Welcome to Beg to Bueg to Differ, the Bullworks Weekly Roundtable discussion featuring civil conversation

across the political spectrum. We range from center left to center right. I'm

Mona Charon, syndicated columnist and policy editor at the Bullwork. I'm joined by our regulars Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution in the Wall Street Journal,

Damon Linker of the Week, and Linda Chavez of the Niskanin Center.

Our special guest this week is Ian Bassen.

Ian is the former Associate White House Council in the Obama administration and is now the

executive director of Protect Democracy.

Welcome one and all.

Ian, you must be very busy these days because as we keep saying on this podcast week after week,

it really is one of those historical moments

where you do have to ask yourself on an ongoing basis, what are we doing to protect democracy when it does seem to be vulnerable?

So why don't you sketch out exactly what protect Democracy is before we get into some more specifics?

Sure.

So Protect Democracy is a cross-ideological nonprofit and I think we probably span the gamut even broader than you proposed here and that we are progressives,

moderates, conservatives who are concerned that American democracy is in danger of going down the road that so many other

democracies have gone down in the early days of the 21st century where illiberal

autocratic leaders have risen and displaced democratic regimes.

We've seen that across the world in the last 15 years and it's pretty clear now that the United States

is no exception.

And so we formed in early 2017 with the explicit mission of preventing American democracy from declining

into a more authoritarian form of government.

Okay, and so concretely, what are some of the steps that you've taken that your organization has taken,

...