Defeating Populist Authoritarians Requires Real-Time Pushback on Social Media
But liberals also need to be clear about what they stand for and deliver governing results to voters
Today, we’re thrilled to share the full video and lightly edited transcript of LibCon2025’s panel, “Practical Strategies for Resisting Authoritarianism: Lessons from Abroad.”
Strongman leaders in liberal democracies may contest elections on a level playing field, but once elected, they often entrench their power by changing election rules, stacking the judiciary, co-opting traditional and social media, defunding opposition groups and dissidents, and generally restricting civic space for resistance.
This panel explored communication and electoral strategies that have—and have not—proven effective in overcoming these obstacles, offering insights liberals can use to reach the public and prevail at the ballot box.
Moderated by
, Founder of Persuasion, the panel featured Poland’s , who has advised democratic campaigns in his own country and Georgia; award-winning Mexican journalist León Krauze, a columnist at The Washington Post; and , a Member of Parliament in Bosnia and Herzegovina who is also the president of the liberal Our Party.
Yascha Mounk: This panel will give you the seven secret tips to beat populists anywhere in the world. To give you those tips, we decided to invite representatives of all of the countries that have vanquished populism so that it shall never return.
Unfortunately, those countries don’t exist.
So let’s instead start by reflecting on why the struggle is so difficult and why the countries that are represented on this panel haven’t fully succeeded in beating the populists. And perhaps we’ll manage to get to the seven secret tips to winning every election at the end.
León, talking with you about Mexico, I know that one of the things that populists tend to be extremely strong at is dominating the media landscape and setting the terms of a political debate. How is it that AMLO—Andres Manuel López Obrador—managed to do that so successfully in Mexico and why is it that the Mexican opposition hasn’t really been able to compete with that?
León Krauze: I think it’s very significant that we’re here to talk about lessons from abroad. I sometimes get the feeling as a Mexican journalist—a Latin American journalist and an American journalist as well—that there’s this sense, this peculiar notion in America, that somehow this authoritarian threat to liberalism and to democracy has only happened here and hasn’t happened elsewhere. Latin American history proves that Latin American liberals have been fighting against autocracy for 200 years now, in many forms and shapes. That region has seen many of the very concerning dynamics that we are seeing in the U.S. today. Sadly—and Mexico is an example of this—many of those dynamics have played out with far more definitive and pernicious consequences than those that we’re seeing in America. So I’m grateful for the opportunity we have today to talk about the lessons from abroad.
I think some context is necessary. Mexico is indeed not a success story. The fight for democracy and liberalism has mostly failed. A populist autocratic regime is taking root. In the seven years since the López Obrador project began, it has entrenched itself as the new hegemonic force, very reminiscent of—and even worse than, I would say—the PRI [Institutional Revolutionary Party], which ruled Mexico for more than 70 years under this anti-democratic system of political succession that Mario Vargas Llosa precisely, correctly, painfully called “the perfect dictatorship.”
During these seven years, López Obrador and his project have amassed unprecedented power. I’ll give you just a few examples: he dominates the legislature—Morena [López Obrador’s political party] controls both houses of Congress—and has almost total control of the states, governing the states where 72% of Mexicans live. He has dismantled and captured the judiciary. This is one of Donald Trump’s wet dreams, and López Obrador actually managed to do it through judicial “reform” that abolished the existing court structure completely, from the first judge at the local level to the highest Supreme Court justice, and replaced them with elected judges. The ruling party has dismantled institutions and watchdogs, and has intimidated and harassed the media on a daily basis. And now the last piece, I would say the coup d’etat, is planning centralized control of the electoral process, a proposed electoral reform which would return control of the elections to the government and effectively dismantle the National Electoral Institute, which has guaranteed electoral fairness. That’s where we stand.
The battle for the daily narrative has been key to this project. López Obrador established a daily narrative through morning press conferences. He didn’t miss one day over six years. In these—called las mañaneras—he set the national agenda, intervened everywhere, became the narrator-in-chief of Mexican public life, and intervened in electoral processes although it was prohibited by the law. The goal was clear: marginalize opposition voices and position the presidential narrative as the sole framework for interpreting reality.
I once took a very distinguished colleague of mine from the Washington Post to Mexico. We were having breakfast early in the López Obrador term, and we were having breakfast surrounded by televisions. All of a sudden López Obrador appears, and he got really ashen-faced, completely terrified, and said to me, “What’s happening? A national emergency?” And I said, “No, this is every day. Every television station, every news site, is broadcasting these three hours every single day.” And he told me, “Well, this is North Korea.” And he was right in many ways.
The lesson there is that the opposition never mounted an effective counter-narrative. They failed to produce a figure who could respond in real time, or any time, and did not consistently challenge the president’s lies—over 90,000 lies during the six-year term, according to independent fact-checkers. So, not challenging the media narrative has played a big role. The media, the official narrative, has played a very big role, a crucial role, in the consolidation of Mexico’s current autocratic turn.
“The opposition [in Mexico] never mounted an effective counter-narrative. They failed to produce a figure who could respond in real time, or any time, and did not consistently challenge the [López Obrador] president’s lies—over 90,000 lies during the six-year term, according to independent fact-checkers. So, not challenging the media narrative has played a big role. The media, the official narrative, has played a very big role, a crucial role, in the consolidation of Mexico’s current autocratic turn.” — León Krauze
Mounk: One of the questions that I think the opposition in the United States faces at the moment is: How do we talk about very concerning developments to ordinary people in a way that warns about real dangers of autocratic erosion without sounding hysterical, without sounding like you’re saying stuff that just doesn’t seem realistic? And how do you do that without feeling like you’re being elitist, like you’re speaking about stuff that just doesn’t matter to everyday people in a straightforward way? I know that in your political context, you’ve been thinking about how to deal with that. How do we speak about the danger of autocracy in a way that actually connects to the lives of ordinary people?
