The Axis of Illiberalism (2026) — Conclusion
How Democracies Unlearn Constraint
This is the final post in The Axis of Illiberalism (2026) series. The earlier pieces examined illiberalism as a system rather than a personality, traced how it aligns across borders, explored its institutional design, and showed how it has embedded itself within Britain without overt rupture. This final article draws those threads together.
The series
Part I: What illiberalism is, and why it is not simply authoritarianism
https://www.ideasthatbrokebritain.co.uk/p/the-axis-of-illiberalism-2026-partPart II: The Axis of Illiberalism as a transnational system
https://www.ideasthatbrokebritain.co.uk/p/the-axis-of-illiberalism-2026-part-4b9Part III: Designing an illiberal state: Trumpism and Project 2025
https://www.ideasthatbrokebritain.co.uk/p/the-axis-of-illiberalism-2026-part-a2cPart IV: Illiberal foreign policy and the erosion of international restraint
https://www.ideasthatbrokebritain.co.uk/p/the-axis-of-illiberalism-2026-part-833Part V: Why capital aligns with illiberal democracy
https://www.ideasthatbrokebritain.co.uk/p/the-axis-of-illiberalism-2026-part-668Part VI: Britain: alignment, accommodation, and respectability
https://www.ideasthatbrokebritain.co.uk/p/the-axis-of-illiberalism-2026-part-e17
Liberal democracy is not simply a system for choosing leaders. It is a system for limiting power.
Elections matter, but they are not the core of the model. The core is constraint: law that binds the state, courts that cannot be overridden by popularity, rights that do not depend on loyalty, and international rules that restrict what governments may do even when they believe themselves justified. Liberal democracy assumes that power, left unchecked, will eventually be abused, and it builds friction into the system accordingly.
Illiberalism begins by rejecting that assumption.
Illiberal systems do not abolish elections. They hollow them out. The vote remains, but the constraints are treated as optional. Courts are reframed as political actors. Journalism becomes a threat rather than a safeguard. Human rights are recoded as privileges, citizenship as conditional, and international law as something that applies only when convenient. Power is no longer bound by principle, only by alignment.
This series has argued that this is not a mood, a backlash, or a cultural turn. It is a governing method. Once constraint is redefined as weakness, the logic travels quickly. Rules become discretionary. Enforcement becomes selective. Risk is redistributed downward, away from those who govern and onto those who dissent. Institutions adapt. Some comply. Some fall silent. Some are forced out. What remains looks like democracy, but functions very differently.
Illiberalism does not advance through coups or sudden constitutional rupture. As the earlier entries showed, it advances by changing how power understands risk. In a liberal democracy, risk is supposed to run upward. Governments hesitate because overreach is costly. Courts can strike down policy. Journalists can expose abuse. International law can impose diplomatic, legal, or reputational consequences. Power is made to pause.
Illiberal systems reverse that flow. The first step is rhetorical. Constraint is framed as weakness. Courts are said to obstruct “the will of the people.” Journalists are accused of bias rather than error. Human rights are presented as abstractions that protect the undeserving. International law is depicted as something imposed by foreigners with no democratic mandate. None of these arguments are new. What changes is how routinely they are accepted.
Once constraint is delegitimised, rules become conditional. The law still exists, but it is no longer universal. It is applied rigorously to opponents and leniently to allies. Breaches are justified as exceptional, temporary, or necessary. Over time, exception becomes precedent. Precedent becomes practice. Practice becomes normal.
At that point, something crucial happens. Risk is redistributed.
Journalists who challenge power face personal and professional consequences. Activists learn that protest carries escalating legal danger. Minorities discover that rights once assumed to be universal are now contingent on behaviour, alignment, or silence. Institutions designed to protect against abuse begin to prioritise survival instead. This is where illiberalism becomes self-reinforcing.
Institutions do not need to be captured all at once. As shown across Russia, Hungary, Israel, the United States, and Britain, they learn. Editors become cautious. Trustees weigh reputational cost before truth. Civil servants avoid certain interpretations of the law. Political parties adjust language to avoid provoking backlash. None of this requires explicit instruction. The environment does the work.
What emerges is not authoritarian rule in the classical sense, but a system of anticipatory compliance. Power does not need to threaten everyone. It only needs to punish a few, visibly and asymmetrically, so the lesson is internalised by the rest.
This is the mechanism that links the cases examined throughout this series.
