Illiberalism as Anti-Liberalism

Illiberalism is all the rage these days. Steve Bannon pounds globalists and “the deep state” on his podcast. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán pontificates to his admirers at their annual jamboree in Transylvania about the virtues of the “illiberal state.” Russian TV pundits decry Europe’s moral decadence. There is no way to avoid anti-liberal messaging. And Donald Trump’s re-election in November 2024 has made it mainstream.

After electoral setbacks in the US and across Europe, liberals have been in a soul-searching mode. They are scrambling to make sense of the new reality, intellectually and politically. As Bannon put it back in 2018, “the tide of history” is with populist, nationalist movements. Worse, geopolitics is at odds with liberalism. Autocratic powers are showing the rest of the world that there are viable alternatives to the Western gospel of liberal democracy, human rights, the rule of law, and multilateral institutions. China—increasingly prosperous, tech-savvy, and assertive—and Russia, which is cosplaying Stalin-era totalitarian rule amid its war against Ukraine (and Europe), appear to be setting the international agenda. In today’s marketplace of ideas different forms of illiberalism are trending.

But are populists, authoritarians, and far-right politicians and thinkers across the world on the cusp of creating a new illiberal order? Not really. Yes, they contest the status quo and they wreak damage. As Trump keeps demonstrating, populists can hollow out democratic institutions, and authoritarian powers are apt at undermining liberal universalism. Yet illiberalism has already displayed its limits and inherent contradictions. Western populists and anti-Western authoritarians do not form a unified camp, let alone pursue a systematic project transcending time and place. After illiberals seize power, their attempts at social engineering often fail. And their hostility toward institutions and their lack of a clear ideological orientation undermine their regimes’ sustainability. Illiberalism is only a convergence of various forces that contest liberalism but fall short of proposing a rival universalist doctrine.

Illiberals claim that they do represent an alternative model. In an often-quoted 2014 speech, Orbán said, “The stars of international analyses are Singapore, China, India, Turkey, Russia.” None of them is liberal, some aren’t even democracies, and, according to Orbán, they are “successful.” His argument was that authoritarian states as well as hybrid polities—read: democracies captured by populist leaders—do a better job than liberal ones of delivering growth and higher living standards precisely because they embody a different set of values, including an attachment to tradition and community (as opposed to individual rights and the cultural relativism embraced by the left).

Even critics of illiberalism largely agree. The political scientist Marlène Laruelle has singled out its five characteristics:

• a belief in the primacy of executive power and majoritarianism over and against institutional checks and balances and minority rights,
• a call for the cultural homogeneity of the nation over and against multiculturalism,
• demands for preserving traditional hierarchies and values over and against those of leftist progressivism,
• a defense of the sovereignty of the nation-state over and against supranational institutions and international law, and
• a realist and transactional foreign policy based on a civilizationalist interpretation of a multipolar world.

Laruelle’s list usefully synthesizes the features of illiberalism that trouble liberals these days. It charts how populists and authoritarians challenge the established order, in both the domestic and the international realms. The label “illiberalism” applies to a variety of cases.

Laruelle’s definition offers, of course, a snapshot of Trumpism and the MAGA take on the US’s identity, political future, and role in the world. But not just that. It applies in equal measure to full-blown autocracies such as China and Russia, where executive fiat reigns, sovereignty is sacrosanct, and civilizationalism is enshrined in state doctrine, and where—in Russia’s case especially—a traditionalist crusade against wokeness has become a core theme of both domestic politics and foreign policy. What’s more, the US has taken its own nativist turn toward unabashedly autocratic, even neo-totalitarian, versions of illiberalism promoted elsewhere. A framed photo of Vladimir Putin and Trump now adorns the White House. The US National Security Strategy warns Europe of the threat of “civilizational erasure”—because of migrant influx and the alleged tyranny of political correctness—chiming in with Putin’s philippics against liberalism.

The question left hanging is whether illiberalism proposes a coherent alternative. Many scholars and political commentators, Laruelle included, seem to believe that it does. Some sound the alert about the rise of an “Illiberal International” that could unite autocracies and anti-systemic political forces in the historically democratic states. The danger is real—in Minsk, Munich, or Minneapolis. But here’s the rub: There are profound differences between states under the sway of populist movements and old-school authoritarian regimes. Start probing these and you realize that little unites the two illiberal tribes beyond their fight against a liberal “Other.” A new illiberal order is unlikely to emerge and small “l” liberalism will probably survive.

