Liberals Need Moral Clarity, Not Moral Purity, in Their Struggle Against Authoritarianism
We should take inspiration from Frederick Douglass and strive for a broad alliance
The following are Shikha Dalmia’s opening remarks today at the second-annual “Liberalism for the 21st Century” conference, convened by the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism. The conference runs August 14–15, 2025.
It is fitting that we have gathered at the venue we have today. If we are discussing the abuse of political power, what better place than the scene of the biggest political crime in America—at least until Jan. 6. Unfortunately, we didn’t have enough meme coins to book the Capitol building.
This setting is a reminder of how far we are from the halcyon days when a single scandal could bring down a corrupt regime. The forces of authoritarianism are stronger now than when we convened last year. Poland’s Law & Justice Party has rebounded, Modi’s Hindu nationalist BJP has regained ground, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally has surged, and Netanyahu’s unpopular, right-wing government has doubled down in Gaza even as starvation sets in. Remarkably, the one country holding its leaders accountable is Ukraine—and that too while battling the Putin Goliath.
But the big story then as now is America. Last July, when we all met, Bill Kristol joked then that we might be hosting this event at Guantanamo Bay. Trump has dispatched the National Guard to D.C. and who knows, any minute now, it could barge in and haul us all away, turning that quip into a prophecy. If you do land in Guantanamo, you should all be aware that although the facility’s Yelp rating is bad, it does have a nice spa with a bracing waterboarding option.
At the time Bill made this remark, few thought Trump would win the popular vote, gain unified control of Congress, and hold a Supreme Court majority.
If you’ve traveled abroad, you know how large America looms in every conversation—partly because its elephantine economic footprint can flatten economies and destroy lives with its abrupt aid cuts and “resets.” And partly from global curiosity and anxiety over what follows if the American experiment collapses.
The beauty of this 249-year-old experiment is that it delivered living standards unprecedented in human history—not by sacrificing moral progress but making it central to America’s success. America rejected the old world’s zero-sum economic model of territorial conquest, mercantilism, and colonialism and replaced it with free and open commerce based on mutual benefit. Slavery is this country’s original sin and much work remains for true racial justice. Still, America’s success came from flattening hierarchies, ending exploitation, harnessing human potential, and offering opportunity regardless of caste, creed, religion, or color. America's genius is not that it draws the best people but that it draws the best out of people. Even the world's “wretched” manage to make something of themselves here.
But we are getting a first-hand taste of what happens when liberal democracy starts to collapse.
A liberal democracy aspires to impartial justice; Trump has exploited his power to reward loyalists—even violent ones—and retaliate against his expanding list of enemies including universities, prosecutors, judges, law firms, media companies, and opposition leaders.
A liberal democracy holds corrupt rulers accountable; Trump has fired watchdogs without cause.
A liberal democracy keeps civil society out of the clutches of the state; Trump’s anti-DEI crackdown aims to scare these groups into silence.
Above all, a liberal democracy affirms the equal dignity of every person and builds institutions—especially, a just rule of law—to protect it. That commitment means, first and foremost, forbidding rulers from dividing the public into favored and disfavored groups and then denying the latter basic guarantees of due process.
Yet, in the last few months:
Masked ICE agents have smashed car windows and abducted people.
Immigration and law enforcement is being militarized. The Marines were hardly out of Los Angeles than the National Guard arrived in D.C.
The Alien Enemies Act is being used to send many innocents to a Salvadoran Gulag.
Foreign students have been detained for months for writing op-eds or protesting; other immigrants are simply being vanished in the detention system, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Foreign tourists have faced harsh interrogations and invasive phone/computer searches just to the enter the country.
Family separation at the border is back.
What started as an attack on “criminal aliens” has expanded to all immigrants—including naturalized citizens and their native-born advocates and now is spreading further. Elected leaders intervening peacefully are being arrested. In other words, the disfavored groups are multiplying.
A friend of mine wryly joked recently, “Hungary is not looking so bad these days.” Our belief that this can’t happen in America is turning into disbelief: How could this happen in America?
Authoritarian consolidation is Trump’s true Operation Warp Speed. After 250 years as a constitutional republic, America has stunningly shown that it had no exceptional institutional immunity to the authoritarian virus. Like everywhere else, all it has is us liberals.
So we have our work cut out for us.
Trump has pulled out of the dustbin of history the patrimonial system, as Jonathan Rauch has written. In this system, rulers treat the state as their personal property and citizens as their personal servants. The result always and everywhere is incompetence, rank corruption and repression. Honest people get fired and the worst rise to the top. Witness Trump’s rogue Cabinet.
A World Bank study two decades ago found that America’s strong institutions—its courts, property rights, and effective government—accounted for about $418,000 of its $735,000 per-capita wealth. Under Putin’s patrimonialism, the average Russian builds only $73,000 of wealth despite the country’s vast oil resources. Russia’s corrupt institutions siphon off more than they put in people’s pockets, it seems. Ditto in the socialist, nepotistic India I grew up in. That is America’s future if we don’t stop Trump from trashing our institutions.
