A world organized around slavery and personal domination of enslaved people, and authoritarian enclaves in the South and elsewhere with longstanding hierarchies of power supported by many who saw benefits, shows that illiberalism was satisfying and provided meaning to people's lives in prosaic daily ways until threatened.

Many people in the 1920s and early 1930s, particularly in America, thought Mussolini was pointing to the future because he seemed strong, active, engaged, and recognized the limitations of the liberal state, without saying the U.S. was moving in a Nazi direction but noting that some ideas, connections, and the overall project of determining who should participate in politics had resonances.

Operation Wetback showed the ease of building a repressive apparatus, and Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren and then criticized it as his worst mistake, and had to go through a second Brown decision to provide enforcement means, showing moderate Republican limitations on preventing segregation.

Illiberalism operates as a way of life in prosaic daily ways until threatened, then erupts, so understanding it requires more than identifying rage—it requires understanding daily lived experience that provides meaning.

Recognizing illiberalism as an important current and field of force challenges the tendency to view disruptions of liberal tradition as simply backlash or angry venting without substance, which is a serious mistake.

Rights, due process, and courts were products of very divisive and very violent struggles, and the period during which these achievements were robust is quite short, making their loss a genuine possibility.

If what's sought is an egalitarian society where regardless of background people can pursue meaningful lives, then liberalism must confront what it has been inadequate to—really addressing power—not just rhetorically but actually.

If you want to build a movement where everyone fits through the eye of a needle it won't work, and real social movements of consequence that use power for change and appeal to large numbers whose lives can actually improve require containing people with divergent views.

Lincoln embodied contradictions about what a national family is and who would be included in it, growing and changing in significant ways but still containing these contradictions, and deserves nuanced understanding rather than simple dismissal as villain or hero.

Political sensibilities do not fit into neat boxes, and there can be overlap between appeals from different political movements (Bernie Sanders appealed to some who voted for Trump, both being anti-institutional), revealing more fundamental cleavages than traditional partisan ones.

Herbert Croly, a founder of the New Republic and advocate of Teddy Roosevelt's new nationalism, was suspicious of Jeffersonian democracy and believed many people in the United States didn't understand the national purpose, so politics should be conducted by trained experts.