How to Fix Democracy - Democracy: It’s the Only Way to Preserve Freedom | Featuring Larry Diamond

Democracy: It’s the Only Way to Preserve Freedom | Featuring Larry Diamond

12/20/19 • 20 min

Considered one of the world’s leading experts on democracy, Larry Diamond, senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, believes democracy worldwide is in a recession. The crisis is “bad, deepening, accelerating,” but he suggests several steps we can take to reverse the trend, such as ranked choice voting to tackle the two-party system, and spreading “motor voter” laws to increase the number of registered voters. For Diamond, democracy is the only political system that can preserve freedom, which is itself intrinsic to being human.

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"Fed or Free" is a False Choice| Featuring Annika Savill

Annika Savill, Executive Head of the UN Democracy Fund admits that the word “democracy” doesn’t appear anywhere in the UN charter, but finds it exists in the demands of people everywhere who are working to hold their governments accountable. She tells Andrew Keen that, as a former journalist, she is passionate about facts and worried about clickbait and “tidbits of information without verification.” She also offers the concept of “citizens’ assemblies” as an alternative for referenda, and muses about exploring the relationship between “linguistic echo chambers” and democracy.

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