Are Democracies Failing?
According to Ian Bremmer, the President of the Eurasia Group, the global pandemic is revealing the extent to which democracies have been failing over the past years. To strengthen them, he proposes that they should re-establish faith in the system by regulating social media, shifting away from American exceptionalism, and embracing an innovative approach to capitalism.
In this conversation, Ian Bremmer and Yascha Mounk debate how different political systems have dealt with COVID-19, how capitalism has fared amidst the pandemic, and what western democracies need to do to live up to their promises.
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Podcast production by John T. Williams and Rebecca Rashid
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Are Democracies Failing?
Bremer's digression about the black experience in the US missed the mark to my mind. Definitely a lack of nuance, made all the less clear by the meandering comparisons to other countries. Good on Yascha for pushing back on it.
A good discussion, I thought. The parameters for evaluating Bremmer's point about the "experience of the average black American male" with the "liberties" of the average Hungarian citizen under Orban were probably not well-enough defined by him. Just how those two things are to be compared economically (either by annual income or net worth) was not very clear. It was also not clear to me what Bremmer believed was enlightening about comparing the average experience of a disadvantaged minority group member in one country to an average citizen in another. A comparison between African-Americans in the US and, say, the Roma population of Hungary for centuries and now under Orban would be more telling, in terms of situating the average black American experience. But perhaps I missed the point?