How To Fix Democracy

Sarah Miller, Executive Director of the American Economic Liberties Project, talks with host Andrew Keen about trust-busting. From the Gilded Age and the New Deal to the present day, their discussion touches upon how capitalism has been met with regulation over the last century. Miller argues that now is the time once again to revisit such measures as power, both economic and political, is concentrating in the hands of the few, thereby posing a threat to the health of American democracy.

In this episode, host Andrew Keen sits down with distinguished economist, Sir Angus Deaton, the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of International Affairs, Emeritus, Professor of Economics and International Affairs, Emeritus, and Senior Scholar at Princeton University. Sir Angus Deaton, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2015 for his analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare, discusses why capitalism is no longer delivering happiness and quality of life for working class people in the United States. Instead, it has created growing inequality in the U.S. healthcare system as many Americans are deprived of health insurance and can no longer afford care, especially when they are unemployed. Deaton’s latest book, “Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism”, written with his fellow Princeton economist and wife Anne Case, looks at precisely this issue: how a changing global economy can have dire public health consequences. Fixing healthcare inequality, Deaton argues in this interview, must be a t

Raghuram Rajan is the Katherine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Previously, he was the 23rd Governor of the Reserve Bank of India and the Chief Economist at the IMF. In this interview, hosted by Andrew Keen, Rajan calls capitalism today an uneven playing field that doesn’t efficiently skill people to meet the needs of the economy. This leads to unequal access to good jobs and growing income inequality. As a result, democracy has at times turned against capitalism. But Rajan reminds us that capitalism works best when there is economic competition, while democracy works best when there is political competition. With this in mind, Keen and Rajan discuss how these two forces can work better together.

Presidential Scholar at CUNY and author of Capitalism, Alone, Branko Milanovic kicks off the second season of How to Fix Democracy. He discusses elements of different capitalistic systems, such as in the United States and Denmark, and rejects the commonly held assumption that people universally value freedom over economic prosperity.

Considered one of the world’s leading experts on democracy, Larry Diamond, senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, believes democracy worldwide is in a recession. The crisis is “bad, deepening, accelerating,” but he suggests several steps we can take to reverse the trend, such as ranked choice voting to tackle the two-party system, and spreading “motor voter” laws to increase the number of registered voters. For Diamond, democracy is the only political system that can preserve freedom, which is itself intrinsic to being human.

Annika Savill, Executive Head of the UN Democracy Fund admits that the word “democracy” doesn’t appear anywhere in the UN charter, but finds it exists in the demands of people everywhere who are working to hold their governments accountable. She tells Andrew Keen that, as a former journalist, she is passionate about facts and worried about clickbait and “tidbits of information without verification.” She also offers the concept of “citizens’ assemblies” as an alternative for referenda, and muses about exploring the relationship between “linguistic echo chambers” and democracy.

Prior to the 2016 election, Richard Stengel, former managing editor of Time magazine, witnessed the rise of disinformation firsthand from his position as Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. He believes that consuming media with caution could be a powerful antidote to efforts to deceive us,  and is skeptical that governments attempting to “counter” disinformation on social media platforms is the correct approach. From the limits of free speech laws to legislation erring on the side of privacy, Stengel and host Andrew Keen discuss what does and doesn’t work in the information wars.

Leon Botstein, music director and conductor, scholar, and president of Bard College in upstate New York, had once thought that the Berlin Wall would never come down. And he found the revolutions surrounding 1989 “frightening” because they could lead to the ascent of unregulated capitalism and the release of suppressed nationalism. Botstein explains that democracy “is harder than people expected” and worries that we are spending too much time staring at our smartphones and “mesmerized by nothing” rather than finding meaning and value by our own activity. Referenced in the interview: https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/college-behind-bars/

Consumer advocate, lawyer, and former U.S. presidential candidate Ralph Nader believes that democracy is about civic organization, not just public opinion. In his assessment, the American people have lost perspective and ceded control of politics to “big money.” But they should understand that there is broad popular support for many of the things they want, and the key is Congress. Nader, who made a career on circumventing big business control in Washington, urges Americans to put the focus on Congress, the most powerful branch of government, and remarks that, historically, it’s only taken concerted effort from 1% of the population to push major change. He reminds the public that there is something that politicians want more than money from special interests: your vote.

