You’re far more likely to hear young socialists talk about enhancing democratic processes by, say, enfranchising felons or making Election Day a national holiday than promoting a vanguard-led dictatorship of the proletariat.

The title of the conference’s closing panel drove this terminal message home. “The Last Best Hope of Earth” (emphasis on last) clearly referred to liberal democracy, as Marc Plattner, co-editor of the Journal of Democracy, made explicit in his opening commentary. Whatever liberal democracy’s shortcomings might be, he argued, “the alternatives are always worse, and often unspeakably worse.” Citizens, he warned, are “likely to undervalue the imperfect freedom and equality delivered by their imperfect liberal democracies.” As a result, “the blessings of liberal democracies are too often discounted, especially by those who have never experienced life under other kinds of regimes.” Bill Kristol weighed in next, questioning the wisdom of ordinary citizens, who, in his estimation, tend to undervalue the liberty he and other conservatives understand as the core tenant of liberalism. (An early and credulous champion of the disastrous occupation of Iraq and the conservative tactician who’d been more responsible than anyone else for Sarah Palin’s elevation to the national stage, Kristol did not acknowledge that elites conspired to deceive the public into supporting the war, nor did he mention that voters were not foolish enough to heed his advice and send Palin to the White House.)

Taken together, their remarks were emblematic of liberalism’s apprehensive response to mounting pressure from the left. In my own comments from the podium, I tried to dispel two stubborn misconceptions about today’s socialist revival. First, its adherents do not criticize liberal democracy because they discount its vaunted rights and freedoms, but because they seek to create the conditions under which such principles might at last be fully enacted and ideally expanded. (You’re far more likely to hear young socialists talk about enhancing democratic processes by, say, enfranchising felons or making Election Day a national holiday than promoting a vanguard-led dictatorship of the proletariat.) Second, the central political and social challenges we now face stem not from the fabled “tyranny of the majority”—the wayward passions of the masses—but from the impunity of a greedy and blinkered minority. This model of oligarchic rule is epitomized by the world’s 26 billionaires who possess as much wealth as fully half of the world’s population—or by the five people on the Supreme Court determined to use their judicial authority to impose a conservative agenda on a resistant population. Poll after poll shows that the bulk of citizens, often in overwhelming numbers, are pro-immigrant, would prefer a public option for health care, want background checks for gun purchases, favor much higher taxes on the wealthy, support swift and serious action on climate change, and want to end wars, but these positions do not reflect what our leaders deliver.

It’s now fashionable in pundit circles to frame our current political moment as “populist”—an explanatory frame that allows for a false equivalency between the left and the right, as though pluralist-minded supporters of Bernie Sanders are the mirror image of Trump’s ethno-nationalist constituency. In reality, however, our core social problems stem not from a misguided people but from unaccountable plutocrats who have rigged the rules of the game in order to veto substantive popular reform. “Democracy advances, liberalism restrains,” Katznelson said. But the socialist wing of our politics and its growing retinue of fellow travelers are asking just who is being restrained: the people or the powerful? What good is liberalism if it enables power to follow property at the expense of a forward-looking popular will?

Even the most basic liberal democratic right—the right to vote, about which there is no end to sanctimony in this country—has never been equitably put into practice. Gaze upon our system’s vaunted political blessings from the perspective of, say, someone in Puerto Rico, and they look even more mixed than they do from the mainland, where the Constitution places more weight on rural votes and less-populated regions by design. Hurricane Maria left more than 3,000 dead, not because of the force of the storm but the because of inadequate, underfunded infrastructure that still has not been repaired. This state of malign neglect exists in part because island residents, American citizens though they may be, lack representation in Congress and have no electoral votes to influence the presidency. Our country’s other supposedly sacred right, free speech, means little when the Supreme Court has repeatedly decided that spending money merits First Amendment protections. Rather than reflecting a desire to ditch liberal rights, the turn toward democratic socialism is born of the recognition that liberal principles are not strong enough to survive, let alone constrain, concentrated economic power. And absent any such robust constraints, the forces that the first capital-P Populists of the 1890s dubbed the Money Power will inevitably seek to undermine the basic freedoms regular people fought and died to win.