In Search of Liberalism

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, July 20, 2026

 

I spent part of the week at Liberalism for the 21^st Century—LibCon 2026—an annual conference put on by the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, a relatively new organization headed by my friend Shika Dalmia, long associated with Reason magazine and now publisher of the UnPopulist. I am interested in opportunities for right-left collaboration on issues such as the rule of law, free speech, free trade, and similar things that traditionally fall under the heading “liberalism,” and so I try to go to things like this when I can. They are, as we say around here, worth our time.

 

The lineup presented some opportunities for political intermixing: There were familiar libertarian types such as Dalmia and Walter Olson of the Cato Institute, left-liberal types such as Ezra Klein and Danielle Allen, idiosyncratic liberals such as Francis Fukuyama and Yascha Mounk, and a fair number of regular ol’ conservatives, including me, David French, and Bill Kristol. I can hear the keys clicking as emails are written denouncing the last of these, or, at the very least, tartly informing me that he is no longer a conservative; about that I will write only that while he and I may have some wide and deep disagreements about the best way to approach the current political moment in these United States, in conversation Bill Kristol strikes me as being, if anything, more conservative in the genuine sense of that word than he was 20 years ago—more skeptical, less ideological, free from party feeling, more interested in preservation and continuity, etc.

 

It is a good mix, but an uneasy one.

 

***

 

I try to put on a friendly face when I encounter some of the lefty types here, many of whom I have exchanged some pretty harsh words with in the past. There is nothing in particular that I wish to retract, but this is a conciliatory occasion. My efforts meet with decidedly mixed results. I do not blame my interlocutors for this: My attempts to be friendly must seem as disturbing and unnatural to them as it does to me.

 

***

 

I have been going to political conferences like this for a long time—more than 30 years now—and have been to conservative conferences, libertarian conferences, progressive conferences, Texas separatist conferences, flat-earther conferences, etc. Sometimes one hears some interesting things, has a useful conversation, meets a new interesting person, and that, of course, is really what these things are for: The panels and the formal program serve a convening function, but most of the real value is created on the sidelines, over by the coffee urns.

 

The programming varies, but there are two things you can always count on hearing: 1) a lament about the movement’s frustrating inability to get young people involved in whatever it is the conference is about; 2) several instances of people insisting that the challenge is finding new and better ways to talk about the agenda, whatever it is, the need to tell emotionally compelling stories about the program under discussion. Conservatives, in particular, have a thing about the need to recruit more young people—if you ever want to see Jonah Goldberg try not to wince, just watch him at one of these conferences when the youth-outreach stuff comes up. One of the things that conservatives, libertarians, classical liberals, etc., never seem to quite understand is that whipping crowds of young people into a state of emotional excitement not only is unnecessary to their program but is, in fact, antithetical to it. No good comes of it.

 

There’s an old joke that libertarianism is “a shadowy conspiracy to leave you alone,” and while conservatism and liberalism (I mean what we call “classical liberalism,” though I do not much care for that phrasing and do not want to repeat it every time) are distinct from libertarianism, they have a certain libertarian character and share a certain libertarian disability: The practical pursuit of political power is always in tension with philosophies based on restraining political power. Populism is exciting and enjoys a certain built-in political advantage because it is based on an underlying premise of action rather than on an underlying premise of restraint: A populist demagogue, of the right or of the left, can promise a crowd just about anything—there is no limiting principle. Ezra Klein, speaking at the conference, praises the “unbounded” vision of New York’s socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani. Liberalism is not an unbounded vision of the scope of state action.

 

The hard part of selling liberalism or American conservatism (which seeks to conserve the liberal principles of the American founding) is not how we talk about the philosophy—the trouble is with the philosophy itself. Restraint is (barring some kink) unsexy. There is nothing thrilling about acknowledging the necessity of trade-offs, the role of prudence applied ad hoc to individual cases, or that the best-case scenario we are offering is a series of good-enough second-best settlements and accommodations.

 

I recently reviewed Luigi: The Musical, which closes with the titular antihero (Luigi Mangione is being tried for the murder of health insurance executive Brian Thompson) singing a song in which he proposes to keep murdering people until there is peace and justice upon the land while the chorus behind him sings about policy trade-offs, the complexity of health care as a social issue, and the necessities of compromise and negotiation. Of course, Luigi drowns out the chorus. That is how it goes.

