How Democracies Revive: Why Illiberalism Keeps Winning and What to Do About

Despite occasional setbacks, illiberalism keeps winning, from India and the United States to Germany. Analytical frameworks remain polarized among cultural backlash, economic grievance, and illiberal-playbook accounts. Each explains part of the picture, but none captures the comprehensiveness of the illiberal challenge.

This talk, drawing on a forthcoming Stanford University Press book that blends scholarly research with insider political experience, proposes a relational materialist framework. It traces illiberalism to the contradictions of an uneven and shifting hierarchical global economic order, which generate a triple devaluation of economic status, cultural worth, and political voice that illiberal movements mobilize. The balance of political forces across these intertwined fields of struggle, above all the capacity of democratic actors to answer the triple devaluation, determines the outcome. The talk applies this framework to illiberal socioeconomic policy, foreign policy, and political strategy, and closes by drawing on successful cases of democratic revival, from South Korea and Uruguay to Hungary in 2026, to identify what durable democratic countervailing power requires.

Banner image: "_1038237," by Stephen Bingham licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.