YASCHA MOUNK
The People Vs. Democracy
Yascha Mounk (left) and Francis Fukuyama. Photos by Sarah Gonzalez
YASCHA MOUNK Lecturer on Government, Harvard University; Senior Fellow in the Political Reform Program, New America; Author, The People vs. Democracy In conversation with FRANCIS FUKUYAMA Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies; Professor by Courtesy, Department of Political Science, Stanford University; Author, Political Order and Political Decay
Why is support for democracy declining among younger voters? From the March 13, 2018 program in San Francisco, “The People Vs. Democracy.” 16
THE COMMO N WE AL TH
FRANCIS FUKUYAMA: Yascha Mounk first came to my attention for an article he published in the Journal of Democracy a couple of years ago, based on data that was showing that support for democracy among young people in the United States was actually on the decline, with a corresponding trend toward favoring authoritarian government. He’s since then done a lot of very acute observations about the nature of democracy. We have something in common: We both started out as political theorists. We started with Plato and Aristotle and Rousseau and Machiavelli. I think that that perspective gives his analysis of the current democratic situation a great deal more depth. We will begin by the question that comes obviously to mind when just looking at the title of your book, The People vs. Democracy. Democracy is supposed to be about the people, so how can you have a conflict between the people and democracy—and what do you mean by democracy? For that matter, what do you mean by the people? YASCHA MOUNK: Some of the best book titles don’t make sense when you look too closely. Perhaps this is the case of mine.
There is something I think that explains that paradox. Part of it is the research that you reference, but actually what you’re seeing is people starting to fall out of love with a democratic system. In the United States, over two-thirds of older Americans, born in the 1930s, 1940s, say it is essential to them to live in a democracy. Among younger Americans born since 1980, less than one-third do. Twenty years ago, 1 in 16 Americans said that they thought army rule was a good system of government. According to more recent polls, it is 1 in 6. You see similar data in other countries as well. In data from last summer, we saw that the number of Germans or French people or Brits who think that a strong ruler who doesn’t have to bother with parliament and elections is a good thing has roughly doubled over the course of the last 20 years. It’s now 50 percent in France and the United Kingdom. So there is one sense of people versus democracy, which is that people actually are getting more and more critical of democracy. But after years of disappointments with this government and that government, we know that they all hate Congress and think that