The Problem With the European Union

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There are lots of ways that you cannot be in the European Union. And so once we got to that situation, it became incredibly hard for politicians to take those options and choose among them. You can end up either with a kind of scorched earth outcome, or if the opposition still have some leaders, you end up with gridlock. I think most of us can sort of intuitively understand that the idea of pure democracy is fictional.

As you may have noticed, modern democracies aren’t doing so hot. In country after country, income inequality soars while solidarity plummets. Resentment simmers while national unity cools. In places like the US and the UK, beacons of liberal democracy, words like “autocracy” and “anarchy” are thrown around with alarming regularity. Meanwhile, our ability to take action on existential threats like AI and climate change is stymied by sniping politicians who are obsessed with point-scoring and eerily disinclined to agree on a shared set of facts.

Given all this, it’s not unreasonable to wonder: Are we doomed?

This week, on the 247th anniversary of America’s birthday — and the dawn of the modern democratic experiment — we’ll get to the bottom of that unsettling question with Ben Ansell, professor of comparative democratic institutions at Oxford and author of “Why Politics Fail.”