Those who want to defend liberal democracy seem not to notice that their weapons have been blunted.

Poland, of course, is not alone. The government of Viktor Orban in Hungary is described as “totalitarian;” President Trump is repeatedly called a “fascist.” Across the West, as a new generation of populist politicians rises, liberal democrats have been quick to sound the alarm. Accompanying this alarmism is an equally dangerous phenomenon: a feeling of fatalism.

The truth is, of course, far more complicated. This fall, for example, a young opposition candidate for a mayor of Warsaw, Rafal Trzaskowski, trounced his Law and Justice opponent. Liberals won similar victories in many other cities. Public protests continue, and sometimes liberals have secured some victories, such as the Court of Justice of the European Union preventing a package of “reforms” that would have destroyed the independence of the Supreme Court of Poland. In other countries where populist nationalists have won elections in recent years, the picture is also far more complex.

So why the despair?

In a 1946 essay, George Orwell wrote about “a new intellectual phenomenon” that he was observing: “catastrophic gradualism.” This is the belief that history proceeds by calamities, and each succeeding age is as bad or nearly as bad as the previous one. In the 21st century, “catastrophic gradualism” often takes the form of a belief in the inevitability of illiberal democrats’ victory.

As a result, their liberal opponents start to adhere to a black-and-white vision of politics that narrows possible interpretations of any given phenomenon to either “good” or “bad.” Liberals perceive themselves only positively, as if they never made mistakes.

Moreover, this way of thinking makes the illiberal populists more influential in defining areas of the political divisions. They are always more radical, for example, in naming the groups responsible for political crises or suggesting the existence of hidden agendas. When such strong divisions are drawn, the liberals usually find themselves in a reactive position, unable to propose new subjects and agendas.