U.S. American democracy is exhibiting symptoms of decline or even of degeneration given the continuing denial of the results of the last presidential election by many in the Republican Party and partisan efforts to curtail voting rights in the United States. How alarmed should one be about legislative capture and voter suppression by an increasingly combative Republican Party, which could significantly alter the very nature of American democracy? Do we need to re-evaluate our deep-seated faith in the irreversibility of democratic achievements in the face of soft authoritarian rulers all over the world becoming ever more popular? Is it time to reconsider issues of socioeconomic inequality and of class to revive a strong sense of collective purpose and solidarity that may indeed be indispensable for a defense of democracy?
Guests featured on this episode:
Craig Calhoun, University Professor of Social Sciences at Arizona State University and Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has written on the struggle by students for democracy in China, a book titled "Neither Gods nor Emperors." He has co-authored the volume, "Does Capitalism Have a Future?" with Immanuel Wallerstein and others. His latest book, "Degenerations of Democracy," written with Charles Taylor and Dilip Gaonkar, notes the signs that U.S. American democracy exhibits symptoms of decline or even of degeneration, and inspires our conversation in this episode.
Glossary
Who is Peter Thiel?
(14:55 or p.4 in the transcript)
Peter Thiel is a German American entrepreneur and business executive who helped found PayPal, an e-commerce company, and Palantir Technologies, a software firm involved in data analysis. He also invested in several notable ventures, including Facebook. Critics questioned involvement of Palantir Technologies with the CIA and other government agencies, especially given Thiel’s libertarianism. However, he argued that Palantir’s technology allowed for focused data retrieval, preventing overreaching searches and more draconian measures. The company was also used by banks to detect fraud and handle other cybersecurity efforts. In 2005 Thiel established Founders Fund, a venture capital firm. It invested in such companies as Airbnb, Lyft, and SpaceX. Thiel garnered attention in 2016 when he became a vocal supporter of Republican presidential nominee—and eventual winner of the election—Donald Trump, donating money and even speaking at the party’s convention: source
What is Silicon Valley?
(15:07 or p.4 in the transcript)
Silicon Valley is an industrial region around the southern shores of San Francisco Bay, California, U.S., with its intellectual center at Palo Alto, home of Stanford University. Its name is derived from the dense concentration of electronics and computer companies that sprang up there since the mid-20th century, silicon being the base material of the semiconductors employed in computer circuits. The economic emphasis in Silicon Valley has now partly switched from computer manufacturing to research, development, and marketing of computer products and software: source
What is the ‘Roe v. Wade’ case?
(25:36 or p.6 in the transcript)
Roe v. Wade is a legal case in which the U.S. Supreme Court on January 22, 1973, ruled (7–2) that unduly restrictive state regulation of abortion is unconstitutional. In a majority opinion written by Justice Harry A. Blackmun, the Court held that a set of Texas statutes criminalizing abortion in most instances violated a woman’s constitutional right of privacy, which it found to be implicit in the liberty guarantee of the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (“…nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”). Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court in 2022: source
What is the ACT UP movement?
(30:50 or p.7 in the transcript)
ACT UP, in full AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, is an international organization founded in the United States in 1987 to bring attention to the AIDS epidemic. It was the first group officially created to do so. ACT UP has dozens of chapters in the United States and around the world whose purpose is to find a cure for AIDS, while at the same time providing accurate information, help, and awareness about the disease by means of education and radical, nonviolent protest. The organization was founded in March 1987 at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center in Manhattan, New York, in response to what was seen as the U.S. government’s lack of action on the growing number of deaths from HIV infection and AIDS: source
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SR: Welcome to "Democracy in Question," the podcast series that explores the challenges democracies are facing around the world. I'm Shalini Randeria, Rector and President of the Central European University in Vienna, and Senior Fellow at the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at the Graduate Institute in Geneva.
It's a great pleasure to welcome Craig Calhoun to this episode. Craig is a University Professor of Social Sciences at Arizona State University and Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has written on the struggle by students for democracy in China, a book titled "Neither Gods nor Emperors." He has co-authored the volume, "Does Capitalism Have a Future?" with Immanuel Wallerstein and others. His latest book, "Degenerations of Democracy," written with Charles Taylor and Dilip Gaonkar, inspires our conversation today.
