Donald Trump built his political brand on the idea that he is an outsider to Washington who is singularly suited to draining “the swamp,” crushing “the deep state,” dismantling “the uniparty,” and burning down “the establishment.” He got a lot of political mileage out of the idea that he is not a politician and that his movement represents an uprising against the elites. It’s a narrative that powered Trump’s ascent to the presidency and fuels his continued dominance over the Republican Party.
But the reality of Trumpism today tells a different story: with Trump himself back in the White House, the GOP in control of both houses of Congress, and a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, Trump and his movement are not the rebels storming the gates—they are the establishment.
Trump’s party has become the political home of entrenched interests determined to tilt the playing field even further in their favor. It has behind it the world’s richest men, a massive propaganda machine, the world’s most powerful political party, and now the entire United States government.
Liberals cannot defeat Trumpism by pretending these dynamics don’t exist, nor by meekly defending a broken status quo ante. The response must be a bold, radical liberalism that takes on entrenched corruption and incompetence with an unapologetic agenda for fundamental change.
Liberals must flip the script.
Trump’s populist style ensures he will always try to project himself as the outsider on a crusade against “the establishment”—but as his party’s nominee in the last three presidential elections, and as a winner of two of them, he has no business portraying his movement as the rebellion when it is actually the empire. It’s time liberals made that clear by embracing an underdog spirit befitting liberalism’s new underdog reality.
Reclaiming Radical Reform Over Stagnation and Nostalgia
Liberalism’s greatest achievements have always come from challenging entrenched power and pushing bold reforms—not defending entrenched interests. The abolition of slavery, the expansion of suffrage, free markets, civil rights, and open trade were victories of a liberalism that embraced its radical reformist roots. But today, Democrats too often retreat into uninspiring technocratic centrism or flirt with discredited ideas from last century’s socialism. Neither approach offers a way forward.
What is needed is a reformist liberal agenda that breaks from the paralysis of the past. America’s housing crisis, for instance, cries out for a YIMBY revolution. Blue states and cities dominated by Democrats have become poster children for dysfunctional zoning laws and permitting systems that protect wealthy homeowners while pricing out young families and workers. Instead of defending these failed policies, liberals must lead the charge for deregulating land use, building more homes, and making housing affordable.
Immigration policy is another example where Democrats have failed to lead. Instead of offering a clear defense of immigration as an economic and moral good, Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris both accepted the underlying premise of their opponent’s anti-immigrant position by promising to enforce a closed border more effectively. Liberals must embrace a pro-immigration message that unapologetically celebrates America as a nation of opportunity and growth, not walls and fear.
It is hard to imagine any politician today talking about immigration as effusively as Ronald Reagan’s farewell speech, but they should. And this includes no longer cowering under the premise that anti-immigration sentiment is a fixed reality, rather than leading the charge to change public opinion.
Likewise, structural electoral reform is essential to breaking up the party system that brought us to this point. The electoral system itself, and the many ways in which it fails to reflect the true diversity of the American people, has produced systemic incentives towards illiberalism, culminating in an existential threat to constitutional rule of law. A radical liberal movement should lead the charge for a more representative democracy. As I wrote in these pages:
As critical as it is to remain focused on liberal democracy’s most urgent challenges, we should not do so at the expense of grappling with its longer-term systemic flaws. Even as we rush to defend democracy from imminent danger—such as Trump’s dictatorial ambitions—we shouldn’t lose sight of deeper structural issues that brought us to this point.
Nowhere is the need for reform more urgent than in tackling rent-seeking corruption— the practice of using political influence to secure economic benefits that would not otherwise be available in a competitive market with a level playing field. Liberals should confront the entrenched interests that block progress—rent-seeking industries, occupational licensing cartels, rampant consumer fraud, corporate welfare. Rather than defending every government program or regulation, liberals must fight for an economy that is both free and fair, recognizing those are two sides of the same coin.
To a large degree, this means understanding that artificial concentrations of wealth, and all their noxious political effects, arise from these distortions of the market rather than insufficient taxation and redistribution, even as we strive to build an efficient and effective safety net. They must be addressed at the root cause, a failure of competition produced by the accreted regulatory captures endemic to our political economy.
Uncompromising Opposition to Trump’s Authoritarian Agenda
The liberal response to Trumpism cannot be accommodation or appeasement. Trump’s authoritarian tendencies—his attacks on free speech, political opponents, and the press—are fundamental threats.
Liberals must reject the idea that these policies are “populist” in the sense of being aligned with ordinary Americans’ interests and desires, rather than “populist” in the proper sense of being driven by us vs. them, zero-sum conflict. Trump’s economic nationalism, including tariffs and protectionism, doesn’t help workers—it raises prices, fuels inflation, and makes the country poorer. Not only are tariffs “injurious to the U.S. economy,” as Steve Chapman noted, “but also to its liberal democracy because he will use them to reward friends and punish enemies”—the very essence of corrupt rent seeking. Trump’s war on free speech and civil liberties, under the guise of combating “wokeness,” is not anti-elite but profoundly authoritarian, silencing dissent and intimidating critics.
