoral power, as formerly low-salience offices like county clerks and school boards became sites of intense contestation. Urban and rural regions continued a long-term trend toward increasing geographic polarization along partisan political lines. Blue cities in red states faced increased repression from state governments.

4. Developments in the New Confederate Front

Over the past decade, the New Confederacy has undergone a historic realignment, as Donald Trump displaced the traditional conservative establishment and consolidated leadership over a restructured political coalition. What began as a populist backlash against neoliberal elites evolved into a full-scale reordering of the party’s internal balance of power, sidelining the old fusionist alliance between economic libertarians and religious conservatives. In its place, a new triad emerged: MAGA populists, Christian nationalists, and techno-capitalists—each claiming greater ideological and institutional influence within the Republican Party, and each contributing to a broader reactionary project.

This reconfigured coalition represents not a continuation of conservative politics, but a rupture—a turn from conservatism to right-wing revolutionary transformation. Where previous Republican agendas focused on defending the existing order, the New Confederate front now seeks to overthrow it. All three dominant factions reject liberal democracy and egalitarian pluralism, but differ in what they seek to replace it with. The MAGA faction envisions a nativist ethnostate, rewarding a narrowly defined in-group of “real” Americans while targeting immigrants, racialized communities, and dissenters for exclusion. Christian nationalists pursue a Dominionist state rooted in patriarchal family structures and biblical law. Techno-capitalists promote a CEO state, a privatized regime of corporate sovereignty.

While these projects differ in substance and strategy, they are bound by a shared enemy in liberal democracy and a shared commitment to the reproduction of racial, gendered, and class domination. Yet the coalition is not without contradictions. MAGA’s welfare chauvinism and economic nationalism clash with the deregulatory agenda of techno-capitalists. Christian moralists push for state-enforced restrictions that disrupt market norms. Tech elites reject religious and populist demands for state intervention in favor of corporate autonomy and global capital mobility. These internal tensions are temporarily held together by shared enemies and by Trump himself—a figure who transcends ideological divisions by offering each faction symbolic victories, institutional access, and the promise of domination over a common opposition.

Trump’s role is not merely that of a populist strongman, but that of a patronal autocrat—at the center of a loyalty-based political network that fuses the machinery of the state with personal power. Under his leadership, the New Confederate front functions less like a traditional party coalition and more like a syndicate: a flexible, opportunistic power bloc animated by grievance, bound by patronage, and oriented toward the destruction of democratic accountability.

At its core, the New Confederacy remains an alliance between the most reactionary segments of capital and a predominantly white social base animated by racial and patriarchal grievance. While often mischaracterized as a working-class movement, its true base lies in the anxious middle strata—small business owners and other petty-bourgeois sectors—who, in times of instability, have historically served as the backbone of fascist regimes. This bloc has been reinforced by a rightward shift among some white sections of the multiracial/multinational working class, disorganized by decades of neoliberal deindustrialization, as well as by a small section of the oppressed nationalities. Above this social base stands a bloc of capitalist elites, long anchored in fossil fuels and agribusiness, but now joined by sectors of tech and finance increasingly hostile to liberal democracy.

5. Developments in the Pro-Democracy Front

As the New Confederacy has consolidated around an increasingly ethnonationalist and fascist agenda, the front opposing it has broadened to include all those opposed to this project. This Pro-Democracy United Front is heterogeneous, encompassing disparate forces with contending social, political, and economic agendas. On the front’s left are progressive forces strongly committed to racial, gender, and economic justice; on the front’s right are a dwindling number of conservative Democrats and a few Republican defectors. Between them stands a wide array of moderate forces, most visibly represented by the establishment wing of the Democratic Party.

Over the past years, the Pro-Democracy United Front has undergone internal shifts marked by both opportunity and fracture. The initial post-2020 period saw a relative strengthening of the progressive wing, reflected in the Biden administration’s unexpectedly ambitious domestic agenda and its tentative progressive pivot. This leftward opening, however, proved fragile: key legislative defeats and the absence of sustained mass mobilization led to strategic retrenchment. The Israeli genocide in Gaza triggered a deeper rupture between progressive and establishment forces, while the 2024 election defeat and subsequent polarization reignited internal debates over strategy, leadership, and direction. For now, establishment forces remain institutionally dominant, but progressives have emerged relatively more organized and ascendant.

The social base of the Pro-Democracy United Front includes oppressed nationality communities across class lines, some (especially unionized) white sections of the multiracial/multinational working class, and white professional and semi-professional strata. Within each of these groups, its strongest base of support comes from oppressed gender people. Post-industrial restructuring has splintered the working class: sectors like logistics and construction lean right, while care, service, and public-sector workers increasingly support the Democratic coalition. Young voters—especially women and queer youth—are the most progressive generational cohort, though a growing gender divide among young men poses emerging challenges.

Ideologically and programmatically, the Pro-Democracy United Front’s direction remains contested. The front’s center-right faction upholds many core tenets of neoliberalism while embracing limited forms of welfare chauvinism. The establishment center has begun to shed some neoliberal orthodoxies in favor of a hybrid model of state-managed capitalism—expanding government intervention without directly challenging corporate power. In contrast, the progressive left calls for a transformative break with neoliberalism, which we conceive of as a “Third Reconstruction” agenda rooted in racial, gender, and economic justice. These three ideological orientations represent not just policy disagreements, but fundamentally divergent visions of democracy, the economy, and the role of the state.

