Confronting
a Crisis

“Then when we saw the Brexit referendum winning, Donald Trump being elected, and Rodrigo Duterte winning in the Philippines … I went from being a bit of a provocateur to somebody who could help explain some of the things that were going on,” he says.

That recognition has led to a number of high-profile positions for Mounk, including senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund, senior adviser at Protect Democracy, and contributing editor at The Atlantic. In 2017, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair hired him to oversee a Renewing the Centre program at his eponymous Institute for Global Change, which is dedicated to helping political leaders defend liberal democracy from populism. He left that role at the end of 2018 to join Johns Hopkins SAIS and the SNF Agora Institute.

Mounk is the first scholar to be formally affiliated with the SNF Agora Institute, which launched in 2017 with a $150 million gift from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. Its mission is to serve as an academic and public forum dedicated to strengthening democracy by examining political polarization and developing new ways to support the open exchange of ideas. Renowned architect Renzo Piano is designing a building to house the institute on the Homewood campus, with a completion date set for 2022. Agora’s leadership plans to invite faculty members from various departments across Johns Hopkins to contribute to its intellectual pursuits.

“The idea of building an institute that tries to understand what’s going on with politics and democracy today by drawing on political scientists, sociologists, historians, economists — and actually communicating some of the findings to a wider audience and engaging the public — that fits my interests and my instincts much better than any traditional academic department,” says Mounk.

He adds, “At academic institutions, there is always the risk of creating different silos where departments don’t speak to one another. One of the wonderful things about the people who have been hired at Homewood and SAIS is that we can make connections between different units of Johns Hopkins, where all scholars do different work.”

Last spring, graduate students had their first opportunity to sign up for Mounk’s class at Johns Hopkins SAIS, Democracy in Crisis. The course covers the main themes of his research, including whether populism poses an existential threat to liberal democracy and what strategies might allow political actors to push back. Students at Homewood also had the chance to take an undergraduate version of the course, called Populism and Politics.

“I found the students to be phenomenally talented, engaged, and from a broad range of personal and professional backgrounds,” says Mounk. “When we talked about Turkey or Venezuela, there were students from those countries, which obviously made some of the questions seem a lot less abstract.”

When asked how he finds the time to add teaching to his already busy schedule of podcasting, lecturing, writing op-eds, and working on his fourth book, he says being in the classroom helps to fuel his other endeavors.

“Research and teaching complement each other. When I’m thinking about how to translate complicated ideas in political science to a wider audience, it helps to have experience teaching that material and seeing where students may struggle to understand arguments,” he says. “Sometimes students have great ideas that make me think about my work in a different context.”

Mounk was born in 1982 in Munich to a family who had fled Poland decades earlier. His first book, Stranger in My Own Country, is a memoir reflecting on the Jewish experience in modern-day Germany. Growing up, he says, the only people who were considered “truly German” were those whose families had been living in the region for generations. But in the United States, he discovered those rules no longer applied.

“The principle that people from any part of the world can come here and be truly American really appealed to me,” says Mounk, who applied to become a U.S. citizen in 2017.

Today he is largely focused on how to strengthen liberal democracy. His most recent book, The People Vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It, proposes a number of concrete solutions, including political activism and policy changes. He has also given a popular TED talk and written a number of op-eds on the topic.

He says part of the answer is to increase living standards for average citizens, many of whom have become disillusioned with the American dream and the political system that comes with it. Research shows more than 90 percent of Americans born in 1940 were earning more than their parents had at the same stage of their lives, while only half of people born in the early 1980s are earning more than their parents did.

According to Mounk, that shift has alienated voters from traditional political institutions and played a key role in helping Donald Trump win the presidency. To recover citizens’ loyalty, he suggests we change our political institutions to be more responsive to the views and interests of ordinary people.

“By having debates about the state of our democracy and involving a broad audience in those debates, I believe SAIS and the Agora Institute can play an important role,” he says.

The other element will be educating young people and informing citizens about populist threats that are already affecting other parts of the world.

“The mission of turning students into citizens who have the tools to change the world is more urgent than people recognize,” says Mounk. “Making people more aware of how brittle our freedom and self-determination are — how easy it is to lose those things to a demagogue — can help empower them to defend those institutions from people who would like to undermine them.”

Mounk has already found a fertile ground for this mission. “The community of scholars here at SAIS, the Agora Institute, and Homewood is just excellent, and people have been incredibly welcoming,” he says. “The leadership here has a real vision for what a 21st-century university should look like and what a university presence in Washington should look like. It feels like a lot of exciting changes are happening.”