Yascha Mounk

The United States and many other democracies in the world are amid a historically unprecedented experiment: For the first time, deeply ethnically and religiously diverse democracies are trying to treat all their members as true equals. 

In this talk, political scientist and democracy expert Yascha Mounk will draw on history and psychology to show why it is so difficult to build thriving diverse democracies. Human nature pushes us to build groups and favor their members over outsiders—for American democracy to succeed, we need to find ways to channel this tendency in a productive direction.  Recognizing the importance of cultural and religious groups while building the connective tissue which can remind us of what we have in common. 

Yascha also teaches us that recognizing the difficulty of building diverse democracies can also make us more hopeful for the future. By heeding the insights presented in this talk and building on the progress of the past decades, America can create a vision of a future society that citizens would be excited to live in.

To Yascha Mounk, we are facing a global crisis. Support for liberal democracy has fallen markedly across Western Europe and North America—and this development is especially stark in the U.S., and especially amongst its youth. Mounk’s research is unsettling. Two-thirds of Americans born in the 1930s and 40s state that living in a democracy is absolutely paramount. But less than one third of Americans born in the 80s or 90s would agree. Twenty years ago, 1 in 15 Americans desired military rule. Today, this number is 1 in 6. And yet, the alternatives to liberal democracy are grim. Populist, authoritarian parties erode the checks and balances of the rule of law, the judiciary system and free press. They discard the rights of citizens and push more people out of the sphere of politics. And they ride waves of racial animosity, promising violence, or imprisonment, for those who resist.

In this timely, necessary talk, Mounk outlines how these forces arise—and, vitally, what we can do to combat them. It’s an interconnected story of economics, ethnicity, and technology: of lost jobs, insecurity, increasing automation, and a flattened standard of living; of mono-ethnic societies transforming into diverse, multi-ethnic states; of the erosion of civic education and the fraught truth of social media. For corporations, colleges, associations, as much as for average, concerned citizens, Mounk provides actionable steps to stand up to the forces of populism: from getting involved in civic life to campaigning for meaningful candidates, from donating to anti-authoritarian movements to organizing in your community. Ultimately, it’s about realizing that democracy is fragile—and impermanent. And that if we continue to take it for granted—if we don’t stand up for it now—it will no longer exist.