As Trump's troops rolled into the nation's capital, attendees at our second annual convening at the Watergate Hotel left recharged and determined to fight authoritarianism
I attended this gathering in search of insight—hoping to hear from some of liberalism’s most acclaimed voices about its future in the coming century. Instead, from gavel to gavel, the proceedings were consumed by TDS. As John Olson aptly notes below, there was not a whit of self-reflection—no acknowledgment of potential error .
Nor was there any substantive engagement with the deeper structural flaws of democracy itself. No reckoning with Francis Fukuyama’s fragile concept of dignity, which undergirds much of liberal theory. No serious consideration of Steven Pinker’s decades of research suggesting that the unchecked veneration of individuality can lead to societal fragmentation—often requiring illiberal constraints to restore cohesion.
These tensions—between autonomy and order, between idealism and reality—are not abstract. They are viscerally understood by voters. Yet the dozens of PhDs who descended from their ivory towers seemed more interested in congratulating one another than in confronting these contradictions. The message, implicit and explicit, was clear: “We are right. Those ignoramuses who voted for Trump must be put in their place.”
If this is the intellectual posture of liberalism in the 21st century, then its crisis is far from political—it is philosophical. Before lamenting electoral outcomes or vilifying dissenting voters, liberalism must first confront the fragile foundations on which it rests. Its errors at the ballot box are symptoms, not causes. The deeper malady lies in its unexamined principles: a brittle conception of dignity, a romanticized faith in democratic virtue, and a refusal to reckon with the disruptive consequences of radical individualism.
We absolutely welcome reactions to the conference of all kinds. We aren't fudging the numbers in our post—overwhelmingly, attendees have told us that they felt the conference was really good. So there is no problem with offering a dissent. There is, however, a problem with offering a dissent that entirely flows from both (a) your support of the conference's main foil, Donald Trump, and (b) your fundamental misunderstanding of what the conference set out to do in the first place.
Let me address point (a) first. In your reply, above, you portray yourself as a seeker of liberal solutions. But you were also interviewed by NPR, and in that interview you registered your support for Trump's military occupation of the nation's capital. You literally said you've "got no problems whatsoever with President Trump" seizing control of D.C.'s police force and even deploying the National Guard to supplement that effort. If you, as not merely a supporter of Trump but of one of his most nakedly authoritarian and cynical power grabs, expected to vibe really strongly with the tenor of our conference, you were only setting yourself up for disappointment. Because we were always going to call out Trump's abuses of power, and that was always going to rankle someone who finds those abuses of power a breath of fresh air.
Now to point (b). You chide us for not "substantively engaging with the deeper structural flaws of democracy itself." That is true—we were not there to assess the propriety of liberal democracy. We are liberals. We are believers in democracy. We were not there to evaluate whether liberal democracy is right in the first place. Our starting point is that liberal democracy is right and that authoritarianism is bad. We did, however, do a whole lot of self-reflection. But you missed it because the sort of self-reflection you were looking for was of this variety, "Democracy has deep structural flaws. And liberals have been terrible and have made so many mistakes. And Trump and his MAGA movement was an appropriate backlash to those many mistakes liberals committed." That's not self-reflection—that's self-rejection. But the self-reflection was, indeed, present at LibCon2025. I could give numerous examples of it but one will suffice: a longrunning thread throughout the conference had to do with how bad liberals had gotten at reaching people, especially in comparison to the right, and how they need to recalibrate how they present and articulate liberalism, and where, to what people. The feeling was that across all these dimensions liberals had really dropped the ball. But as I said that was just one of many instances of self-criticism. You're like the person who chides a book for not covering what you wanted it to cover. Our starting point is that liberalism is worth defending and authoritarianism is worth opposing. We take stock of where liberalism has gone wrong along the way, but that taking stock does not involve repudiating liberalism in its entirety or suggesting that Trumpism was a justified response to liberalism's shortcomings. Doing so wouldn't make us self-reflective liberals—it would make us non-liberals.
The exact quote was: “in my visits over the years to Washington, D.C., it's gone from being a very pristine, beautiful city, a capital of my country that I can be very proud of. It's degenerated over time. Whether it's tent cities or homeless on the streets, It seems to me that it's gone downhill. And so I've got no problems whatsoever with President Trump trying to solve that problem. Whether he can or not, it's a different story.”
If you listen to the interview, you’ll find that my comment was preceded by President Trump saying earlier that he was trying to “make Washington D.C. the safest, most beautiful capital in the world.” Context matters.
Second, you state “We are believers in democracy.”
What I came to understand—more clearly after attending the conference—is that liberalism, in your framing, functions less as a political philosophy and more as an unquestioned religious creed. That’s not a compliment. A belief system that refuses to interrogate its own premises is just evangelizing dogma.
