The article was originally published on Marlene Laruelle’s Substack, Vivatopia.
The term “illiberalism” has become part of everyday political language. Yet it is often reduced to a synonym for authoritarianism, democratic backsliding, or the far right. This misses what makes illiberalism useful as an analytical category, which is to draw our attention to a broader transformation: liberalism no longer operates as the uncontested common sense of contemporary societies; it has become just one ideological option among others.
The Illiberalism Studies Program was created to study this shift in all its dimensions. We look at political leaders and governments, but also at ideas, cultural practices, social movements, and everyday experiences. Over the years, this broader perspective has convinced me that the central question is about what kind of social order people are seeking, and why liberalism no longer provides a convincing answer for many of them.
Here are five takeaways from the field as we have observed it. The first two shift attention from politics to the moral and cultural worlds in which illiberalism becomes attractive. The last three complicate the boundary between liberalism and illiberalism by showing their shared genealogy, their zones of overlap, and their common institutional terrain.
1. Illiberalism speaks a moral language before it becomes political
Political science focuses on voting patterns and the erosion of institutions. But most people do not arrive at politics through a worked-out doctrine and clear policy preferences. They arrive through a sense of what feels fair or unfair, and on what Arlie Russell Hochschild calls the “deep stories” behind political emotion, especially resentment and a sense of others having cut in line ahead of them.
Illiberalism takes root in that sense: it speaks the language of values, family, national belonging, religion, masculinity or femininity, and historical memory. For people who feel their social world has grown opaque or unmanageable, it offers a vocabulary. It promises restored boundaries and a clearer line between authority and responsibility.
This moral dimension is why illiberalism cannot be read as purely reactionary. For many, there is a negative dimension to their illiberalism, catalyzed by the feeling of being brushed aside by liberal elites, of being left behind by technocratic, “depoliticized” management, and the like. But there is something positive, too: a renewed sense of belonging, the reinsertion of meaning into political engagement, the rediscovery that the future can be made differently, etc. Illiberalism is not only backward-looking reaction against the status quo (though it can be), but forward-looking, substantive, and meaningful for those who are its bearers.
By the time illiberalism crystallizes into an electoral platform, most of its worldview has already been circulating for years, embedded in the stories people tell about their lives: a feeling of national decline, deteriorating working conditions, what it means to raise children, cultural norms changing too quickly, etc. This is one reason why electoral defeats do not dissolve illiberal movements: because their deeper moral universe remains active.
This is one reason why electoral defeats do not dissolve illiberal movements: because their deeper moral universe remains active.
2. Illiberalism is expressed in cultural production and everyday life
The second point follows from the first: if illiberalism speaks a moral language before it speaks a policy language, it will surface not in party rhetoric but in cultural production, entertainment, aesthetics, habits, and the texture of everyday social life.
Much has already been written on how online influencers circulate templates of masculinity, femininity, and idealized family life. But the reach extends well beyond that. Fashion and fitness cultures can celebrate discipline, physical strength, and sharply marketed gender roles too. Films and television series can romanticize traditional authority or present hierarchy as a guarantee of order rather than a constraint on freedom.
Music and video games carry the same sensibility, whether through the martial aesthetics of certain gaming subcultures or through lyrics and imagery that glorify loyalty and hierarchy over autonomy and negotiation. Food culture does similar work: an emphasis on rootedness and authenticity can quietly turn eating habits into a marker of belonging, and cooking or foraging into a rehearsal of self-sufficiency and ancestral continuity.
While most actually-existing illiberalism tends to be right-wing, one can imagine a left-wing illiberalism building out similar cultural ecosystems. Films, television series, novels, music, and more could become part and parcel of a shared lifeworld that rejects liberal philosophical assumptions and political institutions in favor of those that prioritize collective dependence instead of autonomous individuality, solidarity, sacrifice, and mutual aid instead of accumulation and consumerism, etc.
An ideology gains real force when it is lived as an aesthetic preference rather than recognized as a political program at all.
In any case, this everyday dimension remains understudied. Political science focuses on institutions and voting behavior, while intellectual history concentrates on thinkers and doctrines. But an ideology gains real force when it is lived as an aesthetic preference rather than recognized as a political program at all.
3. Illiberalism grew from within liberalism
This is precisely why illiberalism is often mistaken for liberalism’s opposite, when it may in fact be one of its offshoots. Their histories are entangled, and illiberalism emerged from liberalism’s own defects and limits rather than as a foreign product.
To give but one example, the conservative neoliberal turn of the 1980s can be read both as a cause of the later illiberal backlash and as one of its origins. Reagan and Thatcher combined free markets with stronger authority and traditional values, while Hayek was willing to accept authoritarian rule when he believed it necessary to protect a liberal market order from democratic pressure. Contemporary illiberalism inherits this model and pushes it further.
