Marc Plattner is the founding coeditor of the Journal of Democracy and the founding codirector of the National Endowment for Democracy’s International Forum for Democratic Studies. Until 2016, he also served as NED’s vice president for research and studies, and from 1984 to 1989 he was NED’s director of program. He is the author of Democracy Without Borders? Global Challenges to Liberal Democracy (2008) and of Rousseau’s State of Nature (1979). His essays and reviews on a wide range of international and public policy issues have appeared in numerous books and journals, and he has coedited with Larry Diamond more than two dozen books on contemporary issues relating to democracy in the Journal of Democracy book series.
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I think we have a more complex notion of what democracy is. That it’s not strictly majoritarianism. That there are certain principles that limit what majorities can do, namely the rights of individuals and minorities, and I would say, if you abandon that, you’re abandoning what we really mean by democracy, certainly what we mean by liberal democracy.
Marc Plattner
Key Highlights
- Introduction – 0:48
- Democratic Consensus – 2:32
- Liberalism and Democracy – 10:26
- Democratic Threats – 20:58
- Governance – 28:51
Podcast Transcript
In 1990 Marc Plattner and Larry Diamond founded the Journal of Democracy. Over the next 30 years, Marc was a coeditor as it published articles that included groundbreaking political theories to firsthand accounts from leaders of democratic movements.
Along the way, Marc wrote many of his own articles on liberalism, democratic transitions, threats to democracy, and the importance of governance. His latest article is called, “Why Ukraine Is Critical to Rebuilding Our Democratic Consensus.” I reached out to Marc to learn more about the need for democratic consensus. But once we started talking, we covered so much more ground.
I’ve always respected Marc for his ability to recognize the big picture ideas in world events. I think that comes through in this conversation. It’s one of the more wide ranging conversations I have had on ideas about democracy for some time.
If you like this podcast, please the show as a monthly donor on Patreon or a premium subscriber on Apple Podcasts. You can also provide a 5 star rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. I’d like to give a shoutout to Mia Suzuki and Stan Masters for their help with some projects for the podcast. If you’d like to help out, please email me at jkempf@democracyparadox.com. But for now… This is my conversation with Marc Plattner…
jmk
Marc Plattner, welcome to the Democracy Paradox.
Marc Plattner
Thanks. Pleased to be with you.
jmk
Well, Marc, I was really interested when I saw that you wrote a piece for the Journal of Democracycalled, “Why Ukraine is Critical to Rebuilding our Democratic Consensus.” It really drew me in, because I felt that the article was about more than just Ukraine. I think it’s important, because Ukraine’s definitely changed how we kind of think about democracy and what we’re expecting from democracy, both from ourselves and from others. So, I wanted to start out by asking you a question about Ukraine. Marc, what has Ukraine taught us about democracy?
Marc Plattner
Well, I don’t know if it’s so much taught us something new as that it’s reminded us of things that we tended to forget, which is that democracy can be an incredible force for uniting a people and inspiring them to acts of courage and bravery that it’s hard to find elsewhere. Because we’ve lived in largely peaceful settings for so long, those aspects of things have tended to be forgotten or overlooked. The Ukrainians certainly resuscitated those feelings about democracy.
jmk
Your piece refers to this idea of democratic consensus. It’s something that I’ve thought a bit about, but I don’t know that I ever put it in those terms, the idea of consensus. I get the impression that you feel that we had a moment where we had some sense of democratic consensus, probably 10-15 years ago. In your mind, how did we come to lose our democratic consensus?
Marc Plattner
Well, it’s a complicated story and it has to do with the global decline of democracy as well. Certainly, in the United States, but in many other advanced democracies, a consensus had developed that liberal democracy was the kind of regime that we wanted to have. Liberal democracies were the places where we wanted to live and this was in a period when democracy was on the ascent. There were more democracies in the world than ever before, but that started fraying first on the periphery and some of the newer democracies reverted back to authoritarianism. Then there was the emergence, particularly of China as a powerful alternative model. I think it weakened the sense among people that liberal democracy was the only decent, prosperity-producing regime there was and that if you were an advanced and civilized country, you had to have a liberal democracy.
I think Victor Orbán was a key figure. He was the first leader of a country, at least that had been a democracy, who started raising deep questions about whether liberal democracy, liberalism at least, was something that really was necessarily desirable. And gradually that questioning of liberal democracy started emerging among political scientists, political theorists, and others who… you may have had them on your show.
