Introduction
In my first article of this year, I outlined some of my prescriptions on dealing with the current rise of illiberalism. In that text, I exclusively focused on cultural and media phenomena and actions.
However, while observing this year’s CPAC convention in Hungary, it became clear that fighting this menace with the effort it deserves would require far more than isolated individual acts. Similarly, the current type of response by establishment parties is utterly insufficient, as they don’t seem to grasp both the scope of the danger and the underlying mechanisms it operates with.
In the following, I will present some of my ideas for a multi-layered, maximalist response. Note that most of these ideas are not meant as a rock solid road map, but examples of what a more serious response looks like when taken across multiple domains. Because of that, some of these ideas might seem overblown or uncomfortable. Also keep in mind that I’m writing this from the perspective of European Union countries, so not everything will apply to other spaces.
Before going into them, I recommend reading some of my prior texts on this topic, as they include crucial context. There’s two texts I wrote specifically covering the European Illiberal movement and explaining why I assign extremely destructive tendencies to them, as well as one about destructive social forces. In short, I believe that illiberalism is based on a rejection of the mainstream politics since the fall of the cold war and recklessly endangers the current organization of society.
Such a movement operates on many levels, and will thus require a symmetrical response. For example, if we only focus on the best policies, but we don’t talk about them, we’re going to lose. If we have the best rhetoric prepared, but our content isn’t seen by our target audience, that’s worthless.
Level 1: Deliver on Liberal Promises
All of my following prescriptions rely on a positive track record to point at by Liberalism’s defenders. That track record must do 2 things:
Have effects that tangibly benefit the living conditions of ordinary citizens.
Include huge, impressive projects that instill a sense of pride in the particular nation.
That could be everything from transport infrastructure to investments into the energy transition to investments into ambitious scientific projects.
Without this, all subsequent steps are doomed to fail because there is no trust in political vision which could replace the illiberal one. You can’t endlessly point at the other side and say they’re bad and expect people to support you. You need a positive vision which fills people with a sense of hope.
Level 2: Political Communication
The second level is about how politicians (and their media teams) need to market their successes and their adversaries. Currently, the approach seems to be to just keep on talking like in the last few decades and hope that the traditional voter base will stay stable. That is nonsense, as the rise of Social Media, and the continuous string of crises since the COVID-19 pandemic has opened the floodgates to more visceral, emotional politics gaining reach.
The specific implementation of a counter to that strategy highly depends on the circumstances. However, there are some basic things that would be helpful across almost every situation:
An aggressive, unapologetic framing of both the positive vision and the dangers that lie ahead if the illiberals succeed.
When discussing why one shouldn’t vote for illiberal parties, don’t lecture on the importance of the separation of powers or the rule of law. Instead what should follow is simple: “When you vote for this party, you will face higher prices because of their reckless disregard of our successful trading alliances, their ideological commitment to fossil fuels dramatically fluctuating in price and their rollback of regulations meant to hold corporations accountable. The huge gaps in their fiscal plans make it clear that this party doesn’t have a plan to govern the country, it only has a plan to gain power.”
To see how to market successes we can actually learn from movements like MAGA, for example by naming ambitious infrastructure projects after the prime minister, or by putting up huge “funded by EU investment signs” wherever appropriate.
An emphasis on just how radical the rupture that these parties want to trigger is. People generally don’t like it when their sense of stability is being shaken up, or when things change too quickly. Make them realize that illiberal wins would mean exactly that, their lives will change radically, and not for the better:
“[Insert Party]’s vision not some grand way to build on what makes [Insert country] great. It is an abandonment of exactly these aspects. They want us to trade the ideals of individual freedom and acceptance for a lofty notion of a unifying culture and an exclusion of those that don’t conform. They want us to pivot from a society with the same fundamental human rights to a society which only acknowledges the will of the strong. They want us to change from a system with a thought-out decision-making process, to a system where a supposedly benevolent executive roughly interprets and implements the whim of the people with no safeguards.”
Show examples of chaotic consequences of similar people taking power. Here I’d use the example of the US because there is a broad sentiment among Europeans that regards the current state of the US as horrific, even among those who support illiberal parties. Use that disconnect to your advantage:
“We don’t even have to look through history to observe how destructive this approach is. We only have to look across the pond, to the US, where the unconstrained leader launches wars with no plan, frightens his domestic population with the use of armed force and intimidates his political opponents with lawfare. Don’t forget that [Insert Party], cheered when Trump won, and are influenced by his peers in their joint conferences. “
Alternatively you could make the comparison to Russia or Hungary.
Drop all anti-nationalist sentiment. Talk about how great your country is and, crucially, what makes it great (here progressive and conservative parties will probably depart). Appeal to a sense of patriotism to make the case for defending it.
This does not mean embracing exclusionary ethnic nationalism.
Don’t talk about abstracted virtues or concepts when defending your successes. Talk in very specific terms about specific policies that have helped people. Make it harder for people to forget the positive things you have done.
Important Note: Abandoning the policy struggles among parties operating in the liberal framework would be disastrous. It would reinforce the uniparty narrative often spread by illiberals and turn voters that are used to that competition.