The “Axis of Illiberalism” is not a formal alliance, nor a conspiracy. It is a shared logic, learned and reproduced across borders. Different histories, different cultures, different targets, but the same lesson: liberal constraint can be shed without immediate collapse.
Russia demonstrates that elections can be retained while opposition is rendered meaningless. Hungary shows how courts, universities, and media can be hollowed under the cover of reform. Israel illustrates how permanent emergency can justify permanent inequality, and how international law can be treated as selectively binding. The United States proves that even long-established democratic institutions can be bent toward personal rule if enough constraints are delegitimised.
Each case reassures the others. If they can do this and survive, so can we.
Britain’s place in this picture has been the central concern of this series. Britain’s problem is not that illiberalism suddenly appeared in 2016. It is that it was already present, and then intensified.
Long before Brexit, Britain had tolerated the steady erosion of constraint: a tabloid culture comfortable with falsehood, a political class willing to frame courts as obstacles, an expanding security state, and a media environment in which some lies carried far less cost than others. The fire was already burning. Brexit was not the spark. It was the accelerant.
The referendum represented both the culmination of illiberal pressure up to that point and the moment at which those tactics were normalised and escalated. “Alternative facts”, contempt for expertise, procedural brinkmanship, and hostility to legal constraint were no longer fringe tools. They were validated by mass participation and electoral success. What followed was not rupture, but learning.
Britain specialises in continuity. Change is absorbed through convention, precedent, and institutional drift rather than formal break. In the post-Brexit environment, this became a liability. Illiberal pressure does not arrive in Britain as a demand to abolish rights or cancel elections. It arrives as a series of management problems. How to handle hostile press campaigns. How to avoid regulatory backlash. How to minimise reputational risk. How to keep institutions functioning under sustained political attack.
Each response appears reasonable in isolation. Taken together, they rewire the system. As the previous articles showed in detail, public bodies learned which pressures mattered most. Right-wing media outrage became urgent. Organised complaints from well-connected lobbying networks became existential risk. Methodical criticism from civil society groups, academics, or minority communities was acknowledged, then quietly deprioritised. A hierarchy of concern emerged.
This process has been reinforced, not resisted, by the political centre.
Reactionary centrism did not halt the illiberal drift. It stabilised it. By absorbing illiberal premises while rejecting illiberal aesthetics, it made the transition smoother. Rights were affirmed in principle but narrowed in law. Protest was defended abstractly but criminalised in practice. International law was praised rhetorically but overridden when inconvenient. The result of that accommodation is now visible.
Nigel Farage leads the most popular party in Britain. This is not a sudden eruption of extremism. It is the predictable outcome of a system that has spent years rewarding illiberal behaviour while insulating itself from consequence.
Farage’s record is extensive and unambiguous. Decades of racist rhetoric. Open admiration for Vladimir Putin. Sycophancy toward Donald Trump. Alignment with the European far-right. Repeated use of antisemitic tropes, racist language, and conspiratorial language. None of this has disqualified him. On the contrary, it has proven key to his success. The illiberal ecosystem rewards its own.
If the centre continues to manage illiberalism rather than confront it, the eventual victory of an openly illiberal party does not require a dramatic break. It requires patience. The architecture is already in place. The precedents have been set. The institutions have learned. The transition would be administratively easy.
This is why the purpose of this series has not been to shock, but to clarify.
Illiberalism does not arrive with jackboots and manifestos. It arrives through adaptation, accommodation, and respectability. By the time it is obvious, it is already embedded. The alternative is not nostalgia or procedural tinkering. It is a return to the principles that define liberal democracy as a system of restraint.
Constraint must be treated as a virtue, not a weakness. Courts must be genuinely independent of political pressure. Public broadcasters must be insulated from government appointment and donor ecosystems. Civil society must be protected from intimidation. Rights must apply universally. International law must bind even when inconvenient.
Structural reform matters too. Britain’s extreme concentration of power makes illiberal capture easier. First Past the Post magnifies swings and rewards polarisation. Multi-seat proportional representation would not cure illiberalism, but it would reintroduce friction: coalition, negotiation, compromise.
Above all, Britain must abandon the belief that illiberalism can be neutralised through accommodation. Every concession teaches the same lesson: that pressure works.
This series has traced how that lesson has been learned across borders, embedded in institutions, and normalised at home. The direction is visible. The choice is no longer abstract.
What remains undecided is whether Britain will defend liberal democracy as a system of restraint, or settle for its hollowed-out form while calling it stability.