About this episode
Professor Richard Youngs discusses the challenges facing democracy in an age of permanent crisis and the implications of authoritarianism on liberal values.
“Authoritarianism today is cleverer; it doesn’t only rule by fear.” From manipulated statistics to collapsing trust in experts and institutions, what happens when people simply stop believing what they’re told? Amid multicultural tensions and identity politics, do efforts to “protect democracy” risk hollowing out its liberal core? Are our systems bending, breaking, or being quietly re‑engineered? In this episode, Professor Richard Youngs of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace shares his thoughts on whether liberal democracy is slipping into something darker and more dystopian. “Democratic backsliding” in the US and Europe, the rise of “in‑between” regimes, a push to regulate speech and encryption that looks uncomfortably like authoritarian control, the fallacious assumption that opening markets in places like China and Russia would deliver accompanying political freedoms — what does the future look like for liberty? Against this backdrop, democratic and authoritarian governments alike are struggling to meet the challenges of an age of “permanent crisis”: financial shocks, migration, pandemic, war, the list goes on and on. Richard argues that what we’re really living…
People in this episode
Host: Mike Freedman
Guest: Professor Richard Youngs
Topics covered
- democracy
- authoritarianism
- crisis of governance
- identity politics
- democratic backsliding
- liberal democracy
- trust in institutions
Keywords
- democracy
- authoritarianism
- crisis
- identity politics
- governance
- trust
- liberal values
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Places: US, Europe, China, Russia
More episodes of 1984 Today!
- Dystopian By Default: The Architecture of Surveillance · May 3, 2026 · 56 min
- Iran’s Global Intimidation Machine: Journalism, Exile, and Keeping Dissent Alive · April 19, 2026 · 1h 43m
- Survival Is Resistance: Prison, Protest, and The Price of Freedom · April 5, 2026 · 2h 15m
- Lawyering Against the Machine: The Human Cost of AI and the Fight for Tech Justice · March 22, 2026 · 1h 11m
- Slowly, Then Suddenly: Surveillance, Social Rupture and Citizens’ Consent · February 15, 2026 · 1h 23m
- Making The Machine That Makes Us: AI, Consciousness, and Human Creativity · February 1, 2026 · 1h 53m
Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the 1984 Today! podcast page.