Third, you offered this as evidence of self-reflection:
“a longrunning thread throughout the conference had to do with how bad liberals had gotten at reaching people, especially in comparison to the right, and how they need to recalibrate how they present and articulate liberalism, and where, to what people.”
That’s not a reflection on liberalism’s ideas. It’s a pedestrian critique of messaging. If liberalism is worth defending, it must first examine its principles:
• a brittle conception of dignity,
• a romanticized faith in democratic virtue,
• and a refusal to reckon with the disruptive consequences of radical individualism.
Until then, your form of liberalism is just one street mob—competing with, but not morally transcending, President Trump’s.
I drove over 1,200 miles round trip and spent more than $1,000 to attend LibCon2025—not for an NPR interview, and certainly not to write you—but because I mistakenly believed that some of the best liberal minds in America might offer something more than an old-fashioned revival meeting.
That belief was misplaced. But my money wasn’t. I had the chance to directly query Mr. Fukuyama, Mr. Pinker, and others. And I found Rabbi Gideon Sylvester, Damon Linker, and Jack Goldsmith particularly compelling. Their contributions reminded me that liberalism still has thinkers capable of nuance, humility, and depth—even if the conference as a whole seemed more interested in reaffirmation than reckoning.
There is very deep moral confusion in calling LIBERAL democracy, which,, at its very root, is about containing tyranny of the majority -- aka, the mob -- a "street mob," while praising Donald Trump's naked and ugly populism -- aka real mob rule -- as something equal or better. It shows that words simply have no meaning anymore. You can plug them any way you like to try and discredit whoever it is you don't like. Also weird that you liked so many speakers and yet feel that there was not enough questioning and dissent! What I think you can't stand is disagreement by anyone who is left of center of you. I think you wanted an exclusive focus on how progressives have fucked it all up. But I think the reality is more complicated and it was our aim to bring together liberals of many shades and your own comment inadvertently acknowledges that we succeeded in that. Ultimately, I think someone who repudiates principles like limited government, federalism, free enterprise and praises an authoritarian like Trump for sending in the troops to clean up DC is at root also not a conservative but a statist. (I live in DC and I can tell you that it is a beautiful, gorgeous city with less crime and more areas that are safer than 20 years ago; in fact, where I live now was uninhabitable then. The halcyon days of your imagination didn't really exist.) These were ideals I espoused my whole life and it is painful to see them repudiated in favor of a naked authoritarianism just because "our" dictator is in power. It shows that for the conservative right, limited government was only a convenient mantra to use against the left. Now that it has the power, it is more than happy to wield it for the flimsiest of reasons like "cleaning up the nation's capital." Thanks for making the effort to come for the conference. We'd love to have you there next year too, but, honestly, you'll get more out of it if you engaged in a little self reflection yourself and returned to true conservative ideals (which are also liberal ideals properly understood).
Shikha Dalmia proposes a mass movement: "We need to fashion a broad countermovement to replace the old right/left divide with a new liberal/illiberal one. That means opposing bigotry and uniting around core liberal values: tolerance, pluralism, equal protection under the law, and accountable rulers." Then, how to make that countermovement a mass movement? First, by figuring out how liberals and their policies became so unpopular that the voters elected Trump and re-elected him, too.
Linking Liberalism and Liberal values to THE ECONOMY, and the financial pain to voters from Trump/GOP policies that are jacking up food prices, electricity bills, mortgage rates and health insurance premiums, is the path to victory in 2026.
Liberalism is clearly the right path to follow; but when also linked to sensible and prosperity-generating Democratic policies--like the recently passed Biden/Dem Infrastructure, Inflation Reduction Act, and CHIPS acts--Liberalism becomes supercharged.
I believe this is the path of resistance we need to be taking.
What struck me the most in Shikha Dalmia's speech was the emphasis on moral clarity vs moral purity, which is the root of fanaticism and divisiveness of all stripes.
I understand why institutionally The Unpopulist might feel it could be advantageous to post something like this humblebrag, and there's nothing wrong with some healthy self-promotion, but it's just a little too on the nose. Speaking as a former PR flack, when I see a press release like this with strained verbiage like "two riveting days and nights," I am forced to wonder if it might be covering up for the reality being closer to the opposite. I considered attending this year and balked when I saw Bill Kristol was a paid speaker, all in all this post does not help persuade me to definitely want to attend the next time.
I hope I hear about Libcon 2026 in time to try to attend. I guess I hope even more that it will be held somewhere in the US, right out in the open, instead of some secret place to avoid the not-so-secret police.
I’d like to offer a dissent.