Consider how different regimes function at the level not of ideas but of political practice. Authoritarian leaders and systems care about stability, which they achieve primarily thanks to what scholars call “performance legitimacy.” Illiberal populism instead is all about input legitimacy: how to mobilize the people and win elections. This is a major cleavage in the supposed illiberal camp.

Much of the conversation around populism and illiberalism zeroes in on democratic representation: Who gets to make decisions within a given polity? In the populists’ telling, liberals are a self-appointed elite who look down on the hoi polloi and promote public policies at variance with the wishes and aspirations of the majority. By contrast, populists or illiberals are the true democrats, as they and only they channel the popular will. Whether the policies they pursue once in office enhance society’s welfare is of secondary importance. Under Orbán, Hungary has been a laggard in the EU on many metrics, among them GDP growth and inflation. The yardstick for legitimacy is not what a government, or the political order in general, does but whether it is in sync with a majority or at least a sizeable plurality of society. As the historian and philosopher Jan-Werner Müller has noted, populists reject pluralism by creating a homogeneous body politic, often engineering it through state institutions, legislation, and policies. “In addition to being anti-elitist,” Müller points out, “populists are always anti-pluralist. Populists claim that they, and they alone, represent the people.”

Fully fledged autocracies do not rely on the ballot box, much less on attacking incumbent elites, to build legitimacy. Stripped to its basics, authoritarianism boils down to rule by an unaccountable elite, often presided by a dictatorial figure, that keeps society in compliance through a combination of carrots and sticks. Institutions—civil administrations, militaries, schools, business associations—exist to broaden the regime’s base, using co-optation or repression to neutralize dissent and fend off challenges to the status quo. In many cases, intra-elite dynamics are a more immediate concern than the grassroots, as regime change can occur through rifts within the governing class, with coups being the most egregious example. China, a standard-bearer of global illiberalism, is as elitist and top-down as it gets. In addition, Xi Jinping’s ideological rigidity is giving a new lease on life to the Leninist notion of a vanguard party reasserting its leadership over the economy and society.

At first Putin’s Russia deviated from this archetype and experimented with authoritarian populism. Putin started off as something of a man of the people, clamping down on the oligarchs, allegedly in the name of restoring justice after the turbulent 1990s, which were marked by rapacious privatization and mass impoverishment. He still holds live phone-in sessions on prime-time TV and plays the good czar to subjects suffering under bad boyars. But today Putin epitomizes the establishment and is no longer above the political fray. In Russia, anti-corruption campaigners (such as the late Alexei Navalny) have mounted a frontal assault on kleptocracy and high-profile graft, tapping into popular discontent. They haven’t spared Putin. Far-right ethnonationalists have also opposed the Kremlin, accusing it of tolerating migration or, since 2022, of not prosecuting the war against Ukraine robustly enough. If anything, populism is now a threat to the regime.

Autocracies build legitimacy and credibility through what they deliver, not by encouraging citizens’ participation. In China, years of reform starting in the late 1970s and the country’s gradual integration into the global market brought breakneck economic development and better living standards for hundreds of millions. As a result, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) consolidated its grip on power and outlived its namesakes in Eastern Europe. During Putin’s first two terms, Russia experienced robust growth on the back of soaring oil prices, which benefited the expanding Russian middle classes and brought a much-needed spell of stability after the troubled 1990s.

Today, China’s economy is slowing down and Russia’s is stagnating after overheating due to the spike in military expenditure to fund the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine. These challenges cannot be addressed through elections as they might be in democracies. Authoritarians rely for their survival on a form of demobilization, hoping that citizens will focus on private pursuits rather than systematically engaging in collective action that could threaten their regime’s stability.

This is not to say that autocrats do not also seek bottom-up legitimacy, nor that the fortunes of democratic leaders do not also depend on performance. Autocrats practice controlled societal mobilization, and democrats need to deliver jobs, economic growth, and public services to win elections and stay in power. In both autocracies and backsliding democratic systems, a classic ploy from the populist toolbox is to accuse the opposition and parts of civil society of being traitors and working against national sovereignty and social cohesion. Another is to rally public opinion against other countries and transnational actors by claiming that they threaten the nation’s vital interests or are denying it its supposedly rightful place in the global pecking order. Autocracies typically embrace nationalism—with an ethnic flavor or, in the case of Russia and China, by appealing to the notion that they are a “civilizational state.” Yet factors such as elite cohesion, economic performance, and state capacity are much more important for autocrats’ survival in power. Illiberal populists, by contrast, need to keep winning at the ballot box.