Canadian political philosopher and writer John Ralston Saul discusses how the crisis in democracy today is self-inflicted and intentional. The people, he says, have given up holding power themselves, accepting instead to gain influence over power. In pursuing good causes they have turned over the levers of power to business and the higher echelons of government. To fix democracy, Ralston Saul hopes that citizens — a concept he says has been abandoned —  will seek to participate in democracy at local levels in order to reclaim the foundations of democratic power.

Rob Riemen, Dutch philosopher and founder of the Nexus Institute, names Baruch Spinoza, the 17th century philosopher, as one of the first great minds to understand the importance of democracy. Spinoza, he says, saw that only democracy would be able to put human dignity and individual freedom first. But maintaining democracy, Riemen says, is not about institutions. Instead, it relies on cultivating the “spirit of democracy” through liberal education.

Carl Gershman, founding president of the National Endowment for Democracy, recalls how the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States marked a turning point, derailing the idea that democracy would simply continue its forward march in history. His hope, however, is that democracy’s current regression spurs people around the world to defend it more vigorously.

Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Constanze Stelzenmüller discusses how domestic problems have led to disruptions in foreign policy—turning partners into rivals. At home, many democracies are struggling with balance: between national security and privacy, the political center and the peripheries, or direct and representative democracy. Stelzenmüller goes into detail about the many aspects we should re-evaluate, particularly in Germany, France, the UK, and the United States. And she relishes the challenge for her generation to preserve democracy for the future.

Rappler CEO and co-founder Maria Ressa got her start as a journalist in the Philippines in the 1980s and has seen the pendulum of democracy swing in both directions since. In her interview with Andrew Keen, Ressa—who was among the journalists named Person of the Year by Time Magazine in 2018—dives into the way that “lies laced with anger” have spread faster than facts across social media, playing to the worst of human nature and undermining democracy. As we find ourselves in a political environment she likens to dystopia and chaos, Ressa asks us all to reflect on the values that guide us.

Yascha Mounk, associate professor at Johns Hopkins SAIS and expert on the rise of populism, describes three main challenges to democracy: the stagnation of living standards in developed democracies, cultural and demographic changes that are shifting the status quo, and the social media’s domination. These elements have combined to increase the supply of “noxious ideas” that have led to factions and division in the United States and other countries. One way to reverse this process, Mounk argues, is to resist divisive ideology in favor of what he calls “inclusive nationalism.”

Norman Ornstein, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, has been immersed in U.S. politics since the late 1960s and has watched the evolution of the Republican Party with concern. Ornstein no longer views the GOP as conservative, he tells Andrew Keen, but as radical, leaving behind its ideology for a theology. And though he cannot point to a period in American history where the political situation was ideal — even the post World War II years of bipartisan cooperation were fraught with racial divisions — today it is about as dire as he’s seen.

For Cornell William Brooks, former president of the NAACP and current professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, democracy is not an ethereal concept from Greece; it is about his family lineage. For centuries, the story of democracy in the United States has been about an expanding definition of citizenship and what an American looks like. Brooks encourages us to remember the art of conversation in an increasingly digital world and promotes removing obstacles to voting, even making voting a requirement. 

Director of the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy and former White House and State Department official, Laura Rosenberger views democracy from a national security perspective. In this interview, she urges the United States to pay close attention to threats from without and within. In addition to focusing on borders, security means focusing on systems, she claims. Otherwise, the United States leaves itself vulnerable to authoritarian regimes and illiberal forces who could seek to undermine democracy in order to increase their relative power. Americans’ first line of defense is to not let external interference divide them, an important message heading into a year of presidential campaigning.

Washington commentator and columnist for the Financial Times Ed Luce recounts the many misunderstandings we've had over the past few decades. From the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to the collapse of the neoliberal Washington Consensus in 2008, Luce illustrates how political developments frame how we experience economic events, and how economics can predict politics. Ultimately, he asks us to consider the price we must pay for social peace and warns about the stakes of the 2020 election in the US.

Sheri Berman, professor of Political Science at Columbia University's Barnard College offers a historical perspective of democracy, along with some very useful definitions of concepts like illiberal, liberal, fascism, populism, and democracy. She argues that polarization, even at the scale we're experiencing today, is very common throughout history; what is unique about today is that a lot of changes are happening all at once.