Craig and his co-authors worry that U.S. American democracy exhibits symptoms of decline or even of degeneration, given the continuing denial of the results of the last presidential election by many in the Republican Party and partisan efforts to curtail voting rights in the U.S. How alarmed should one be about legislative capture and voter suppression by an increasingly combative Republican Party, which could significantly alter the very nature of American democracy? Do we need to re-evaluate our deep-seated faith in the irreversibility of democratic achievements in the face of soft authoritarian rulers all over the world becoming ever more popular? Is it time to reconsider issues of socioeconomic inequality and of class to revive a strong sense of collective purpose and solidarity that may indeed be indispensable for a defense of democracy? These are some of the questions I'm going to discuss with Craig Calhoun on today's podcast. Craig, a warm welcome to the podcast, and thanks for making the time for joining me today.
CC: Well, thank you for being interested. It's great to talk with you, Shalini.
SR: Let me begin with your new book in which you've repeatedly made the point that democracy is and always has been an unfinished project, marked not only by internal contradictions but also periodically threatened by antagonistic reactions, and that democracy being under duress and in danger of degeneration in the U.S. is merely a case in point of a larger trend so that we would actually only at our own peril take democracy for granted. Against this assessment, what do you think about the significance of the upcoming midterm elections in the U.S.? What is the likely outcome on November 8th, and how will it affect democracy in America but also elsewhere in the long run?
CC: It's hard to say. And it's hard to say partly because polling isn't working as accurately. Pollsters are finding it hard to reach an adequate cross-section of the population because there's been a shift in who is engaged and how. Associated with what often is called populism. The upshot of this in the U.S. is a few things. First, the fate of the whole election is not about the whole vote. It's about the vote in certain places like the state of Georgia where the contest for the Senate may well decide the majority in the Senate, and therefore, whether there is approval for judges nominated by President Biden or for a whole host of other items on his agenda. This is the result of a polarization in the country. And that's one of the kinds of degenerations of democracy that Charles Taylor, Dilip Gaonkar, and I point to.
When we say degenerations, we don't mean just a linear decline. Democracy doesn't just go up gradually or down gradually. Democracy as a project takes two steps forward, one step backward, shifts in various ways through its course. It's always been this way. The U.S. wasn't founded as a full-blown democracy. It was founded as a republic with very limited democracy. Enslaved people couldn't vote. White men without property couldn't vote. Women couldn't vote. And it took a long time to change this. And so my message would be we do appear to be in a time of sharp degeneration, but that doesn't mean that there can't be renewal. But if we don't work hard to try to achieve greater democracy, this degeneration could be fatal. And fatal in the U.S. has big repercussions for the rest of the world.
SR: So, Craig, let's spell out some of these repercussions before we look at some of the proximate and longer-term causes. The kind of helplessness on the part of ordinary citizens in the face of seemingly uncontrollable and distant forces which impact on their lives and also their livelihoods is something we have seen in Brexit as well, which capitalized on this feeling of powerlessness. What we've also seen in the Brexit campaign and elsewhere has been the opportunist manipulation of public opinion by unscrupulous politicians using misinformation and disinformation campaigns, especially on social media. Some of this is due, I think, to the erosion of the spirit and substance of grassroot local forms of democratic engagements and practices. So, let's look at some of the causes, but also some of the repercussions of the U.S. elections and the way in which it'll affect democracies worldwide, and then come back to some very specific U.S. American political tactics and their implications.
CC: The first thing to note is that we tend to look at the problems of democracy inside individual countries, and we say, "Oh, look, something's going wrong in the United States. I bet something's going wrong in Britain. Actually, some things are going wrong in France," and we can go on down the list of the world's established democracies. So, this is a clue that the forces at work are bigger than just any one country. There has been a geographical reorganization that has had several dimensions and has contributed to the polarization, the disempowerment, and the sense of a kind of a winner-take-all politics in which politicians put winning ahead of any project of actually governing and actually making society better.
So, what's up? Well, part of it is a split between more or less metropolitan cities and small towns and suburbs. Part of the story is people moving to suburbs, making choices about a kind of middle-class life they want to defend, and they want to defend against cities, which they see as having immigrants, which they see as full of people with cosmopolitan lifestyle tastes. And the split is a very basic one. Brexit is a rebellion against London as much as it is a rebellion against Europe. And it is England, in particular, not Britain at large because it's not Scotland or Northern Ireland, but England outside London asserting an identity and a set of interests there. So, this kind of division is basic.
