LibCon2026 Kicks Off Tomorrow!
Are you ready for the most important convening of liberal thinkers and advocates from around the world?
Hear ye and rejoice! The 2026 edition of ISMA's flagship annual conference, “Liberalism for the 21st Century,” or LibCon for short, kicks off tomorrow—and we could not be more excited for the days ahead. The response has been overwhelming: we first had to expand capacity to meet demand; then, we had to close registration altogether and open a waitlist; soon after, we had to shut down the waitlist! Here's what we've got in store.
As she does every year, ISMA President and The UnPopulist editor-in-chief Shikha Dalmia will kick things off with an opening address to set the stage for the rest of the conference. If you missed her remarks from 2024 and 2025, please give them a read.
Dalmia’s diagnosis perfectly sets up the conference’s first panel: “Authoritarian Consolidation in America: The State of the Union.” On this panel, Princeton’s Jan-Werner Müller—the scholar who literally wrote the book on populism—will be alongside The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer, Stanford’s legendary (and LibCon legend) Francis Fukuyama, and Michigan State’s Erica Frantz, who will moderate the panel. Their charge: an unflinching look at how far the damage has gone before anyone talks about fixing it.
From there, the aperture widens and the global picture comes into view—which has been an ISMA/The UnPopulist focus from the beginning. “Building a Global Liberal Coalition” brings together a truly fantastic lineup: The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, The Economist’s Robert Guest (the panel’s moderator), exiled Nicaraguan democracy leader Félix Maradiaga, and former Canadian statesman Bob Rae—four people working four different fronts of the same fight, asking how liberals scattered across very different countries actually coordinate instead of just cheering each other on from a distance.
Thursday closes on a truly high note: a dinner keynote from Nathan Law, the Hong Kong student leader who spearheaded the Umbrella Movement, was stripped of his citizenship, and now lives in exile with a bounty on his head. His topic is persuading a divided society—and it is hard to think of a more relevant theme.
Friday will pick up right where Thursday left off. “Checking the Imperial Presidency,” the second day’s first panel, will bring together The New York Times’ David French, NYU Law’s Bob Bauer, the Brennan Center’s Liza Goitein, and Protect Democracy’s Justin Florence, who will moderate the panel, to tackle the era’s biggest structural question: how do you rebuild guardrails around executive power without just handing the next occupant a tamer version of the same weapon? The panel immediately following it is “Congress and Courts: Checks, Not Rubberstamps”—which brings in Aziz Huq, co-author of How to Save a Constitutional Democracy, The Atlantic’s Quinta Jurecic (the panel’s moderator), the Society for the Rule of Law’s Gregg Nunziata, and former acting U.S. Attorney General Stuart Gerson, asking what it actually takes to get two branches that have spent years deferring to a third to start doing their jobs again.
Midday brings what promises to be an electrifying panel: “Gen Z: Keeping it Liberal,” moderated by The Bulwark’s Sarah Longwell, who has probably spent more hours in focus groups with American voters than anyone else in politics, and featuring panelists Rachel Janfaza, founder of The Up and Up, a research and media firm built around understanding Gen Z; Gabe Fleisher, who’s been writing his own political newsletter since he was nine years old and now reaches tens of thousands of readers; and Steven “Destiny” Bonnell, whose online debates have built one of the largest youth-facing political followings on the internet. Why has the liberal coalition struggled to reach the generation it most needs, and what would it actually take to close that gap?
As if that weren’t enough, Friday afternoon runs four breakouts concurrently, so pick carefully! “A Rational and Humane Immigration System” brings together The Watch’s Radley Balko, who’s spent two decades investigating prosecutorial and police misconduct; the American Immigration Council’s Aaron Reichlin-Melnick; former Reagan administration official turned Renew Democracy Initiative vice chair Linda Chavez (moderator); and Kristie De Peña, who leads America’s Competitive Edge’s push for high-skilled immigration reform. “Defending Free Speech, Fighting Hate Speech” features Techdirt founder Mike Masnick, Brookings’ Jonathan Rauch (moderating this breakout panel), The Bulwark’s Cathy Young, and the Knight Institute’s Alex Abdo, who argued the case that struck down the NSA’s bulk call-records program.
“Delivering Equitable Prosperity,” the third breakout, focuses on economics, and brings together Scott Lincicome, Stan Veuger (moderator), Sonja Trauss, and 2024 Nobel laureate Simon Johnson, honored for his work on how institutions shape prosperity. They’ll take up the economic grievances fueling populism in the first place. And last but not least, “Federalism as a Bulwark” brings together Kathrina Wolfkot, managing editor of the Brennan Center’s State Court Report; Kevin Williamson, who broke with National Review after 15 years to help build The Dispatch; moderator Walter Olson, the Cato scholar and frequent contributor to The UnPopulist; and Jessica Bulman-Pozen, the Columbia law professor whose scholarship helped define how modern federalism actually works, making the case for the states and institutions positioned to check runaway federal power.
After the breakout panels, it’s back to the main stage. “Past Liberal Crises and Lessons: Overcoming Hurdles to Reconstruction” brings Poland’s former minister of justice Adam Bodnar together with Devin Pendas, a historian of the postwar Nazi war crimes trials; Jacob T. Levy, the moderator of this panel and McGill political theorist; and Manisha Sinha, whose recent book traces the rise and fall of the first Reconstruction. The panel takes up the left’s temptation to simply redirect the expanded executive power authoritarians normalized, and the right’s reflexive cry of “weaponization” against any effort to restore accountability.
Then it’s on to the closing fireside chat—theme: “What Is Freedom?”—between The New York Times’ Ezra Klein and Harvard’s Danielle Allen: the author of Why We’re Polarized and co-author of Abundance sitting down with one of the country’s foremost political theorists of democratic renewal—and author of The Renovator on Substack.
And before we call it a day, our friend and ISMA board member William Kristol takes 15 minutes to send us off—so we can get to the work of reconstruction ourselves.
That’s a seriously formidable lineup, and a perfect blueprint for our main conference theme: the Reconstruction Agenda. Getting classical liberals, erstwhile Republicans, center-left democracy hawks, abundance-minded economists, and social-justice liberals into the same room to build a movement against emerging illiberal threats is a genuinely special thing. We share a conviction that liberal democracy is worth defending and, now, worth rebuilding.
Authoritarian movements are skilled at tearing down institutions and considerably less skilled at replacing them with anything durable. The people gathering this week are the ones who will have to do that harder, slower work—writing the actual blueprints for a more accountable presidency, a judiciary that commands public trust, a Congress willing to reclaim its own authority, and an economy that gives ordinary people a reason to believe in the system defending them.
None of that gets settled in a day and a half. But the arguments made this week, and the alliances that hold up under real disagreement, will shape how seriously that rebuilding effort is taken well after the conference ends.
If you’re in the room this week, feel free to share your thoughts live and tag us using #LibCon2026—we want to hear from you as it happens.
See you in D.C.
© The UnPopulist, 2026
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