Saving liberal democracy without going all-in on compulsive centrism

“I am … simply unprepared for a world in which [Bill] Kristol sounds way more radical than Ezra Klein,” says Dan Drezner in a footnote to a recent Substack. (1)

Esquire columnist Charlie Pierce refers to Kristol as “Butcher’s Bill” Kristol, using a old term for casualties in war, referring to Kristol’s chronic neocon enthusiasm for wars.

Kristol became an enthusiastic NeverTrumper. And if he wants to be part of the “popular front” against Trump, I’m fine with that. (2) That’s a bit of historical sarcasm, because Bill’s father Irving Kristol is one of the founding thinkers of what we now call “neoconservatism.” Kristol Sr. and some other leading figures of the 1980s neocons had previously been Trotskyists – or at least influenced by Trotskyism. (3) Trotskyists were known for being so pure in their Marxist doctrine that they were said to “support revolution everywhere except for where one was actually going on.”

Whatever the exact influence of the Trotskyist perspective may have been, the neocons had an intense fondness for the kind of “regime change” operation that resulted in the disastrous Iraq War. Their idea was that it was immoral to allow regimes that were anti-American and/or annoying to Israel should be replaced by revolutionary wars of liberation to establish liberal democracy. Or at least to make them cooperative with America and friendly to Israel. We’ve seen the results for decades now. But even though the theory was pretty thin to begin with, groups like the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) are still out there promoting the neocon regime-change gospel.

At least Kristol Sr. nominally promoted an “ethic of restraint” even in foreign policy, in Michael Signer’s judgment. In an essay on the occasion of Kristol Sr.’s passing, Michael Signer noted that Bill didn’t seem to share much of his father’s attitude of “restraint”:

There is perhaps no more respectful way for progressives to commemorate Kristol’s legacy than to explore the decline of his thought - as dramatically evidenced by the contrast of Irving Kristol’s ideas and those of his son, Bill. Irving Kristol placed practical experience at the heart of his political theory. By contrast, his son would choose the inducements of pure theory - of a foreign policy chasing dreams rather than the hardscrabble earth. Where a certain humility drove the ideas of Kristol père, a certain hubris has driven those of Kristol fils. These intellectual differences have had profound consequences for world events, including the disastrous conduct of the war in Iraq. …

[I]n the years to come his son [Bill] fixed neoconservative foreign policy on abstractions and evils - on metaphysics rather than physics - particularly when it came to democracy. As a result, the striking feature of Bill Kristol’s political theory is not the ideas but the extravagance surrounding them. In a now-famous 1996 Foreign Affairs article co-authored with Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol wrote that Republicans should endorse a policy of “benevolent hegemony” that was “good for conservatives, good for America, and good for the world.” “America,” he added, “has the capacity to contain or destroy many of the world’s monsters, most of which can be found without much searching.”

Monsters, power, and dreams - in retrospect, the Iraq War seems so simple. [my emphasis] (5)

But, to be fair to Bill Kristol, he is singing the praises of liberal democracy against Trumpism. He was one of the attendees at a Liberalism for the 21st Century Conference (LibCon 2026) at which Ezra Klein surprised him by making Kristol look like a leftie radical by comparison. Klein has recently been advocating an “Abundance” agenda, which he and Derek Thompson advocated in a 2025 book of that title. In their construction, the problem of housing affordability is due a bunch of whiny NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) liberals who insist on building codes and environmental reviews and similarly useless sissy stuff.

What, your house burned down because of faulty wiring because there were no building codes or inspectors? That’s just the free market at work! Because once it burns down, nobody will buy that house again, right? Free Enterprise!!

Christopher Jones explained the problems with that framing:

Let’s start with a limited view of abundance as a policy agenda to build better by avoiding layers of review, overly long permitting processes, burdensome reporting requirements, and so on. That these inefficiencies should be corrected is all well and good in theory, but what would corrections look like in practice? The reader does not really know, because Klein and Thompson explicitly avoid getting into the weeds by claiming that they are offering “a lens” to think about problems rather than “a list” of recommendations.

Consider railroads. They cite Americans’ construction of a transcontinental railroad in less than a decade during the 1860s as an instance of how the nation used to be able to build. But what they don’t say: This technological progress came at immense cost by way of hundreds of dead workers, tens of thousands of exploited Chinese laborers, wide swaths of lands stolen from Native Americans, and staggering amounts of financial manipulation that enriched robber barons while leaving others destitute. How do we recreate the benefits of railroads while avoiding such harm?

Another rub: their environmental assumptions. Klein and Thompson echo the claims of ecomodernists who believe that we can solve all our environmental problems through technological innovation and economic growth. Dubbed solutionists, ecomodernists assume a world of infinite renewable energy, which means we can have it all—abundant food, medicine, travel, and wildlife. This Pollyannaish vision ignores the messy realities on the ground, such as the massive environmental costs that accrue from mining, manufacturing, and disposing of the materials necessary for generating so-called clean energy. It’s an unrealistic vision that fails to engage with hard choices. (4)

Drezner’s report on that LibCon event is a reminder that there it’s easier to talk about broad concepts on the questions of how to preserve and strengthen liberal democracy against Trump’s or any other brands of fascism. (That F-word does not appear in Drezner’s essay.)