Sabina Ćudić: I come from a political party that, given our political structure—both systemic and normative—should not exist by any means, because we are the only truly multi-ethnic, truly liberal, progressive political party located in Sarajevo; the only party located with a headquarters in Sarajevo that had non-Bosniak party presidents, including a Serb. And so many other examples: When I was elected to the federal parliament, 63% of our elected officials were women. We are the only party whose election lists were rejected by the Central Election Committee because they didn’t have enough men on them given the law stipulating 40% of any gender.
However, we do exist. We are growing. We are in the government. We’ve had the prime minister of Sarajevo Canton, which due to our heavy decentralization is actually an economic hub that has a budget greater than one of the Entities—half of the country. And how was that possible given all these restraints? I’m not trying to paint a picture that’s unrealistic: We still suffer from all the other obvious setbacks that you expect from a deeply divided country. Just to illustrate, we’re now a country of approximately 2.7 million people with 14 governments with all the governmental structures within them. We are still very sectarian, very divided. We still have ethnonationalist or extreme right-wing people leading extreme right-wing nationalist parties that are big players.
However, in the past months, our institutions have been resilient, in finishing a court case against one of those oligarchs who will now, as a result of the judgment, be forbidden to participate in the political life of Bosnia and Herzegovina for the next six years. Milorad Dodik will not be participating in the political life of Bosnia and Herzegovina. But how did we get there? Why did we survive? Why are we growing? And why do we remain on the scene? I think there are no shortcuts. I wish I could tell you now that there are three ways you beat oligarchs, because it seems to me that in the United States, the only way to get your point across is to enumerate it. And ideally there would be three. So I was trying desperately to come up with three ways—but I’m still struggling, so work with me here.
One of the ways is that you simply need to deliver, and we did. There was a huge gap, a huge open space, for quality-of-life measures in a country that’s deep in symbolic ethnonationalist debates for the past 30 years. Over 80% of our policies and politics are symbolic ethnonationalist politics. The weapons used against us, we actually turned against our critics. They said, “You’re not for big policies. You’re not for national policies. You’re not foreign policy people. You care about cats and dogs and human rights and organizing a parade in Sarajevo.” Then the surveys actually showed that in a deeply conservative, deeply divided country, people were more than willing to vote for young people, to vote for women, to vote for progressive policies, because they felt that on the local level where we captured the audience through delivering things like public transport. In three months since we got in power, we managed to completely abolish waiting lists for early education in Sarajevo Canton.
I’ll leave you with a controversial statement, which is not very popular in this crowd: I think that our form of liberalism, similar to liberalism around the world or particularly in the U.S., has been to some extent a victim of its own success similar to vaccines. In a way, because it presupposes constant progress and constant reevaluation of where we are, we forgot to take stock of where we got to and forgot that it also contains in itself mechanisms for self-regulation and development and questioning all these things. Did we pay enough attention to the environment? Did we pay enough attention to the nonbelievers, and so on? So in that sense, that has been, I have to say, a winning ticket for us so far.
Mounk: Alexander, until three or four months ago, it would have been obvious why you’re on this panel, which is that Poland is one of the few countries that managed to win after eight years of rule by a far-right populist party, with a moderate democratic movement winning the parliamentary elections there about two years ago. It was a big ray of hope. Since then, you’ve lost a very important presidential election against the very forces that seemed to be on the retreat. What went wrong with this election? Why do you think that populism has proven to have sustained power in Poland?
Alexander Sikorski: I worked on both the 2023 election, which we won, and on the 2025 presidential election, which we lost. I think there were a few factors that helped us win in 2023. After eight years of Law and Justice government, an authoritarian-style government pushing us towards a dictatorship, there were structural problems which—because of Covid, high inflation, endless corruption—made people sick of the government and more likely to vote for an alternative. In addition, the opposition for the first time managed to truly cooperate during the election. And both the center-right, the center, and the left-wing opposition groups, though not forming into a united coalition, managed to run a campaign that was coordinated so that different topics were taken by different parties, and they were able to gather a majority of the voters.
On top of this—and this is something that I have to disagree with Sabina on—it’s not enough to just simply deliver. You also have to constantly communicate that you are delivering. And this is something that López Obrador and many other populists understand perfectly: daily press conferences, walking up and down the length of New York City, AI videos every single day about your re-migration plans in Germany.
Ćudić: You’re not really disagreeing with me, you’re just adding to my argument that in addition to delivering ...
“It’s not enough to just be good at government, you have to constantly communicate. And in that 2023 election, we did have a leader who was constantly on social media, constantly communicating what needed to be done … I was just looking at the statistics: In the U.S., 75% of people under the age of 30 are on Instagram, 62% of people under the age of 30 are on TikTok. That is where young people now are. You cannot rely on traditional media. You cannot rely on newspapers and TV shows. You need to be there. And the liberal campaign [in Poland] completely underestimated that in a way that it didn’t in 2023.” — Alexander Sikorski
Mounk: You’re disagreeing about disagreeing, how very liberal.
Sikorski: ... it’s not enough to just be good at government, you have to constantly communicate. And in that 2023 election, we did have a leader who was constantly on social media, constantly communicating what needed to be done.
