How to Fix Democracy

Ivan Krastev, chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia and permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, sits down with Andrew Keen. In a thought-provoking discussion, they cover democracy's capacity for self-correction, the disappearance of the political center, and how DC today reminds Ivan of Bulgaria in 1989.

From Prague, where he served as Ambassador from the United States, Norman Eisen discusses the ups and downs of democracy in the Czech city over the course of the 20 th  century. Democracy, he argues, offers core freedoms—personal, political, press, and juridical—that other forms of government ultimately cannot preserve. And that gives him optimism for the future.

Moisés Naím, distinguished fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, explains the trend of "one vote, one person, one time," or, how some democratically-elected leaders undermine institutional checks and balances in an attempt to hold onto power indefinitely. Crucially, however, many of these creeping authoritarians are intent on maintaining the appearance of legitimate democracy....

Soraya Chemaly, author, activist, and director of the Women's Media Center Speech Project, challenges the idea that democracy in the United States was ever unbroken, unpacks the negative and sometimes violent reactions to women who show political ambition, and explains how culture and gender frame the way we think about technology.   

Eurosceptic and anti-Brexit, The Economist 's Adrian Wooldridge argues that democracy must find a middle ground between the elites and the populists. However, even this middle ground proves to be controversial. Wooldridge and Andrew Keen debate whether a politics of identity is undermining or invigorating democracy, whether capitalism and democracy are on divergent paths, and how to detach the "li...

Andrew Keen talks with Carol Anderson, Chair of the Department of African American Studies at Emory University, about the flaws in American democracy and why she's still hopeful for the future.

Andrew Keen interviews David Runciman, professor of politics at Cambridge University and host of the Talking Politics podcast, who believes that democracy is in a midlife crisis, and what comes next is not a repeat of history, but something that could only happen in the 20th century.

Andrew Keen interviews Michael Ignatieff, the rector and president of the Central European University in Budapest, an institution that has come under attack by Viktor Orban's government in Hungary.