America is changing. And so is the world.

But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval.

It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere.

I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C.

I'm Tristan Redman in London, and this is the global story.

Every weekday will bring you a story from this intersection, where the world and America meet.

Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Ravi Agrawal, Foreign Policy's editor-in-chief.

This is FP Live.

Welcome to the show. I was recently at the Aspen Ideas Festival, a place where there's

always a great collection of thinkers and writers from a wide range of disciplines.

And one topic that kept coming up in a variety of ways in different conversations was democracy.

It is under assault all over the world.

But more than that, it also seems stuck in a strange slide downwards, an internal crisis of sorts.

You see, in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, and Francis Fukuyama famously

described that moment as the end of history, there was a real sense that democracy had won a

grand battle of ideas. There was no better form of government. A wave of countries around the world

began to democratize. But then about 15 years ago,

we realized something very strange was going on. Yes, many countries were nominally democracies.

They were holding elections. But those elections weren't always fair. And the leaders they were

producing was sometimes more autocratic than democratic.

And so we are in the midst of what scholars call a democratic recession. Why? How did we get here?

...