I attended this gathering in search of insight—hoping to hear from some of liberalism’s most acclaimed voices about its future in the coming century. Instead, from gavel to gavel, the proceedings were consumed by TDS. As John Olson aptly notes below, there was not a whit of self-reflection—no acknowledgment of potential error .
Nor was there any substantive engagement with the deeper structural flaws of democracy itself. No reckoning with Francis Fukuyama’s fragile concept of dignity, which undergirds much of liberal theory. No serious consideration of Steven Pinker’s decades of research suggesting that the unchecked veneration of individuality can lead to societal fragmentation—often requiring illiberal constraints to restore cohesion.
These tensions—between autonomy and order, between idealism and reality—are not abstract. They are viscerally understood by voters. Yet the dozens of PhDs who descended from their ivory towers seemed more interested in congratulating one another than in confronting these contradictions. The message, implicit and explicit, was clear: “We are right. Those ignoramuses who voted for Trump must be put in their place.”
If this is the intellectual posture of liberalism in the 21st century, then its crisis is far from political—it is philosophical. Before lamenting electoral outcomes or vilifying dissenting voters, liberalism must first confront the fragile foundations on which it rests. Its errors at the ballot box are symptoms, not causes. The deeper malady lies in its unexamined principles: a brittle conception of dignity, a romanticized faith in democratic virtue, and a refusal to reckon with the disruptive consequences of radical individualism.
We absolutely welcome reactions to the conference of all kinds. We aren't fudging the numbers in our post—overwhelmingly, attendees have told us that they felt the conference was really good. So there is no problem with offering a dissent. There is, however, a problem with offering a dissent that entirely flows from both (a) your support of the conference's main foil, Donald Trump, and (b) your fundamental misunderstanding of what the conference set out to do in the first place.
Let me address point (a) first. In your reply, above, you portray yourself as a seeker of liberal solutions. But you were also interviewed by NPR, and in that interview you registered your support for Trump's military occupation of the nation's capital. You literally said you've "got no problems whatsoever with President Trump" seizing control of D.C.'s police force and even deploying the National Guard to supplement that effort. If you, as not merely a supporter of Trump but of one of his most nakedly authoritarian and cynical power grabs, expected to vibe really strongly with the tenor of our conference, you were only setting yourself up for disappointment. Because we were always going to call out Trump's abuses of power, and that was always going to rankle someone who finds those abuses of power a breath of fresh air.
Now to point (b). You chide us for not "substantively engaging with the deeper structural flaws of democracy itself." That is true—we were not there to assess the propriety of liberal democracy. We are liberals. We are believers in democracy. We were not there to evaluate whether liberal democracy is right in the first place. Our starting point is that liberal democracy is right and that authoritarianism is bad. We did, however, do a whole lot of self-reflection. But you missed it because the sort of self-reflection you were looking for was of this variety, "Democracy has deep structural flaws. And liberals have been terrible and have made so many mistakes. And Trump and his MAGA movement was an appropriate backlash to those many mistakes liberals committed." That's not self-reflection—that's self-rejection. But the self-reflection was, indeed, present at LibCon2025. I could give numerous examples of it but one will suffice: a longrunning thread throughout the conference had to do with how bad liberals had gotten at reaching people, especially in comparison to the right, and how they need to recalibrate how they present and articulate liberalism, and where, to what people. The feeling was that across all these dimensions liberals had really dropped the ball. But as I said that was just one of many instances of self-criticism. You're like the person who chides a book for not covering what you wanted it to cover. Our starting point is that liberalism is worth defending and authoritarianism is worth opposing. We take stock of where liberalism has gone wrong along the way, but that taking stock does not involve repudiating liberalism in its entirety or suggesting that Trumpism was a justified response to liberalism's shortcomings. Doing so wouldn't make us self-reflective liberals—it would make us non-liberals.
Berny, first, don’t misquote me.
The exact quote was: “in my visits over the years to Washington, D.C., it's gone from being a very pristine, beautiful city, a capital of my country that I can be very proud of. It's degenerated over time. Whether it's tent cities or homeless on the streets, It seems to me that it's gone downhill. And so I've got no problems whatsoever with President Trump trying to solve that problem. Whether he can or not, it's a different story.”
If you listen to the interview, you’ll find that my comment was preceded by President Trump saying earlier that he was trying to “make Washington D.C. the safest, most beautiful capital in the world.” Context matters.
Second, you state “We are believers in democracy.”
What I came to understand—more clearly after attending the conference—is that liberalism, in your framing, functions less as a political philosophy and more as an unquestioned religious creed. That’s not a compliment. A belief system that refuses to interrogate its own premises is just evangelizing dogma.
Third, you offered this as evidence of self-reflection:
“a longrunning thread throughout the conference had to do with how bad liberals had gotten at reaching people, especially in comparison to the right, and how they need to recalibrate how they present and articulate liberalism, and where, to what people.”
