In moments of democratic crisis, those who claim to be the guardians of the liberal order often prove to be its most hapless saboteurs. As the far right consolidates power across the United States—through voter suppression, ideological school boards, gerrymandering, book bans, and creeping theocratic nationalism—many of the institutions that pride themselves on defending “liberal democracy” have opted for paralysis, false equivalence, or appeasement. They confuse posture with resistance and decorum with principle. The result is a political center that mistakes neutrality for virtue and becomes an accomplice in its own undoing.
It is important to note here that “liberalism” refers not to left-leaning politics or the Democratic Party, but to the broader ideological framework that has long underpinned U.S. political institutions: a belief in market-based solutions, procedural governance, incremental reform, and the neutrality of civic institutions. Taken together, these principles form the tradition of classical liberalism. When updated for the modern age, classical liberalism evolves into neoliberalism, prioritizing individual freedoms, technocratic management, and faith in capitalism as the driving force of social progress. These values may clash with overt authoritarianism, but they remain deeply invested in preserving elite consensus, market discipline, and institutional continuity—even when those same institutions are being weaponized by the far right.
It’s an old pattern, familiar to anyone who has studied the rise of authoritarianism. The reactionary threat rarely arrives through the front door, goose-stepping in jackboots. It builds slowly, through the erosion of norms, the mobilization of resentment, and the repurposing of existing institutions. The more these shifts resemble “normal” political behavior, the easier it becomes for liberal institutions to rationalize them. And rationalize they do, by issuing strongly worded statements, appealing to procedural rules, or defending the abstract sanctity of “both sides” while one side sharpens the knife.
The media’s cult of balance
No institution exemplifies this dynamic more clearly than the mainstream press. In their determination to avoid charges of partisanship, liberal media outlets have internalized a doctrine of false balance that now distorts public understanding of fundamental realities. Decades of right-wing pressure—from Nixon’s “liberal media” narrative to Trump’s cries of “fake news”—have pushed legacy outlets into an endless cycle of self-flagellation, where even the most basic truth must be “balanced” by a counterpoint, no matter how absurd or malicious.
Thus, climate change becomes a “debate.” Racism becomes a matter of “opinion.” Election lies are weighed against voter turnout statistics as if both were equally credible. This is not objective journalism; it is institutional cowardice. And it has created a media landscape where outright authoritarian rhetoric can be laundered into mainstream discourse without ever being called what it is.
Compounding this crisis is the media’s addiction to spectacle. Figures like Trump are catnip for ratings, and editorial decisions are often governed less by civic responsibility than engagement metrics. By treating fascist-adjacent movements as entertaining content rather than existential threats, media platforms help normalize extremism and desensitize the public to its consequences. Outrage becomes ambient noise—the line between coverage and complicity blurs.
Universities as citadels of compromise
Higher education has long imagined itself as the vanguard of a democratic society, training critical thinkers, challenging dogma, and expanding access to knowledge. However, under neoliberalism, the university has been remade in the image of the market. Governance structures now resemble corporate boards. Donors wield enormous influence–2024 was a year that saw record-breaking donations to top-tier universities. Faculty precarity has increased. And the student has become a “customer.”
In this environment, “controversy” is treated as a brand liability. When right-wing provocateurs target campus initiatives—from diversity programs to Palestinian solidarity groups—administrators often respond not with principled defense, but with risk assessments and PR strategies. They cancel events, investigate faculty, and issue hollow reassurances about “viewpoint diversity” that, in practice, mean capitulating to organized backlash. This isn’t free speech—it’s institutional surrender dressed in the language of civility.
Worse still, elite universities have positioned themselves as bipartisan centers of discourse while continuing to accept money from authoritarian regimes, private equity firms, and fossil fuel conglomerates. These relationships aren’t incidental. They reflect a profound moral confusion within liberal academia—an unwillingness to choose sides, even when the stakes are civil rights, public knowledge, or human survival.
Even within curricula, the danger is present. Once committed to critical theory, labor history, or anti-colonial studies, departments are being marginalized in favor of STEM-heavy, “employable” skill sets. The corporate language of efficiency, metrics, and performance has crept into syllabi, pedagogical goals, and faculty evaluations. In the name of preparing students for the job market, universities are subtly abandoning their role as incubators of democratic consciousness.
Think tanks that think small
Centrist think tanks, too, have legitimized authoritarian drift—not through malice but through narrowness. Obsessed with “pragmatism,” these organizations often view politics as a technocratic adjustment rather than a structural transformation. They embrace bipartisanship as an end in itself. Their policy recommendations avoid challenging entrenched hierarchies, preferring modest reforms that keep existing power structures intact.
As authoritarianism becomes impossible to ignore, these institutions respond with measured reports and public forums, promoting business-friendly fixes and vague appeals to national “unity.” But they stop short of naming the crisis’s capitalist underpinnings or confronting how decades of neoliberal governance have gutted public goods, bred alienation, and opened the door to reactionary movements. By refusing to see the system itself as culpable, they ensure that any resistance will be cosmetic at best.
Consider how many centrist policy shops promoted “school choice” or corporate education reform, framing them as innovative solutions for underserved communities. The actual outcome, of course, has been the defunding of public schools, the proliferation of for-profit charters, and the erosion of teachers’ unions—conditions ripe for cultural reaction and right-wing capture.
This incrementalism, this allergic reaction to structural analysis, is not neutral. It is ideological. It also helps preserve the illusion that capitalism can be tweaked for justice, even as its contradictions radicalize ever-larger segments of the population.
Moderation as ideology
The central delusion of liberal institutions is the belief that moderation is inherently stabilizing. But history suggests otherwise. From Weimar Germany to post-Soviet Russia, the centrists often proved most unprepared for the demands of democratic defense. Their political instincts—compromise, de-escalation, institutional preservation—are ill-suited to a moment when one party no longer believes in democratic norms and the other refuses to see that fact clearly.
In the U.S. today, this delusion plays out in real time. Moderates bemoan polarization, scold activists for “divisive” rhetoric, and insist that we must return to a mythical center. However, when one side wants to dismantle democracy, there is no center—only acquiescence or resistance.
Even Democratic Party leaders, still captive to the donor class and consultant orthodoxy, often cling to norms that have already been weaponized against them. They frame opposition in terms of “decency” rather than power. They plead for unity while the right is organizing for domination. This misreading of the terrain has left the left and the working class exposed, waiting for institutional safeguards that no longer function.
A different kind of courage
Confronting authoritarianism requires more than institutional continuity—it demands moral clarity. It means naming white nationalism as such. It means refusing to platform propagandists under the pretense of dialogue. It means recognizing that power does not yield to reasoned debate alone but to organized pressure and popular mobilization.
Liberal institutions are not doomed to irrelevance. They can still play a role in this fight—but only if they shed their illusions of neutrality and take sides in the struggle for democracy, justice, and human dignity. This is not a call for partisanship but for courage: the courage to be honest, bold, and to act in accordance with the values they claim to uphold.
This also means embracing a class politics that has long been off the table in elite liberal spaces. To challenge authoritarianism, we must organize around material conditions—wages, housing, healthcare, and education. These are not distractions from the culture war. They are its terrain. The right wins when it convinces ordinary people that liberal elites are contemptuous and indifferent—the left wins when it shows up with solidarity, not slogans.
As the authoritarian tide rises, the question is not whether liberal institutions will be destroyed. It’s whether they will destroy themselves through inaction, cowardice, and complicity.
The stakes are clear. The hour is late. And neutrality is a luxury we can no longer afford.
As with all op-eds published by People’s World, this article reflects the views of its author.
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