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? And what can we do about it? Well, Aspen helped

FP Live convene a great set of thinkers on this

very issue. Shadi Hamid is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and has an excellent bookout

called The Problem of Democracy. Mike Abramowitz is the president of Freedom House and Maria Ressa,

a former FP Live guest, is the winner of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize and the founder and executive editor of Rappler in the Philippines.

Those are the guests. Here what they have to say. Let's get started.

Let's hear a round of a pause.

...