The Bulwark‘s pitch, faithfully relayed in the Wall Street Journal‘s recent profile, is that it has built a popular refuge for the “politically homeless” — noble exiles cast out of a politics that lost its mind to MAGA or Zohran Mamdani. The site was started in 2018 by Bill Kristol, Charlie Sykes, and Sarah Longwell after Kristol’s Weekly Standard was shut down.

At first, the publication was basically a lifeboat for anti-Trump Republicans: former Reaganites, Bush veterans, neocons, and conservative pundits who had discovered that the GOP base no longer wanted what they were selling. But over the last eight years, the Bulwark has evolved into a cross-partisan media hub for the technocratic professional class in both parties. It’s a niche that’s been very good business recently: a million-odd Substack subscribers, talent poached from the legacy press, and $20 million+ in annual revenue.

Now the anti-Trump establishment Right and the centre-Left media world are beginning to congeal into a more self-conscious political formation, becoming something like the anti-populist centre. Next month, that same group will descend on DC for a kind of Woodstock for lanyard-wearers — the sort of people who ask follow-up questions during the Q&A. It’s called LibCon 2026: two days at the Watergate Hotel in DC under the gloriously self-serious banner of “The Reconstruction Coalition”.

LibCon organisers say that this year, they are “catalysing a new political alignment,” one determined to defeat authoritarianism and undergird an increasingly fragile democracy. But there’s hardly anyone new in the speaker list, which reads like the grand merger of the anti-Trump establishment under one chandelier: the aforementioned Bulwark figures; David French and Ezra Klein from the New York Times; Anne Applebaum and Adam Serwer from the Atlantic; and various lawyers, professors, and professional guardians of the liberal institutional order. Presiding over all of it is Francis Fukuyama to mourn the end of the End of History, 10 years later.

Sound familiar? What is being formed here is a reunion of the old governing class after its two halves were briefly separated by the unpleasantness of the Trump years. A mix of Bush and Obama people and Clintonites and the neocons, the liberal hawks and the market-friendly conservatives, the Atlantic essayists and the Cato deregulators, the democracy nonprofits and the former GOP consultants have all discovered that, beneath their old partisan hostility, they shared a deeper civilisational bond: they all hate populism.

Trump has made them realise that the great divide in American politics is not really Left versus Right, or even Democrat versus Republican, but respectable versus vulgar, institutional versus insurgent, credentialed versus pitchfork. They think politics should be returned to the adults. The adults, naturally, are them.

There is a comic quality to this. The people who helped build the pre-Trump consensus have reassembled to save the country from the wreckage it left behind. Populism did not simply fall from the sky wearing a red hat; it grew out of institutional and elite failure, deindustrialisation, endless war, cultural fragmentation, financial crisis, opioid ruin, and the slow-motion collapse of any shared confidence that the people in charge knew what they were doing.

It’s true that the Bulwark types are indeed gaining momentum during Trump II. The President has given centrism something it never had before: drama, a villain, a sense of apocalypse. The centre no longer has to defend itself as moderation; it’s rebranded as the last barricade before authoritarianism. But politically homeless? It’s a flattering self-image, but the Bulwark isn’t really a safe space for ideological orphans; it’s new paint on an old clubhouse for the intellectual wing of the establishment, one with a single-minded, pathological hatred for Trump.

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Ryan Zickgraf is a columnist for UnHerd, based in Pennsylvania.

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