The Slow Death of Democracy

Update: with a regional war having broken out in the Middle East, with significant democratic and anti-democratic dimensions - which Lyse Doucet can speak to directly, having reported from Iran for the BBC in February - this conversation will now be starting there. We hope you’ll join us. 

With David Runciman, Lyse Doucet, Thant Myint-U and Christopher Clark

At the end of 2016, the London Review of Books published a piece by David Runciman (which would later become a book) with the title: ‘Is this how democracy ends?’

‘It is not possible to keep behaving like this without damaging the basic machinery of democratic government,’ he wrote of Trump’s election. ‘Fake disruption followed by institutional paralysis, and all the while the real dangers continue to mount. Ultimately, that is how democracy ends.’

Ten years on, the LRB and David’s Past Present Future podcast have assembled an exceptional panel to reflect on the state of democracy in the West, and around the world. Will democracy survive as a 21st-century form of government, or are we watching it slide towards bankruptcy, first gradually, then suddenly, as Hemingway put it?

Lyse Doucet is the BBC’s chief international correspondent and the author of The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People’s History of Afghanistan.

Thant Myint-U is the author of five books, most recently Peacemaker: U Thant, The United Nations, and the Untold Story of the 1960s. He served on three UN peacekeeping operations before leading reform efforts in Myanmar as a presidential adviser (from 2010 to 2021).

Christopher Clark is the Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of St Catharine’s College. His most recent books are Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849 and A Scandal in Königsberg.

David Runciman is an honorary professor of politics at Cambridge, a contributing editor at the LRB and the host of Past Present Future, the history of ideas podcast.