Reclaiming Liberalism, in a Time of Peril and Hope

The rise of authoritarianism—and why friends of liberty must band together to defeat it.

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AT THE DAWN OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, liberal democracy seemed to be on a triumphant march around the world, from South Africa to the former Soviet Union. Fast-forward less than twenty-five years, and not only have many fledgling democracies reverted to some degree of authoritarianism, but there is talk of liberal democracy being imperiled in its traditional bastions and birthplaces: the United States and Western Europe.

Aside from the complicated question of how and why this happened, how do friends of liberty respond? That was one of the questions tackled at a conference last month in Washington, D.C. titled “Liberalism for the 21st Century,” with a star-studded cast that featured historian and journalist Anne Applebaum, Brookings Institution scholar Jonathan Rauch, and political scientist Francis Fukuyama, whose 1989 essay “The End of History?” (and the 1992 bestselling book that grew from it) argued that humanity’s ideological evolution had reached its endpoint with “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” (He has since had to update his thesis somewhat.)

“Liberalism,” in this context, is meant not in the typical American political sense but in the universal sense: a political philosophy based on individual rights, civil and political liberty, government by consent of the governed, and equality before the law. In American terms, it encompasses both Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama. Indeed, one of the goals of the conference, whose speakers also encompassed a wide range of viewpoints, was to bring together liberals of different hues—conservative, libertarian, centrist, progressive—to push back against a common enemy.

That enemy is a loose international alliance of autocrats—“Autocracy, Inc.,” to quote the title of Applebaum’s new book—in which Vladimir Putin is the most recognizable face.¹ As Applebaum pointed out in her remarks, one notable thing about this gallery of baddies is that, in contrast to the Cold War, it is not united by a common ideology but simply by “the need to stay in power”; it includes the Iranian Islamist theocracy, Putin’s pseudo-Christian kleptocracy, and Nicolás Maduro’s far-left thugocracy in Venezuela. Self-preservation is the main reason autocrats hate and fear the West and liberal democracy; besides, as Applebaum pointed out, the “Western” language of liberal democracy is also the language of the pro-freedom opposition at home.

Foreign dictators aren’t the only leaders of the autocratic moment—there are others much closer to home. The conference on liberalism opened just two days after the closing of the latest National Conservatism conference, which featured an array of Donald Trump-adjacent personalities, including former Trump immigration adviser Stephen Miller, former Trump lawyer and would-be 2020 election thief John Eastman, Trump toady Vivek Ramaswamy, and JD Vance, just a few days before Trump named him as his running mate. National conservatism is the vanguard of so-called post-liberalism—which, as the liberalism conference made very clear, is the same old illiberalism under a new cover.

The conference, hosted by the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism and organized by its president, Shikha Dalmia, admirably avoided the trap of liberal self-congratulation. It grappled seriously with challenges to liberalism, both general, encompassing the “post-liberal” critiques, and specific, including liberal solutions to climate change and ways to combat disinformation without censorship.

Brookings Institution scholar William Galston (a regular panelist on The Bulwark’s Beg to Differ podcast) noted that “if we want to make a deep defense of liberalism, we have to take the deepest criticisms of liberalism on board”—for instance, concerns that “individual rights cannot long endure without some sense of responsibilities to the community.” A liberal polity, he argued, must also acknowledge (though obviously not incorporate) the genuine belief held by a large portion of humanity that legitimate authority stems from God, not from the consent of the governed. Otherwise we are at risk of being caught flat-footed by religious hostility to liberal governance. Galston similarly emphasized the need for liberal societies to be comfortable with the notion of “national borders and the right to secure them,” pointing out that the idea of distinct nations is embedded in the Declaration of Independence and that “the right of the people to constitute a demos” is “core to the idea of liberal democracy.”

As Galston’s warning shows (and it was far from the only such example), the conference successfully avoided another trap common to discussions of threats to liberal democracy: denouncing right-wing illiberalism while ignoring or downplaying illiberalism on the left. Several speakers—from the opening panel on liberalism beyond the West to the closing keynote conversation between Fukuyama and Indian political commentator Pratap Bhanu Mehta—addressed not only authoritarian populism based on conservative grievances but also the problem of coercive progressivism that purports to champion the disadvantaged.

