The New Consensus Against the Liberal Consensus: Reflections on Libcon 2025
In the end, if liberalism fails it will fail because of its inability to compellingly articulate a basis for its ideals, ideals which reduce the likelihood of political violence in a diverse society. It will fail by suffering from the success of its own prosperity, its ossification into a sterile banality, a reality that is merely “given.” It will fall by becoming a cult of tolerance and neutrality over a voice of moral clarity and genuine freedom.
The Watergate Hotel, where Libcon 2025 was held.
In 1972, one of the most infamous scandals in modern American history roiled the Watergate Hotel. There, a burglary and wiretapping at the DNC headquarters lit a political firestorm under the Nixon administration, leading to the president’s resignation, his national disgrace, and a deepening sense among many Americans that the government could not be trusted—that all political institutions were incorrigibly corrupt. Poetically capping off an already tumultuous era of cultural politics—defined by the assassination of JFK, aggravated race-relations, a bloody and futile conflict in Vietnam—the Watergate scandal cemented a new distrust of “big government” in American public life.
This past week, a group of self-proclaimed liberals met at the Watergate for a conference under the name “Liberalism for the 21st Century” to discuss another scandal, one of a different order yet not disconnected with the history of American disillusionment with institutions. Pronouncing the event, Shikha Dalmia (president of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism) announced the existence of “a growing fear of coming to the United States” caused by the “abuses of political power” present in the current administration.
“Many are tired of consensus and managerialism and are beginning to yearn for utopias both revolutionary and reactionary, progressive and nostalgic.”
“The forces of authoritarianism,” Dalmia proclaimed, “are even stronger today than when we last met one year ago. We have learned that America is not exceptional when it comes to an immunity to authoritarian vices.”*
What Dalmia referred to, and what the conference as a whole meant to address, is the growth and political success of rightwing populist movements both at home in America and internationally, as well as their propensity to test the boundaries of the rule of law and consensus-based political order.
From MAGA in America to Modi’s Hindu nationalism to EU-skepticism and the Orbanization of Europe, something is changing. There is a new consensus against the liberal consensus.
***
I myself came to the conference because over the past several years I have become something of a student of the various ideological currents, both liberal and illiberal, that animate the modern American left and right. I am a young man who has grown up in the era of online politics, culture-war polarization, and American radicalization. During my time as an undergraduate, I was attracted to study the history of political philosophy both to understand our current political moment and to understand my place within it, to evaluate the values I had inherited, and—like many young people thrown into the world after graduation—to decide what it is that I want to make of my life.
What I have noticed, and something I have deep sympathies for, is that many Americans (particularly young Americans) of various political stripes share a common animus against one thing—consensus.
Consensus is what the American right (and left) recoils against and what liberal institutionalists have been struggling to defend. Liberalism is no longer viewed as a life-affirming form of politics—it is the status quo, the banner of which proclaims, “there is no alternative.” Many are tired of consensus and managerialism and are beginning to yearn for utopias both revolutionary and reactionary, progressive and nostalgic.
With these concerns in mind, I was fortunate enough to attend an event dedicated to discussing these very topics as well as the potential for a rebirth of American liberalism.
“Institutions don’t die, they ossify,” asserted Francis Fukuyama, the renowned political scientist and author of the infamous End of History and the Last Man thesis, at the first panel of speakers. “Sovereigntism,” he warned, is fueled by disenchantment with the “procedural justice” of the liberal international order, including institutions such as the United Nations, the European Union, and NATO as well as the downstream effects of “globalization”—a force for good but one that has deracinated many traditional communities and dislocated the American working class.
Similar insights were followed by the subsequent panel on the topic of immigration, particularly by the Malaysian-born Australian political theorist Chandran Kukathas. The cultural division, according to Kukathas, between a sovereigntist and liberal-international politics really stems from an economic division between those who consider themselves purely “national citizens” and those also consider themselves “global citizens.” In this sense, Kukathas elaborated, “immigration is not about a native ‘us’ versus a foreign ‘them’ but an internal cultural conflict between nationalists and cosmopolitans.”
It is for this reason that the MAGA movement represents a distinct variant of identarian politics, one in which the elite class they seek to dismantle are not merely the wealthy or the bourgeoise as in traditional class-based populism. They are “globalists”—what to MAGA are merely a transient class of people who no longer identify strictly with the traditional notion of the nation-state. This is not an entirely new concern. Similar appeals to sovereigntism have been made in the past, often with clearly antisemitic overtones designed to condemn the “wandering Jew.”
