Where is liberal democracy going? I think, I think it's pretty well
recognized that liberal democracy is in a
bit of a crisis right now. You see
populism rising all across the world.
Popular sovereignty or populism
and individual liberty, I think those are
coming to a head or to a clash. The
democrat apart and the liberal apart.
Another thing that the sort of
contemporary circumstances allow us to
do is to tap into these extraordinarily
rich historical questions that have been
asked for quite some time, right, about
the conditions under which liberal
democracy can thrive. Oh, absolutely. In a
sense I think a political scientist
has to believe that history somehow
repeats itself, right. Otherwise, you know,
what are we doing? There does seem to be
a kind of pattern where Republican
democracies go through a stage of
expansion and then metastasize into
empires. The students will be doing a
number of different political
simulations. They'll do the policy memos,
they'll do the political debates, and
they'll be doing at least again in my
class, the role-playing essays, right, where
they have to take the position of a
presidential adviser or the President
himself. They're going to be thinking
through the eyes of people who've
considered this question in the past and
they're going to be doing this as a way
of entering into contemporary political
debates as well. What we're hoping is
that this can energize the next
generation of leaders, right, to fifteen
twenty whatever years down the line to
have the thought in their mind that maybe the other guy might have a point.
The classroom is a kind of microcosm of
broader political society, right, and
that's the kind of debate that we want
to encourage in the classroom as a kind
of training for the political debates
that these students will have for the
rest of their lives.
