Progressives once believed that the retreat of liberal democracy would be akin to water flowing uphill. History, they assumed, was irrevocably on their side. But from the US to Russia, Turkey to Poland, and Hungary to Italy, an Illiberal International is now advancing.
One of the first to sound the alarm was Yascha Mounk, the author of The People vs Democracy (2018) and a lecturer on government at Harvard University. “I started to joke that I was a ‘democracy crisis hipster,’” the 36-year-old recalled when we met recently in a café in central London. “I thought democracy was in crisis before it was cool and people didn’t take that point seriously.”
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