 

***

 

Liberalism, like conservatism, is less of a policy agenda or a coherent political movement than it is a sensibility and a set of attitudes. It is not a platform or a party. The foundation liberalism provides is by no means prior to politics, but it is, in a sense, prior to the familiar divides and controversies in American politics in the current era. I disagree with your typical left-leaning New York Times columnist (Jamelle Bouie is in attendance) on a great many things, but, if we agree on some fundamental things—the rule of law, freedom of speech, due process, the dangers of official corruption, etc.—then there is room to cooperate, and a need to cooperate, on those things when our shared bedrock values are threatened, as they are now.

 

I have in the past joked that you will know conservatives have won the day when I decide that the fact that Ramesh Ponnuru is wrong about child tax credits is now at the top of my list of things to care about and the time has come for us to get down to having a real fight about it. I would rather be in a position in which my top political priority is fighting with my progressive friends about their various batty and impractical ideas rather than looking for ways to work with them to preserve the fundamental things that create the conditions under which such a fight can be had at all. But that is not where we are.

 

We are not preparing ourselves for some hypothetical future crisis: The crisis is upon us, though there are different views about how best to approach that—differences in views about that (and judgments about what practical responses are necessary) are really the basis of the differences in sensibilities between organizations such as The Bulwark and National Review and our style here at The Dispatch, though none of these is homogeneous. I do not take precisely a Bulwark view of the current crisis, but the argument that the most meaningful practical thing we can do at the moment is to reduce the political power of Donald Trump and the Republican Party by electing Democrats, including loopy socialists, is not obviously bananas. I think it probably is wrong, in the way simplifications always are wrong, but I don’t think it is insane.

 

There are many people at this conference who believe that the project of liberalism in our time is electing Democrats. The people who believe this do not want to hear about the illiberalism of the Democratic Party or the illiberalism of the left. There are many self-described liberals in attendance, including Danielle Allen, a Harvard political scientist whose top priorities include overriding the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United and thereby empowering the government to engage in political censorship under the guise of regulating campaign finance, a body of regulation that is mainly about preventing bribery in one form or another. I do not think that is a liberal position, though she no doubt makes a good case that it must be.

 

Allen and Ezra Klein, in their discussion, agree that it is necessary to do such things to counteract “concentrations of capital and power,” as Klein puts it. Klein is associated with the New York Times Company, arguably the most influential corporation of its kind in the world, one with a revenue stream measured in billions of dollars and that is, and has been over the years, controlled by people who might be described in the pages of the New York Times as oligarchs if they had different kinds of last names or different political associations. Allen is associated with Harvard, arguably the most powerful institution of its kind on Earth, one backed by a $57 billion endowment among its other considerable financial resources. Concentrations of capital and power, to be sure. I am reminded of a South by Southwest conference I once attended, where I heard very comfortable people, some of them rich and famous, lamenting their situation as members of “marginalized” groups at a forum sponsored by Google, PepsiCo, AT&T, NBCUniversal, Facebook, UBS, JPMorgan Chase, and Deloitte. “We should all be so marginalized,” I wrote at the time.

 

But fish don’t know they’re wet.

 

***

 

Are simplifications always wrong? If I have a single political idea that is always at the back of my mind, it is Paul Valéry’s maxim: “Everything simple is false. Everything complex is unusable.”

 

***

 

The conference is at the Watergate Hotel, which leans into its association with the scandal that ruined Richard Nixon’s presidency. (The scandal by means of which Richard Nixon ruined his own presidency, I mean, J.D. Vance’s recent judgment notwithstanding.) A sign offers office space at the “infamous address,” and there is a hospitality room called the Vault, which one approaches through a hallway bedecked with scandal memorabilia and images of Nixon. For a slightly disreputable right-winger with a shaved head and a considerable firearms collection, skulking around the Watergate is a bittersweet thing. I am no G. Gordon Liddy, but I feel like I should be wearing a trenchcoat.

 

What I am wearing when I enter the hotel is a very good suit. It is a cotton suit, not a silk suit—it is very, very hot in Washington this week—but I have silk suits on my mind. More precisely, what I have going through my head is a bit of dialogue spoken by John Goodman in the film Born Yesterday, in which he plays a wealthy businessman, a rich but vulgar self-made kingpin who feels condescended to by a slick journalist who is profiling him, a role played by Don Johnson. The journalist, indicating the magnificent hotel suite in which his subject is being pampered by a barber and manicurist, asks, “Are you afraid of losing all this?” The businessman says he does not worry about that, because he believes in himself.

 

I started with a wagon, selling somebody’s junk. And I got here, in a silk suit, talking to a college know-it-all like you. If I lose it, I’ll meet you right back here in this room, in a new silk suit.