At lunch the various eclectic strains of this new “liberal” movement could be seen assembled together, munching on chips and roast beef sandwiches while engaging in conversations of geopolitics, philosophy, and social policy. I was struck by the fact that many of the people speaking together as friends in that room were not too long-ago political rivals. There, Obama-era Democrats such as Derek Thompson (coauthor of Abundance) mingled with keen interest and cordiality with McCain-era neoconservatives such as Bill Kristol (now editor-at-large at The Bulwark).
Perhaps what brought them together most was their shared sense of being politically displaced, one group by the electoral process and the other by the very party they once represented.
The next two panels featured an admixture of analysis of the ideological roots of global rightwing illiberalism with possible proscriptions on how to combat its continued rise.
“Our world tends to inculcate people into policy design,” bemoaned libertarian political theorist Thomas G. Palmer. Conventional liberals, in his view, tend to “treat their values as given,” allowing them to become “susceptible” to being attacked and undermined by adversaries more accustomed to defending their more radical notions.
Similarly, American University political theorist Laura Field highlighted that today’s Republican party has moved away from the “traditional stool of Reaganite conservatism.” Far from embodying a fusion between the ideas of social conservatism and libertarian economics, conservatives today have adopted a more transparently nationalist vision for the country, often borrowing from thinkers who led the “conservative revolution” in Weimar Germany before the onset of the second world war. Liberals today, she claims, need to overcome platitudes about “neutrality and consensus,” emphasizing instead the “moral values” that undergird liberalism.
Subsequently, Yascha Mounk, founder of Persuasion magazine, led a panel discussing what is to be done, stressing the need for a “counter-narrative” to the voices of reaction. Drawing from this, Sabina Ćudić (a current liberal member of the Bosnian house of representatives) discussed the importance of working directly with local communities to achieve such a narrative, emphasizing the “danger of ignoring ordinary stories of concrete human suffering.”
“The United States,” Ćudić posited, “is an octopus cutting off its own tentacles” with its refusal to make the positive case to ordinary citizens as to why the liberal international order is both in their interest and morally worthy of defending.
Ćudić makes an excellent point: societies cannot rely simply on the authority of elites or deference to established norms without making an energetic and compelling defense for their existence. That being said, I could not help but notice a frustrating lack of consideration among the panelists as to what this new narrative in defense of liberalism ought to be, or how liberals ought to concretely mobilize voters in new or innovative ways.
The younger generation of national conservatives have a mobilizing message. It is not “I will open things up to more creativity and economic growth,” but rather, “our identity and very way of life is at threat. I will defend you.” This is a profoundly old and romantic narrative but one that has stood the test of time and is capable of wielding tremendous political power. What is the animating narrative that liberals can use to advance their cause?
The final panel sought to address this issue, featuring an interview between Derek Thompson and popular author and Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. Dr. Pinker wants liberalism to return to a positive defense of the Enlightenment, the philosophical and revolutionary movement which took place in eighteenth-century Europe and gave birth to our modern ideas of individual freedom and social equality.
“Government is necessary,” Pinker stressed, “because men are not angels.” This, however, does not mean that an overbearing state is necessary aside from what is needed for the defense of mutual security and prosperity. “Deliberative forums and freedom of speech,” claims Pinker, “allow us to approach truth and solve problems.” Liberal democracy, in his view, is the best tested political system at our disposal for the creation of a post-scarcity society.
At this point Derek Thompson asked a question to Pinker that amounted to perhaps the most surprising moment of the conference, especially given Thompson’s generally wonkish interests in technocratic social policy and a program for the future he calls “abundance.” Thompson asked: “How do we make sense of the fact that the most affluent members of the liberal society are often its most radical opponents?” Does not economic “abundance” lead to “post-scarcity questions of identity and meaning” that have the potential to undermine the open society?
To this powerful and poignant question, Pinker argues that societal purpose can be derived purely by contributing to the “welfare of humanity” as a whole, not by a return to past ways of life. “Solutions always create new problems,” Pinker stressed. “We tend to romanticize community, but we also understand the traditional close-knit community as oppressive to the aspirations of individuals.” Any temptation to rebel against modern affluence must be understood in Pinker’s view as merely a symptom of the “madness of crowds.”
