Is There Room for Revolutionary Conservatives in a Liberal Democracy?

In old and new democracies alike, the right has largely given up its traditional instinct to conserve. Instead, it has adopted the revolutionary tactics once associated with the Left. The United States (Donald Trump case) and Poland (Law & Justice – PiS case) are the two clearest cases in which this “conservative revolution” has gone full circle - seizing power, losing it, refusing to disappear, and then returning - all while holding on to somewhere between a third and a half of the electorate.

That staying power raises an awkward question for anyone committed to liberal democracy. When tens of millions of people vote, repeatedly and with open eyes, for movements that most scholars call a threat to democracy, how long can that vote be waved away as manipulation, grievance, or simple error? At some point constitutional thinking may have to separate two things it usually runs together: the moral legitimacy of the conservative program, which remains hotly contested, and its democratic legitimacy, which a string of election wins makes ever harder to deny.

The recent Oxford University Press volume Let’s Agree on Poland (eds. Maciej Kisilowski and Anna Wojciuk, 2025) - the international edition of a Polish nonfiction bestseller written by a network of more than 20 intellectuals from across the political spectrum - confronts exactly this problem. Its argument is that a purely legalistic “counter-revolution” cannot stabilize a polarized democracy, and that the way forward runs instead through power-sharing and deliberate decentralization. With a PiS-backed president elected in Poland in June 2025 and a second Trump administration remaking American institutions, the two countries now shed a surprising amount of light on each other.

The event has four aims. The first is to introduce a U.S. policy, academic, and student audience to the “conservative revolutionaries” framework and to the Polish debate over a new social contract and the need for a new constitutional design. The second is to compare the Polish and American cycles of conservative revolution and liberal counter-revolution - the fights over courts, public media, the politics of prosecution, and contested transfers of power. The third is to ask whether institutional accommodation - federalism, decentralization, a vertical division of power - offers a realistic alternative to winner-takes-all politics in both countries. The fourth, more broadly, is to build a transatlantic conversation between Central European and American scholars of democracy at a moment when both regions are under similar constitutional strain. 

The discussion could turn on a handful of further proposed questions. Is “conservative revolutionary” a more honest analytical label than “populist,” “illiberal,” or “authoritarian” - and does the choice of word carry political consequences? Has liberalism started treating conservative moral commitments as illegitimate rather than merely mistaken? Can a democracy still count as “consolidated” when a large, mobilized bloc of voters backs movements that openly challenge the constitutional order? 

From there we turn to remedies. What have the legal “speed bumps” - militant rule of law, court battles, EU sanctions - actually accomplished in Poland and the U.S.: have they slowed the revolution down, or hardened it? Could constitutional geography, whether decentralization along the lines proposed for Poland or a revived American federalism, lower the stakes of national elections enough to take the heat out of the conflict? Or does decentralization simply swap a national culture war for the tyranny of local majorities over local minorities?