The Philosophical Roots of Illiberal Movements

A preview of what I’m going to say about immigration at an important conference taking place next month in Washington, D.C.

A protester poses for a portrait with an upside down American flag during the "No Kings" protest on June 14, 2025 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Joshua Lott/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

This post will be a little unusual. Instead of commenting on and analyzing the latest headlines or writing on an apolitical cultural topic, I’m going to give a plug for a conference coming to the nation’s capital next month in the hope that you might consider attending.

It’s the second annual gathering of the “Liberalism in the 21st Century” conference hosted by the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism (ISMA). I wrote here about last year’s meeting, which I attended as an observer. This year, I’ll be participating in a panel with the same title as this post: “Philosophical Roots of Illiberal Movements.” My co-panelists will be Tom Palmer, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, and Laura Field, the author of a major book about Trumpism that will be appearing in November, Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right. The discussion will be moderated by Zack Beauchamp, a senior correspondent at Vox. It’s bound to be a lively and illuminating conversation.

I encourage you to read through the full program and consider coming, especially if you live within a reasonable distance of Washington, D.C. It would be great to meet and get to know some of the subscribers to this Substack in person. But more broadly, I think it’s important for those committed to the defense of liberalism not only to think deeply about how we’ve found ourselves so much on the defensive. It’s also important for us to build—institutions, networks, communities, and personal bonds—to sustain us through the battles ahead. If Donald Trump’s victory in 2024 should have taught us anything, it’s that right-wing antiliberalism isn’t going anywhere. Its presence in our politics is a new normal. Those of us who oppose it will have to beat it back at the ballot box, and then keep doing so for some time to come.

To do that, we will need to understand it—specifically, its appeal, from the inside.

That’s what my remarks at the conference will be about—and also what the remainder of this post is about. What follows is my first, tentative effort to lay out the strongest case I can for the populist right’s implied philosophical position on immigration. Unlike so much liberal commentary on the populist right, I won’t conclude with a cry of and this is BAD! That’s both because I don’t think that form of pep talk for my own side is especially useful, but also because I think the anti-immigration arguments need to be taken on their own terms if liberals hope to craft a winning political response. I’ll conclude with some thoughts about how they can begin to do that.