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Liberals can’t eliminate Trump-style politics — but they might be able to beat it

A rising strategy for global politics’ new normal.

TORONTO — At a conference bookended by speeches from President Barack Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, the leading lights of the global center-left gathered to consider their fate.

The Global Progress Action Summit was billed as a “progressive version of CPAC,” the right-wing conference that has become a premier gathering for populist conservatives from around the world. And indeed, the conference was preoccupied with its right-mirror image — with speakers admitting that the far right had outmaneuvered them in the past, and advancing ideas for how to blunt its seemingly persistent appeal going forward.

“This is the raison d’être for this work,” as Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress (one of the conference’s organizers), put it to me.

For years, liberal elites on both sides of the Atlantic saw figures like President Donald Trump as a blip to be outlasted. The right’s “fever” would, as the last two Democratic presidents suggested, eventually break after electoral rebukes — returning the old establishment to its traditional leadership positions.

The evidence on this theory is in, and it has failed. Biden’s presidency did not mark the end of Trumpism, nor have far-right electoral defeats in countries ranging from France to Poland been Waterloos.

“It’s clear that Democrats can’t just treat this as some random anomaly or self-correcting problem,” Pete Buttigieg, secretary of transportation under Joe Biden and a rumored 2028 candidate, told me in an interview at the conference. “Look around the world for evidence of that.”

The conference organizers chose to meet in Toronto because Canada was an exception to these trends. Canada’s center-left Liberal party has been in power for 11 unbroken years; its main opposition, the Conservative Party, has grown more populist in recent years but remains considerably more moderate than Trump’s Republicans or the typical European far-right faction.

Yet few attendees had anything like a plan for making their countries more Canadian. In fact, their comments revealed an implicitly opposite approach: Instead of figuring out how to head off the far right entirely, the center-left was learning to live with their presence.

That means redefining victory not as crushing the far right, but defeating it the way they would any other normal political opponent.

“This is not normal” — except it is

The main reason behind the new liberal stance is simple, brute reality: polls and election results show that the far right is simply part of the new normal.

In the US, Trump long ago transformed the Republican Party in his image. The right-wing Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, began her political career as a neo-fascist activist and is now a major world leader. The far-right AfD is topping German........

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