 

The first time I heard that line, I heard only the well-earned confidence of the self-made man. Now, I hear both that confidence and the resentment behind it, the chip on the shoulder. I have my own little history with the Watergate, where the Atlantic had its offices during my infamously brief period of employment there. I meet the Dispatch’s production guru, Victoria Holmes, for lunch at the lobby restaurant and pick up another Dispatch-associated guest, David French, along the way, running into him in the lobby. The last time I was in that restaurant was when I learned, over breakfast, that I was going to be fired. I got fired over breakfast from another job a long time ago, too—the most important meal of the day, to be sure, but, for me, a fraught one! I like to think that I do not have a very large chip on my shoulder, but I do hear that bit of dialogue from Born Yesterday in the back of my head. And I do make a point of putting on a very good suit.

 

***

 

One of the conference speakers is Bob Rae, who served as Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations. As he tells it, the wake-up call that something had really changed in the United States beyond Donald Trump’s idiotic talk about making Canada a state was something he experienced at the United Nations. Canada and its European allies, among many other nations, were putting forward a resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but the United States, at the last minute, introduced a much softer resolution, one calling for an end to the war but omitting any reference to the cause of the war—Russian aggression. That measure carried the day, with the United States voting in a bloc with the world’s autocracies over the objections of the world’s despairing liberal democracies. When Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney talks about “the rupture,” Rae said, that is what he is talking about. Under the Trump administration, the United States has become less like Canada or the United Kingdom and more like Russia or China, and the consequences are profound for the American people and for the world.

 

Rae’s remarks raise a question about how enduring we should expect the stamp of Trump and Trumpism on American politics to be. The optimists believe that we will look back on this period, after a few years, as a mere aberration; the pessimists believe that we will look at it as the beginning of something, a new ugly era of caudillo-ism and corruption. At the conference, I heard good arguments for both sides, and I still am not entirely sure what to think.

 

***

 

Reporting from some of the first Tea Party rallies lo these many years ago, I wrote:

 

There was an interesting coalition assembled for the Tea Party, and my unscientific sampling suggests it was about two-thirds regular Joes and about one-third people who are involved, in some way, with heterogeneous political enterprises, whether Ron Paul’s Campaign for Liberty, Libertarian- or Republican-party factions, anti-tax and anti-Fed groups, and the like. The regular Joes with whom I spoke were almost to a man talk-radio listeners, and their cheery ferocity makes me suspect that even conservatives have failed to truly appreciate the reach and power of that medium. There were some single-issue fanatics, inevitably, including one colorful clown who kept shouting “Abolish the Fed!” with the occasional improvised expletive. Another fellow was explaining, with great animation, that Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada was a converted Jew (this would have come as a surprise to his uncle, Cardinal Juan de Torquemada) and that various Jewish and Islamic tendencies, including the concept of machismo, had been imported into the New World by the conquistadors, most of whom were conversos as well, and that this apparently has something or other to do with something or other. One meets these sorts of characters in political crowds, and one learns to dread obsessions with matters Semitic, or mentions of the Knights Templar.

 

There is an inverse relationship between the specificity of political ideas and the sanity of political ideas. There are sensible people who are generally liberal and sensible people who are generally conservative, and then there are passionately deontological libertarians slugging it out with angrily consequentialist libertarians, or Objectivists affiliated with the Ayn Rand Institute vs. Objectivists loyal to the Atlas Society, because A is A, damn all heretics. I met a fellow at the Tea Party who described himself as an anarchist, and it seemed natural to us both that I asked him: “More of a Rothbard guy, or more of a Proudhon guy?” One wouldn’t want to associate with the wrong sort! The scattered nuts in the tea-party mix showed great specificity: abolish the Fed, or adopt a new tax code, or abolish the Fed, or legalize homosexual marriage, or abolish the Fed, or whatever.

 

...

 

I wonder if the people at the Tea Party want the same things, or want enough of the same things to cohere, and to cohere in a movement that is recognizably conservative. And if they do want enough of the same things, I wonder what those things are — because I was there, and I am not sure.

 

Looking backward, one can see a line, not quite straight and not quite unbroken, from those rallies to the present moment—a political current, right-wing but revolutionary rather than conservative, getting near to bursting its banks. And now the flood is upon us. It seems almost inevitable that Tea Party figures such as Sen. Ted Cruz were so easily swept away by the sewage flood of Trumpism. But if you were to ask me today whether the Republican Party still had a core around which it might once again be able “to cohere in a movement that is recognizably conservative,” I have a more definite answer, and it is “no.”

 

And so here I am—and here we are—looking for alternatives and allies. And this, I am more confident, is the beginning of something rather than the end of something.