The Democracy Dilemma

If the rules-based order is broken, what comes next? And who will lead it? Mark Leonard argues in his new book, Surviving Chaos: Geopolitics When the Rules Fail, that the coming system will be “un-order,” governed not by China or the United States but by no one at all. Are states ...  Show more

U.S. President Donald Trump arrived in Beijing for his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping to great fanfare but left with little to show for it. What does the Trump-Xi summit reveal about the balance of power between the world’s two biggest economies? Rana Mitter, a top his ...  Show more

Larry Diamond once again joins Francis Fukuyama for a year-end review to discuss the state of global democracy as 2023 draws to a close. Diamond also recounts his Seymour Martin Lipset Lecture, the 20th iteration of the annual lecture series named in honor of the famed political ...  Show more

Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942) contains a famous, and minimal, definition of democracy as the competition between political elites to sell themselves to the electorate. Schumpeter wanted to debunk more elevated ideas of the common good and the popu ...  Show more

On this episode of The Enemies List, Rick is joined by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. Both are authors and professors at Harvard University. Together they discuss why the upcoming 2024 election rivals the importance of the 2020 election in maintaining our democracy, why the ...  Show more

Autocracy as we understand it today is a modern creation. I think there we see very few successful examples of modern autocracies that are able to sustain themselves.

Shadi Hamid

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