LibCon2026 Is Coming, July 16–17
Register now and avail yourself of our early-bird special to hear and meet the world's most brilliant and courageous liberal thinkers and activists
Here is the moment that you have been waiting for!
Registration is now open for the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism’s (ISMA’s) third annual “Liberalism for the 21st Century” conference—LibCon2026—on July 16 and 17 at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C.
What began three years ago as an ambitious experiment—can the world’s leading liberal thinkers, journalists, and advocates be gathered in one place to forge a shared vision for liberal democracy’s renewal?—has become the most important annual convening of its kind anywhere in the world. This year’s convening is our most ambitious one yet.
Purpose
The theme of LibCon2026 is the Reconstruction Agenda. On America’s 250th anniversary, its constitutional framework and democratic institutions are under more sustained pressure than at any point in living memory, and probably since the Civil War.
That is why this is not a conference about resistance. This is a conference about what comes next. It’s about ensuring that the post-Trump moment becomes a new post-authoritarian era in which liberal, open, tolerant, pluralistic societies once again flourish with renewed resistance to strongmen demagogues.
The first two conferences were about diagnosis—tracking authoritarianism, defending liberal norms, keeping the flame alive. That work isn’t done. But LibCon2026 opens the next chapter: What do liberals actually build when the authoritarian moment passes?
Authoritarians can destroy institutions. They cannot rebuild them. That task belongs to us, liberals—and we’d better have the blueprints ready.
People
Our speaker lineup is not yet complete, but it is already star-studded. Over the course of a day-and-a-half, starting on July 16, you’ll hear from Princeton’s Jan-Werner Müller, whose What Is Populism? has been translated into more than 25 languages; The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer, author of the New York Times bestseller The Cruelty Is the Point; Anne Applebaum, one of the world’s most prominent observers of authoritarianism; Aziz Huq, law professor at the University of Chicago; the brilliant Francis Fukuyama, a LibCon veteran, whose The End of History and the Last Man remains one of the most consequential works of political philosophy of the past half-century; The Economist’s Robert Guest; Adam Bodnar, Poland’s former minister of justice; Protect Democracy’s Justin Florence; our friend William Kristol and his inimitable colleague at The Bulwark, Sarah Longwell; the country’s premier criminal justice reporter, Radley Balko; the always-thoughtful Jonathan Rauch … the list goes on and on.
As if this were not enough of an embarrassment of riches, Nathan Law, the Hong Kong student activist who spearheaded the Umbrella Revolution against a Chinese takeover of his miraculous city and had to flee to the U.K., will deliver the dinner keynote on Thursday.
Oh, and we’ll close on Friday with a fireside chat between The New York Times’s Ezra Klein and Harvard University’s Danielle Allen.
Program
The conference opens where it must: with a clear-eyed situational assessment of authoritarian consolidation in America—how far it has progressed, what institutions have bent and which have broken, and how the American experience compares to other democracies that have navigated similar descents. Understanding the full depth of the damage is the precondition for knowing what reconstruction actually requires.
From there the program moves into the hard, specific work of figuring out what to build. On governing institutions, LibCon2026 will take on the executive branch, the courts, and Congress in turn. What does it actually take to restore prosecutorial independence, protect Inspectors General from political retaliation, and depoliticize a civil service that was systematically pressured into personal loyalty? How do you reform a judiciary so that it is simultaneously independent, accountable, and trusted by the public—rather than a political prize that inflames every election? And how does a Congress that has spent decades handing its powers away to the executive reclaim its role as a genuinely co-equal branch?
The program also takes on the culture war flashpoints—free speech and immigration—that have done the most damage to the liberal coalition, with an eye toward frameworks that are principled, coherent, and politically practicable. A liberal democracy that can’t deliver broadly shared prosperity will keep losing citizens to the appeal of strongmen. So we’ll consider some of the best ideas for achieving economic growth and spreading its fruits as broadly as possible.
Finally, LibCon2026 will consider the two powerful obstacles to any reconstruction agenda: on the left, the temptation to keep the expanded executive power that authoritarians normalized and simply redirect it; on the right, the reflexive cry of “weaponization” against any effort to restore accountability. The conference will work through both—and, through a dedicated session on Generation Z, ask how liberals secure the buy-in of the generation that stands to inherit whatever we build, or fail to build.
You can check out the program and the lineup thus far here. (And you can also browse the pages of the LibCons of yesteryear: well, the years 2024 and 2025, anyway.)
Public Participation
LibCon has always been open to the public, and we not only want to keep it that way but make it easier for anyone who cares about the state of liberal democracy in America and the world, not just the policy and academic crowd, to fully participate. To that end, we’re offering an early-bird all-access pass for $600 through June 5—after which it goes to $850. All-access means exactly that: every panel, the Friday lunch, and the receptions and dinners on both evenings. If you’ve been thinking about coming, now is the time to commit.
You could also obtain the basic package for $150, which we heavily discount for students, faculty, and those who work for non-profits.
We have sold out weeks in advance the previous two times. So don’t wait. Again, here is the program. Sign up now and avoid FOMO later.
If you have questions or experience any issues while registering, write to us at conference@ismaglobal.org
© The UnPopulist, 2026
Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.