Instead of trying to co-opt elements of Trumpism or cede ground on his talking points, liberals must offer a principled alternative that promotes openness, accountability, and the rule of law. Trade and immigration should be celebrated as engines of growth and opportunity, not scapegoats for economic anxieties. Free speech and pluralism must be defended against the creeping trend towards censorship and intimidation. Foreign policy should reflect competence, diplomacy, stability and, above all, a commitment to human rights and liberal values—not bellicose saber-rattling and reckless unpredictability.
The liberal opposition to Trumpism must be resilient, not reactive. It must not retreat into fear but articulate hope. And it must make clear that liberal democracy, not populist authoritarianism, is the only system capable of meeting America’s challenges and securing its freedoms.
A Liberal Future Worth Fighting For
The future of liberalism depends on reclaiming its radical heritage as a movement for reform and progress. To counter Trumpism, liberals cannot be content defending the status quo or hiding behind empty, uninspiring technocracy. Nor can they fall into the trap of offering discredited command-and-control economic experiments that voters rightly distrust and have relegated to the ash heap of history. Instead, they must offer a bold vision—one that confronts corruption, breaks down barriers, and expands freedom.
This means leading the fight for housing reform, immigration liberalization, electoral democracy, and an economy freed from inbuilt structural advantages to dominant interests and connected elites. It means taking on entrenched interests and failed policies, even when doing so challenges Democratic leaders and allies. And it means rejecting Trump’s authoritarian agenda with confidence and clarity, offering voters a real alternative to corruption, chaos, and division.
This agenda is an affront to liberalism’s bedrock commitments such as defending the equal dignity of all. Pushing back on them requires much more than the tepid business-as-usual Democratic response, on the one hand, or the accommodationist and deferential response of some center-left intellectuals on the other.
A revitalized liberalism must be both principled and pragmatic, combining moral conviction with policy innovation. It must defend free markets without tolerating corporate capture, champion democracy without excusing dysfunction, and protect the rights of all without compromising tolerant pluralism. It must be, in short, a liberalism that is unapologetic and fearless.
The stakes could not be higher. Trump’s GOP is not an outsider force railing against elites—it is the establishment, wielding state power to entrench its rule. Liberals must rise to the moment, not as defenders of what is, but as architects of what can be.
An earlier version of this essay first ran in our pages in January 2025.
Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.
We welcome your reactions and replies. Please adhere to our comments policy.
This reads to me like a lot of empty words and wishful thinking. Awkwardly, much of it is a tepid technocratic way of communicating some of the same messages that MAGA relies on. The whole point of MAGA is to ‘reform’ the system. EVERYBODY agrees that reform is necessary, it’s the specifics of what and how that are in such violent dispute.
The multiple references to immigration in this piece avoid specific policy recommendations, yet seem to suggest a degree of openness to increased levels of it, which is a non-starter in today’s political environment.
Today’s political right is a somewhat uneasy coalition of people who are primarily united around their feeling that current institutions are no longer adequately serving their interests, and their belief that its the people on the left who are the radicals. Whatever the relative level of validity or contrivance of these two starting points, it has resulted in a strong reactionary movement, eager to weaken or even destroy institutions (and people), without any shared vision for the replacement.
I really don’t know how to repair the political and social landscape, and I’m increasingly worried that it will collapse into chaos or autocracy. What I do fervently believe is that the path towards a less contentious future lies not in positions on specific policy areas, but on a renewed recognition each of our individual circumstances are more likely to be better under a cooperative approach. History shows over and over again that the people who successfully burn systems down end up even worse off.
Life is inherently ambiguous. When too high a percentage of the population demands certainty, the result is widespread human suffering. I’m not sure there is any way people infected by a reactionary fever can learn this lesson, other than through experience.
The other commonality on the reactionary right (and much of the radical left) is a stunning level of naïveté about the degree to which all other forms of government sooner or later bite their supporters in the ass. Perhaps that is the underlying message of this essay, but it won’t be obvious to most readers.
Liberal Democracy has taken itself for granted for way too long, thus failing to educate a populous as to why such an awkward and clumsy system is desirable.
The author makes it sound like liberals (Democrats) are merely faced with a strategic problem -- a simple choice of policies that "work." He points out that their policies have led to higher costs and less freedom, and calls on them to embrace freedom, free-markets and free-speech as if this is the obvious, responsible thing to do. And then he goes on to say that they need to be principled.
But.... what are the principles guiding the liberals? Does the author think it's just a strategic oversight that liberals are consistently anti-free-market, pro-welfare state, pro-nationalized health care, anti-free speech, pro-regulation, pro-tax-the-rich (and everyone else for that matter)?
Yes, liberals have a problem. It's their ideas. No amount of wishy-washy "dignity for all" and anti-"corporate capture" nonsense is going to bring about change. What the liberals need to embrace is real freedom, individual rights and capitalism. Those liberals who actually believe in the rights of the individual, rather than collectivism, redistribution and egalitarianism, need to speak up and denounce the anti-liberty forces on both sides. And not in the name of some pragmatic, political calculous -- people can smell that a mile aways -- but because it's right.