What Bill Kristol offered to the convention does not seem all that impressive in Drezner’s telling, in which he describes Kristol’s diagnosis as follows:

Illiberals have captured too many institutions — corporations, law firms, some universities — creating authoritarianism within the government, beyond the government, and projecting pressure from the government. He fretted that there had not been enough people who have expressed revulsion about Trump. Kristol was nonetheless pleased that 20% of Trump’s supporters have abandoned him ...

Since public opinion polls have been showing historically low ratings for Trump and his Presidency and elections in 2026 have shown a strong tendency to rejecting Trump’s and the Republican Party’s agenda and candidates, it hard to guess what Kristol means when he grouses that not enough people are negative on Trump.

If Drezner’s article doesn’t dissuade you from any curiosity about LibCon, here is a two-hour segment of the of the 2025 version of the event featuring, among others, Bill Kristol. And there are hours more of video of it at C-Span. (6)

Mainstream pundits all too easily fall into the trap of assuming that voters care only about one or two issues and are too blinkered to pay attention to Big Issues like the sanctity of elections or the rule of law. Actually, most Americans who are not Trump cultists actually do think democracy is important and do understand why it’s a very bad thing when the laws apply to jaywalkers but not to mega-criminals like Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein.

The challenge for the Democratic Party and civil institutions that care about a democracy that works for ordinary people is to develop political narratives and campaigns that call attention to the massive corruption and criminality for which the Trumpified Republican Party stands and connect those Big Themes with specific and visible problems like the shrinking access to health care, the mass closing of rural hospitals, the ever-escalating costs of college and the ever-decreasing resources of public schools.

Drezner cites Ezra Klein at the conference as arguing “that liberalism had become too enmeshed in institutions and procedures rather than grander visions.” Unfortunately, lazy centrists who are attracted to Ezra Klein’s Grand Vision of, uh, less rigorous housing codes never get around to exciting people with meaningless “moderation” or grand visions like, the President shouldn’t be allowed to use the Presidency to make billions of dollars for his own crime family.

It’s also critical for the Democrats to build a much stronger infrastructure to train and recruit candidates at all levels and building more effective networks of people to run get-out-the-vote campaigns at election time. Despite being laser-focus on making billionaires richer and more powerful, the Republican Party through its Christian-fundamentalist political networks does have an impressive get-out-the-vote political network.

Not starting wars like the current one with Iran that have massive negative implications for large numbers of people in the US and across the world would also be a great idea. Although for Ezra Klein and other insistent centrists, that might not qualify as enough of a Grand Vision – or at least not “centrist” enough for their liking.

But for Democrats wanting to get people to the polls in November, that should look very attractive.

Notes:

(1) Drezner, Daniel (2026): Whither Liberalism? Drezner’s World 07/19/2026. <https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/whither-liberalism> (Accessed: 2026-19-07).

(2) The Soviet-line Communist parties in the 1930s promoted the idea of a “popular front” of Communist, Socialist, and nonsocialist parties who supported liberal democracy in order to politically and militarily defeat fascism.

(3) William King has contested the nature of the Trotskyist influence on “neoconservatism.” (Neoconservatives and “Trotskyism” (2004). American Communist History 3:2, 247-266. [It's an academic journal, if you're wondering.]) He argues rightwing isolationist “paleoconservatives” invented the story of Trotskyist influence as a form of redbaiting against the interventionist neocons. He cites several examples of liberals who echo that analysis. King points out that Irving Kristol himself later made references to having considered himself a Trotskyist for a few years. He also gives a glimpse of what a fractious set of theories and positions it was that constituted American Trotskyism.

The US Radical Right has long had a fondness for people who claim to have been Communists but who converted to the True Light of hardcore rightwing fascism (or something adjacent). The former Soviet spy Whittaker Chambers was one of that group, who could claim to be defectors from the Communist cause who understood better than anyone how really evil the Reds were.

The historian Bernard DeVoto in 1951 describe (with heavy irony) the pose of the devout ex-Communist’s pitch this way: “I understand, I am right now because I was wrong then. Only the ex-Communist can understand Communism. Trust me to lead you aright because I tried to lead you astray. My intelligence has been vindicated in that it made an all-out commitment to error.” As DeVoto notes from the beginning of his essay, the pose is very similar to that of the converted Christian who claims he understands sin much better than most people because he was once so sinful. (The Ex-Communists. Atlantic Monthly Feb 1951, 61-65. <https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1951/02/the-ex-communists/639665/> (Accessed: 2026-21-07).) And that stance is still popular on the far-right today.

(4) Signer, Michael (2009) : The Neoconservative Père et Fils. Dissent 12/03/2009. <https://dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-neoconservative-pere-et-fils/> (Accessed: 2026-19-07).

(5) “Abundance” Is Not the Answer. Los Angeles Review of Books 07/20/2025. <https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/abundance-is-not-the-answer/> (Accessed: 2026-19-07).

(6) Conference on Liberalism in 21st Century, Part 1. C-Span. <https://www.c-span.org/program/public-affairs-event/conference-on-liberalism-in-21st-century-part-1/664282> (Accessed: 2026-19-07).