Charting Liberalism's Comeback

Reflections on this past weekend's important conference in Washington, D.C.

Russian opposition activist Vladimir Kara-Murza sits on a bench inside a defendants' cage during a hearing at the Basmanny court in Moscow on October 10, 2022. Kara-Murza was released in August 2024 as part of a prisoner exchange. He delivered the keynote address at the second-annual “Liberalism for the 21st Century” conference at the Watergate hotel in Washington, D.C. this past weekend. (Photo by NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA/AFP via Getty Images)

The second-annual “Liberalism for the 21st Century” conference was, by all accounts, a huge success. Organizer Shikha Dalmia deserves considerable praise for conjuring this event and its rapidly expanding network of participants and supporters out of thin air over the past two years. Doing something like this is an enormous amount of work, and she’s the one whose vision, energy, and talent made it happen. Bravo.

This time around, the venue was much larger than it was last summer, and attendance at the panels was quite high, with most seats filled with an attentive audience (that asked consistently thoughtful questions during the Q&As) from midday Thursday through the final event late Friday afternoon. I’m proud to be a part of this group and to have contributed to a panel this year—and I have every intention of attending and taking part in any way I can at next year’s summer gathering in the nation’s capital.

Most of the panels were excellent. I learned some things and felt inspired by many of them. (Here Russian dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza deserves to be singled out, since his keynote address over dinner the first night was powerfully moving and did an excellent job of reminding everyone in the audience how easily what seems like a momentary setback for the cause of liberty can become something much closer to a death sentence.)

But that doesn’t mean I agreed with or considered helpful to our political troubles everything I heard at the conference. It was a mixed bag, which is what one should always expect from any gathering of intellectuals and writers who see the world in partially divergent ways. In the spirit of continuing an important and vital conversation, what follows are some of the things I liked best, and others I found most frustrating, at the conference.

Laws and Norms in the Crosshairs