I think Patrick Deneen is the clearest example. I reviewed his book, Why Liberalism Failed, seems now long ago, but I guess it was probably only four or five years. People started writing things that called into question the constitution, the whole Lockean tradition of liberalism, which I think certainly in the United States, I mean, maybe it had been done by communists or fascists, but within the broad spectrum of American opinion, it was pretty much unheard of. I think that both what was happening politically and what was happening. among the intellectuals contributed to people not being so sure anymore that liberal democracy was the way to go.
jmk
Did that catch you off guard as you were seeing a shift away from the democratic consensus and you were seeing books published like Deneen’s book, Why Liberalism Failed; I’m thinking of Ryszard Legutko’s book, The Demon in Democracy, and many other books that really challenged the idea of both liberalism and democracy? I mean, did that catch you off guard when you were living through it in real time?
Marc Plattner
It did, but the thing is… I mean, I’d been at meetings with Legutko, so I sort of knew that he was coming from a place that was not friendly to liberal democracy. What surprised me more was that – I think I’m remembering this correctly – that the forward to his book was written by John O’Sullivan, who was a conservative, but I would have thought very much of… Well, he was a strong promoter of transatlantic relations, a Thatcherite, but still, I would have thought very much a committed liberal Democrat. He wrote a forward, more or less praising Legutko’s book, and that surprised me.
Of course, John now is living in Hungary and is friendly, in his thinking at least, to Orbán, so I saw this gradually emerging starting in the late teens. But I guess I am surprised by the speed with which it’s gained traction. Then of course, I mean, we haven’t mentioned Donald Trump and so on, but it’s clear that his ascendancy has something to do with all of this as well. But again, it’s important to not see this as purely an American tendency because it was happening in so many other places before Trump came to power.
jmk
Legutko is a good example of that and obviously what’s happening in Poland and what’s happening in Hungary, and honestly, what’s happening in lots of other places whether we talk about India… I mean, we could really kind of run the gamut around the world, to be honest. Does it surprise you that a country like Ukraine that has been known for its political divisions is now the country that’s teaching us about democratic consensus?
Marc Plattner
Certainly, it is a surprise. If someone had told me ten years ago that Ukraine would be in this position or playing this role, I would have certainly been dubious about it. But again, for better or worse, I think wartime experience has often melded together the citizenry of countries that are fractious and polarized in peacetime. That certainly seemed to have been the case in Ukraine. But I think it also reflects the fact that for all the divisions historically that it’s had, there was a bit of experience with democracy and a strong sense of wanting to join the West, at least among, maybe not the whole population, but a significant part of it.
That’s been crystallized by the brutal Russian invasion. Hardly anyone wants to gravitate back into the Russian orbit. They see joining the West as their salvation, for them to be not just democratic, but really independent as well.
jmk
I want to ask you a little bit about liberalism.
Marc Plattner
Sure.
jmk
Larry Diamond has written extensively in the Journal of Democracy about a democratic recession, but recently, Francis Fukuyama came out with his book about liberalism and kind of made the case that it’s not so much that people are rebelling against democracy, but they seem to be rebelling against liberalism itself. I want to ask you about the relationship between the two, because I remember a few years ago, actually, more than just a few years ago, you had written an excellent piece in Foreign Affairs that was called “Liberalism and Democracy: You Can’t Have One Without the Other.” Can you explain to us a little bit about why liberalism and democracy seem to be so intertwined?
Marc Plattner
Yes, that title is a little misleading, because my view is historically the two are separable. There have been relatively liberal societies, one thinks of some of the constitutional monarchies in 19th century in Europe, Hong Kong under British rule, that have been quite liberal, but were not democratic. At the same time, there were democracies in the ancient world and elsewhere where the people really did rule, but the individual liberties we associate with liberalism were not guaranteed or protected. So, in theory and historically the two are separable. But my argument was that, in this sense, there’s a complementarity. That liberalism is based on the idea that all people are entitled, naturally entitled, to freedom and equality. Once you accept that principle… and for a while liberalism did coexist with a government that was not democratic.