The past few years have been a mixed bag in Poland, in terms of what the government has actually achieved and what it hasn’t achieved. One of the mistakes of the 2023 campaign was that we made 100 promises for the first 100 days of ruling. I believe maybe a dozen, or 15 or so, of those policies have actually been passed, and that has come back to haunt us two years later. When it comes to the 2025 campaign, I actually don’t think that there are huge structural changes in Polish society, that the far right is on the rise. My personal belief is that we lost that campaign because of specific bad decisions made by the campaign team that ran the election campaign, such as not focusing enough on new forms of media, on social media, on TikTok, and on Instagram.
I think it was too certain of itself. There were also mistakes made when it came to spending campaign funds and advertising. These small decisions made by a handful of people had a big effect on the future of Poland’s democracy. The government needs to do a good job, but you also need to be good at winning the communication battle during election cycles and throughout your term in government.
Krauze: I could not agree more. I mean, going back to the Mexican example, six years of this daily torture and the other side had nothing—complete silence. When I see what’s happening in the U.S. and when I hear these debates among some of my friends in the Democratic Party, some of them advising people not to react, to stop reacting to what Trump is saying, my reaction to that advice is: please keep on reacting. React more forcefully. Respond forcefully. Clarify as much as you can. Because Trump is learning. The first time around, he rarely held these impromptu press conferences. Now he does it very often. We saw it the day before yesterday: the part about immigration was full of lies and misrepresentations. He got no disciplined reply by anyone in the Democratic Party.
That’s why, frankly—and I’m not referring specifically to the figure as a presidential candidate—someone like Gavin Newsom or L.A. Mayor Karen Bass gives me hope. Because at least there’s a response there. They are trying to respond to the narrative, to the way Trump and the Republican Party own the news cycle. Politically, it might make no sense to redistrict, but to reply, to clarify who Trump is and what his narrative is on a daily basis is absolutely crucial to keeping that narrative from taking root and taking hold of the American conscience. Because if you don’t do that, if you take the high road and stop reacting and only think in terms of vision, then you one day wake up and find yourself in a situation like the one Mexico is in, where narrative no longer matters much because power is in the hands of a very specific set of people, very deeply entrenched, and who knows if they will be able to be dislodged democratically from power in the near future. I frankly doubt it.
“If we are simply pointing out what’s shocking about what is going on, without offering credible alternatives—and by credible alternatives I mean calm, convincing, deliberate alternatives—I think we are feeding into that, and we are also becoming populists. The challenge is how to fight populism without becoming a populist. How do you remain a liberal? And how do you remain an emancipatory force for your voters, for your party? The challenge is always finding a perfect recipe, in terms of the ingredients and percentages involved in representing my voters and emancipating my voters and leading my voters.” — Sabina Ćudić
Mounk: I think being silent is not a good strategy in politics, and we can all agree on that. But it also matters whether you have something to say and whether the thing you have to say actually accords with the views of most people. And when I look at the challenge in the U.S., I fear, first of all, that too often those who are standing up to populists don’t have enough to say. I didn’t personally have a sense that the Democratic candidate in 2024 actually knew what they wanted to do with power if they were elected, and that’s one of the reasons why they were reluctant to go on shows and podcasts and so on where they’d have to speak at length. Too often, the people who are opposing populists just don’t speak for what most people believe on a whole set of economic and cultural issues. So, great, let’s go out there, let’s be on social media, let’s do counter-programming, but how can we stand for liberal values in a way that actually is compelling, that feels like you have a reason to speak and that connects with the views of most people? And no disrespect to all of my wonderful panelists here, I’m going to ask the only practicing politician about how to do that first.
Ćudić: I disagree. I think speaking up in a way that you maybe just evoked—speak up, speak more, point out—probably has the effect of demonstrating impotence rather than political power, and I think voters are not drawn to that. If we are simply pointing out what’s shocking about what is going on, without offering credible alternatives—and by credible alternatives I mean calm, convincing, deliberate alternatives—I think we are feeding into that, and we are also becoming populists. The challenge is how to fight populism without becoming a populist. How do you remain a liberal? And how do you remain an emancipatory force for your voters, for your party? The challenge is always finding a perfect recipe, in terms of the ingredients and percentages involved in representing my voters and emancipating my voters and leading my voters.
What I refuse to do is engage in this politically incestuous relationship, where I observe on social media exclusively what my voters want, and then I deliver it and then I feed it back to them, and then in the end we create this rather sick creature that’s directionless and inspiration-less. So, I don’t think we need to shout.
This morning I woke up at 6:00 a.m. and I was met with crazy media theories in Bosnia and Herzegovina that I’m actually not here. It was actually under the headline, “Fake News: Sabina Ćudić Did Not Have a Panel with Steven Pinker and Francis Fukuyama.” They somehow found that there is this panel happening, and claimed that I’m misrepresenting it and that it’s fake news, and that the photo we took last night that I posted is AI generated. How do you engage with that? Do you fall into that trap of engaging with that kind of news regularly, or do you keep marching on your own path? I think [the answer is] marching on your own path. As liberals, simply pointing out what’s wrong with the existing system does not inspire me. It does not get me out of bed in the morning, let alone large numbers of people. So, it needs to be credibly explained in terms of interests.
Mounk: I think this is a really important point. What populists are trying to do is polarize the whole political system around them and to dominate every conversation. Now, perhaps the worst answer is to be silent in such a way that they just get free reign to do whatever they want. But I suspect, with Sabina, that the second worst answer is to play into a polarization where they are setting the agenda and the non-populist opposition is simply saying, “That is bad, not that, not that.” We’re responding each time.
So, how is it that opposition parties can actually set their own agenda? How is it that they can fill the political space, not cede all of it to people like AMLO and Kaczynski and others, but do it on their own terms?
