You actually have a big turn to identity politics under conditions of globalization, in part because the room for contestation in the economy actually reduced.

And so if you have to build political coalitions, you have to actually fight on something else.

And if it happens to my identity politics, it'll be a lot more kind of non-negotiable.

And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.

My guest today is one of my favorite thinkers. Patap Pan Panometer is the Lawrence as Rockefeller visiting professor for distinguished teaching at Princeton University.

He also has founded and was vice chancellor of one of the most important new liberal arts colleges in India called the Ashoka University and founded one of the most influential think tanks in

the country, the Center for Policy Research.

In the past, I've had Pratap on to talk about developments in India, and we do cover some

of what is going on there with Narendra Modi.

But Pratap, by training, is a political theorist who really thinks about

the basic challenges of liberal democracy and of other regime forms in very incisive ways.

And so I talk to him about a new project he has in which he argues that we're in a global

moment of legitimation crisis, that we need

to understand the particular reasons why liberalism and the democratic project in the West

are in such crisis today. But we have to put it in the context of trying to understand why it is

that the neo-democratic project of Iran, the attempt to

wed together democracy and feocry in an Islamic state, is failing. Why it is that, according to him,

China is undergoing a deep internal crisis of legitimacy. Why it is that there are no live alternatives to liberal

democracy in that sense either. So this is one of the more challenging conversation I've

recently had in the podcast, but one from which I have learned a tremendous amount, not just about the condition of the United States, of Western Europe,

but really about how to think about this particular historical moment

in the broader context of intellectual history.

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