Now, let me bring that back to the U.S. but also make a comment in general. You mentioned, quite rightly, a sense of powerlessness. People’s feelings in these things. They can't control what's going on in their lives. I think that's partly political, and they are attacking that politically. It's partly economic. The global capitalists, corporate-dominated markets are not something that even small businessmen, let alone employees are able to control. And so, this sense of powerlessness is there.
But it's more than just that sense of powerlessness. It has a temporality. It's a sense of disempowerment. That is, it's people saying, "We had more control over our lives a generation ago. We've lost it," and a sense of loss and anger at what's been taken away. So, if you look at a version of globalization that was dominated by finance was conducted with an emphasis on free trade, benefits for corporations, capital accumulation, not ordinary people. You see in the United States factory towns, steel mill towns just destroyed, the whole town destroyed. You see an epidemic of the use of certain kinds of painkillers and other drugs that have been addictive. At the same time, towns losing hospitals and schools because they don't have the tax base to support them. So, this feeling isn't just one of long-term powerlessness, right? It's a feeling of becoming disempowered, and that produces an anger against the elites.
SR: So, to continue with that argument, in your book, you've made the point that democratic struggles over the last few decades of neoliberal hegemony have tended to neglect exactly these questions, questions of class, of economic inequality, of de-industrialization and what it does to communities, and that politics is focused instead on the politics of recognition and of identity. So, two related questions. One, do you think that there is any chance of questions of class either being taken up more systematically by the Democrats in the U.S.? Because they seem to be actually quite divided on the question of how radical an economic agenda the Democratic Party should follow. But if we look at British politics, which is in shambles at the moment, to say the least, the Labour Party is having equally trouble at mobilizing along lines of class.
CC: So, I think class is basic, but it's also changing, right? We can't say that we just need to go back to the old working-class politics because the old working class isn't there anymore. The rise of a new set of technology industries is both a change in our everyday lives as we use these technologies in various ways, but also a transformation in the employment structure. But it's not a transformation to technology work entirely. It's largely a transformation to service work as various kinds of older industrial work decay. The older class alignment wasn't just a matter of saying, "Oh, there's a working class." It was that the working class came together in factories and large places of work, where service workers today are very dispersed. That the working class was largely unionized. That unions have been attacked and beaten back and cut down over many years, as well as suffering from the transformations of the economy.
And on both left and right, there are problems with how to come to terms with this. In many ways, the soft left, the liberal center-left has refused to deal with these issues. It has embraced high-tech capitalism and globalization and has profound benefits in rising housing prices and a new kind of cosmopolitan urbanism. And on the right, there are real paradoxes in how the so-called populists have dealt with this. People who are frustrated by those economic changes embrace leaders who are closely tied to corporate capitalism and to the finance industry. And so they aren't able to bring about the changes that are implied by some of their policies either.
So, the right-wing, which says, "We hate this woke politics of identity on the left," produces a new politics of identity, nationalism. We don't want the politics of identity that the left is offering, but we want the politics of identity, too, because it gives us an excuse for not dealing with the fundamental economic issues that are facing the country for not dealing with inequality and not dealing with the blockages against social mobility and opportunity.
So, the result of that, on both left and right, is this continued frustration of people who feel that their chances of upward mobility are blocked. That's the problem. Now, this is common to left and right who have different ways of taking hold of it, but it shares not dealing with the core structural transformations in our societies, and instead focusing on largely symbolic identity issues. But let me quickly say one last thing, which is, when I say symbolic identity issues, I don't mean that these are not real and powerful, but I mean that they don't go to fixing the underlying problem.
SR: So, Craig, let me ask you about another aspect of the turn to populism, which is not specific to the U.S., but the rise of a certain kind of ultra-conservative authoritarian figure in the U.S. seems to be quite interesting. So, I'm thinking of someone like Peter Thiel with his profoundly anti-democratic views who embodies an outsider maverick kind of ethos, and yet seems to be very popular among some of the Silicon Valley people. How do we understand the prominence of these figures in U.S. politics?
