Robert Kagan is a foreign policy expert who turned his focus to the United States last fall in a Washington Post column titled "Our Constitutional Crisis Is Already Here" that became one of the Post's most-read pieces of 2021. We're lucky to have Kagan with us this week to discuss the ongoing crises of democracy at home and abroad as Russia's war on Ukraine continues to unfold.
Kagan has argued that there was nothing inevitable about the relatively peaceful liberal democratic order that followed World War II, and that there is nothing inevitable about the perseverance of American democracy. In fact, he says that because so many reject the 2020 presidential election, we are already in a constitutional crisis, and it will take deliberate actions by the public and members of both political parties to get us out. For too many politicians, a recognition of our condition, let alone a commitment to those actions, appears to be a long way off.
Kagan is the Stephen and Barbara Friedman Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute and a member of the Foreign Affairs Policy Board in the U.S. State Department. He is the author of The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World and The New York Times bestseller, The World America Made.
Additional InformationKagan's piece on constitutional crisis
Kagan's piece on Ukraine
Kagan's lecture at Penn State
Related EpisodesSore losers are bad for democracy
How national parties are breaking state politics
How positive and negative freedoms shape democracy
Introducing: When the People Decide
Democracy's summer blockbusters
Can American democracy have nice things?
Baby Boomers and American gerontocracy
No Jargon: How white Millennials think about race
Book bans are never just about books
Debating the future of debates
What student debt says about democratic institutions
Combating disinformation at home and abroad
Jon Meacham on creating a more perfect union
The roots of radical partisanship
How democracies can win the war on reality [rebroadcast]
Ro Khanna on dignity and democracy
Russia and Ukraine: How we got here
What academic freedom really means in a democracy
Tracing the rise of illiberalism
Moving beyond news deserts and misinformation
How national parties are breaking state politics
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
City Manager Unfiltered
Potencial Americano
The ASIC Podcast
The Chris Plante Show
Strict Scrutiny