6. State of the Movements

While social movements have played a crucial role in shaping the pro-democracy front’s progressive edge, they remain fragmented and strategically divided—prone to both left and right errors. To win a Third Reconstruction, our movements need an inside/outside orientation that balances independent left initiative and a united front orientation. In the face of both internal contradictions and external challenges, the development of this orientation was uneven across social movement sectors during this period.

The last several years have brought both historic mobilizations and deep crises across oppressed nationality movements. The 2020 Black-led uprising sparked the largest protest wave in U.S. history, forcing shifts in public discourse, local policy, and federal investment. Since 2023, the mass protests in solidarity with Palestine—triggered by Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza—have brought unprecedented visibility to U.S. complicity in apartheid and catalyzed a generational surge of internationalist consciousness, particularly among youth of color. Yet these gains have been met with fierce backlash: censorship, criminalization, and efforts to roll back racial justice advances. Internally, ON movements face fragmentation, underdeveloped infrastructure, and strategic disorientation. The challenge remains how to rebuild political organization, leadership and strategic alignment so that the oppressed nationality movements can play a leading role in the fight for a Third Reconstruction.

The labor movement has experienced a resurgence in worker militancy, organizing, and political engagement. Strike activity has reached new highs, organizing efforts have expanded into the South, and a growing number of unions have taken bold stances on issues like Palestine and reproductive justice. A new layer of progressive union leadership and rank-and-file insurgency is taking shape. Yet union density remains stagnant, organizing uneven, and coordination across the movement underdeveloped, with national leadership largely unprepared to fend off the attacks, especially on the public sector, of the Trump regime. The emergence of a labor left current—anchored in key locals and national unions—offers promise, but it lacks infrastructure and contains multiple contradictions undermining its ability to consolidate into a strategic force capable of anchoring a multiracial/multinational working-class bloc in the fight for democracy.

Gender justice has been a critical frontline of repression and resistance. In the face of increasing attacks on gender rights and bodily autonomy, abortion and reproductive justice groups have worked collaboratively to continue providing services, trans-led grassroots networks have organized sophisticated mutual aid work, and the small but growing housing justice sector is leading many important local fights. Across all these efforts, however, the urgency of immediate needs can detract from longer-term organizing and power- building. There is also a disconnect between large, well-resourced nonprofits that frequently make pragmatist errors and often lack accountability to a mass base, and smaller grassroots groups that have a more radical power analysis, but are often ambivalent about base- and power-building and prone to left sectarianism. An exception is militant unions with a majority oppressed-gender membership; at their best, they combine political clarity with clear structure-based organizing, making them among the most effective, if often overlooked groups in the fight for gender justice.

Since 2016, climate and ecological justice movements (CJ/EJ) made a strategic leap forward, aligning around the Green New Deal and securing partial victories through the Inflation Reduction Act. But these gains have been thrown into crisis by the return of Trump domestically and increased geopolitical instability internationally. The CJ/EJ movement now faces the challenge of recalibrating strategy in a context where federal policy is foreclosed and the window for coordinated international action is rapidly closing. In this new period, frontline community fights at the local level—like the Black-led campaign against Elon Musk’s data center in Memphis—and state-level wins like New York’s Build Public Renewables Act offer a potential path forward. But the next phase of climate justice organizing will depend on whether these movements can weather the current storm—and rise to meet the next ones.

Within and across these social movements, many sectors of the US left have come to embrace an inside/outside orientation rooted in independent political organizations (IPOs). Many exciting IPOs have developed, primarily at a local and state level, and generally adopting one of two models: “stand alone” organizations, or “umbrella” coalitions of existing labor and social movement groups. IPOs have had some success electing candidates and winning issue fights at a local and state level, but more mixed results federally—helping elect a number of progressive house candidates, but failing to protect Squad members Cori Bush and Jamal Bowman. Nationally, coordination remains weak, even as the Working Families Party has emerged as a vital if still contradictory embryo of a national political vehicle. While our most advanced IPO projects have led exciting wins inside the terrain of the state, the “outside” component of the strategy—rooted in building organs of direct democracy—remains less developed.

Across sectors, our movements continued to face three interlocking challenges:

1. There are too few mass membership groups organizing at scale

2. There is still too little coordination, collaboration and connective tissue across groups

3. There is too little strategic consolidation around an inside/outside strategy

To address these challenges, Liberation Road set itself the task across the past three-year period of helping to build a stronger, more coherent socialist “core.” This has not meant consolidating all who self-identify as socialist, nor excluding aligned forces who use other labels. Rather, the task has been to help bring together those advanced forces who are rooted in mass organization, committed to left coordination, and strategically clear on the tasks at hand.

Efforts to cohere this core have made some significant advances in terms of strategic alignment, if not yet programmatic and organizational coherence. While no single organization has cohered our inside/outside trend, there is increased alignment among formations like Liberation Road, North Star Socialist Organization (NSSO), Convergence, Rising Majority, Grassroots Power Project, and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA’s) Socialist Majority Caucus (SMC) and Groundwork. What’s needed now is not just shared vision, but shared practice, structure, and initiative to strengthen our movements’ ability to move from strategic defense to a coordinated counter-offensive. The question is whether we can forge a coherent, self-conscious “bloc” that doesn’t just resist New Confederate autocracy, but builds the power to defeat and unseat the New Confederacy and begin a process of structural transformation—both inside the terrain of the state and across civil society. The Third Reconstruction will not build itself. But it can be built—if we do the work to build it.

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