Liberalism is in crisis, we’re told, assailed on left and right by rising populists and authoritarians. The center cannot hold, they say. But if liberal democracy itself is under threat of collapse because of this weakened center, why are the great defenders of the “open society” such as Isaiah Berlin, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Karl Popper, and Raymond Aron so little invoked? One would think that liberals today would be pressing back into service these robust thinkers of cold-war liberalism. But while not forgotten, their names are barely cited in contemporary political debates. One curious exception—that almost proves the rule, given its eccentric grounds—was when, last year, an Irish finance minister lauded Berlin for helping him deal with “the demands of corporation tax policy.” That is hardly using Berlin as a buttress against populism.

There remains much to be recovered from cold war liberalism for our historical moment. These thinkers had already learned the hard way that progress in the direction of a more liberal world is not inevitable. In a self-critical vein, they took seriously some of the charges that had been leveled against capitalist democracies in the 1920s and 1930s. But what Schlesinger outlined in an influential 1949 book called The Vital Center was not a matter of mere pragmatism, let alone triangulation between extreme left and right. These thinkers sought to craft a principled politics of freedom for the circumstances of the twentieth century. This was very different from the tendency of today’s disoriented centrists  to pre-emptively enact the agenda of populists—for example, Hillary Clinton’s cynical call for Europe to stop aiding refugees, since, in her view, the migration issue just helps populists. Her underlying idea appears to be that one can defeat one’s political adversaries by imitating them. That is not what cold war liberals thought.     

One obvious reason for cold war liberals’ relative exclusion from conversations today is that the cold war was to a great extent a struggle between grand narratives of warring political ideas (even if it was not just about political ideas). Berlin and Aron famously denounced the totalitarian utopias of the twentieth century as the “opium of the intellectuals.” Populists have no such utopian program, and they do not believe in historical determinism in the way many Communists did. Indeed, populism has no intrinsic ideology or doctrine of either left or right. Rather, populists claim that they, and only they, represent “the real people” or “the silent majority,” as they deny the legitimacy of their political competitors who are declared to be corrupt and “crooked.”

Berlin and Aron’s critique cannot apply here because populists have no use for appealing to intellectuals or the seduction of big ideas. Rather than looking forward to a perfected future, right-wing populists in particular conjure up a fantasized past of a homogeneous, pure volk. In fact, they tend to reduce all political questions to questions of belonging: they insinuate that those citizens who do not share their conception of the people do not properly belong to the people at all; if citizens criticize populists, they are quickly condemned as traitors. This explains why right-wing populists like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán attack “liberal elites” and vulnerable minorities at the same time.

Trump, for his part, declares opponents “treasonous” and “un-American.” In a speech he gave in Warsaw, Trump’s rhetorical question—“Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost?”—could be mistaken for a soundbite from the height of the cold war, but tellingly, he followed it with another: “Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders?” With this, he conjured a world in which real Americans are constantly threatened by caravans of Middle Eastern terrorists and people from Latin America who can pass for citizens but might be enemies within.