CC: These folks like Peter Thiel are pretty idiosyncratic. So, it's a little bit hard to say, "Oh, this is the picture for all of them." But one thing we could say is we have a celebration of success that Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and a number of other figures of this kind embody the idea that they have achieved fantastic wealth by themselves. This ideology of meritocracy is attractive to other people who imagine that they, too, could succeed, they're just being blocked by others who have gotten in the way, who are not having the same opportunities. So, there's an enthusiasm for wealth and success. And it's true in various different settings, and it's been going on for a while.
Second, it's not just popularity. Peter Thiel is an extremely successful leader in Silicon Valley. Elon Musk is enormously wealthy. So, these are people who have profited enormously from the rise of these new technology firms, but much of the technology that is employed by these firms was subsidized by government funding. They're then anti-government, right? Now that I've got the government funding that has led to the R&D that has produced the artificial intelligence systems that I use to steer my Tesla, or that I use to organize my payment systems, for Peter Thiel, I want the government out of my hair. So, when the government is subsidizing my business, I love it. When the government is producing regulation, I hate it. But even more, I want to deny and pretend that subsidy never happened.
So, that's the dynamic, I think, of Silicon Valley, and it's very self-congratulatory, right? It is lots of people imagining a story of human evolution like that told by Yuval Harari in "Sapiens," and imagining it leads to them, right? That the whole evolution of the human race is leading to them. They're the smartest boys in the room, and they're almost all boys, and they are entitled to their wealth and power because of that. And they're popular with others because they seem to embody freedom, individualism, and success. So, they are terrible role models in a way, but they're popular by people who feel frustrated with the limits on their lives and like to celebrate somebody who seems to be breaking through the limits all the time and seems to be doing it just by force of individual personality.
SR: So, that's a very interesting point, the fact that they ideologically oppose the very economic basis, the subsidies, which have led to some of the technological innovations on which they're capitalizing in such a large way. But Craig, if we may look at the more structural dimension of it, the U.S. politics is probably among the political systems in which elections are very highly affected by money. So, the impact of business interests in collusion with certain political groups is another really corrosive factor leading to democratic decline. And if that is the case, do you think there is any efficient way to break out of this vicious cycle of money guaranteeing or helping to guarantee political success? And then, of course, success, which is owed to those corporate interests has to be repaid in some form by, let's say, regulation. Is there any political popular support for breaking this cycle?
CC: So, great question. The short answer is I think there's a lot of popular unhappiness that has not yet been galvanized into anything like an effective opposition to this. So, there's anger, but it is politically ineffective, partly because it doesn't map onto the interests of Democrats versus Republicans and their particular fights, and partly because money flows everywhere in this. It's not like the Republicans get money and the Democrats don't. The elite incumbents get money. A lot of the power of money in politics is keeping incumbents in office. Some of it is subsidizing challengers, but people hedge their bets, rich people give to both candidates. So, no, there's not much effective opposition to this, though there's discontent.
We refer to inequality, but we need to know just how substantially inequality has grown in the United States in recent years and that it hasn’t always been that way. Inequality actually went down during the post-war boom when the so-called welfare state institutions were being built and new opportunities being created. So, from World War II until the 1970s, '68 to '75, inequality actually went down. The U.S. became a more equal place. There was unionization, but there was also a growth of public universities with extremely low fees, right? Well, what's faced by young people now, public universities charging almost as much as private universities, mountains of debt. And a labor market that doesn't offer the same sorts of opportunities and very little in the way of collective organizations like unions, right? So, there is a really big issue of inequality. Why do we not see it and act on it? And is the issue just business interests? Part of the issue is that the world of big finance and massive wealth is not just business interests. Business interests include people who own a restaurant or dry cleaners on Main Street in a small town.
One of the problems of the left has been that it has been anti-business, instead of saying, "We are for small business, we want to help people who are opening an art gallery or opening a coffee shop or manufacturing specialized furniture in a small town, right?" So, being anti-business makes no sense. You can, on the other hand, say, in many ways, the structure of finance is anti-business. Those small businesses are being hurt by debt and well, by problems of inflation.
The language of entrepreneurship, which is used for the Elon Musks or the Steve Jobs of the world is also used for Uber drivers and the owners of small businesses. And it's not the same thing. So, it becomes an ideology that everyone has a chance, but actually, driving for Uber does not give you the chance of rising to the top of Silicon Valley corporate elites, right? It's not entrepreneurship. It is just self-employment, and often fairly exploitative self-employment where you have to drive 12 hours a day 7 days a week to make a really good living. So, we see an ideology that is equally problematic from the right confusing the issue of business, mobilizing the people who know that their town needs some businesses on its main street. To think that that has something to do with big business and that entrepreneurship is the answer to everything and that entrepreneurs control everything – finance controls it.
