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.
Key takeaways
“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 polls despite frequent accusations of neo-Nazi ties, and France’s National Rally is the odds-on favorite to win the presidency in 2027. Two days before the conference, the United Kingdom’s Reform Party stomped to victory over the ruling Labour Party in local elections so resoundingly that the centrist Prime Minister Keir Starmer is now on resignation watch.
One theory, popular among conference goers, is that this far-right trend could be blunted by economic success. Speaker after speaker touted various policies in this area, on the implicit — and sometimes explicit — assumption they could deliver victory by striking at the heart of the far right’s appeal.
“It’s gotten harder to get and stay in the middle class,” Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan told me. “That economic stress is causing people to head into the arms of someone who will tell them they have an easy solution and they have someone to blame.”
A version of this approach, widely termed “deliverism” at the time, was an animating idea behind the Biden administration’s pursuit of a large stimulus and redistributive policy. But it’s also easier said than done: Biden did deliver low unemployment, high economic growth, and more manufacturing jobs in cutting-edge industries — producing a US economy that The Economist famously termed “the envy of the world” in October 2024. That obviously didn’t work out as planned, as voters revolted against spiking inflation and grew more pessimistic than ever.
Slotkin’s response is that Biden simply delivered in the wrong ways, trumpeting good economic statistics while ignoring the devastating effects of higher prices.
“They tried to tell the American people that they were better off than they felt they were,” she says. “Even while it was happening, I said, ‘If I hear one more Harvard economist tell me people are better off than they really think they are,’ I’m going to lose it.’ Because people know their own pocketbooks.”
The underlying premise is questionable. The best social science has shown, time and again, that the far right’s base is motivated less by the economic anxiety that Slotkin cites and much more by concerns about cultural and demographic change. The far right persists across different democracies with different economic circumstances and models because all of them are, in one way or another, grappling with changes wrought by mass immigration and shifting cultural roles surrounding race and gender.
But what’s interesting about Slotkin’s approach is just how normal it is.
Trying to beat the other party by delivering concrete economic goods is perhaps the most traditional of traditional political strategies. “It’s the economy, stupid” was James Carville’s famous tagline back when he was running Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. It is also a necessarily cyclical strategy; eventually, the economy will perform poorly under your watch, and your party will lose. Slotkin’s deliverism isn’t a strategy for vanquishing the far right, but beating it temporarily in the traditional manner of democratic politics. It is how you deal with a rival, not an existential threat.
Of course, the far right can indeed pose a kind of existential threat by attacking democracy. When the Hungarian center-left lost the country’s 2010 election, they did not get another fair shot in 2014. Instead, they were forced to compete on increasingly uneven ground, locking them out of power until this year’s wave election gave Prime Minister Viktor Orbán no choice but to concede defeat.
Center-left politicians are, at this point, acutely aware of the danger. On the American side, Buttigieg suggested that this required fundamental political reform.
“If return to normal could have been done, could have succeeded, the last administration would have done it,” he says.
He believes the ultimate goal should be to create a system where moderate Republicans could break with Trump more easily when democracy is on the line. True MAGA, he estimates, represents only 20 percent to 30 percent of the population; perhaps changing the way the system works could bring its political representation more in line with that.
How exactly to get here from there was more fuzzy: the two reforms he floated as examples, ranked-choice voting and California-style jungle primaries, would almost certainly be insufficient. Moreover, even his ideal state concedes a significant role for MAGA — one not far from what we see in many European democracies, where far-right parties are always a visible part of the legislature. In Germany, for example, the AfD has reached a position of significant influence while commanding a small plurality (roughly 27 percent) in the polls.
Even the most radically ambitious vision, in short, still sees MAGA as a persistent and durable force in American politics.
Maybe normal politics can work
But if liberals now seem to be conceding that the far right won’t simply be vanquished, they also are growing more hopeful as to their ability to contain it.
Even as the far right has risen in power around the world in recent years, it’s also held power in relatively few places — and the closer it gets to governing, the more voters seem to remember why they kept them out of power so long in the first place.
Trump’s second administration is a case in point. The president followed through on his promises to boost the economy by throwing up protective tariffs, blowing up government agencies, expelling immigrants, and slashing taxes — only to see his approval scraping new lows on issue after issue. Government by the far right and for the far right is so far backfiring on its own terms and producing a doom loop of corruption, infighting, war, and economic uncertainty.
Elly Schlein — the leader of Italy’s Democrats, the center-left opposition to Meloni’s government — was perhaps the most optimistic in this regard. Coming off of a recent victory in a national referendum, where the opposition defeated a Meloni proposal to increase her control over the judiciary, Schlein saw a far-right whose ascent was finally starting to ebb — primarily as a result of its own governing failures.
“The time of right-wing nationalists is over, because they are not delivering with people,” she said in a panel appearance.
The strategy for the left must not be “running after them or trying to speak their language” — an implicit rebuke to leaders like the UK’s Starmer, who tacked to the right on immigration and got wiped out. Rather, Schlein suggested, the center-left should try to force the conversation onto “uncomfortable ground” for the right — meaning economic issues like “housing, wages, healthcare, and education.”
Though Schlein is a leftist, one occasionally termed Italy’s AOC, her advice sounded strikingly similar to the moderate Slotkin’s. Both believed that the center-left can survive periods of far-right government and then, subsequently, return to power by attacking the incumbent’s corruption and unequal governance. The battle will never be over, but losing once doesn’t necessarily mean the setback is permanent.
Perhaps the most striking piece of evidence that “normal” political rhetoric can work — even in the context of democratic backsliding or outright authoritarianism — came from the success of new Hungarian Prime Minister Peter Magyar.
As it happened, the day of the conference was the day that Magyar was officially sworn into office — and, as such, everyone was talking about him. In our conversation, Slotkin explicitly cited “the Hungarian model” as an inspiration for her own approach to thinking about beating back the far-right tide.
Magyar campaigned both on economic issues and as an agent of structural transformation, while linking the two topics together. Focusing on the Orbán regime’s ostentatious corruption, he argued that the current government’s nature had made its very existence a barrier to prosperity for ordinary Hungarians. He promised not just a change in economic policy, but also the functional demolition of what Orbán had built: transforming politicized institutions and even prosecuting top government officials and allies who committed crimes on the former government’s behalf.
Now, the circumstances in Hungary are different from those in any other Western democracy. Orbán was not just a far-right politician but an authoritarian who had twisted every aspect of the political system to try to maintain power indefinitely. After 16 years of such a regime, and amid an economic disaster, Magyar’s message was unusually likely to hit (especially given his clever tactics for getting around the government’s tight control over information).
But his success at least offers a hint of hope for the otherwise beleaguered liberal movement represented at the conference. If a country that had crossed the line into authoritarianism can come back through the tools of “normal” politics, the thinking goes, then perhaps the world’s oldest democracy and its allies can save themselves the same way.
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