Krauze: I’m not advocating for Jasmine Crockett; I’m advocating for a response like that of Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass. This is not outrage-reaction. Especially recently, [Newsom] has chosen to react to the idea of redistricting in Texas by opening the door to possible redistricting in California. He has done that and he has also explained why Texas’ steps, in the middle of a decade, is a clear political move that endangers American democracy. He has done so forcefully, which matters in the current political environment—force and strength matters. Saying things forcefully doesn’t mean yelling or being outraged, it means showing decisiveness and leadership.
“One of the ways [to win] is that you simply need to deliver, and we did. There was a huge gap, a huge open space, for quality-of-life measures in a country [like Bosnia] that’s deep in symbolic ethnonationalist debates for the past 30 years. Over 80% of our policies and politics are symbolic ethnonationalist politics. The weapons used against us, we actually turned against our critics. They said, “You’re not for big policies. You’re not for national policies. You’re not foreign policy people. You care about cats and dogs and human rights and organizing a parade in Sarajevo.” Then the surveys actually showed that in a deeply conservative, deeply divided country, people were more than willing to vote for young people, to vote for women, to vote for progressive policies, because they felt that on the local level where we captured the audience through delivering things like public transport.” — Sabina Ćudić
And he has chosen other topics, for example, the importance of the rule of law and the exaggeration—to put it mildly—that was sending the National Guard into to L.A. I was there during the protests, covering them, and Newsom did a great job, along with Karen Bass, in explaining to the American public that no, L.A. was not on fire; that there was vandalism and violence, circumscribed to a 0.5 mile space in America’s second largest city. And then, on immigration, clearly explaining not only why deporting people the way the government is doing so is absolutely outrageous and immoral, but also explaining very clearly why immigration is important for California, the fifth largest economy in the world.
I am not vouching for him as a political figure, a presidential candidate, but he has not gone to the rafters and shouted, “I hate Trump, and the only thing I am is anti-Trump.” He has played a role which is more productive. And I think that is the model that somehow the Democratic Party has to arrive at. It’s not only him. The bench is so deep, with governors and mayors and senators. My point is this: the Democratic Party, and liberalism, has to find a clear voice, not only of outrage and reaction, but of proposition and ideas—vision, of course, but it has to be forceful.
From the Mexican experience, coming from a country that’s falling apart because we have stayed silent—again, my role here is to share with you the Mexican experience—from my experience, silence is much worse than outraged reaction.
Mounk: I buy it’s worse. The question is: What’s enough? And I’m not sure that just outrage is enough.
Ćudić: We listened to a debate today on immigration and where liberalism fits in, and I found myself in many of these categories mentioned. I’m a former refugee. As a child, I was a refugee briefly from Sarajevo to a neighboring country. I’m Muslim. I’m a woman. I got a scholarship for the U.S. in high school and I ended up studying here. In this discussion between the Democrats and Republicans, I see exactly that reaction to the forceful evacuation of people. But what I don’t see is decisive leadership and an argument in favor of people who came to this country, how it also shaped the interests—both domestic and foreign—of this country.
For example, in my entire leadership of my party, they’re all foreign educated, whether they were migrants, whether they were refugees, whether they got scholarships, and so on. Half of them have foreign citizenship, dual citizenships. There are foreign policy interests in taking people in, educating them, reshaping the global scene. The intervention that happened in the Western Balkans was the last, greatest liberal institutionalist intervention in the world. It was under NATO leadership, led by the U.S. and the U.K. These successes are not celebrated enough. USAID changed lives tremendously, not just on a sentimental level, but in the interest of the U.S. What the U.S. is currently doing is like an octopus cutting off its own tentacles, because these tentacles were deep in our systems through organizations such as USAID. And now you see somebody literally taking a chopping block and cutting off their own hands, and the Democrats are sitting aside and kind of apologizing and explaining, “No, those were not condoms in Mozambique.” There is no decisive explanation why these policies mattered, why they brought so much interest to the U.S. and the world.
In that sense, I find it devastating that something that I bought into, now I turn towards the people who disseminated that information and those policies and I find them lacking confidence to explain why they did it in the first place.
“One thing is defending the institutions that we think are important, defending the policies that we think are good, and defending the values that we think are correct. Another thing, and I agree with Leon on this, is that you have to constantly communicate that. Another thing is also going on the attack, and making sure that you are not just responding to whatever the Trump administration is doing or defending whatever the authoritarian is attacking, but also finding wedges within the authoritarian’s own base to try and create your own news. Do investigations, like who in the authoritarian’s family or closest supporters is stealing money. We were talking last night about the Epstein list, which is an issue that divides the extreme Trump loyalists and the extreme MAGA ideologues. That is a venue of attack, an anti-pedophile message is an effective message. If we have to sacrifice some Democrat donors to bring Trump down, I think that’s a good trade.” — Alexander Sikorski
Mounk: This seems to me to be the fundamental point, and it’s the fundamental point of this conference: How do we actually talk about the importance of liberalism, which I do think makes a giant difference in the lives of ordinary people, in a way that is fulsome, accurate, and communicates to people?
I’m very struck by the fact that when the leaders of some of the greatest educational institutions in the history of the world had a chance to explain their mission to Congress, not a single one of them was capable of talking in a common-sensical way about what the purpose of Harvard University, of MIT, or of the University of Pennsylvania is. And it’s the same when it comes to something like USAID. Why, in the last seven months, have we not been able to make a case for why that institution was important and did something positive for the world?
