How to Fix Democracy

Leon Botstein, music director and conductor, scholar, and president of Bard College in upstate New York, had once thought that the Berlin Wall would never come down. And he found the revolutions surrounding 1989 "frightening" because they could lead to the ascent of unregulated capitalism and the release of suppressed nationalism. Botstein explains that democracy "is harder than people expected" a...

Consumer advocate, lawyer, and former U.S. presidential candidate Ralph Nader believes that democracy is about civic organization, not just public opinion. In his assessment, the American people have lost perspective and ceded control of politics to "big money." But they should understand that there is broad popular support for many of the things they want, and the key is Congress. Nader, who made...

Canadian political philosopher and writer John Ralston Saul discusses how the crisis in democracy today is self-inflicted and intentional. The people, he says, have given up holding power themselves, accepting instead to gain influence over power. In pursuing good causes they have turned over the levers of power to business and the higher echelons of government. To fix democracy, Ralston Saul hope...

Rob Riemen, Dutch philosopher and founder of the Nexus Institute, names Baruch Spinoza, the 17th century philosopher, as one of the first great minds to understand the importance of democracy. Spinoza, he says, saw that only democracy would be able to put human dignity and individual freedom first. But maintaining democracy, Riemen says, is not about institutions. Instead, it relies on cultivating...

Carl Gershman, founding president of the National Endowment for Democracy, recalls how the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States marked a turning point, derailing the idea that democracy would simply continue its forward march in history. His hope, however, is that democracy's current regression spurs people around the world to defend it more vigorously.

Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Constanze Stelzenmüller discusses how domestic problems have led to disruptions in foreign policy—turning partners into rivals. At home, many democracies are struggling with balance: between national security and privacy, the political center and the peripheries, or direct and representative democracy. Stelzenmüller goes into detail about the many aspects we sho...

Rappler CEO and co-founder Maria Ressa got her start as a journalist in the Philippines in the 1980s and has seen the pendulum of democracy swing in both directions since. In her interview with Andrew Keen, Ressa —who was among the journalists named Person of the Year by Time Magazine in 2018 — dives into the way that "lies laced with anger" have spread faster than facts across social media, playi...

Yascha Mounk, associate professor at Johns Hopkins SAIS and expert on the rise of populism, describes three main challenges to democracy: the stagnation of living standards in developed democracies, cultural and demographic changes that are shifting the status quo, and the social media's domination. These elements have combined to increase the supply of "noxious ideas" that have led to factions an...

Norman Ornstein, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, has been immersed in U.S. politics since the late 1960s and has watched the evolution of the Republican Party with concern. Ornstein no longer views the GOP as conservative, he tells Andrew Keen, but as radical, leaving behind its ideology for a theology. And though he cannot point to a period in American history where the pol...

For Cornell William Brooks, former president of the NAACP and current professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, democracy is not an ethereal concept from Greece; it is about his family lineage. For centuries, the story of democracy in the United States has been about an expanding definition of citizenship and what an American looks like. Brooks encourages us to remember the art of conve...

Director of the German Marshall Fund's Alliance for Securing Democracy and former White House and State Department official, Laura Rosenberger views democracy from a national security perspective. In this interview, she urges the United States to pay close attention to threats from without and within. In addition to focusing on borders, security means focusing on systems, she claims. Otherwise, th...

Washington commentator and columnist for the Financial Times Ed Luce recounts the many misunderstandings we've had over the past few decades. From the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to the collapse of the neoliberal Washington Consensus in 2008, Luce illustrates how political developments frame how we experience economic events, and how economics can predict politics. Ultimately, he asks us to co...

Sheri Berman, professor of Political Science at Columbia University's Barnard College offers a historical perspective of democracy, along with some very useful definitions of concepts like illiberal, liberal, fascism, populism, and democracy. She argues that polarization, even at the scale we're experiencing today, is very common throughout history; what is unique about today is that a lot of chan...

Historian and journalist Anne Applebaum sat down with Andrew Keen during the opening dinner of the Bertelsmann Foundation's Washington Symposium in April 2019 for a live episode of How to Fix Democracy. A thought leader on disinformation, Applebaum commented on current political polarization by arguing that unless you can have debates based on a commonly agreed upon set of facts, you cannot have d...

Sir Malcolm Rifkind, interviewed at the Aspen Ministers Forum in Kansas City, sees the challenges to liberal values as tied to, but separate from, the challenges to democracy. He explains how many places where democracy is said to be in crisis today are actually experiencing a shift away from liberal ideas rather than from democracy itself. In a conversation that touches upon Brexit, the Cold War,...

Mete Coban is a Councillor for Stoke Newington in the London Borough of Hackney and Chief Executive at My Life My Say, a youth-led, non-partisan charity focused on increasing participation in democracy. Mete offers his views on how young people view democracy differently and how Brexit helped draw more young people into politics.

In our second interview from the Aspen Ministers Forum in Kansas City, former Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Israel Tzipi Livni offers her view on democracy's condition. She talks with Andrew Keen about the current state of politics in Israel, what she thinks political parties must do to contribute to the strength of democracy, and how supporters of liberal democracy around...

From Kansas City, where she was holding the  Aspen Ministers Forum  in May 2019, former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright spoke with Andrew Keen about why her first president, Harry Truman, was such an inspiration to her. In this engaging episode, Secretary Albright also shares her view that the 1% is anti-democratic, tells a story about how cassette tapes helped lead to martial law in co...

This episode reaches back in time to revisit the origins of democracy with Greek historian and classics scholar Angelos Chaniotis. Host Andrew Keen asks: why democracy began in Athens and what was it like when it first emerged? In looking back to the origins of democracy, they find there are clues to preserving the modern version. Listen to find out more.

Earl Lewis shares with Andrew Keen that his students give him hope for the future of democracy. In their discussion, Dr. Lewis explains that through his work at the Center for Social Solutions he has identified four main challenges for American society: addressing its slavery past, valuing diversity, dealing with climate change, and maintaining the dignity of labor in an automated world.

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...