Looks Like I Picked the Wrong Week to Attend A Liberalism Conference in DC

The cruel irony of attending a conference on liberal democracy in DC this week.

Photo by LSE Library on Unsplash

Washington-based readers of Drezner’s World should know that the hard-working staff will be sojourning down to DC in just a few days. On August 14th and 15th the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism and The UnPopulist are hosting a conference entitled “Liberalism for the 21st Century,” to be held at the Watergate Hotel.

You can register to attend by clicking here. Some highlights from last year’s similarly-themed conference:

You can check out the program here. My panel is on at 9 AM on Friday the 15th, entitled “Perils of a World of ‘Sovereigntist’ Nation States.” Here’s the description:

The post-Cold War “liberal” international order—under which various countries agreed to respect universally-recognized individual and human rights within their own borders, on the one hand, and pursued their mutual interests through multilateral institutions, on the other—has been abandoned by the United States, its imperfect champion.

What will replace this is not yet fully clear, but an aggressive form of nationalism that prioritizes national sovereignty over mutually-beneficial goals and universal values is currently ascendant. What will a world in which great powers take a zero-sum view of global affairs and pursue their own self-interest above all else look like, and what are its implications for world peace, commerce, and culture?

My co-panelists will be professor Jennifer Mittelstadt from Rutgers University and professor Janice Gross Stein from the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. Nayyera Haq, Assistant Dean at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, will be the moderator.

Having a conference in Washington in the depths of August is always a dicey proposition because of the swamp-like conditions. The last 24 hours have certainly upped the irony ante, however., as Trump has decided that injecting the state directly into the economy is an insufficient amount of illiberalism. On Monday Trump decided that he needed another distraction from the Epstein mess to make his administration even more illiberal. He announced that he would federalize the DC police force and deploy the National Guard to the District.

The New York Times’ Katie Rogers provided the absurdity and the banality of Trump’s press conference:

President Trump on Monday took federal control of the police force in the nation’s capital for 30 days and mobilized 800 National Guard troops to fight crime in a city that he claimed was overrun with “bloodthirsty criminals,” even though crime numbers in Washington are falling.

During a 78-minute news conference, during which he was flanked by several members of his cabinet, Mr. Trump took the lectern in the White House briefing room and said he also intended to clear out the capital’s homeless population, without saying how officials would do it, or detailing where those people would go.

Armed with papers that showed crime statistics, Mr. Trump decried murders in Washington compared with other global cities but ignored the fact that violent crime has fallen recently in the nation’s capital. While the violent crime rate surged in 2023, it fell 35 percent from that year to 2024, according to the city’s Metropolitan Police Department.

Instead, Mr. Trump painted Washington as an urban hellscape, repurposing some of the incendiary language he has used to describe conditions at the southern border. Mr. Trump has railed against crime in urban, largely liberal cities for decades, but his announcement on Monday was an extraordinary exertion of federal power over an American city. Warning of “caravans of mass youth” rampaging the city streets and relaying stories of children caught in shootings, Mr. Trump blamed Democrats for allowing the crime.

Stepping back, Trump’s justification is even weaker. As Axios’ Anna Spiegel reported, the Justice Department announced in January that, “total violent crime for 2024 in the District of Columbia is down 35% from 2023 and is the lowest it has been in over 30 years.” The vibes seem to match that:

The best that Trump’s supporters can come up with as a defense is… anecdotes and racist vibes I guess?

Rogers’ Times colleagues Eric Schmitt and Helene Cooper implicitly note the illiberal nature of this action: “President Trump’s decision to send at least 800 National Guard troops into the streets of Washington to fight crime is the latest example of how the president has used the military to advance domestic policy priorities.”

The question about the precise limits to Trump’s authority in the District of Columbia remains a matter of the GOP-dominated Congress and Supreme Court’s willingness to defer to Trump yet again legal and political debate. The Atlantic’s writers are split on the meaning of Trump’s actions. David Graham warns, “what this PR stunt could also do is create precedent for Trump to send armed forces out into American streets whenever he declares a spurious state of emergency.” On the other hand, Quinta Jurecic argues, “This ostensible show of strength is more like an admission of weakness. It is the behavior of a bully: very bad for the people it touches, but not a likely prelude to full authoritarian takeover.”

I, for one, am looking forward to being in DC later this week to debate the state of liberal democracy when the most optimistic thing one can say about Trump’s latest power grab is, “not a likely prelude to full authoritarian takeover.”

I can’t help but feel like Lloyd Bridges in Airplane!

Looks like I picked the wrong week to talk about liberal democracy in Washington, DC. But unlike Trump’s federal government, I believe in credible commitments. So I’ll be presenting regardless of what is happening down there.

See some of you later this week!