Alexander, you talk a lot about the importance of social media, and I agree with you that one of the venues in which we have to explain that case is on social media. But I worry that if we just focus on the medium, but we don’t have a message, we’re not going to succeed. The problem with Kamala Harris’ campaign was not that she didn’t have good enough social media, it’s that all of her smart, well-paid social media consultants didn’t have anything to communicate because she didn’t have anything to communicate. How can liberals stand up for their values on social media, but in a way that actually speaks to a deeper message?
Sikorski: One thing is defending the institutions that we think are important, defending the policies that we think are good, and defending the values that we think are correct. Another thing, and I agree with Leon on this, is that you have to constantly communicate that. Another thing is also going on the attack, and making sure that you are not just responding to whatever the Trump administration is doing or defending whatever the authoritarian is attacking, but also finding wedges within the authoritarian’s own base to try and create your own news. Do investigations, like who in the authoritarian’s family or closest supporters is stealing money. We were talking last night about the Epstein list, which is an issue that divides the extreme Trump loyalists and the extreme MAGA ideologues. That is a venue of attack, an anti-pedophile message is an effective message. If we have to sacrifice some Democrat donors to bring Trump down, I think that’s a good trade. So not just defending the institutions but finding new forms of attack, new messages that divide the bases.
One of the successful messages in 2023 in Poland was actually on immigration. It turned out that while the Law and Justice government was extremely anti-immigration, extremely anti-refugee, used very hateful and racist rhetoric towards them, they had actually overseen not just the greatest increase in legal immigration into Poland in its history but also had been selling visas for cash to help immigrants from Asian and African countries come to Poland. And the opposition used this as a wedge issue, to be against immigration—against mass immigration—but not in a corrupt and racist way like the government was doing. This was a successful issue that divided those voters. Finding those wedge issues, finding scandals or lifestyle topics to attack the authoritarians, is also important. You have to put them on the defensive. Let them explain why their friends are incompetently putting journalists into group chats, or selling visas, or maybe on a pedophile list. Make sure that you’re also on the attack.
“Something that I admire about the extreme right wing literally everywhere—anywhere from the Philippines to the U.S.—is how much they love what they do, and how they always project this idea that there is no alternative for them. I think liberals are, on average, somewhat embarrassed that they’re in politics. And there is this kind of distance: I could be somewhere else, doing something smarter, I could be paid better. There is almost a resentment towards politics, even by liberal politicians. And that’s not a good look.” — Sabina Ćudić
Mounk: One of the things that I find striking is that it’s often difficult for moderate politicians to speak fulsomely. We always have this concern that we need to explain the subtleties of some policy issue, that we can’t talk too much about a corruption scandal like that because perhaps it communicates that we’re anti-migrant, and we don’t want that. Often, we’re worried about parts of our own political coalition, that when we speak in plain terms, some part of our own political coalition may get angry at us.
Sabina, you’re somebody who is capable of speaking very clearly, and yet you stand in a difficult political context for deeply philosophically liberal values. What are some tips for politicians in the U.S. for how to square that circle? How can we not always be the party or the movement of the eggheads who speak in these roundabout circumlocutions, who use terms concocted by activists to represent the world in the most correct way, rather than actually communicate directly and fight for those values in that more direct way?
Ćudić: To be a liberal in the Western Balkans, and particularly in Bosnia and Herzegovina, you have to be either a masochist or a sociopath. When I’m having a hard time motivating myself, I deeply believe in that Bukowski quote, “Find what you love and let it kill you,” and now I’m in the phase of letting it kill me. Something that I admire about the extreme right wing literally everywhere—anywhere from the Philippines to the U.S.—is how much they love what they do, and how they always project this idea that there is no alternative for them. I think liberals are, on average, somewhat embarrassed that they’re in politics. And there is this kind of distance: I could be somewhere else, doing something smarter, I could be paid better. There is almost a resentment towards politics, even by liberal politicians. And that’s not a good look.
This might be contrary to liberal thinking, but I do think that we need to project power. Fake it until you make it—simply behaving like you’re already in power. I instituted a rule in my party’s PR office, first to cut reactions to what the nationalists are doing by 70%. The reactions we do issue cannot be sent without the last paragraph explaining what needs to be done, and how we are going to go about it, and first steps that we are going to take: legal steps, political steps, and so on. And we did that when we were practically not even on the map.
As a nation in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but also the region, we are addicted to victimization. We actually don’t like it when something terrible happens in the rest of the world, because we miss us being the kind of the center of the universe and the central victims. And I openly say we need to move away from those identities. We need to move away from this perception that we need to continue exporting problems to get the attention of the world. And the same thing that I think about Bosnia and Herzegovina, I think about my party. We need to be exporting solutions confidently, and in a sense almost ignore the noise.
I don’t think that you’re particularly good at avoiding and ignoring that noise here. The chant of, “We will win” by Schumer in the Senate ... how effective was that on a scale from 1 to 10? Below zero? That projection of victimhood and these lukewarm reactions don’t sell liberalism well.
“The power of symbols, the power of having fun, of making jokes and laughing about it and speaking in an extreme radical way, promoting moderate centrist policies. You can divorce the two. You don’t have to be boring when you talk about moderate policies. You can be radical in your language while still promoting that. Especially in this age of hyper short attention span media environment, where everything is focused on social media and these rapid reactions, using tough, extreme language is the way to get attention.” — Alexander Sikorski
Sikorski: One of my favorite things that Trump did, in his first days in office, was that as soon as he got inaugurated he went and filled out a huge stadium full of his supporters. He had a little desk in the stadium, and he sat there and signed executive orders and held them up to cheering crowds of people. That is political symbolism, and you can do that as a liberal, signing liberal executive orders or liberal laws. The power of symbols, the power of having fun, of making jokes and laughing about it and speaking in an extreme radical way, promoting moderate centrist policies. You can divorce the two. You don’t have to be boring when you talk about moderate policies. You can be radical in your language while still promoting that.
