It seems scarcely imaginable, but The UnPopulist just completed five circles around the sun!
We founded the publication for the express purpose of defending liberal democracy from the rising tide of populist and other forms of 21st-century authoritarianisms. I wish I could report that our relevance had diminished in the 1,826 days since launch.
For a tour through memory lane, check out my very first post:
Alas, that is not the case. To the contrary, The UnPopulist is needed now more than ever.
Our hope was that by now the democratic recession that the world entered around 2006 would start reversing course—with the United States leading the way by reclaiming its proud liberal democratic traditions. Eight months before we launched, these traditions, after four years of sustained assault, had taken another big hit when a violent mob stormed the Capitol building, ending America’s unbroken 244-year ritual of the peaceful transfer of power. At the very least, we imagined the shock of this event would cause Donald Trump, the instigator, to be banned from political life forever and the culprits held accountable.
That didn’t happen. Even as other countries like Brazil managed to banish leaders such as Jair Bolsonaro who had tried to steal an election, the populist furies that buffeted Trump to office in 2016 reelected him to the most powerful office on the planet in 2024. These forces of course received no small amount of help from the geriatric and out-of-touch incumbent who refused to make way for a better challenger until it was too late.
But that was not Joe Biden’s only sin. He simply did not take the authoritarian threat looming over the country seriously—and failed not just to rebuild the presidential guardrails but chipped away at them himself through his own expansive use of executive authority, leaving us massively exposed.
Trump’s abuses before—and after—the Biden interregnum have been in a league of their own. We have covered them doggedly and plan to do so going forward. Our coverage has fallen into two main buckets:
Bearing Witness: Through our daily commentaries by some of the most thoughtful writers from around the world, podcasts with leading liberal thinkers, hard-hitting short-form videos and our Executive Watch tracker, we have systematically documented the abuses of power and institutional destruction currently underway— building an authoritative record in real time for accountability and history.
The Reconstruction Agenda: Bearing witness is necessary but not sufficient. We need to rebuild our decimated institutions not as they were—but stronger so that they are more invulnerable to another authoritarian takeover. To that end, we are building the intellectual roadmap to ensure that the post-Trump era is a post-authoritarian one through our Reconstruction Agenda series. The agenda spans: executive branch reform (rebuilding the internal guardrails the Trump administration has dismantled); congressional and judicial reform (restoring the legislature and courts as genuine co-equal branches capable of checking both the executive and each other); electoral reform (fixing the broken primary system and exploring alternatives to winner-take-all that reduce polarization and reward governing over extremism); federalism (how stronger state capacity can serve as a counterweight to federal executive overreach); and the culture wars—particularly immigration and free speech—where The UnPopulist is developing new liberal frameworks compatible with openness, tolerance, and pluralism. A running liberalism-and-religion series completes the picture, making the case that religious traditions are ennobled by serving liberalism and degraded by betraying it.
Ultimately, however, the battle for liberalism is the battle of ideas. A number of post-liberal ideologies—integralism, national conservatism, tech-bro monarchism, red pill nihilism—have arisen to retrofit an intellectual case into Trumpism, a fundamentally anti-intellectual movement.
Trump will depart from the scene shortly, but these challenger ideologies will stick around to undermine liberalism. Liberalism’s only recourse is to respond to them thoughtfully but forcefully. They would ban liberals if they ever got their hands on state power; but liberals undermine themselves by resorting to such tactics so they have no choice but to duke it out in the marketplace of ideas. And that is what The UnPopulist is doing well—and will continue to do.
The GOP needs time in the political wilderness to find its way out of the Trump cult. This is a vital task because a liberal democracy where one of the two major parties remains this sick cannot survive; it will infect the other party and bring down the whole body politic. We are determined to keep administering tough love—reminding Republicans of their pre-Trump commitment to limited government, a constrained executive, checks and balances, and ordinary human decency. And we’ll keep an eye on the Democratic Party for signs of slippage toward the fringe. We don’t believe in false moral equivalence; but we do believe in vigilance.
