Whither Liberalism?

What I saw and heard at LibCon 2026.

Photo by Aaron Burson on Unsplash

Back in the 20th century there was a running joke that every other Foreign Affairs essay would have the title “Whither ________?” in which the author would unintentionally put the reader to sleep with less-than-scintillating prose that talked about a country or a concept without really arriving at a conclusion.

So, is this post gonna be something similar about the future of liberalism? Well… you, dear readers, can be the judge of that.

This past week the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World attended a conference on “Liberalism for the 21st Century,” also called LibCon 2026, sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism.¹ The conference assembled some top-tier academics (Jacob T. Levy, Jan-Werner Müller, Francis Fukuyama, Manisha Sinha, and Danielle Allen among others) and columnists (Jamelle Bouie, Adam Serwer, David French, Ezra Klein, Anne Applebaum, Robert Guest, Quinta Jurecic, and William Kristol among others). The theme of this year’s conference was, essentially: “is there a viable reconstruction agenda for American liberal democracy?”

After listening to my betters for a day and a half, however, I am honestly unsure if an agenda exists.

Goodness knows the theme is timely. As with last year’s conference, it seems difficult to have a convening on the state of American liberal democracy without Donald Trump doing something that points out the “badly maimed” state of the republic, as Shikha Dalmia put it in her opening remarks. Last year LibCon happened as Trump took control of the DC Policy and deployed the National Guard. This time around the conference took place as Trump attempted to claim yet again that the 2020 election was rigged.

Looking over my notes, however, I think the conference did a far better job of diagnosing the problems than offering solutions. Many participants rejoiced in the fall of Viktor Orbán, for example, but Müller astutely noted that Orbán was constrained by the European Union, whereas the U.S. is unique unburdened by a concern for global public opinion.

Multiple participants agreed that there was a distinct gap between how ordinary Americans and elites had reacted to Trump’s illiberal efforts. The depth of citizen resistance was considerable: grand juries refusing to indict, marching at No Kings rallies, or or citizens taking to the streets in Minneapolis and elsewhere to resist draconian immigration policies. On the other hand, far too many American elites had acquiesced to the Trump administration’s illiberal pressures. The public turns out to have been a little more democratic and liberal than elites feared. But while mass resistance is certainly a good thing, a lack of leadership is a problem.

Is there a positive reconstruction agenda for the future? This is where the fissures started to become clear. LibCon attendees come from multiple intellectual streams. Some are exiled neoconservatives horrified by everything Trump has done. Some are the libertarians who actually stuck with the ideas of libertarianism rather than deciding Trump was cool because he likes crypto. Some are traditional liberals. Some are further to the left but really, really want to smash a system that seems rigged in favor of Trump and his GOP compatriots.

There were some areas of agreement among the many tribes at LibCon. Constraining the presidential pardon power was universally popular, as was the idea of more rigorous antitrust enforcement. Reforming the Insurrection Act and time-limiting the presidential use of emergency powers was also popular. A strong anti-corruption program got a lot of nods and claps.

Beyond that... well… not so much. Attendees were split on expanding the Supreme Court as a means to overcome the current conservative cabal. As for a positive agenda, I did not hear much in the way of reconstruction. For example, while the panel on historical reconstruction efforts was interesting, the obvious point that everyone raised was that large-scale reconstruction usually happens only after a war or revolution. Democrats winning in 2028 does not quite rise to that level.

Bill Kristol’s closing remarks were particularly sobering.² He argue that although Trump’s Thursday speech wound up being a bit of a dud, Trump’s second term has been worse than expected. Illiberals have captured too many institutions — corporations, law firms, some universities — creating authoritarianism within the government, beyond the government, and projecting pressure from the government. He fretted that there had not been enough people who have expressed revulsion about Trump. Kristol was nonetheless pleased that 20% of Trump’s supporters have abandoned him, and that because Trump is 80 years old, any third-term ideas are unlikely to play out. He concluded that authoritarian efforts have been stronger than expected — but so has the resistance.

Kristol closed by quoting James Carville from an October 2020 Bulwark essay:

What this moment has done for all of us—for all those who have sat on the sidelines of history or never were presented with something that held as much gravitas—is that it has given us, for one fleeting moment—the moment we’re living right now—a sense of common purpose. Common purpose of which we will be able to recall forever: that when our country and our Republic were on the brink of collapse, when our fellow Americans needed us, we took a blow torch to our past differences, our former conflicts and our old rivalries, and we fought together.

The question Kristol was asking was whether that moment will happen again in 2028, in favor of small-l liberalism.

And here the preceding panel was sobering. Simply put, the conversation between Ezra Klein and Danielle Allen was a bit of a letdown. It took Klein and Allen about thirty minutes to get to their rather different definitions of liberalism.³ Klein further argued that liberalism had become too enmeshed in institutions and procedures rather than grander visions. That may be true as far as American political liberalism is concerned, but for guarding against authoritarianism, procedures and institutions are at least two-thirds of the ballgame,⁴ so I don’t think the conference’s focus on them was misplaced. But Klein might have a point in asking whether this kind of liberalism can inspire a mass movement.

So what do I think? I think that there were elements of a liberal reconstruction agenda, but I don’t know if they will get the blood pumping in the public sphere.

I was fortunate enough to procure Laura K. Field’s outstanding Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right just before I left. Field focuses on the intellectual movements that have supported Trump over the past decade. While it is mostly about conservatism, the last paragraph of her introduction stopped me cold. She warns against dismissing the ideas of the New Right as unserious:

Above all else, the naive view overestimates liberalism’s immediate appeal and underestimates liberalism’s fragility. Growing right-wing extremism has not emerged in a vacuum but in many instances is a response, however misguided, to real problems, and to the real vulnerabilities of liberal democracy. It reflects some of the actual failures of modern liberal politics and economics, of modern liberal culture, and of the corporate neoliberal academy. One of the major advantages of spending time with the New Right is that it allows us to see these challenges more clearly, and to think through future possibilities for a pluralistic liberal order more deeply. And with some urgency.

LibCon 2026 felt a sense of urgency. I don’t know if that will be enough.

1. Full disclosure: I attended and presented at LibCon 2025.

2. I am also simply unprepared for a world in which Kristol sounds way more radical than Ezra Klein.

3. I live-tweeted it here for those who were interested.

4. The other third is civic virtue, which did was mentioned but not really discussed at length at the conference.