Episode 2149: How the Populist Attack on Modern Government Endangers our Future

Keen On

Much of the critical writing about authoritarianism warns that contemporary populism threatens democracy. But as Stephen Hanson and Jeffrey Kopstein argue in their interesting new book, The Assault on the State, this global attack on legalistic government by wannabe dictators like Putin, Erdogan and Modi endangers not just democracy but also much of what we take for granted about the convenience of modern life. It’s a return to what they call the “patrimonialism” of The Godfather - a chillingly dysfunctional future in which to get a road fixed or a school built, we have to kiss the ring of a Don Corleone or a Donald Trump. Weird, eh?

Stephen E. Hanson is the Lettie Pate Evans Professor in the Department of Government at William & Mary. At William & Mary, he served as the Vice Provost for Academic and International Affairs from 2011 to 2022. Hanson received his B.A. in Social Studies from Harvard University (1985) and his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley (1991). He served from 2011–2021 as the Director of the Wendy and Emery Reves Center for International Studies, while also serving as Vice Provost for International Affairs at William & Mary. In 2016, William & Mary received the Senator Paul Simon Award for Campus Internationalization from NAFSA: Association of International Educators. Hanson served from 2009–2011 as the Vice Provost for Global Affairs, and from 2000–2008 as the Director of the Ellison Center for Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies at the Jackson School of International Studies, at the University of Washington, Seattle. Hanson is the author of Post-Imperial Democracies: Ideology and Party Formation in Third Republic France, Weimar Germany, and Post-Soviet Russia (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and Time and Revolution: Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions (University of North Carolina Press, 1997), which received the 1998 Wayne S. Vucinich book award from the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies. He is the co-author (with Richard Anderson Jr., M. Steven Fish, and Philip Roeder) of Postcommunism and the Theory of Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2001).

Jeffrey Kopstein is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of California, Irvine. In his research, Professor Kopstein focuses on interethnic violence, voting patterns of minority groups, antisemitism, and anti-liberal tendencies in civil society, paying special attention to cases within European and Russian Jewish history. These interests are central topics in his latest books, Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust (Cornell University Press, 2018) and Politics, Memory, Violence: The New Social Science of the Holocaust (Cornell University Press, 2023).

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

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