“Authoritarianism today is cleverer; it doesn’t only rule by fear.”
From manipulated statistics to collapsing trust in experts and institutions, what happens when people simply stop believing what they’re told?
Amid multicultural tensions and identity politics, do efforts to “protect democracy” risk hollowing out its liberal core?
Are our systems bending, breaking, or being quietly re‑engineered?
In this episode, Professor Richard Youngs of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace shares his thoughts on whether liberal democracy is slipping into something darker and more dystopian.
“Democratic backsliding” in the US and Europe, the rise of “in‑between” regimes, a push to regulate speech and encryption that looks uncomfortably like authoritarian control, the fallacious assumption that opening markets in places like China and Russia would deliver accompanying political freedoms — what does the future look like for liberty?
Against this backdrop, democratic and authoritarian governments alike are struggling to meet the challenges of an age of “permanent crisis”: financial shocks, migration, pandemic, war, the list goes on and on.
Richard argues that what we’re really living through is a crisis of governance, in which citizens become increasingly alienated from systems barely able to hold their societies together.
Can democracy survive as a broad, raucous, messy endeavour that embraces the mutable mood of the multitude? Or will it be sanitised, even strangled, by the very people claiming to defend it?
You can follow Richard on X.
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