Partly for this purpose, The UnPopulist’s publisher, the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, is tracking the rise of authoritarian populism on both sides through its biennial survey whose findings we have been doggedly reporting. (This year’s survey shows some heartening developments: Trump’s hardcore populist base is noticeably eroding and we are not seeing an uptick in populist sentiment in the Democratic Party.)
We have also been tracking the rise of authoritarianism in other backsliding democracies—and mining them for lessons. Not everything is bleak: Poland, India, and Hungary are offering glimmers of hope that democratic resistance can work, and we have been reporting on what that resistance looks like and what it took to mount it.
And our readers will have noticed that we have been publishing the fascinating conversations at ISMA’s annual Liberalism for the 21st Century conference, which in three short years has become the biggest, cross-political, pan-ideological gathering of leading liberal public intellectuals, journalists, academics, practitioners, activists, and concerned citizens from around the world.
The UnPopulist prides itself on not being an op-ed mill or a place for hot, sexy takes that titillate but don’t inform. Everything we publish is with an eye toward providing something fresh that adds value—not noise—to our discourse. Despite—or maybe because of—our editorial model, we have grown rapidly: from around 600 subscribers at inception to 48,000 now, with nearly 50% growth in the last year alone. Our social media presence nearly doubled over the same period, with total followers across platforms rising 91%. Facebook growth has been particularly extraordinary: from 702 followers to 8,800—a more than 12-fold increase in 12 months. We started as a solo operation. Now we are a full-time team of three—the multi-talented Berny Belvedere and the scarily erudite Andy Craig—plus part-time staffers including our meticulous survey director Thomas Shull.
We have branched into short-form video content distributed across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and other platforms. This is driving our expansion by connecting The UnPopulist‘s arguments to younger and broader audiences well beyond the newsletter’s core readership.
Meanwhile, our long-form features—print and podcast—continue to earn us respect from scholars, journalists, and policymakers around the world. We have become a leading voice with our work cited in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Bulwark, The Dispatch, MSNBC, and other major outlets. One mark of our success is that those whom we respect, respect us—and want to write for us.
We’re not resting on our laurels though. Starting next week, Andy will launch Deep Cuts, a regular Monday column—noon sharp—where he’ll bring his prodigious knowledge of constitutional law, history, and politics to bear on the broken state of our world and what it will take to fix it.
We’re also expanding our live chats, including a regular one from Berny Belvedere built around a simple premise: inviting a sensible, center-left voice to offer fair-minded critiques of their own side. We have no interest in the hysterical anti-left pile-ons from the hard right infotainment complex, or even the heterodox commentators who perform neutrality while functioning as closeted right-wingers. But the left, like any political movement, has problematic tendencies—and tracking them honestly is part of what intellectual seriousness requires. Also, should the next president be a Democrat, he or she will need to have their feet held to the fire to fix our decimated institutions, not try and exploit the wreckage to advance their own policy preferences. We are committed to doing that.
We’re also launching a regular roundup of ICE abuses, which have continued apace despite the change of top leadership at the Department of Homeland Security. (Look out for my podcast soon with the great Radley Balko on this subject.)
The authoritarian forces in this land of freedom and elsewhere were stronger than we had imagined. But so is the resistance—at least outside of elite institutions. We are determined to do our part to strengthen it.
But we invite you to do yours. We paywall none of our content because we want it to reach the widest possible audience. On our milestone birthday, however, consider upgrading to a paid subscription. Do it now! It is a small contribution to saving the world.
And, of course, as always, please circulate our work to your friends and family and ask them to subscribe. Together, we can turn the tide and restore sanity—and ensure that our children and grandchildren live in a decent, prosperous, and peaceful world.
For a birthday toast, here’s a video montage of LibCon2026, conveying our mission and vision going forward:
© The UnPopulist, 2026
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