Of course, there are other postliberal contenders besides patrimony vying to replace the liberal order. Viktor Orbán is the neo-right’s chief hero with his promise to purge “wokeness” and revive Western civ. Yoram Hazony, the architect of the National Conservative movement, seeks to replace liberalism with an ethno-religious nation-state. Catholic integralists want to fuse religion and state and establish a national faith that rules civic life. And hyper-individualistic and futuristic tech-bros—ironically—want to resurrect past group hierarchies around race and gender in the name of merit. Make no mistake, together they will restore religious persecution along with every form of bigotry: nativism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, no matter how much they package their ideas in gauzy utopias.
We have an entire panel tomorrow to parse these postliberal alternatives, so I won’t dwell on them—except to say this: expect each of these systems to end up riddled with patrimonial corruption. Why? Because realizing their visions requires placing unchecked power in the hands of ideologues while sidelining good governance, equal protection of the law, and citizens’ rights.
These facts give us liberals a huge political opportunity. But to capture it, we need to fashion a broad countermovement to replace the old right/left divide with a new liberal/illiberal one, as I tell anyone willing to listen. That means opposing bigotry and uniting around core liberal values: tolerance, pluralism, equal protection under the law, and accountable rulers.
To some extent, this realignment is already underway in the U.S. Look around you and you’ll see in this room: Devoted Democrats, skeptical Democrats, independents, libertarians, recovering libertarians, former Republicans, anguished conservatives. Practically everyone except the MAGA right and the extreme left.
But let’s not kid ourselves. Solidifying a new alignment won’t be easy. Why? Because it’s easier to know our enemies than our friends. That’s one big reason there aren’t that many examples in the world of successful resistance movements yet, a topic we’ll consider tomorrow. Building a liberal coalition requires getting former political foes to learn to trust one another and negotiate their inevitable moral disagreements.
We’ll have to overlook what we regard as each other’s past transgressions. We’ll have to live with disagreements over whether non-right-wing threats to liberalism are worth addressing, or mere distractions. We’ll have to thrash out differences over how much to concede to our opponents to secure electoral victories. That seems like a strategic issue but often strategic disagreements stem from different levels of commitments to competing moral values.
As in any workable marriage, we can’t paper over these differences. But we also can’t let them turn into separate Netflix accounts.
But one thing we must bear in mind is that although moral clarity will help our effort—insisting on moral purity would be self-defeating.
My inspiration, as I grapple with these issues, is Frederick Douglass, specifically the oration he delivered at Lincoln Park to commemorate a statue of Lincoln commissioned by emancipated slaves on the 11th anniversary of our 16th president’s assassination. I live right next to the park and every day I walk by the larger-than-life, 12-foot bronze figure with Cherry, my beagle mix.
What is striking about the speech, given the occasion, is its utter honesty. It is no Lincoln hagiography. To the contrary, Douglass is shockingly scathing, as if he wanted to make sure that history did not paper over Lincoln’s many faults. Reversing a previous statement, he dubbed Lincoln the “white man’s president” who was “entirely devoted to the welfare of white men.” For that reason, he told his assembled Black brothers and sisters, Lincoln can’t be “our man or model.” He pointed out that Jefferson had said that one hour of slavery “was worse than the ages of oppression” that American revolutionaries had endured at the hands of British colonialists. Yet, he noted, Lincoln seemed to love the Union more than he hated slavery. He rattled off a litany of Lincoln’s troubling views including his desire to resettle Blacks to Africa; his belief that if he could save the Union without abolishing slavery, he would; and his refusal initially to let Blacks serve in the army.
Despite all this, Douglas also admired and trusted Lincoln. “The hour and the man of our redemption had somehow met in the person of Abraham Lincoln,” he praised. There was no man “better fitted for this mission” of emancipation than Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln’s name “was near and dear to our hearts in the darkest and most perilous hours of the Republic.”
He defended Lincoln against slams by his radical abolitionist brothers like William Lloyd Garrison, who never forgave Lincoln for his alleged slowness. What did Douglass see in Lincoln?
For starters, Douglass was too clear-headed to confuse radicalness for commitment— or prudence for lack of principles. Unlike more weak-kneed slavery opponents, he could see that there were basic moral lines deeply carved in Lincoln’s heart. For example, his fondness for the Union did not cause him to minimize the heinousness of slavery. His depictions of its evil were unflinching. Nor did he ever concede an iota to the notion that the South’s economic dependence on slavery was any reason for caution. That dependence wasn’t mitigating, it was implicating. As Douglass reminded his audience, Lincoln, for all his determination to keep the Union intact, hinted in the Second Inaugural that the Civil War was divine retribution for slavery when he said that “if God wills that the war continues” it was because “all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and … every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.”
In short, Douglass did not create a checklist of moral principles and expect Lincoln to score full marks on it. Nor did he put blind faith in Lincoln. Douglass drew moral boundaries that allowed him to assess Lincoln’s heart, not build moral silos that prevented him from joining hands with the most effective champion of his cause.
In our common struggle against authoritarianism, we should make Douglass our role model. We need to be generous, forgiving, clear-headed yet committed. Let’s join hands to defeat the bullies and the tyrants and defend a reinvigorated Liberalism for the 21st Century.
© The UnPopulist, 2025
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And, for a clear headed view of the challenge, Letter from a Birmingham Jail.
Wow! Great speech!