In Britain, for example, it was a very, very gradual process untill the electoral franchise was extended to the point where it could be considered democratic. But the working out of the principles of liberalism, of human freedom, and equality pretty much inevitably led to it being very hard to maintain a liberal regime where people had freedom to voice their concerns and their demands. It became very hard to preserve that without giving people a say in the day to day running of the government, or not day to day running, but at least giving them frequent recourse to changing their leadership. I think if one looks at the way history unfolded, that’s really what happened. So that today I don’t think it’s possible to have a liberal regime that is not democratic, none that will last in any case.
jmk
I’m surprised that you said liberalism involves freedom and equality, but you didn’t mention rule of law, because I oftentimes think of rule of law as the glue between liberalism and democracy. Rule of law requires that everybody is equal under the law and that seems to be difficult to achieve if you have some people who have more political power than others. I mean, it just doesn’t tend to work in the long term. It almost necessitates that eventually you move to a system of political equality where you have democracy.
But at the same time, rule of law is almost the quintessential idea of liberalism. I mean, it’s something that you read about when you’re reading Hobbes and Locke. It’s something that you see really clearly in some of the liberal undemocratic states like Hong Kong. They were known for rule of law. I mean, do you kind of see that the same way that rule of law is both essential for liberalism, but at the same time eventually leads us to democracy?
Marc Plattner
Yes, I guess I’d agree with that. Certainly, rule of law is one aspect of the societies and ideas that liberalism leads to. But there it gets into a question of defining rule of law. One can say in one sense, almost every polity has some rule of law. Even authoritarians claim to have a rule of law and have legal systems and trials and all of that. What’s distinctive though about what we often by shorthand just refer to as rule of law is that it means a kind of liberal rule of law where there’s also equality before the law. So, in that sense, yes, I would say it’s definitely a key part of the picture and if I under emphasized that, I regret that.
jmk
You’ve emphasized that authoritarian regimes are oftentimes brittle compared to democratic regimes. What do you feel makes authoritarianism so brittle?
Marc Plattner
Well, the simple answer is that it doesn’t enjoy the support of the people, which means that if there’s an internal dispute, it’s not clear how it resolves it. But partly it’s just the history that we have. The Soviet Union well into the 1980s seemed like it was just a permanent and inevitable force that was going to be with us pretty much forever. Then all of a sudden, it cracked. I think the Chinese pay a lot of attention to that and their regime may not be as brittle, but I think the Soviet experiences raises questions about how solid the regime in China is.
What’s characteristic of democracies is that they have constant friction, debate, opposition, but as long as that remains on a level where the disagreements are about policy or different economic platforms and so on, that’s perfectly compatible with a longer-range resilience, as long as people remain committed to liberal democracy as a regime. Whereas in the authoritarian regimes, one doesn’t know what will happen. One has to say, if you look at places like Cuba and North Korea, which probably I would have predicted in the 1990s had at best a short-term future, they’ve been amazingly capable of resisting the global democratic wave.
I think revolutionary regimes, I guess this is something that Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way have written about, have a particular coherence or cohesiveness that comes from the revolutionary experience. This is something that democracies can have as well, certainly in the early years of the United States, the memories of the revolution were very powerful in helping to produce consensus.
jmk
You mentioned about the collapse of the Soviet Union and you’ve also mentioned some present-day revolutionary regimes that are authoritarian or even totalitarian, like North Korea and Cuba. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. In between those two, the Journal of Democracy was founded in 1990.
Marc Plattner
Good timing.
jmk
Yes. You’re publishing articles about democracy. Right in the midst of just monumental changes in terms of geopolitics, in terms of the possibilities for the spread of democracy. What was it like living through the actual collapse of the Soviet Union as somebody who’s not just a scholar, but an editor of a very new journal that’s writing about these topics?
Marc Plattner
Well, first of all, without even referring to or thinking about what it meant as a journal editor, it was a wonderful time to be alive, I would say. To see the Soviet Union, the inveterate enemy of democracy that seemed like a permanent force in the world, to see it go under and crack so quickly was remarkable. In terms of the journal, it made it hard to edit a quarterly. I mean, if we’d been a, a biweekly or something, we would have had endless things to publish and been able to stay on top of things. But it was difficult to keep up with all that was going on, and it’s funny, the clearest example we had didn’t even have to do with the fall of communism.
