Yascha Mounk has been sounding the alarm for some time: Democracy is in crisis, and it’s our responsibility to save it.
“One of the great threats to our democratic system,” he says, “is that many don’t recognize what it looks like when it’s under attack.”
The German-American political scientist predicted this turn well before the polarizing 2016 U.S. election. Since then, he’s been using a variety of public platforms—his writings, social media, and speeches—to analyze how we got here, and how we can fix it.
As interest in these topics has grown, so has Mounk’s audience. He has a Twitter following of more than 42,500. On Slate, he pens a weekly column and hosts a popular podcast, both titled “The Good Fight.” His name pops up frequently in articles on our fraught political climate, and dozens of his essays and op-eds have appeared in publications including The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times.
Mounk’s new home for discourse is the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins, where he has been appointed a senior fellow. He embraced this role, he says, after finding resonance in SNF Agora’s ambition to serve as a public forum promoting civic engagement and democracy.