Especially in this age of hyper short attention span media environment, where everything is focused on social media and these rapid reactions, using tough, extreme language is the way to get attention. Once you have people’s attention, you can slip in the fact that actually you want to do very moderate things. But selling it is as important as the actual policy itself. If you can’t sell the policy, you’re not going to be able to enact it.
Krauze: In the U.S., reality presents a very clear opportunity, because the Trump administration has been committing daily overreach. Many people believe that this is actually an advantage for them, because they’re flooding the zone—the famous Bannon theory. I consider it an opportunity; I see it as a glass half-full. I’ll give you an example: Hispanic voters. We were under the assumption that Hispanic voters had switched generationally. Now Trump is down to 27% support among Hispanic voters. I think that’s lower than what he had in 2017. Why? There’s many reasons—yes, inflation, but basically it’s immigration. It’s the stories that the media has chosen to tell about immigration, and the outrage around the images of immigration.
I believe in the power of stories. I was terrified that my colleagues in the national media would choose to ignore the very concrete stories of human suffering that this was going to cause, and has begun causing when this campaign of terror began against immigrants. And the exact opposite has happened: we have kept focusing on the stories, and you can see the result. Trump is losing Hispanic voters in droves. There’s a clear opportunity with this constant overreach that the administration is insisting on carrying on. The media has to play a role, which is another big “if” when you bring in examples from abroad, but I think the American media, contrary to many people’s opinion, is surviving. Let’s call it surviving, but surviving enough, and dealing with the current moment diligently enough.
Mounk: I’m starting to worry that we’re putting too much weight on how to communicate and not enough weight on the substance of policy, of what the government delivers, and of the core messages. You’re right that the media has done a very good job of showing the stories of individual people who’ve been very negatively affected by some of these indiscriminate roundups and deportations. But when I try to understand why it is that Hispanics have changed, from being in the Democratic column to helping Donald Trump win 2024 to now souring on him, a lot of that seems to me to have to do with policy.
There is a set of views in America among the majority of the population, including the majority of Latinos, which is that immigrants can make a great contribution to the country, that this is a country of immigrants, that we should respect people’s rights, that we should appreciate their contributions, and also that the country needs control of its southern border with Mexico. Joe Biden did not do enough to control the border with Mexico, which is one of the reasons why a lot of Latinos and a lot of other voters turned on him. Trump has hugely overshot that message and is indiscriminately deporting a whole bunch of people in ways that also go against the views of the majority.
“When I see what’s happening in the U.S. and when I hear these debates among some of my friends in the Democratic Party, some of them advising people not to react, to stop reacting to what Trump is saying, my reaction to that advice is: please keep on reacting. React more forcefully. Respond forcefully. Clarify as much as you can. Because Trump is learning. The first time around, he rarely held these impromptu press conferences. Now he does it very often. We saw it the day before yesterday: the part about immigration was full of lies and misrepresentations. He got no disciplined reply by anyone in the Democratic Party.” — León Krauze
So are we overemphasizing the importance of how to communicate, and through which channel, and with what language, and underestimating the importance of just moving into the space where the majority of the population lies? Is that actually the way to win against the populists? Is that one of the mistakes that the opposition has made in some of your countries? Is that perhaps a mistake that Democrats are making in the U.S. today?
Ćudić: When I used to teach, I would ask my students who they think are the three key interest groups, the most powerful interest groups in Bosnia and Herzegovina. And they struggled with it: are they war veteran organizations, religious groups, conservative groups? They were actually way quicker to answer that question about the U.S. It’s mind-boggling that 350 or so million people were essentially centralized down to these issues of gender, transgender rights—which, coming from a progressive party, I’m absolutely in support of—but 350 million people really bogged down to several issues: separation of church and state, gun rights, and this. I feel like you fell into political stereotypes here, and there was no conversation with the other side.
I visited Bosnia’s diaspora community in St. Louis. I visited the diaspora communities throughout the U.S. They told me the overwhelming majority of them actually votes for Trump. I asked them why. And the overwhelming majority of them are Muslim, such as myself. Despite the Muslim ban and everything else, for them it was gas prices because a lot of them are in the truck industry and transportation industry. For them, that’s a key element of their survival. In that sense, I don’t think we openly talk to the other side. We are constantly thinking about tricking people into voting for us. And we are constantly thinking about strategies.
With all due respect, I don’t think the Epstein case, as important as it is, will lead the U.S. into this progressive new future. As exciting as it is to use those things, I don’t think we need to be corrupted by the process. Not only for ethical reasons, but for strategic reasons as well. It’s simply not sustainable to play that game on a daily basis. There needs to be something more substantial at the table that you believe, in order to sell it. I simply cannot be selling a product that I don’t believe in.
Sikorski: On the other hand, the Biden administration did try and pass through a bipartisan bill on the border, on immigration, that was the toughest ever. They did do a lot of work with unions. It was the most economically progressive administration ever in the U.S., that passed huge infrastructure spending bills. These were real policies, this was a real economic vision for how the U.S. should function. And he was still extremely unpopular, and his vice president disastrously lost the election.
Ćudić: You’re onto something here, absolutely, but there was no framework for that. There were a lot of excellent policies—and I think that’s the crux of the issue with liberalism, not just selling each of them very cleverly in social media, but providing a general framework. As I was saying about USAID, it’s an excellent thing. But I couldn’t explain in simple terms, if you woke me up at 4:00 a.m. and asked me to explain, the interests of both the U.S. and other countries in these liberal institutionalist policies. We didn’t create a convincing, inspiring, future-oriented, but also present, interests-based framework in which all of this fits in. And I think Trump is doing that. And not just based on social media, but first of all, like Will Ferrell in the movie, “Nobody knows what it means, but it’s provocative.”