Our first issue contained an article on the struggle against Noriega. Between the time we went to press and the issue appeared, the US military ejected him from power. So, in that sense, the struggle was over and we were able to get in on the bottom of the first page a little note taking account of that fact. But I think we were able to do a pretty good job of staying in touch at least with the major trends, and of course the fact that things were opening up in the Soviet bloc made it much easier to get articles by prominent voices from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union – not that there hadn’t been dissident writings that appeared before.
Having people who were themselves involved in the struggles and heroes of the change was remarkably heartening. So, in the beginning, I felt we could have filled up three times the space and the 90s altogether were a wonderful period for democracy and a very good period for the Journal. The last ten years, not so much.
jmk
During the Cold War, most people felt that the threat to democracy came from external sources like the Soviet Union. Today, it feels like the threats are all around us. I mean, we hear about threats from countries like China and Russia, not just in terms of physical military threats, but in terms of more subtle threats like sharp power and things like that. But we also notice threats that seem to be internal, such as attitudes of people within our own country. When you think about the threats to democracy that we’re facing, I mean, what is that greatest threat to democracy? And how is it different from when you started back in 1990?
Marc Plattner
Well, I would say the internal threat to democracy was very minor at the outset. The concern was liberating countries from authoritarian rule and we probably had an exaggerated sense of how much success in democratization that would lead to. I remember, and I think it was in 1995, in our fifth-year anniversary, we already were saying that it’s become clear that toppling a dictatorship is much easier than consolidating a democracy after its demise. I think that was a lesson that was learned pretty quickly. But I think what was different is that in the 90s and part of the 2000s there was still very much a sense that time was on the side of democracy.
That, and as things move forward, yes, there’d probably be some failures of consolidation, but history had shown that there had been other cases in which democracy had failed to consolidate. Some years later there’d be another attempt and countries that had undergone an initial attempt, even if it failed, were in better shape for future successthan countries that hadn’t. So, things were moving in the right direction and were likely to continue to do so. That was the sense that got lost when… I would say in the teens that conviction started to be questioned and really to erode. I remember the early cases of it.
I think I once cited the case of Poland, Peru, and the Philippines as three countries that were close alphabetically, but otherwise shared hardly anything in common, that had been stars of the third wave of democracy. Then all of a sudden, in all three of them, you had voters voting for people who were connected with the third-wave authoritarian regimes: Fujimori’s family in Peru; Duterte, but also a resuscitation or rehabilitation of the Marcos family in Philippines; and then in Poland, the beginning of the backsliding of democracy. That all happened before Trump and it was mystifying at first and shocking and most unwelcome.
jmk
I remember a piece in the Journal of Democracy that was about 10 years ago, that was about Poland as a democracy promoter. It just really reminds me of how our views on Poland have really changed over the last few years. That Poland was such a democratic star for so long and now we think of it as one of the sickest cases of democratic backsliding that we’re hoping turns around. I mean, they have elections coming up…
Marc Plattner
Yes, but it’s also been a stalwart in terms of supporting Ukraine, so on that issue, Poland and Hungary, which otherwise seemed like they were becoming a twosome have taken strongly opposed positions. Orbán is still very much pro-Putin and pro-Russia. Poland does think of itself very deeply as part of the West and wants to be part of the West, which I think may inhibit the degree to which it can backslide on democracy. But the fact that it’s gone as far as it had in terms of backsliding already is, you know, an indication that some of our earlier confidence in the stability of consolidated democracies was misplaced. We were too confident about that and I probably was myself as well.
jmk
Do you think that we overstated how much people had accepted democracy culturally in a lot of countries? I mean, it’s really shocking when we see people freely elect leaders with autocratic ambitions. It just raises the question to me whether people have actually changed over time or whether there have been these sensibilities all along that we just didn’t realize.
Marc Plattner
Well, that’s a very good question and hard to answer. Again, here, I think, the distinction between liberalism and democracy is important in that even the Orbáns and the, Kaczyńskis in Poland and so on, none of them talk about doing away with free elections. So that part, I think, does remain solid, but support for liberalism is definitely, I think, was much more shallow than most of us thought it to be.
jmk
Do you feel like that’s progress? I mean, in the past, we would have saw autocratic leaders, or aspiring autocratic leaders, win elections in places like Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and then close down elections. Today, we see leaders win in elections in places like Turkey, in places like Hungary, and others and they’ll try to change the rules of the game so that they’re not entirely free nor fair, but they institutionalize elections. They continue to depend on elections and they continue to lean into the institution of elections.