In the 1970s, about a quarter of disposable wealth was held in the form of financial assets. By the financial crisis 10 years ago, 3/4 of wealth was held in the financial assets. And that change – the redistribution of the wealth away from ordinary people. Most of the gains were not just of the pretty rich, right? It's not the top 20%, it's the top 1%, and the top 1/10 of 1% who become fantastically wealthy. Many, many more billionaires in this, and it's corporations that become very large and powerful. We have to notice the way in which they may be products of entrepreneurs at one time, but they're anti-entrepreneurial in important senses.
What does Google do? It buys up small companies before they have a chance to become big companies, very much like General Motors did seventy-five years ago. So, we need to distinguish what’s happening in the reality of the economy from that. But a sad end to this story, so far, we haven't done that very well, and we haven't produced a political realignment in the U.S., in Britain, anywhere else. There's been a huge turn against political parties. People are kind of angry at all politicians. Sometimes they have a side, and they hate the other side more than their side. But there's, you know, a sense that the political parties aren’t working. Discontent is without effective voice. We really need a movement that would speak for people and enable people to speak across some of the traditional divides.
SR: So, that brings me precisely to what I was going to ask you, and that is, you know, the Republicans have been sort of in this game trying to change some of the basic structures of American democracy through gerrymandering, voter suppression since a long time because they have long feared the consequences of the civil rights movements combined with the changes in the demographic balance over the last half a century.
So, the question would be, what kind of social movements do you think could deepen and strengthen democracy? We saw under very adverse conditions of the pandemic the Black Lives movements. We are seeing women coming out after the Roe v. Wade decision on the streets. But the question is, do you think the more radical claims for welfare, for solidarity, for collective action, which we have been missing, what kind of social movements would be in a position to galvanize those? Because I think one of the very important points that you make in your book is the absence of the spirit of social cohesion, of the sense of a shared fate, a common belonging because that is one thing which a strong democracy will need and is predicated upon.
CC: Something we see around the world in many ways, but certainly achieved in the United States is that the kind of movements we have turn fellow citizens into enemies. And it's on the left, too, right? What is wrong with those people who are still focused on debunking the 2020 election and claiming it was stolen and promoting Donald Trump's lies? Right? So, I become angry, right? Well, I do think that there's something insane about that.
On the other hand, I think there's something wrong with responding to it just by being angry rather than asking why this is happening. You speak of Republicans. The Republican Party is being torn apart by the attacks from the sort of Donald Trump right on the more traditional moderate Republicans where I live in Arizona. John McCain was a conservative Republican, extremely popular, former Republican presidential candidate. The current Republican Party has censured him retroactively, though he's dead, right? They have basically pushed his wife out, who's now an ambassador. They have pushed out all kinds of genuinely conservative Republicans, where conservative meant they wanted to maintain what was going on that they thought was good with American society.
They're being pushed out by radicals who are not conservative. Most of the people in the Conservative Party leadership in these contests now, the candidates who may use the word conservative to mean that they're anti-government are not conservative. They are not identifying what needs to be conserved and valued. They are radicals who are for extreme change. Now, what kinds of movements can deal with this? Well, movements that are unifying. And that's really hard because people, not just on the left but in the center get caught up in these, is it really racism? Is it really gender? Is it, you know, really class?
And we have these foolish and debilitating debates about which one of these is the real issue that has to be prioritized instead of analyzing the ways they intersect. I mentioned service workers before. And coming out of the pandemic, we saw healthcare workers, teachers, other kinds of caregivers, caregivers for the aged, and so forth. There's a huge population of caregivers. They are disproportionately women, but not entirely. They are disproportionately people of color, but not entirely. They are spread around urban and non-urban areas.
Well, if we can have a movement of people who are giving care and are valued for giving care, we are speaking to all these issues at once. Let's pay healthcare workers, not just neurosurgeons, right? All healthcare workers really well, right? Well, in doing that, you would be advancing minorities, you would be advancing women, you would be beginning to create pathways for immigrants, right? You would speak to lots of issues, but not in a divisive way. Not by saying, "No, no, we have to put blacks first or Hispanics first”, but by saying we have to put caregiving first. We have to put education first. We have to put the public good first and then pay the people who are working to provide the public good really well. Pay them comparably to what we pay people who are working just to make money.
