Hello everyone and welcome to the Minescape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll.

Back in the early 1990s, there was an idea going around called the End of History.

The Berlin Wall had fallen, the USSR was dissolving.

There was a feeling that history had been very interesting, you know, thousands of years of conflict and war

and trying out different forms of government and society, but that now, as the 20th century came to a close,

we had more or less figured it out. The way to live is in a liberal democracy and liberal democracy was gaining ascendance throughout the world.

Even old dictatorships or authoritarian regimes were crumbling under the democratic pressures.

As it turns out, the idea of democracy is not necessarily a stable one.

You can have a democratic society that gets rid of its democratic institutions for one reason or another

and a couple of centuries, which is the time period over which democracy has been ascendant in the Western world, is a short period, historically.

Right now, we're in a period where the world is changing rapidly in many ways and you can't just say everything is done politically.

We figured it out we're all going to be liberal democrats going forward.

Indeed, as many of you might have noticed, just over the past couple years, there has been increasing anti-democratic sentiment around the world.

It can be very blatant in some places, some countries have elected through democratic means quite explicitly anti-democratic leaders.

Here in the United States, there's certainly been controversies and arguments about whether or not our new Trump administration is not getting in line with the norms of liberal democracy, attacking the media, undercutting our confidence in our electoral processes and so forth.

Around the world, strong men and autocratic forces are ascendant and you can have different opinions about this.

I think that this is a real problem and if you do think it's a real problem, then I think that it's something that is not just alarmism.

I think that if you are of the opinion that this is happening and this is bad, there's more than enough evidence that we should really take this seriously.

You might, on the other hand, think that this is just liberals complaining that they lost the election.

They're not used to having a strong leader, they have to fight against.

It's true, okay, but it's up to you to articulate exactly why it's okay to attack the media in certain ways.

What should be the norms that are always respected, no matter who is the boss, no matter which party is in power.

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