What does it mean like make America great again? At what point did it become bad? At what point was it great? To what age are we returning? Is it 1920s? 1800s? I don’t know. Nobody knows. But somehow, it provides this general sense that we strayed in the wrong direction, and I am now moving the ship where it needs to go. I don’t see that framework in the counter-narrative, or any narrative at all.
Mounk: A basic premise of any panel is that you should under-promise and over-deliver. I said earlier that we were going to leave you with seven tricks to beat populists forever. We’re going to deliver nine of them, so I’m going to ask each panelist to give us three tricks to win the supremacy of liberalism for the 21st century.
Sikorski: Trick number one is to spend a lot of time understanding and communicating on Instagram and TikTok, and making sure you understand how those algorithms work and that you are reaching voters, not just through The New York Times and through CNN, but also through social media.
Trick number two is to not just defend the institutions and not just defend the policies, but to attack, and find those wedge issues that divide your opponent’s base and be ruthlessly disciplined in attacking those weak spots.
Trick number three is build a broad coalition, and make sure that you can work with people to your left, to your right, and unite against a common enemy. And then you can have arguments later. In Poland, the fact that we had a broad coalition was great for winning the election. It was not so great for governing. But in order to govern, you do need to win the election first. So take social media seriously, attack and find those wedge issues, and unite as an opposition.
Ćudić: Remember why you started. This crisis is an excellent opportunity for all of us to carefully examine why we do what we do. Once you have a convincing explanation for why what we do matters, it’s endlessly easier to come up with strategies to deliver that product to your voters, to your colleagues, to the general population. I believe the same goes for professors, activists, politicians: if we simply keep running in this endless hamster wheel of coming up with new strategies to sell something that we are not sure ourselves what it is, we are going to have a hard time. We have an assumption that the sense of urgency we feel is felt by the people outside of this room. It is not. In that sense, I think the first step is explaining it to yourself, and then to everybody else.
Krauze: Communicate better. When you think of immigration and Hispanic voters, you hear what Hispanic voters have been saying. The Democratic Party has failed to deliver, for ages, on reform. They promised, but they didn’t deliver. The truth is that the Republican Party was the one that blocked immigration reform for decades in America, but the Democratic Party didn’t manage to explain it correctly. And that’s one example of many.
And then, community-oriented politics. If there’s one thing Bernie Sanders did wonderfully with Latinos, it was to build offices through his advisor, Chuck Rocha, in communities. If you are not in the community, if the community can’t see you, can’t feel you, if you don’t do grassroots—this sounds basic, but sometimes it’s not—then the community won’t vote for you. Those would be my two cents.
“Many people believe that this is actually an advantage for them, because they’re flooding the zone—the famous Bannon theory. I consider it an opportunity; I see it as a glass half-full. I’ll give you an example: Hispanic voters. We were under the assumption that Hispanic voters had switched generationally. Now Trump is down to 27% support among Hispanic voters. I think that’s lower than what he had in 2017. Why? There’s many reasons—yes, inflation, but basically it’s immigration. It’s the stories that the media has chosen to tell about immigration, and the outrage around the images of immigration. I believe in the power of stories.” — León Krauze
Question (Jennifer McCoy): I want to return to the question of resistance. There’s a strategic dilemma for the Democratic Party in the calls to use power. Gavin Newsom has power, and he’s using it. Excellent. The Democratic Party in Congress really has few levers of power. There needs to be a narrative, a clear narrative explanation. But when you have an unpopular party like the Democratic Party is right now, should it be involved in organizing resistance or should it let grassroots, organized resistance be independent of it? And what about the other sectors of society—corporate leaders, the media, the universities, the law firms—how do you get them involved?
Sikorski: Civil society plays a very important role in getting people excited about politics and motivated to vote. But at the end of the day, in a democracy, in order to change governments you need to vote for a political party. So you cannot allow the political parties to atrophy and not do their work. In Poland, and in Georgia (the country), one of the failures of the political parties was that they didn’t do politics. Politics means you go to your voters, you go to the villages, you talk to people. You convince people to sign up to be a part of your party and to be party activists, you fundraise, you communicate with voters, you do all the things that we talked about earlier. The political party needs to win the next election. You can’t just turn to the nice, friendly people in the think tanks and the civil society groups and the human rights foundations to bear the brunt of the political work. The political party at the end of the day has to win.
Ćudić: Not only should it, it must. It absolutely must participate in this process. Last time I checked you have a two-party system. The emergence of a third party, unless you’re counting on Elon Musk, is not likely. Even if it does emerge, obviously it won’t be comparable to the resources the Democratic Party already has. It is an unpopular party, because it’s not providing a coherent alternative to Trump administration, so this is an enormous opportunity. You have midterms coming up, and I think we need to move away from theoretical discussions and you need to go out and vote, invite your neighbors and work with those candidates, work with what you’ve got. We don’t have ideal scenarios or context.
Krauze: We’re in the time of personality politics. Personalities matter, and I think the Democratic Party has a really deep bench. The party should find a group of people, a group of spokespeople, who could address specific themes of the Trump presidency. Pete Buttigieg, I don’t think he would be a great presidential candidate, but he’s incredibly eloquent. So is Gavin Newsom. [J.B.] Pritzker is like that. There are many people like that. The only option is to find them and give them a platform to respond, in my opinion, on a daily basis.
