America’s democratic crisis didn’t start with Donald Trump’s reelection — it was predicted by experts who studied democracy’s fundamental weaknesses years before November 2024.
Two conversations from the WhoWhatWhy podcast archive show our commitment to understanding these challenges before they reached critical mass.
"This melting pot is at boiling point" mural near Shoreditch, in London, UK. September, 2017. Photo credit: Padaguan / Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
In these remarkably prescient interviews, scholars Yascha Mounk and Daniel Ziblatt identified the structural problems now threatening American democracy: our Constitution’s counter-majoritarian features, the psychological pull of tribalism, and the historical pattern of backlash against diversity.
- Mounk’s 2022 conversation revealed how democracies throughout history have struggled with diversity — often relying on homogeneity for stability.
- He noted that “never in history has a democracy succeeded in being both diverse and equal.”
- At the same time he argued that the US’s experiment in government of, by, and for the people remains possible if we develop new civic bonds across tribal lines.
In another podcast, a year later, Ziblatt warned that our Constitution inadvertently enables minority rule, with partisan minorities wielding disproportionate power through mechanisms like the Electoral College and the filibuster.
- He observed that while about 30 percent of voters support authoritarian populism across democracies worldwide, “our Constitution allows that 30 percent into power in a way that other countries don’t.”
Both scholars offered pathways forward, from institutional reforms to generational change. Their insights — which remain pertinent in the post-2024 landscape — demonstrate why WhoWhatWhy’s analysis consistently outpaces mainstream discourse.
As America endures another Trump presidency, these conversations provide essential context for understanding not just how we got here, but how, despite institutional inertia and other inherent vulnerabilities, we can fight to preserve democratic norms — and succeed.
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Original Interview Full Text Transcript (Yascha Mounk):
(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. We live in a moment when ideas move at the speed of social media, transforming them from academic theories into institutional practices almost overnight. Concepts that once percolated in university corridors for years now reshape boardrooms, classrooms, and the fundamental ways we govern ourselves. Few thinkers have been as prescient or as sharp, and dissecting these transformations as my guest Yascha Mounk. Since arriving in America in 2005, he’s witnessed and analyzed a profound shift in the nation’s character from a culture of optimistic self-awareness to one of deepening cynicism.
He spent years warning about the threats to liberal democracy from the rise of right-wing populism to the challenges of maintaining democratic institutions in an increasingly fractured world. His most recent book, The Identity Trap, examines how well-intentioned movements for social justice and identity politics can evolve in unexpected ways that undermine the very social cohesion they seek to achieve. . ."
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