That’s not a reflection on liberalism’s ideas. It’s a pedestrian critique of messaging. If liberalism is worth defending, it must first examine its principles:
• a brittle conception of dignity,
• a romanticized faith in democratic virtue,
• and a refusal to reckon with the disruptive consequences of radical individualism.
Until then, your form of liberalism is just one street mob—competing with, but not morally transcending, President Trump’s.
I drove over 1,200 miles round trip and spent more than $1,000 to attend LibCon2025—not for an NPR interview, and certainly not to write you—but because I mistakenly believed that some of the best liberal minds in America might offer something more than an old-fashioned revival meeting.
That belief was misplaced. But my money wasn’t. I had the chance to directly query Mr. Fukuyama, Mr. Pinker, and others. And I found Rabbi Gideon Sylvester, Damon Linker, and Jack Goldsmith particularly compelling. Their contributions reminded me that liberalism still has thinkers capable of nuance, humility, and depth—even if the conference as a whole seemed more interested in reaffirmation than reckoning.
There is very deep moral confusion in calling LIBERAL democracy, which,, at its very root, is about containing tyranny of the majority -- aka, the mob -- a "street mob," while praising Donald Trump's naked and ugly populism -- aka real mob rule -- as something equal or better. It shows that words simply have no meaning anymore. You can plug them any way you like to try and discredit whoever it is you don't like. Also weird that you liked so many speakers and yet feel that there was not enough questioning and dissent! What I think you can't stand is disagreement by anyone who is left of center of you. I think you wanted an exclusive focus on how progressives have fucked it all up. But I think the reality is more complicated and it was our aim to bring together liberals of many shades and your own comment inadvertently acknowledges that we succeeded in that. Ultimately, I think someone who repudiates principles like limited government, federalism, free enterprise and praises an authoritarian like Trump for sending in the troops to clean up DC is at root also not a conservative but a statist. (I live in DC and I can tell you that it is a beautiful, gorgeous city with less crime and more areas that are safer than 20 years ago; in fact, where I live now was uninhabitable then. The halcyon days of your imagination didn't really exist.) These were ideals I espoused my whole life and it is painful to see them repudiated in favor of a naked authoritarianism just because "our" dictator is in power. It shows that for the conservative right, limited government was only a convenient mantra to use against the left. Now that it has the power, it is more than happy to wield it for the flimsiest of reasons like "cleaning up the nation's capital." Thanks for making the effort to come for the conference. We'd love to have you there next year too, but, honestly, you'll get more out of it if you engaged in a little self reflection yourself and returned to true conservative ideals (which are also liberal ideals properly understood).
Shikha Dalmia proposes a mass movement: "We need to fashion a broad countermovement to replace the old right/left divide with a new liberal/illiberal one. That means opposing bigotry and uniting around core liberal values: tolerance, pluralism, equal protection under the law, and accountable rulers." Then, how to make that countermovement a mass movement? First, by figuring out how liberals and their policies became so unpopular that the voters elected Trump and re-elected him, too.
It was an excellent conference. It was my first but definitely not my last.
Linking Liberalism and Liberal values to THE ECONOMY, and the financial pain to voters from Trump/GOP policies that are jacking up food prices, electricity bills, mortgage rates and health insurance premiums, is the path to victory in 2026.
Liberalism is clearly the right path to follow; but when also linked to sensible and prosperity-generating Democratic policies--like the recently passed Biden/Dem Infrastructure, Inflation Reduction Act, and CHIPS acts--Liberalism becomes supercharged.
"We need to fashion a broad countermovement to replace the old right/left divide with a new liberal/illiberal one . . ."
I think this is exceptionally well framed.
I believe this is the path of resistance we need to be taking.
What struck me the most in Shikha Dalmia's speech was the emphasis on moral clarity vs moral purity, which is the root of fanaticism and divisiveness of all stripes.
I understand why institutionally The Unpopulist might feel it could be advantageous to post something like this humblebrag, and there's nothing wrong with some healthy self-promotion, but it's just a little too on the nose. Speaking as a former PR flack, when I see a press release like this with strained verbiage like "two riveting days and nights," I am forced to wonder if it might be covering up for the reality being closer to the opposite. I considered attending this year and balked when I saw Bill Kristol was a paid speaker, all in all this post does not help persuade me to definitely want to attend the next time.
I did attend. See my comments from the bleachers confirming your thoughts.
Congratulations! We need these principled voices more than ever.
I hope I hear about Libcon 2026 in time to try to attend. I guess I hope even more that it will be held somewhere in the US, right out in the open, instead of some secret place to avoid the not-so-secret police.