Marc Plattner
I think that’s a very good insight, and the question is how stable that situation is. I mean, that’s basically what electoral authoritarianism means, is that you keep having elections that are not entirely free or fair, but at least they’re competitive to some extent. It’s probably true that if the opposition in places like Hungary and Turkey were able to really unite that they conceivably could win. But how long will it continue that way without either having a breakthrough election that ends the authoritarianism or, conversely, having the authoritarian ruler erode more and more what remains of free elections. I hesitate to make predictions these days, having been wrong about other things, but it still seems to me unlikely that that’s a stable form. It seems to me it’s likely to evolve one way or the other.
jmk
A little less than 10 years ago, you wrote an article about democratic governance and the importance of governance in democracy. I’ve noticed that that’s become a theme within the Journal of Democracy as well. There’s a lot of people writing about the role of governance and the importance to get governance right in democracies, making democracies work. Was that something that past generations undervalued, that they just assumed that if you had the right institutions and you had liberal values within them, that governance would take care of itself?
Marc Plattner
I think there was probably a propensity to neglect the importance of governance. I think you’re right about that. Of course, you know, Frank Fukuyama has been one of the people who’s been insisting on the importance of the state. So, there have been contrary voices. And now, well, it’s different now because a whole industry of governance has developed with support from the World Bank and others, with governance indicators and development agencies focusing more than they used to on governance. So, in that sense, there’s been a kind of new recognition of its importance. But I think what’s still lacking is a kind of, and I’m not sure I can supply the answer, but a linking of the democratic institutions part with the governance part.
Governance, first of all–we used to just say government, which I think was a perfectly adequate word–but obviously democracy is a way of choosing rulers and so on, but it’s also a way of governing, and if it fails at governing, it’s not going to survive as a way of choosing rulers. I think over the long run that’s what’s certain to be the case and so I think it’s critical that people concerned with democracy also pay attention to good government, which I would say in today’s world is generally best provided by democracies. There are some well governed regimes in terms of administration and so on that are not democratic. Singapore is always the example that’s cited.
Now, then you start getting into questions, well, is it good government still if people’s rights are not protected? One can argue about that, but certainly in terms of administration and security in the streets and that kind of thing. Singapore provides it. Then you get into these things that people pose, ‘Well, would you rather live in authoritarian Singapore or democratic Haiti?’ I think once the governance gets bad enough, most people would prefer any decently administered society to one that may have elections, but has this total mayhem in every other respect, economically, in terms of security and so on. So, democracy to be viable certainly has to provide at least some minimal form of good governance.
jmk
I think El Salvador is a great example of a country that shows that when governance gets bad enough, when the government doesn’t provide those basic elements of safety and security for its people, that eventually it will turn authoritarian. So, it’s not really so much a choice sometimes. I mean, if you don’t get the governance down, you’re going to end up with a strong man like we’ve seen Bukele over in El Salvador and Mexico’s facing some of the same problems with the strength of the cartels there.
Marc Plattner
I think that’s right.
jmk
Yeah, and it does also raise a question to me about how much freedom you have when the people who are really governing your country is no longer the state armed criminal organizations. I mean, that’s something that has to be taken into account too.
Marc Plattner
It’s true. Particularly in Latin America, that’s been a constant problem. I mean, narco-terrorists or what I guess are really street gangs in some of the Central American countries and especially El Salvador, and again that’s not new. That article on Panama that I mentioned that was in our very first issue in January 1990, I think may have coined the term “narco-terrorism,” but basically it was saying that this was an unlivable kind of regime. Some countries I think have done a better job of dealing with that. Colombia has had some successes. But if you’re not successful at that, it’s hard to imagine democracy surviving in any meaningful sense.
jmk
Do you think that the way that we think about democracy, the way that we measure democracy should include elements of governance? Because I know Freedom House doesn’t really take into account any kind of governance measure per se. I don’t think V-DEM necessarily does. I mean, do you think that governance should be part of how we measure or how we think about a truly democratic society?
