Worth Repeating: Welcome to the End of Democracy
New Thinking for a New World - a Tallberg Foundation Podcast
07/21/22
•32m
About
Comments
Featured In
"We may remain, as we are now, nominally democratic, but be ruled by a technocratic class empowered by greater powers of surveillance than those enjoyed by even the noisiest of dictatorships.”
Those words were written by Joel Kotkin in a recently published essay on democracy’s demise. Donald Trump is not the villain of the piece, as most pundits want us to believe, nor other populists outside the United States. Rather, Kotkin argues that the withering of democratic process and institutions reflects the deeper transformation of American and European societies: the emergence of a ruling technocracy; the use of the pandemic and the environmental crisis to constrain individual rights; the new concentration of power in governments, and the growing distance between the governing and the governed. All of it made worse by the mind-boggling concentration of economic wealth, which is as much an issue in China as it is in the United States.
Kotkin’s analysis deserves our attention. What do you think—not about Trump, but about democracy? Who can do what to bend the arc away from the dystopian end game that he and others describe? Joel Kotkin is the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in California and Executive Director of the Urban Reform Institute, as well as the author of the Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class.
Previous Episode
Worth Repeating: Save the Seas
July 14, 2022
•43m
Do you care about the future of the oceans? Are you worried that pollution, acidification and warming of the seas could transform the planet as much as, maybe more than, what’s happening to the rainforests?
Seventy percent of the earth is covered by water. If we want a livable planet, we need livable oceans. Can we save the oceans? If failure is not an option—and it should not be—who needs to do what?
In a Tällberg webinar, oceanographers Sylvia Earle from the United States and Asha de Vos from Sri Lanka talked about water, the oceans, threats, and solutions. Both are explorers, educators, and activists and both are winners of the Tällberg-SNF-Eliasson Global Leadership Prize.
Next Episode
Worth Repeating: Sweden Burning? Really?
July 28, 2022
•36m
We live in the age of the refugee—and the numbers of people fleeing their homes are almost certainly going to continue to increase. Will they be welcomed or will destination countries try to harden borders?
Arguably, no country in the West has been more welcoming to refugees over the years than Sweden has. Progressive, secular, social democratic, Swedes have worked hard to integrate migrants into their society, to help refugees create new lives in their new home country.
How then do you explain what happened last month during Easter when Stockholm, Malmö and other cities were racked by riots and violent clashes between police and mostly Muslim young men? The proximate cause was actual or rumored Quran burnings, but is something more fundamental happening? Many refugees fleeing Middle Eastern wars seem to have decided they don’t want to become Swedes Instead, they want to remain who they are, but to live in a safe, wealthy country. Is there space in Sweden for people who don't want to be Swedish? What if many of those refugees reject Swedish progressive values in favor of Islamic values—whatever that means—in particular? And what does all of this imply for other countries who have not done anywhere near as much as Sweden has to welcome refugees?
Lars Åberg, one of his country's leading journalists and a prolific author, has thought and written about these questions for years. His beat covers social affairs, culture, politics and the media. Listen as he explains what Sweden has done right, but also what it has done wrong.
This episode was originally published on May 5, 2022.
If you like this episode you’ll love
Promoted