The Axis of Illiberalism (2026) — Part 1
Liberal Democracy, International Law, Restraint, and the Systems Being Dismantled
Liberal democracy is often described as a political preference, a cultural style, or a Western habit of governance. In reality, it is something far more demanding: a system of power that agrees to bind itself.
At its core, liberal democracy rests on a paradox. Authority is derived from the people, yet it is constrained against their worst impulses and against its own interests. Governments are elected, but they are not sovereign over everything. Majorities rule, but they do not own the rights of minorities. The state enforces the law, but the law applies to the state with equal force.
This is not an abstract ideal. It is a practical architecture built to prevent a familiar failure mode: the conversion of temporary power into permanent dominance.
Democracy alone cannot prevent that outcome. Elections can authorise governments, but they cannot, by themselves, guarantee restraint. History is crowded with regimes that came to power through the ballot and then used that legitimacy to dismantle the conditions that made meaningful choice possible in the first place.
Liberal democracy exists precisely to prevent that collapse. It does so by embedding constraint into the exercise of power.
Three elements give that constraint substance.
The first is the rule of law, not as a tool of punishment but as a discipline imposed on those who govern. Law in a liberal democracy is meant to be slow, procedural, and frustrating. Courts are independent precisely because they must be able to say no. Legal processes exist not to accelerate power, but to expose it and force it to justify itself.
The second is universal human rights. These are not permissions granted by the state, but limits placed upon it. They do not depend on nationality, ethnicity, religion, loyalty, or usefulness. Their purpose is not to reward virtue, but to protect vulnerability. They exist most meaningfully for those who lack political leverage, when democratic processes fail to deliver justice on their own.
The third is multilateralism and international law. Liberal democracy was never purely a domestic project. It depended on the extension of restraint beyond borders. The post-war settlement rested on a shared understanding that some acts were forbidden everywhere, that sovereignty did not erase responsibility, and that power could be collectively constrained when it refused to restrain itself voluntarily.
Together, these elements form a system that limits what governments can do, not only to others, but to their own populations. It is a system designed to raise the cost of cruelty, to slow violence, and to force domination to explain itself rather than simply assert itself.
This system is often criticised for being weak. It is slow. It is legally dense. It frustrates decisiveness. But these features are not flaws. They are safeguards. A political order that moves too easily toward force is one that has stopped governing and started ruling.
From its earliest struggles, liberal democracy has relied on pressure from below to correct itself. Strikes, protests, boycotts, and civil disobedience are not deviations from democratic life. They are among the means by which those excluded from formal power force their interests into view. Nearly every expansion of democratic rights arrived through disruption that was, at the time, denounced as unlawful, irresponsible, or destabilising. What later generations remember as moral progress often appeared first as public disorder.
For this reason, liberal democracy protects the right to protest even when it is inconvenient or unpopular. Not because disruption is inherently virtuous, but because a system that cannot tolerate non-violent pressure cannot reliably correct itself. When dissent is reduced to permission and protest to performance, democracy loses one of its essential feedback mechanisms.
A similar logic applies to the press and to free expression. A free press is not an ornament of democracy. It is an infrastructure of accountability. Its function is not to reassure the public, but to expose power to scrutiny. By investigating, contextualising, and connecting events to decision-makers, journalism makes political responsibility legible. Without it, elections become rituals rather than judgments.
Liberal democracy therefore protects not just the formal right to speak, but the conditions under which speech can matter: independent media, plural ownership, protection for journalists and whistleblowers, and legal environments that do not punish investigation through intimidation or selective enforcement.
Illiberalism begins where this architecture of restraint is treated as an obstacle rather than a safeguard. It does not abolish elections. It retains them. What it rejects are the constraints that give elections meaning. Courts are recast as enemies of the people when inconvenient. Journalists are framed as traitors or agitators. Protest is redefined as extremism. Human rights become conditional. International law is treated as binding on others and optional for the powerful.
The vote survives, but the veto disappears.
This transformation rarely announces itself honestly. Illiberalism does not always arrive through coups or constitutional abolition. It advances through pragmatism, through the language of security, realism, and national interest. Rules are described as luxuries. Rights as obstacles. Restraint as weakness.
Crucially, this logic is applied selectively.
Law does not disappear. It is repurposed. Enforcement becomes asymmetric. Allies are protected. Opponents are punished. Procedures remain intact, but outcomes become predictable. Power stops asking what is lawful and starts asking who is loyal.
The same pattern appears internationally. Multilateral institutions are not always abandoned, but they are hollowed out. Treaties are cited when useful and ignored when inconvenient. War crimes are condemned in enemies and denied or excused in allies. Universal principles are quietly replaced with bloc alignment and transactional loyalty.
Illiberalism feeds on the achievements of the system it is dismantling. It inherits stability, wealth, and legitimacy produced by decades of constrained power, then spends that capital eroding the constraints themselves. By the time the damage is visible, the institutions that could have resisted it have already been weakened.
This process is not confined to any one country. Norm-breaking travels. Each individual violation lowers the cost of the next. Each unpunished abuse becomes precedent. What emerges is not chaos, but a different order: one in which democracy survives as a symbol while its defences are systematically removed.
This series examines that order. It traces how illiberalism embeds itself within democracies rather than overthrowing them, how it aligns across borders without formal coordination, and how it is sustained not only by strong leaders, but by institutions, capital, media, and those who mistake accommodation for containment.
Liberal democracy is not dead, and it is not naive to defend it. What is naive is to believe it can survive if its core commitments are treated as optional.
Illiberalism is not an alternative model of democracy. It is democracy stripped of restraint, emptied of correction, and repurposed as a tool of power. Understanding that is the beginning, not the end, of organising resistance.
What Comes Next
The next piece will step back and look outward, tracing the Axis of Illiberalism as a system rather than a set of personalities. It will examine how illiberal power aligns across borders, how norm-breaking becomes contagious, and how democratic restraint is eroded through precedent, permission, and selective enforcement.
From there, the series turns to design. It will examine Trump, Trumpism, and Project 2025 not as spectacle or scandal, but as a blueprint for the deliberate construction of an illiberal state, built to survive elections while emptying them of constraint.
The third article moves from design to practice, examining how illiberal democracy operates in everyday governance and foreign policy. Law becomes a weapon rather than a restraint. Protest becomes disorder. International rules become optional. Power learns to act without needing to explain itself.
The final piece brings the analysis home, with a national case study of Britain. It will show how illiberalism arrives not through rupture, but through alignment, accommodation, and respectability, and how reactionary centrism helps normalise what once would have been unthinkable.
Taken together, these articles argue that illiberalism is not an accident, a mood, or a backlash. It is a system. And systems can be understood.