From Kansas City, where she was holding the&nbsp;Aspen Ministers Forum&nbsp;in May 2019, former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright spoke with Andrew Keen about why her first president, Harry Truman, was such an inspiration to her. In this engaging episode, Secretary Albright also shares her view that the 1% is anti-democratic, tells a story about how cassette tapes helped lead to martial law in communist Poland, and says what she learned writing her most recent book,&nbsp;Fascism: A Warning.

Madeleine Albright

Mete Coban is a Councillor for Stoke Newington in the London Borough of Hackney and Chief Executive at My Life My Say, a youth-led, non-partisan charity focused on increasing participation in democracy. Mete offers his views on how young people view democracy differently and how Brexit helped draw more young people into politics.

Mete Coban

In our second interview from the Aspen Ministers Forum in Kansas City, former Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Israel Tzipi Livni offers her view on democracy’s condition. She talks with Andrew Keen about the current state of politics in Israel, what she thinks political parties must do to contribute to the strength of democracy, and how supporters of liberal democracy around the world can band together to defend it.

Tzipi Livni

Sir Malcolm Rifkind, interviewed at the Aspen Ministers Forum in Kansas City, sees the challenges to liberal values as tied to, but separate from, the challenges to democracy. He explains how many places where democracy is said to be in crisis today are actually experiencing a shift away from liberal ideas rather than from democracy itself. In a conversation that touches upon Brexit, the Cold War, and China’s rise, Sir Malcolm frames the challenge to liberal democracy today as a battle between “rule of law” and “rule by law.”

Sir Malcolm Rifkind

Historian and journalist Anne Applebaum sat down with Andrew Keen during the opening dinner of the Bertelsmann Foundation’s Washington Symposium in April 2019 for a live episode of How to Fix Democracy. A thought leader on disinformation, Applebaum commented on current political polarization by arguing that unless you can have debates based on a commonly agreed upon set of facts, you cannot have democracy at all. For a deeper dive into these themes and others beyond her interview, read the essays that she and other leading experts on democracy prepared for the Symposium here.

Anne Applebaum

Sheri Berman, professor of Political Science at Columbia University's Barnard College offers a historical perspective of democracy, along with some very useful definitions of concepts like illiberal, liberal, fascism, populism, and democracy. She argues that polarization, even at the scale we're experiencing today, is very common throughout history; what is unique about today is that a lot of changes are happening all at once.

Sheri Berman

Washington commentator and columnist for the Financial Times Ed Luce recounts the many misunderstandings we've had over the past few decades. From the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to the collapse of the neoliberal Washington Consensus in 2008, Luce illustrates how political developments frame how we experience economic events, and how economics can predict politics. Ultimately, he asks us to consider the price we must pay for social peace and warns about the stakes of the 2020 election in the US.

Bertelsmann Foundation

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