Liberal progressivism has been the principal adversary for the Illiberal International. MAGA, Putin, Orbán, and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey have all praised conservative values, such as attachment to the nation, religion, and traditional views of hierarchy and authority.

Trump has moved to abolish policies promoting racial and gender equality. One of his first executive orders, in January 2025, terminated diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs across federal agencies and contractors and rescinded prior affirmative-action-related mandates. Businesses and higher-education institutions have followed suit. The ostensible reason was to restore fairness and a meritocracy: MAGA has hijacked liberal democratic norms by arguing that collective rights should bound individual freedoms, including free speech. Trump casts his supporters as an oppressed minority, appropriating the discourse of victimhood usually associated with the left’s struggles. 

Yet abolishing DEI and affirmative action was less about replacing one vision of social justice with another than catering to Trump’s conservative backers. That base includes mainstream Republican voters who welcomed the Supreme Court’s landmark 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which allowed the states to restrict abortion. Similarly in Poland, the conservative, illiberal Law and Justice (PiS) party has pushed for tightening rules on abortion, with the help of a friendly Constitutional Tribunal. 

The Kremlin has been on the same wavelength as Trump’s conservative supporters. Consider gender and sexuality, a bellwether issue. The Russian legislature banned what it called “gay propaganda” to minors in 2013 and extended the prohibition to all ages in 2022. In 2023, a Supreme Court ruling labeled “the international LGBT movement” an “extremist” organization, essentially banning all such activism or organizing. The governments of Russia and Hungary have pioneered pro-natality policies encouraging marriage, parenthood, and traditional family structures. In Hungary, these measures have been rationalized to counter not only demographic decline but also the perceived threat that immigration might dilute the nation.

Such ideas, along with underlying fears about identity loss, also bear on MAGA. Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill has offered $1,000 for every newborn. His administration is considering further programs and financial incentives that, critics allege, privilege so-called traditional families. Autocrats and populists might be operating in different political systems, but they seem to be pushing for the same thing: a body politic that expands in numbers while growing more cohesive in terms of culture and identity. It is a communitarian alternative to liberal individualism.

But does all this amount to an illiberal project driven by social conservatism and against the excesses of the left or the progressivist strand of liberalism focused on empowering historically marginalized groups? No.

First, populist movements in the West have a catch-all quality. The Trump coalition combines social conservatives and libertarians—notably, proverbial tech-bros like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel—as well as protest voters driven by economic factors. Those diverse constituencies have dissimilar, often clashing, views on core issues to do with culture, identity, and immigration. This rift has already manifested. Silicon Valley has pushed back against the Trump administration’s plans to raise the bar on H-1B visas, the main route to the US for skilled workers from overseas. As for any political leader, Trump’s role is to balance competing demands and he has been doing this with varying degrees of success. MAGA ideologues of Bannon’s ilk tend to lose out, not least because the movement takes its cues from Trump—as on the war in Iran—rather than setting his agenda.

Second, when illiberals actually are driven by a sense of purpose, social engineering from the top down rarely is successful. In a recent Pew Research Center survey of US adults, 60 percent of respondents said they believed abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances. In a 2025 poll by CivicScience, a majority of respondents said they supported or felt neutral about DEI initiatives (compared with 37 percent who opposed them). Top-down imposition does not work in more authoritarian settings either. According to a 2025 nationwide survey by KONDA Research in Turkey, the share of respondents who identified as “devout” fell from 55 percent in 2008 to 46 percent in 2025. Rule by Erdogan’s Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) has not expanded conservatism. According to one 2023 poll in Russia, a bastion of traditionalist values, 39 percent of respondents said that they almost never or never attended religious services, 23 percent that they only attended on holidays, and 9 percent that they went no more than once a month. In the US, the figure for monthly attendees is about 33 percent.

Third, culture wars are a double-edged sword for anti-liberals. As they polarize society, they often also energize the liberal side. During the 2022 midterm elections in the US, the Democrats pulled off a decent showing, partly thanks to voters’ reaction to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. In Poland, PiS lost in the general polls in 2023 because its policies on both cultural matters and dismantling checks and balances antagonized voters. The conservative agenda triggered a liberal backlash without peeling off a critical percentage of center-right Poles from the opposition camp dominated by Donald Tusk’s Civic Coalition (KO). Illiberalism may be a form of conservatism, but if it is a project, pace Bannon, it has not become dominant in neither politics nor society.

Illiberalism is not an ideological construct so much as just an assault on the established order, domestic and international. It offers no positive blueprint for the future. It wants to do away with institutions that limit executive authority or protect the separation of powers and individual rights and freedoms; it does not seek to establish God’s Kingdom on Earth. Illiberalism is only anti-liberalism.

