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.

Historian and journalist Anne Applebaum sat down with Andrew Keen during the opening dinner of the Bertelsmann Foundation’s Washington Symposium in April 2019 for a live episode of How to Fix Democracy. A thought leader on disinformation, Applebaum commented on current political polarization by arguing that unless you can have debates based on a commonly agreed upon set of facts, you cannot have democracy at all. For a deeper dive into these themes and others beyond her interview, read the essays that she and other leading experts on democracy prepared for the Symposium here.

Sir Malcolm Rifkind, interviewed at the Aspen Ministers Forum in Kansas City, sees the challenges to liberal values as tied to, but separate from, the challenges to democracy. He explains how many places where democracy is said to be in crisis today are actually experiencing a shift away from liberal ideas rather than from democracy itself. In a conversation that touches upon Brexit, the Cold War, and China’s rise, Sir Malcolm frames the challenge to liberal democracy today as a battle between “rule of law” and “rule by law.”

Mete Coban is a Councillor for Stoke Newington in the London Borough of Hackney and Chief Executive at My Life My Say, a youth-led, non-partisan charity focused on increasing participation in democracy. Mete offers his views on how young people view democracy differently and how Brexit helped draw more young people into politics.

In our second interview from the Aspen Ministers Forum in Kansas City, former Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Israel Tzipi Livni offers her view on democracy’s condition. She talks with Andrew Keen about the current state of politics in Israel, what she thinks political parties must do to contribute to the strength of democracy, and how supporters of liberal democracy around the world can band together to defend it.

From Kansas City, where she was holding the Aspen Ministers Forum in May 2019, former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright spoke with Andrew Keen about why her first president, Harry Truman, was such an inspiration to her. In this engaging episode, Secretary Albright also shares her view that the 1% is anti-democratic, tells a story about how cassette tapes helped lead to martial law in communist Poland, and says what she learned writing her most recent book, Fascism: A Warning.

This episode reaches back in time to revisit the origins of democracy with Greek historian and classics scholar Angelos Chaniotis. Host Andrew Keen asks: why democracy began in Athens and what was it like when it first emerged? In looking back to the origins of democracy, they find there are clues to preserving the modern version. Listen to find out more.