This shared genealogy helps explain why the boundary between liberalism and illiberalism is sometimes difficult to draw. In many cases, these blurry boundaries are institutional. While some illiberals have built new institutions, many have simply employed the mechanics of the liberal state toward different ends. Liberals often cry foul at illiberal statecraft, but the reality is that, in many cases, liberals themselves provided the precedents, the tools, and the architecture for the illiberal turn (we will return to this theme in the section below).
Moreover, liberalism has never been a fixed doctrine and its central concepts have always been contested. Freedom can mean protection from state power, but also freedom from social obligations. Rights can defend individuals or be mobilized on behalf of families, religions, and national majorities. Democracy can refer to institutional restraints and pluralism, or to the direct authority of the majority.
There is little point in denouncing this as semantic theft or usurpation: liberalism does not own the concepts of freedom, rights, or democracy.
There is little point in denouncing this as semantic theft or usurpation: liberalism does not own the concepts of freedom, rights, or democracy. This reappropriation of liberal language belongs to ordinary ideological competition, as the meaning of these concepts changes through conflict and historical experience. The rise of illiberalism should therefore not be treated as a supposed abnormal pathology disturbing an otherwise stable liberal order. It simply shows that liberalism has lost its monopoly over how contemporary societies define political legitimacy.
4. Liberalism produces its own illiberal practices
To add to these ambiguities, illiberal practices do not belong only to governments that openly reject liberalism. Liberal democracies may also restrict rights in the name of security, public order, emergency, or the protection of liberal values themselves.
In the United States circa the War on Terror, policymakers operating well within the bounds of liberal political institutions created an opaque and far-reaching security architecture, normalized mass surveillance, and sustained prolonged states of emergency. They also funded migration policies that created detention systems and border practices that sit uneasily with proclaimed commitments to human rights. They increasingly put pressure on free speech and protest in the name of protecting certain minority groups. This behemoth-like structure has not been upended by the more overtly illiberal Trump. The same can be said about liberal Europe.
These developments point to a broader transformation of liberalism: as governments confront growing ungovernability and social fragmentation, they increasingly rely on executive authority and forms of exceptional rule. The deeper difficulty is that liberalism has come to equate progress with the continuous expansion of individual rights, without clearly defining where those rights end or how they relate to collective needs. This leaves it poorly equipped to arbitrate conflicts over belonging and the common good, because any limit can appear as a betrayal of its own principles.
This is why the boundary between liberalism and illiberalism is better understood as a zone of overlap than as a clear dividing line. Liberal regimes can generate illiberal practices from within their own logic, without adopting an illiberal ideology. These pockets then strengthen the critique advanced by illiberal actors, who can point to the gap between liberal principles and the way liberalism actually governs, creating a feedback loop effect on liberalism’s betrayal of its own ideal.
Liberal regimes can generate illiberal practices from within their own logic, without adopting an illiberal ideology.
5. Illiberalism transforms institutions from within
This feedback loop also helps explain why illiberalism rarely advances by simply attacking institutions from the outside. More often, it works through them: elections, courts, universities, public administrations, and media regulators can all become instruments of illiberal transformation.
This institutional pathway is central. In addition to the points made above about national security institutions, illiberal leaders may maintain elections while changing the conditions under which political competition takes place; they may preserve courts while narrowing judicial independence; universities may continue operating while their funding structures and governing boards are redesigned to favor a specific ideological orientation; public broadcasters can remain formally independent while being turned into instruments of government messaging; the list continues.
The result can be more durable than open institutional destruction, because institutions retain their names and formal procedures, which allows governments to claim continuity. But their purpose gradually changes.
The dilemma is that measures adopted to defend liberal democracy can themselves narrow the liberal rights they are meant to preserve. When exceptional tools become routine, militant democracy produces its own illiberal practices.
This process also unfolds inside liberal democracies through the logic of “militant democracy,” the idea that democratic systems may restrict certain freedoms in order to defend themselves against forces seeking to destroy them. In practice, this can justify bans on organizations, limits on demonstrations, expanded surveillance, or restrictions on speech in the name of protecting the constitutional order. The dilemma is that measures adopted to defend liberal democracy can themselves narrow the liberal rights they are meant to preserve. When exceptional tools become routine, militant democracy produces its own illiberal practices.
Questions to consider
These few examples show how Illiberalism Studies widens the lens. Liberalism now faces genuine ideological competition, and acknowledging that fact should lead neither to panic nor resignation but push us toward better questions. Why has liberalism become so distant from ordinary life for some segments of the population? Which forms of belonging has it failed to sustain? What kind of social order could preserve pluralism while recovering a shared sense of purpose?
These are good questions to carry through the summer, especially as the US midterms approach and Europe enters another dense electoral cycle in 2027.
Marlene Laruelle is Full Professor at Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome and the director of the Illiberalism Studies Program at George Washington University.