***
After attending this conference, I had a strange and ill-mixed sensation of having been both enlightened and disenchanted. I could not help but be reminded by the nature of the closing conversation of a certain movie quote by Wally, the mild and passive humanist from My Dinner with Andre, who rebutting his radical and conspiratorial friend asks, “Are we just like bored, spoiled children who have just been lying in the bathtub all day playing with their plastic duck, and now they’re just thinking ‘well, what can I do?’ ”
There clearly exists a strong love for the values of liberalism, pluralism, and openness among the class of people present during those two days. But I could not help but feel that they struggled to communicate this love in a palpable language that could be popularly accepted or understood. Ironically the most common appeals to dialogue and openness were themselves often laced in technocratic and jargony phrases symptomatic of their use within an in-group.
Populism can often be thought of as a reactive force against the language of elites. It was for this reason that I was drawn to read a work written by one of the referenced villains at the conference thereafter—R. R. Reno, American philosopher and theologian, editor of the conservative and predominantly Catholic magazine First Things, and author of the book Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West.
I found myself, while reading Reno’s work, in a strange and precarious state of fear and awe. Several chapters provided poignant and sharp critiques of the passive nihilism and cultural relativism that is all-too-often celebrated in elite liberal circles and institutions.
“To be an educated person today,” writes Reno in his book, “means acquiring the virtue of disenchantment […]. The rising person should be guided toward what Philip Rieff calls ‘deconversion,’ the condition of critical knowingness that makes us ‘faithless,’ not in the sense of believing nothing but of not believing anything strongly, which is to say ‘uncritically.’ This negative piety allows our leadership class to be impartial brokers in conflicts about substantive truths, or so we are told” (50).
Such a description shares deeply emblematic affinities with my own liberal undergraduate education. It does for many other scholarly and humanities-oriented students around the country as well, whether they are interested in art, music, literature, or philosophy. Commitments to deeply held ideals, either presented on the basis of faith or rationality, are largely considered passé in the world of intercultural dialogue and mandatory diversity training.
All this properly accepted, Reno uses what he calls the “hypocrisy” of the open society to advocate a “return of the strong gods,” by which he means the forces of nationalism and strict obedience to traditional religious norms.
“The West needs to restore a sense of transcendent purpose to public life (and private) life,” Reno writes. “We don’t need more diversity and innovation. We need a home” (xxx).
Contrary to R. R. Reno, the human condition is not satisfied merely in residing “at home.” When it finds itself within the warm restraints of a community it finds itself in need of adventure, and when it is on the road it always tends toward melancholia and homesickness. Restlessness finds us no matter where we reside.
The return of the “strong gods” of nationalism, sovereigntism, and strict religious community do not themselves provide an alternative solution to the ailments of the modern world. A return is always the reinstatement of a certain world from which men and women were at one time happy to escape. Whether we are restless at home or feeling lonely on the road, neither truth can deny the other. Both are equally guilty and viewed as beautiful in the other’s absence.
In the end, if liberalism fails it will fail because of its inability to compellingly articulate a basis for its ideals, ideals which reduce the likelihood of political violence in a diverse society. It will fail by suffering from the success of its own prosperity, its ossification into a sterile banality, a reality that is merely “given.” It will fall by becoming a cult of tolerance and neutrality over a voice of moral clarity and genuine freedom.
The future, however, is always uncertain. There is no one person with the power of divination or an oracle toward which we can direct our fearful questions. But there is one certainty—the postwar liberal consensus is over. Notably, this does not mean that liberalism is over—far from it. While an era of history has finished, history itself has yet to offer its final say. What is certain is that we now find ourselves in an age of profound political uncertainty, in which old values are being questioned and even older ones are being reasserted.
Perhaps what we should seek is not the victory of a grounded heaviness nor an alienated lightness but the freedom to move between these modes of life, in an enlightened, truthful, and honest fashion as real pluralism demands. Then we will perhaps learn to love each other both as free individuals and as an inter-connected community of human beings.
* Editor’s note: Remarks from speakers at the Liberalism for the 21st Century conference (August 14–15, 2025), hosted by the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism (ISMA), are from the author’s notes.
