Join the Liberal Currents Community Today and Be Part of Our Fight for the Future of Liberal Democracy

We are now not quite two years into the second Trump administration. We have seen assaults on our basic rights and liberties, Americans murdered in the streets, and an authoritarian push against the foundations of our republic. Perhaps most of all, we have seen elite capitulation to this push—from university presidents to law firms to media corporations. 

In the face of this all of us have asked "What can I do?" I certainly have. But this is not a battle that can be won by individual action. It can only be won through community, through organizing, through collective action.

Community is the soil from which action grows. Here at Liberal Currents, we are building one such community. A place for fiery hearts and cool heads, where we can approach the most pressing issues of our time not with clickbait and ragebait, but reasoned discussion amongst committed liberals. A place where different currents within the liberal tradition can hash out their disagreements—even or often quite heated disagreements—and hopefully arrive at new ideas and new agreements for restoring our democracy. A community where like-minded liberals can sustain themselves through these years and beyond.

Do you read our essays and learn from them? Do you think new thoughts or find fresh succor? When you disagree, do you nevertheless find the disagreement productive? Then we're asking for your support. Our community is sustained not by corporate ads or megadonors with agendas, but by its own members. Our subscribers pay our authors, pay our staff, and pay our hosting fees. We want your help to keep doing the work we are doing.

We are, and have always been a community. In the beginning, we were just that, full stop. The Liberal Currents Discord server was the core of that community. In the beginning, only authors and editors had access.  In 2020, we evolved to become something like a community-managed fund used to pay authors, and part of how we funded it was by offering access to the Discord server. It grew, and growth brings growing pains, but the Discord server remains an important way that the publication stays grounded and committed to doing good work.

But in 2025, it wasn’t enough. We knew we had more to give, and our community took every opportunity to tell us they thought so as well.

So near the end of Liberal Currents’ eighth year, we asked for your help to fundamentally transform it as a publication. Until that moment, no matter how much we grew—and in 2025 we grew quite a lot—we paid nearly 100% of our funds to our authors. There were some small fixed costs associated with having a digital publication, and we had begun to pay a modest per-piece editing fee, but the trajectory we were on was not one that allowed any of us to dedicate ourselves full time to the work.

So we asked: will you support a publication that is really committed to liberal values at their most demanding? We have been called pro-trans and pro-transit, because we will never abandon trans people and we are very enthusiastic urbanists. But more generally, we are committed to an unflinching defense of liberal rights combined with an uncompromising demand for liberal democratic governments that deliver results. 

We want freedom of speech, of association, of movement, and more, but also enough housing for anyone to live anywhere they wish to live, a capable welfare state that actually keeps everyone out of poverty, and a medical system that makes the best care in the world available to all.

Rights and results. Too often, we’re told to pick one. If there was ever any doubt that losing one puts the other in immediate peril, I hope the second Trump administration has put those to bed. Not only are our rights trampled upon daily by masked agents of the state and a politicized DOJ, but our world-class system of scientific and medical advancement is being destroyed before our eyes. Not only is our right to vote under siege, but our institutions of higher learning are being subordinated to a dictator. Alongside a protracted campaign against freedom of speech and expression, a parallel campaign against freedom from want is being waged.

Unlike the many older, larger, and nominally liberal publications that have failed to meet our moment, Liberal Currents has remained firmly committed to the defeat of fascism in this country, the defense of our rights, and developing a vision of government that delivers results.

That is the work we promised to ramp up if you helped us to meet our funding goal. 

You did, and we have.

Now I would like to invite you to join us, if you have not already. And if you have, to move closer to the center of our community.

Details below, but US readers who sign up today for $60 for their first year can expect:

• To join our Discord community
• Copies of The Reconstruction Papers as long as inventory lasts
• A reserved copy of next year’s issue of The Reconstruction Papers

Here is the announcement smuggled in that offer: We are going to be publishing new issues of The Reconstruction Papers annually.

Join our community

In that initial call for support, we outlined what to expect:

If we meet our goal, we will be able to take a big leap ahead in terms of organizational capacity. It will mean doing some projects we’ve struggled to get off the ground this year, such as special issues made available in print, and regularly produced video essays. And in general it will mean that we have more time to commit to making Liberal Currents the best and biggest version of itself that it can be.

We have expanded our video presence significantly this year. We have published 267 essays this year compared to 211 in all of 2025 and 89 in 2024. We have produced 104 podcast episodes compared to 116 in all of 2025—we began our very first podcast, Neon Liberalism, in November of 2024 and produced 6 videos before the end of that year. Our web traffic has increased by 62%, our email subscribers have increased by 210%, and our paid subscribers have increased by 195%.

We are bigger than we have ever been, doing more than we have ever done, and looking better than we’ve ever looked.