Marc Plattner
I think it is part of how we should think about it. Whether we should have a combined measurement tool, I’m less certain. V-DEM to some extent, and again, I haven’t been following closely the latest iterations of their study, but they do separate out various aspects of democracy. I think that can be useful. I think it’s helpful to know how countries are doing on governance apart from how they’re doing on democracy. It helps us analytically as well as anything else.
jmk
So, drawing us back to the idea of democratic consensus. There was an article, I think it was last year in the Journal of Democracy by Michael Ignatieff, that made the case that democracy oftentimes involves debates about the idea of democracy. One of the things I’ve noticed among people, especially on the right that we often label as anti-democratic is they’re sometimes using the language of democracy within their concerns. An obvious issue is the fact that they oftentimes are making erroneous claims, but the language behind what they’re concerned about is things like stolen elections, things like censorship, things like that. Does that give you any solace that we might be able to find some measure of consensus, because they haven’t necessarily lost some aspects of the language of democracy, even as some of the candidates and some of the policies that they’re looking for are sometimes anti-democratic?
Marc Plattner
Yeah, I think that’s similar to what we were saying before about Turkey and Hungary. But I would say more generally in the world today that nobody is making anti-democratic or anti-egalitarian arguments. I mean, maybe the Thai generals at one point were actually saying something about “those upcountry peasants shouldn’t be able to vote.” But really, with that possible exception, I think that’s old already. It’s impossible to gain acceptance for arguments based on the justice of inequality. But individual freedom, liberalism is a very different matter. There are people, certainly in other countries but probably on the far right in the US as well, who will adhere to the need for elections and want to say that it’s the people who should rule, but want to say that if the people vote to get rid of the First Amendment, well, that’s democracy.
I think we have a more complex notion of what democracy is. That it’s not strictly majoritarianism. That there are certain principles that limit what majorities can do, namely the rights of individuals and minorities, and I would say, if you abandon that, you’re abandoning what we really mean by democracy, certainly what we mean by liberal democracy.
jmk
So, in your mind, how do we reclaim our democratic consensus?
Marc Plattner
Easier said than done. I think it will depend partly on what happens in electoral politics and in terms of the American case, but it’s hard to know how these things evolve. The Italian case has really surprised me, where you have the heiress of a pro-Mussolini party governing, and again, I’m not following it closely, but some people say it’s reasonably democratic. After all, even with Trump, we didn’t lose our democracy, although it was sorely tested. So, I think, a few electoral breaks might start moving things in a more healthy direction. But the other is in the academic and intellectual world. People like Deneen and Legutko and others are gaining some stature. They’re talked about. They’re prominent in a way that wouldn’t have been the case before.
But I don’t think they’re winning that many adherents. You know, it’s important to oppose their arguments, to make again the case for liberal democracy. You know, in some ways it’s something that we all know and many of us take for granted that makes it hard to vigorously state the case as we probably should. But anyway, I hope the Journal of Democracy did it under my stewardship for many years. But I think it’s continuing to do it now under its new editorial leadership. You know, I think it still has a critical role to play.
jmk
Do you feel that establishing that democratic consensus depends more on political elites or do you think that it depends on the opposition to accept the democratic process. I mean, I’m seeing a lot of articles from people like Laura Gamboa that are emphasizing the role of the opposition. There’s a lot more discussion about how much influence the opposition has within a democracy and within the efforts to consolidate democracy these days.
Marc Plattner
Oh, I think there is an important role to be played, especially if they remain loyal to the political regime. That’s the way democracy works is that people get elected, they have a program, they try to implement it and then it’s up to voters to decide whether they’ve done well or not and to oppose them on serious grounds when they go wrong. That seems to me an essential part of what we mean by democracy. The problem becomes when they go beyond opposition–to the policies of Trump, for example–and try to say that, therefore, we have to get some different kind of regime, that liberal democracy no longer works. I think that would be a fatal error.
jmk
Well, Marc, thank you so much for joining me today. I want to plug your article one more time. It’s called, “Why Ukraine is Critical to Rebuilding our Democratic Consensus.” It’s available free on the Journal of Democracy website. So, thank you so much for writing it. Thank you so much for joining me again today.
Marc Plattner
Thank you. I enjoyed the discussion.
Key Links
“Why Ukraine Is Critical to Rebuilding Our Democratic Consensus” in the Journal of Democracy by Marc Plattner
“Democracy Embattled” in the Journal of Democracy by Marc Plattner
“Liberalism and Democracy: Can’t Have One Without the Other” in Foreign Affairs by Marc Plattner
Democracy Paradox Podcast
Anne Applebaum on Autocracy, Inc
Larry Diamond on Supporting Democracy in the World and at Home
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