Their conclusion, to be published in the
January issue of the Journal of Democracy, is that democracies are not as
secure as people may think. Right now, Mr. Mounk said in an interview, “the warning signs are
flashing red.”
Amanda Taub
WASHINGTON — Yascha Mounk is used to being the
most pessimistic person in the room. Mr. Mounk, a lecturer
in government at Harvard, has spent the past few years challenging one of the
bedrock assumptions of Western politics: that once a country becomes a liberal
democracy, it will stay that way.
His research suggests something quite different: that liberal democracies
around the world may be at serious risk of decline.
Mr. Mounk’s interest in the topic began rather unusually. In 2014, he
published a book, “Stranger in My Own Country.” It started as
a memoir of his experiences growing up as a Jew in Germany, but became a
broader investigation of how contemporary European nations were struggling to
construct new, multicultural national identities.
He concluded that the effort was not going very well. A populist backlash
was rising. But was that just a new kind of politics, or a symptom of something
deeper?
(...)
Para continuar a leitura, acesse http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/29/world/americas/western-liberal-democracy.html?_r=2
Amanda Taub – 29.11.2016.
In The Interpreter (republished in The New
York Times).