The most trenchant comments about the relationship between left-wing and right-wing illiberalism came from Iranian-American writer Azar Nafisi, author of the bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran, who spoke with palpable anger of Western progressives who defend the compulsory hijab as part of Muslim women’s cultural identity and see Western cultural imperialism in critiques of Islamist patriarchy. Nafisi, who has been attacked by Columbia University professor Hamid Dabashi as a “native informer and colonial agent” for her criticism of Iran’s repressive regime, cited the slogan of Iranian women’s rights protesters: “Freedom is neither Eastern nor Western; freedom is global.”

New York Times columnist David French also addressed the question of left-wing illiberalism, calling it a “a giant blind spot” for the left—and one that makes it harder to address right-wing authoritarianism:

A lot of times everyone on the center-left thinks about the movement for greater equality in areas of race gender and sexuality as being an entirely virtuous movement, and a lot of it has been very, very virtuous—but some of it, particularly on campuses, has been very hostile and illiberal itself. And so it is a little rich to a lot of young, right post-liberals to hear all of a sudden everyone rising up left of center saying we’ve got a post-liberalism problem, when they’re like, “I just graduated from a school with a speech code, okay? I just graduated from a school where if I raised, even in the most kind way, an objection to, say, a biological male competing against biological females in athletics, I could probably face sanction, punishment, and certainly massive social exclusion,” and then to hear that same wing of people saying, “defend liberalism.”

French wasn’t the only speaker to point out the tension between liberalism and social justice movements—in fact, there was a panel dedicated to the subject. Its primary focus was not on specific conflicts about race, gender, and sexuality but on the overarching question of how Enlightenment-based liberalism can exist when many people are rejecting the Enlightenment itself—not only “post-liberals” on the right, but progressives who see the liberal tradition as steeped in racism, sexism, and other bigotries. University of Virginia religion and culture professor James Davison Hunter, who popularized the term “culture wars” back in the early 1990s, spoke of the troubling replacement of a common culture by a “fundamentally nihilistic” alternative culture. He also warned that authoritarianism is a likely outcome of the loss of basic cultural solidarity, something essential to the functioning of institutions and societies: “If it cannot be generated organically, it will be imposed coercively.” Hence the rise of Trump and Trumpism, which, Hunter warned, will not disappear if Trump loses the election. In a more hopeful note, he cited hundreds of local initiatives to build bridges across political divides.

Hunter’s overall pessimism was counterbalanced by intellectual historian Keidrick Roy, who discussed his forthcoming book, American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism. His view is that the social hierarchy of the slave states was a “racial feudalism” that betrayed the liberal ideals of the Founding, and his book focuses on black thinkers who sought to reclaim those ideals by relying on the Enlightenment tradition to challenge slavery and white supremacy. Drawing inspiration from Frederick Douglass, Roy proposed an “identity-aware” liberalism—a middle ground between the “identity-driven” and the “identity-blind.”

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“LIBERALISM FOR THE 21ST CENTURY,” envisioned by its organizers as the first of many events, was more about questions than answers. Both the panel on liberalism beyond the West and the closing dialogue between Mehta and Fukuyama, for instance, teased the question of whether—in Mehta’s words—“denaturalizing America and Europe as the sites of liberalism” was possible. (Nafisi wryly remarked that between the two countries she has called home, Iran is currently the one where liberalism inspires far more enthusiasm.)

The panel on “a new theory of liberal internationalism” asked when foreign intervention by liberal powers is justified or desirable, but fell short of articulating a persuasive standard, with most of the discussion retracing the “responsibility to protect” debates of the 1990s. One suggestion was replacing the paradigm of “liberal democracy vs. autocracy” with one of “impunity vs. accountability”; but it’s unclear how such a framework would be meaningfully different, since autocracies are by definition unaccountable.

In the closing conversation, Mehta spoke of the sense that “liberal polities are extremely fragile [and] rare”—a useful cautionary note not to take liberal democracy for granted. At that time, most attendees were glumly resigned to a likely Trump victory in November and all that would entail. With Kamala Harris now taking the lead in national polls, things look very different.

Perhaps by the next conference, the question of fending off the authoritarian populist threat in the United States will be less relevant than the question of rebuilding cultural solidarity across political lines, revitalizing a conservatism based on classical liberal values, and resisting the pull of illiberalism on the left. And, of course, shoring up the defense of liberal democracies around the world against the Putin-led authoritarian international.

1. The conference opened with a poignant keynote speech by exiled Russian dissident and journalist Yevgenia Albats.