SR: So, Craig, the last question, and the question of scale. You've talked about rebuilding democracy at the nation-state scale, but also at the community scale. What would be an argument that you could make about the need to rebuild or, build, actually build democracy at a supranational, transnational scale? Because when you were talking about public goods, the point that came to my mind was the absence of a movement for making the COVID-19 vaccines patent-free as global commons, as public goods, the kind of campaign that we saw quite successfully in the case of HIV/AIDS vaccines and removing the patents on them.
CC: So, we saw that in the case of HIV/AIDS vaccines because we had movements of gay people and others that had been already organized to get those vaccines invented and produced, right? So, ACT UP and a similar series of campaigns in Brazil and South Africa, and other places already existed. This speaks to the issue of transnational solidarity, which is really important, but also to why we still need democracy inside nation-states. We can't wish those nations away because we don't have the cohesive groups in every case, right?
So, we need globally to create movements of solidarity. We need to contend with capitalism. We need to deal with issues of justice and equity and public health, but we don't have, right now, the kind of solidarity group to organize democracy globally. So, what we need is to organize democracy in countries, and then have countries support being good globally instead of being aggressive and protectionist globally.
Let me say one more thing, though. Inside countries, our contention in the book, and certainly my view, we do need to revitalize and strengthen local communities, but we also need to revitalize and strengthen intermediate associations, groups, and networks at a scale between the very local and the national. So, I hope that we are building networks of solidarity that connect us across our local communities as well as building stronger local communities because I think that's crucial.
SR: Thanks very much, Craig, for this wide-ranging discussion of the ills of democracy, how to renew democracy, not only at the local community scale but also at the national as well as at the transnational level, the kinds of organizations, the kinds of movements, and the kinds of politics that are needed to strengthen and to deepen democracy in these troubled times. Thank you very, very much for being with me today.
CC: My pleasure, Shalini. Thank you for having me and for the questions.
SR: Let me sum up some of the main points of my discussion with Craig Calhoun. Democratic degeneration is neither a new nor a linear process. Democracies are full of tensions, and they take two steps forward and then one backward. They shift their course, but they can always be renewed. Global economic reorganization under neoliberalism has contributed to polarizations within societies and has led to feelings of disempowerment. A loss of control over one’s lives and livelihood, that produces anger, anger often directed against elites. Brexit was a rebellion of those who have been left behind in de-industrialized areas of Britain, directed as much against London and its privileged rich as against Europe and the EU. So, we need to pay attention to questions of class and rising inequalities that are corrosive for democracy. But we also need to realize the significant changes in class structures with the wide geographical dispersal of workers in service industries. These fundamental structural transformations in our societies should not be neglected in the focus on largely symbolic issues of identity, which populists love to talk about. Rich entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, are popular with those who are frustrated by the limitations of their own lives and admire these men as they seem to embody freedom, individualism, and success. But they don’t realize that their businesses have benefitted greatly from huge government subsidies and funding for the research into the technologies that these businesses use, which is something that people like Musk hide, while complaining incessantly about the perils of government regulation. The language of entrepreneurship that they use hides the fact that an Uber driver has little chance of rising to become part of the Silicon Valley corporate elite. Despite discontent in the US about the enormous power of the money of the super-rich donors in politics, this is not yet a matter on which there’s effective political mobilization and opposition. Instead, there’s a general disappointment with and distrust of politicians and political parties, which affects democratic politics negatively. Such political discontent is without effective voice. We therefore need movements that unify citizens and mobilize for the public good instead of those that foster divisions and resentment. To address issues of equity and social justice, we need to not only strengthen local communities and associations, but also create movements and networks of solidarity across national borders.
So, thank you very much for listening, and join us again for the next episode in two weeks' time when I'll be talking with Charles Taylor in a companion piece to today's episode on degenerations, but also on the rejuvenations of democracy. Please, go back and listen to any episode you might have missed, and, of course, let your friends know about the podcast if you're enjoying it. You can stay in touch with the work of the CEU at www.ceu.edu and the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at www.graduateinstitute.ch\democracy.