Liberalism, meanwhile, is adaptable. It goes back to time-honored ideas now embedded in the constitutions of democratic states and in international law and organizations. But as Francis Fukuyama has argued in a recent book, new sub-strands of liberalism are evolving: for example, as a rightwing version advocating unfettered markets (neo-liberalism) and a leftist version concerned about identity politics (progressivism). And these have been open to contestation. The left has challenged neo-liberalism, especially in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, but so, too, to some extent, have the far-right populists who demand the state’s protection against the disruptions of globalization. Both centrist liberals and the right have attacked progressivism, and parts of the left have argued for focusing more on economic inequality and less on identity-based grievances. All these ideology-driven struggles can be—and indeed historically have been—negotiated and resolved within the framework of liberal democracy.

Illiberalism, on the other hand, is just a form of othering. Illiberal populists construct a two-dimensional, a-historical version of liberalism, glossing over its richness and internal diversity to raise a red rag that will mobilize their supporters. They have a single objective: to seize political power and remove limits on its exercise and to suppress their opponents, whom they denounce as enemies of the people. Illiberalism can come from the far right but also, as Hugo Chávez showed in Venezuela, from the left. There may be something distinctly novel about the omnipresence of social media and the backlash against open borders and economic interdependence in the twenty-first century, but we also have been there before.

As the ancients knew, demagoguery is democracy’s dark twin. In modern times, populist leaders have repeatedly mobilized the masses against established institutions and elites, harnessing a national will to undermine the political order. In some cases, this energy has brought democratic rejuvenation by broadening participation and re-legitimizing institutions. That was the case of late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century electoral regimes in parts of Latin America and eastern Europe. In the view of the British Greek sociologist Nicos Mouzelis, populist movements democratized politics by mobilizing new strata of people in order to challenge oligarchic elites.

That is why segments of the left in the West are, deep down, intrigued by Trumpism and argue for developing a rival project, also populist but progressive. The Belgian political theorist Chantal Mouffe has argued that leftist movements and parties should reclaim populism as an antidote to the excesses of global capitalism and “post-democratic” politics embraced by the mainstream on both the center-left and the center-right. But not even such proposals change the fact that illiberalism—call it “actually existing illiberalism”—only amounts to plain old autocratization, riding on the inherent defects of representative democracy. Power is an end in itself, not the means to a higher good.

There are practical implications. Illiberalism of the democratic-populist variety has a hard time becoming hegemonic. Partly this is because it has to reckon with political and societal opposition. But importantly, too, its disdain for institutions, legal rules, and procedures—including deliberation and cross-party compromise—hinders its ability to secure and embed its ideas and preferences over the long term. Trump’s lackluster legislative record illustrates the point.

Typically, old-school authoritarians perform much better because they are much more serious about institutions. A burgeoning literature on autocratic legalism describes strongmen who instrumentalize the law and institutions to gain legitimacy, suppress dissent, co-opt rivals, ensure smooth leadership transitions, or simply optimize governance. This goes even for a personalistic regime like Putin’s and for China, even though Xi has amassed enormous power at the expense of the CCP and the bureaucratic elites. Backsliding democracies, for their part, tame or eviscerate independent institutions such as the judiciary, regulatory agencies, and the media. That is a relatively straightforward task. Building a regime that can outlive its charismatic founding figure is a different order of business.

The essence of liberalism is the contestation of an ancien régime by insurgents from within and geopolitical competitors outside. But there is no illiberal paradigm capable of setting a global standard and displacing liberal democracy to become the new normal. Autocracies such as Russia and China show resilience, drawing on their internal strengths along with their capacity to fend off challenges and manage internal contradictions. But they are unlikely to become flagbearers of an illiberal crusade to reshape the world, as both Marxism-Leninism and fascism tried to do in the twentieth century. Meanwhile the illiberal wave in the West is failing to establish a stable order based on charismatic leadership, a commitment to traditionalism, and reliable voter support. Being ideologically fluid and undermining institutions, norms, and rules might chart a path to power, but not necessarily for retaining it in the long run. Illiberalism may prove less effective than both its fans and its critics believe. Even if the Illiberal International is a specter that haunts liberal democrats, it is not the cornerstone of a new hegemonic ideological order.

Dimitar Bechev is the director of the Dahrendorf Programme at the European Studies Centre, St Antony’s College, Oxford, and a senior fellow at Carnegie Europe.