Level 3: The Media Environment
The Media environment is possibly the most important battleground because the issues dominating public discourse are determined there. Social media has structurally favored illiberal movements, as they provide a more unfiltered access to the voter base.
Illiberals have succeeded in creating a media network of channels directly controlled or associated with them, combined with a huge number of accounts that will push their messages with an unclear amount of coordination.
To demonstrate this, I’ve compiled a document you can access at my website.
In order to compete with this, establishment parties will have to invest into creating a similar messaging apparatus. If illiberal parties are going to have a huge industrial content machine, traditional parties have to build such a machine of their own. With that machine, they can also put forward their preferred topics into the broader public discourse. This is very important, because if a political movement is constantly on the defensive and talking about the topics another movement dictates, the best they can do is draw. If they put forward topics and talking points, they can actually win and put the pressure on the other side.
Concretely, that means teams of people cranking out short-form content, producing longer videos utilizing clickbait, giving interviews to bigger pundits that broadly support you, posting your speeches across multiple accounts, etc.
Note: I do get that people who push back against the illiberal messaging already exist and have large platforms, but they are often simply against something, without a positive vision, or a particular roadmap to implementing it in politics. Channels like this risk just producing disaffected audiences who see no way forward, until they eventually tune out of politics entirely.
While that is hugely important as an insulation mechanism, you can’t defeat a movement in the long term without thinking about conversion as well. That is why I would encourage everyone with appropriate quality to go into the competing content machine as well, with the focus of challenging common views there and laying the groundwork for changing people’s minds. Realistically, this will not work immediately nor with the majority of the audience, but it might grow once reinforced over time.
When it comes to traditional media, it is time to abandon all discussion formats that don’t have relentless fact-checking in post production. Without this, the incentives for every participant in these discussions is just to make their case the most convincing one, with no particular focus being put on the truthfulness of your statements (essentially, they can just say what appears to be right and strengthens their case but don’t have to stress about what is right). In such an environment, bad faith actors will inevitably dominate. Importantly, this has to be done in unison, because otherwise guests will just go on the shows that have laxer standards and the harsher ones will run out of guests.
In general, we need to relocate some of the emphasis put on “free speech” and “being able to speak your mind” to “media should be accountable for false information that they spread” and “lying should not be the best way to push your message”.
Level 4: Institutional levers
If actors reject liberal-democratic norms, communication alone cannot constrain them. Success will also require concrete, focused action.
There is a whole swath of reforms that I’d consider to be helpful in that regard:
A Digital Passport administered by an independent agency created by the EU: This would solve 2 Problems at once. You’d get rid of all the bots that are plaguing social media sites by amplifying subversive campaigns and create a clear accountability mechanism for people that post things that is incongruent with the rules of a public sphere (as you couldn’t bypass bans or time-outs with new accounts).
A clear and straightforward process that allows for the banning of parties if they are deemed unconstitutional by the relevant organs (probably the supreme court of the individual country). Make the Supreme Court determine a clear list of criteria that would warrant a deeper investigation.
Sanctions on adversarial foreign powers that are aggressively meddling with European politics, e.G. funding opposition parties or sending them political advisors.
Dropping the presumption that our current allies inside Europe will remain our allies, and preparing for a more transactional and coalition-based foreign policy. This requires abandoning most of the decision-making organs that rely on good faith by all involved parties, e.G., the veto power.
Level 5: Culture
When dealing with a political movement, one must not forget that politics is downstream from culture. Of course, there is a complex interplay between the 2, but I’d argue that there are deeper problems with how people interact with politics that cannot be addressed strictly on the political level.
My main recommendation on that front would be mandatory classes on healthy epistemic practice and critical thinking in schools. Other than that, we should culturally recognize some things:
There are gradients to “bad”.
Every cultural movement inevitably has problematic aspects. We should avoid lumping them all together under a maximalist term like “fascist”, “racist” or “sexist”. Instead, we should address most in a nuanced, substantive way.
2 things can be true at the same time. More often than not, there are multiple sides in a conflict of interests that have really valid claims.
Conviction should match level of knowledge.
You haven’t won the argument by labeling your enemies in a specific way. If there is a considerable portion of the population that stands behind an idea, you have to engage it in a reasonable manner.
However, you are also not obligated to give credence to any idea, or debate it. As a society, we don’t want to spend all our time going against Flat Earthers or Conspiracy Theorists.
Free Speech doesn’t mean freedom from accountability. Just because you have the right to say something doesn’t mean you should promote it in the public sphere, or that you should be insulated from the ensuing pushback.
Without this, we’ll face similar problems over and over again.
Conclusion
I’ve heard a lot of theories and discussions about dealing with illiberalism. They range from “let them govern themselves into the ground”, to “they will automatically moderate” to “we have to call it fascism and socially shame its adherents”. Part of my idea here was to show that these ideas are structurally too simplistic to work, and that we need a more serious, interlocking way of thinking to preserve our liberal democracies. In the process, I hope I offered a a framework for approaching the problem that remains within the realm of feasibility.
You're not talking about liberalism. You're talking, at best, about a kind of squishy technocratic leftism. But tbh, I think a lot of this reads as progressivism, which is actually illiberal itself. You need to figure out what you believe and defend that, not call whatever isn't right-wing "liberal" as if that's coherent.