Hi everybody, welcome to Downs Knows History here. Democracy, folks, democracy, it's in crisis.

Around the world, people are chipping away. What for generations, we consider to be a consensus

on how we ought to govern our society. You can have representative democracies and rules based

democracies in which the people were nominally sovereign and they expressed their will through

elected representatives. Electrical systems may differ, some produce profoundly anti-majoritarian

outcomes, but there was a sense in which people voted in the Canada, France, UK, US, various

places like that. And the composition of the resulting parliament or government would be kind of

vaguely democratic and acceptable to the majority of people that cast their votes.

Well, things are changing folks, you've had me talk a lot about the podcast, we've talked

about also brilliant scholars like Ann Applebaum, on why democracy is under threat, under threat from

the economic challenges we face, the technological transformation we're going through, global warming,

China, alternative systems, and just populist strongmen realizing it could be their

electoral advantage to undermine democracy. All that means it's time for a pod. Yeah, it's time

for history to do our democracy special. What the hell's going on with democracy? And for that,

I've got one of the most brilliant minds of people who come on this pod. He's been several times

before. He is Rob Saunders, he's a reader in modern British history at Queen Mary University of

London. He is a brilliant on social media. He brings that 19th century, that 20th century context

in history to debates that rage in the present, pointing out that we've been through things like

this before. People have said things like this before, trying to enrich our understanding of what

is going on at the moment. He is writing a gigantic new history of democracy in Britain,

and he is demand to talk about why democracy is having a tough time. If you want to listen to

previous podcasts with Rob Saunders, you'd be very wise. You can subscribe to history. It's a new

...