Help Us Stand Up to Authoritarianism: Become a Paid Subscriber This Holiday Season

Right-wing extremism is well funded. That means liberals can't afford to hold back if they want to win.

Liberal institutions don’t survive on good intentions alone. They survive only when people who believe in them decide they are worth defending.

For more than four years, The UnPopulist has been committed to one task: standing up to new and emerging forms of authoritarianism—and making the case for liberalism as the best framework for human freedom, dignity, and pluralism ever devised. We’ve done it without paywalls and without compromising our principles.

Today, as authoritarian pressures intensify and independent voices face growing political and economic threats, we are asking readers who value this work to help sustain it by becoming paid subscribers.

The UnPopulist launched in Sept. 2021 as a small newsletter. A little over four years later, it has grown into a full-spectrum publication reaching hundreds of thousands of readers every few months. Throughout that growth, we made a deliberate choice: everything we publish—every essay, podcast, and video—would remain freely accessible to anyone who wants to read, watch, or listen.

That is not changing.

What is changing is that, for the first time in our history, we are asking readers who believe this work matters to help financially support it.

Trump’s renewed assault on the very idea of a free and open information environment—his hostility to independent media, to criticism of any kind, and to institutions that refuse to conform to MAGA ideological demands—has made reader support more essential than ever. We are doing everything we can to prepare the intellectual groundwork for a post-authoritarian future. If you’ve been waiting for a moment when supporting this work would matter most, this is it.

From the beginning, The UnPopulist has been unwaveringly focused on opposing new and emerging forms of authoritarianism threatening liberal democracy.

By liberalism, we mean a political and moral framework grounded in the equal dignity of every individual—one that embraces pluralism, toleration, openness, and the rule of law. We believe in markets and social justice, unapologetically. We are institutionalists who believe progress is achieved not through revolutionary rupture but through reform, persuasion, and deliberation.

When we say liberalism is the greatest governing system ever devised, we do not mean that it is perfect. We mean that it is uniquely capable of self-correction. Systems that reject freedom, equality, and accountability may invite revolution. Liberal systems demand something harder and more valuable: the patient work of reform.

That is why postliberal ideologies that seek to justify authoritarian power grabs are fundamentally illegitimate. Political power that is unchecked and unaccountable inevitably becomes a threat to liberty. When persuasion and deliberation are sidelined, brute force fills the vacuum. History leaves little doubt about where that road leads.

The United States is not yet a full-blown tyranny. But the rapid erosion of liberal institutions has already enabled this administration to:

• Order masked agents to seize citizens off the street

• Impose punitive tariffs on allies out of spite

• Insert the federal government as an equity holder in private companies

• Call for the execution of political opponents

• Unleash deadly, lawless violence in international waters

• Engage in unprecedented corruption and cronyism

• Threaten to unleash the military to quash the “enemy within”

Over the past year, we have dramatically expanded our coverage of these developments. Within weeks of Trump taking office, we launched Executive Watch, a real-time tracker documenting abuses of power, corruption, and institutional sabotage emanating from the White House. Bearing witness to this destruction is a vital task in and of itself—but also to preserve a record of what must be recovered and rebuilt in a post-Trump world.

Authoritarians excel at tearing institutions down. They are far less capable of building anything durable in their place. That task will fall to liberals.

That’s why we brought long-time, super smart guest contributor Andy Craig, whose knowledge of American history and the Constitution is encyclopedic, on full time to lead a major new initiative: The Reconstruction Agenda. This project is diagnosis and prescription, asking how American democracy became so brittle—and how it can be rebuilt to resist future authoritarian takeovers.

Through essays, expert contributions, and in-depth interviews on The Reconstruction Agenda podcast, the project examines reforms to governing institutions, the presidency, and the electoral system—especially the primary process that has trapped us in a cycle of extremism and dysfunction. The goal is not nostalgia, but resilience: institutions that are more accountable, more effective, and more protective of freedom.

Institutional reform alone, however, will not be enough. Liberal democracy also depends on cultural renewal.

That is why we continue to invest in our Liberalism & Religion series, led by our uber-thoughtful and erudite Senior Editor Berny Belvedere. Through essays and widely acclaimed podcasts, the series tracks the rise of religious nationalism while exploring authentically liberal interpretations of the world’s major faiths. Conversations with thinkers such as Russell Moore, Jerome Copulsky, Jonathan Rauch, and Tyler Huckabee examine how religious traditions—especially Christianity—can reject extremism and recover a liberal and more humane ethos.

We have also expanded beyond written work and podcasts into sharp, widely shared videos crafted by our hilarious and hard-hitting Senior Producer Landry Ayres—who does a mean Trump impression. In a short time, Landry has helped us build a formidable presence across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, reaching audiences far beyond traditional political media.

And finally, our meticulous and scholarly editor-at-large and director of our populism survey, Thomas Shull, will shortly return to the field to measure the appeal of strongman politics in America, a year-plus into the Trump presidency.

Our core team is small but deeply committed—Andy, Berny, Landry, and me. But we are supported by our young and bright Contributing Editor Birch Smith and our brilliant and zen Contributing Podcast Host Aaron Ross Powell. They bring additional depth and breadth to our work. Together, we’ve grown The UnPopulist from roughly 600 subscribers to more than 32,000, and from a few hundred monthly views to roughly half a million every 30 days on our site alone. We decided to expand our presence on new social media spaces not too long ago. Since then, we went from digital nonexistence to attracting over 25,000 followers across half a dozen platforms in just a couple of years.

Our work has been cited numerous times in The New York Times (just a few weeks ago, Tom Edsall quoted me on the fate of MAGA post-Trump), featured on MSNBC, and shared by leading voices such as William Kristol, Anne Applebaum, Charlie Sykes, Steven Pinker, Matthew Yglesias, Radley Balko, Tim Miller, Mehdi Hasan, and many others. One of our essays formed the basis of an amicus brief now before the Supreme Court in the recent Trump vs. Slaughter case about whether a president can fire agency heads without cause. Not just our reach, but our influence is growing. (Hell, even MAGA darling Laura Loomer has noticed us!)

As the flagship publication of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism (ISMA), we also are all involved in planning and hosting the annual “Liberalism for the 21st Century” conference (LibCon)—now the world’s most important convening of liberal thinkers. Past speakers include Francis Fukuyama, David French, Derek Thompson, Tom G. Palmer, Jack Goldsmith, Ruth Marcus, Vladimir Kara-Murza, and many others. We publish all LibCon transcripts and videos so that these conversations remain accessible to all.

Why support a publication that keeps all its work free?

Think of it as investing in a public good: rigorous analysis that resists authoritarianism, defends pluralism, prioritizes reason over rage, and insists on moral clarity rather than moral purity. Every paid subscription strengthens our ability to provide unflinching opposition to authoritarianism—here and abroad—and to help shape a liberalism fit for the 21st century.

We are asking you to contribute $80 for the upcoming year. That’s $1.50 per week to help sustain analytically rigorous but also morally clear journalism at a moment when it is urgently needed.

If you believe this work is worth defending, we hope you’ll partner up with us in this way.

© The UnPopulist, 2025

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