Question (John Mackey): Something I’ve been struck with at this conference so far is speakers who demonstrate courage. Sabina, you were talking about faking it until you make it, but you weren’t faking your courage. There’s a truth to courage, and I’m realizing I haven’t heard a courageous politician for a while. So my question is: Are we doing enough to create the space for courageous people to speak courageously?
Ćudić: I have a series of lawsuits by oligarchs against me, and I won them all. I’m now in the appeals process that will start in September. I was testifying in one of those hearings for hours, and I thought, “This is exciting, I could do this, bring them on, bring more of them.” And then I went home and got sick and was throwing up for three days. So your body registers something that perhaps your mind doesn’t register at the time, from the adrenaline and all that. But I think the question is of authenticity. Writers often say it’s not that they want to write, but that they have to write. We need more people like that, who just feel like they have to do it. Of course there are alternatives, but I am driven by my sense of anger in observing my environment, and there is almost no possibility of not doing it.
That’s why I am resistant to the idea of strategies that go beyond our authentic sense of what we are doing, and why we are doing it. I want to have a meaningful life. I want my son to be proud of me. That’s at the very core of it. It’s not just a chess game that I want to win at. So in that sense, I think we need to evoke that sense of courage in leadership in all spheres, including universities that are under enormous pressure, judges under enormous pressure. I feel a lot of people don’t know why they started.
Sikorski: I’ll say on the topic of courage. It’s not just courage in campaigning or when in opposition, but courage once you’ve defeated the populists and are back in government, the courage to govern effectively and to prevent the populist from coming back. One of the failures of the Polish government in the last two years has been a lack of decisiveness and courage to prosecute all the people who we accused of stealing and of corruption and of breaking the constitution.
One of the issues you’re facing in the U.S. is the lack of courage to prosecute Donald Trump for inciting violence in the Capitol on Jan. 6. Political courage is not just individual politicians standing up to dictatorship; it is also the courage, once you have won the election—by a sliver of a percent—to defeat the populist, to then really take your values seriously and bring those people to justice.
Question (Lenny Glynn): I’m a veteran of the 1992 Clinton campaign, and I remember very well that we had a war room that did not let one day’s news cycle go by without a sharp, quick, strong response, and also initiated things that the other side had to respond to, sometimes two in a single day. The Democratic Party is headless and clueless right now. But is it possible that Trump’s actual enforcement of immigration, the style of it, might tip over the Hispanic vote in the U.S. as a whole? The way that Pete Wilson’s anti-Hispanic behavior in California turned it into a one-party state?
Krauze: I’ve never bought this idea of the Latino vote swinging to the Republican Party. I think the Trump phenomenon in this particular election with Latino voters requires a larger, deeper, more complex explanation, including some cultural factors that I won’t get into here. But I think that it was never a generational realignment. And what we’re seeing now even surprised me—the speed with which, in polls at least, the Latino vote is moving towards the Democratic Party again.
If Texas does go on to redistrict its map and gerrymander the state, how will that affect Southern Texas, which is mostly Hispanic and traditionally blue, although it voted red in the last election? My bet would be that we are going to see the Latino vote swing back towards the Democrats in the midterms. Whether or not that happens in 2030 depends, frankly, on personalities: who the candidates will be, who the Democrats will nominate. Trump won’t be on the ballot, and that’s a big part of the deal with Latinos, that’s where the cultural aspect comes in. I won’t go into that, but I think that he’s a caudillo-like figure who has an appeal. The strongman has a cultural appeal for the Latino voter. So the answer to your question is yes, I think there’s going to be, hopefully, a swing back to the Democratic Party.
Question (Jack Goldstone): Yascha, your t-shirt says a free society is worth fighting for. I could say Trump is doing that: he’s freeing us from cancel culture, he’s freeing our companies from unfair foreign competition, he’s freeing our communities from a foreign invasion. Populists have stolen the narrative on freedom, patriotism, and confidence in the future. How do liberals get that back?
Sikorski: We’ve talked a lot about communication, and Trump does a really good job of communicating all the time, being effective on new media, and finding new topics to constantly throw in—flooding the zone, as we mentioned earlier. Liberals need to do a better job of appropriating those tactics, which work better in this new media environment, to reclaim those words. I don’t think this is anything new, but: wave the American flag, use the language of freedom and America and the Statue of Liberty or whatever it might be, and talk constantly about your own ideas.
Find ways to undermine Trump. Find ways to attack his patriotism. Show where he’s taking money. I think this Qatar airplane deal was a good example of something that’s not patriotic, that is anti-American. I think you can, by being more patriotic than the supposed patriots and the supposed nationalists, win that back. You don’t have to sacrifice any liberal values to do that, because we are also patriots. There’s nothing wrong with that, and I think you should be able to admit that.
Mounk: One of the fundamental problems of this moment is that some of the accusations against moderate political forces, and some of the accusations against liberalism as a governing ideology, have electoral force because they seem right. One of the things that we need to do, collectively, is to look in the mirror and to see where we haven’t been living up to our own values, and where we really need to change, not just how we talk, but what we stand for, what we deliver for people, what we promise to people in order to stand up for those values. We need to reinvent liberalism—and this is one of the missions of this conference—for the 21st century. The values to which we are committed are in a deep crisis. And what happened, in past periods in which liberalism was in a crisis like that, was that we really rethought what that meant in terms of what we fight for, how we argue for those values, and where we’ve fallen short. It’s great that at this conference we are proudly standing for our values—that is something that we absolutely need to do—but I think we also have to have a deep process of introspection about why it is that we are not clearly winning in Poland, not clearly winning in Mexico, not clearly winning in the United States. That requires some self-criticism.
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