Now we’re hoping to leverage everything we have built to accelerate our subscriber growth and put us on firmer financial footing moving forward.

The short version is that, as part of the subscriber drive we are kicking off today, you can:

• Pay $60 for the first year as Premium Subscriber and get access to the Discord as well as everything we publish online and in print. 
• If you are outside of the US, you can pay $150 for the first year as a Major Subscriber in order to get everything we publish in print.

The Reconstruction Papers

Creating The Reconstruction Papers was unlike anything we had ever done before.

Historically, Liberal Currents has published authors who pitch us ideas. Occasionally, we have commissioned specific work. But we have never done this in quantity, never mind for nineteen authors at once with the intention of holding back what they wrote until it could be released all at once.

Most significantly, we had no experience in print whatsoever. But we felt strongly about getting it into that format. There are people who will read a printed magazine who would not read the same thing on a screen. Moreover, it is my impression that even the best web design will not make as favorable a first impression as a really well designed print product. At a moment when we are working very hard to break into the media industry and spread awareness of ourselves, being able to have a beautifully designed print issue to send people seemed like a good move.

Suffice it to say that intuition has proven correct. And now that we have gone through this process once, and learned from it, we know that we can do it.

Once a year, we will offer you a single package of real solutions to the biggest problems facing America, or indeed the world. A large number of building blocks for a comprehensive positive vision for an ambitious liberal democratic future.

The first issue went very far in this direction, but even with 21 essays—none of them short—we felt there was much we hadn’t managed to cover. 

The fact is, even if we were to agree on a specific Reconstruction program in the next two years, it would not be possible to fully enact it by 2030. And even if a trifecta held for a term, even if we got a scenario more favorable than Obama’s two terms, there would still remain a great deal of work to be done.

The priority remains to arm a potential 2029 trifecta to do whatever it takes to get us beyond this crisis and start building the foundation for a better future. But clearly, we will need to continue having this conversation for years to come. We intend to make Liberal Currents the center of such conversations, and The Reconstruction Papers a nice, consolidated format for keeping up with that conversation. 

If you live in the US, consider paying $60 right now to get a copy of the current issue while supply lasts, and reserve a copy of next year’s issue.

If you live outside of the US, you can do that for $150.

These are temporary discounts, as will be discussed below, so don’t hesitate!

New Pricing

We have learned a lot this year so far, and not just about print. We learned how to more effectively drive free email subscriptions. We also experimented with a metered wall to various degrees. For the most part, we have stuck with making people create free accounts if they read more than a certain number of articles a month, and having some explicitly paywalled categories of writing such as the Editor’s Notes.

So we decided it was time to revisit our pricing, to take account of what we learned and to reflect the overall strategy we’ve landed on:

What had been called the Subscriber tier will now be called our Basic Subscriber tier.

• Has been updated from $3/month and $30/year to $5/month and $30/year
• Benefits unchanged; able to access essentially all paywalled writing we publish, save for the State of Liberal Currents newsletter.
• Since we no longer do The Editors’ Chat the main thing that this tier is missing out on is access to the Discord and a discount on issues of The Reconstruction Papers.

The Community Subscriber tier:

• Has been updated from $5/month and $50/year to $8/month and $50/year
• The only change in benefits is the 50% off pre-orders of The Reconstruction Papers

What had been called the Supporting Subscriber tier will now be called the Premium Subscriber tier.

• Has been updated from $12/month and $120/year to $16/month and $100/year
• We will no longer be listing subscribers in this tier on our About page. Legacy Supporting Subscribers’ names will remain up.
• This is the print subscription tier in the US, but only for the annual subscription, not the monthly one.
• The rest of the benefits are unchanged.

The Major Subscriber tier:

• Has been updated from $50/month and $500/year to $60/month and $300/year
• This tier will continue to be listed on our About page.
• This is the international print subscription tier, but only for the annual subscription, not the monthly one.
• The rest of the benefits are unchanged.

To summarize: all of our monthly rates will increase, half of our annual rates will stay the same, and the other half will go down. All current subscribers will be grandfathered in at their current rate, though if your tier’s rate has gone down please shoot me a note at admin@liberalcurrents.com if you do not hear from me today or tomorrow.

90 percent of our subscribers pay annually. Monthly subscriptions are largely a way for people to dip their toes in or to read a specific Editor’s Note that interests them. There are some benefits that simply become more difficult to manage if people are dipping in and out (such as access to the Discord server) so we’d like to further encourage people to subscribe annually.

If you agree that we’re doing valuable work, I once again strongly encourage you to jump on the Premium Subscriber or Major Subscriber discounts while they last, and while we still have copies of the first issue in stock.

If you are reading this, there is a high odds you played a significant role in making all of this possible. Why distance yourself from that accomplishment? Redeem one of these discounts today and come join us.