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“Earlier generations have a real sense of what it means not to live in a democracy,” Mounk said in an interview. “They have fought against fascism or have experienced fascism or they have been alive at a time when communism was a real force in the world. When they assess liberal democracy, they assess it in relation to these other systems, and they recognize these other systems are bad.”

Photo by Burhan Ozbilici/ Associated Press

He said younger people do not have the same negative experience of alternatives to democracy: “They look at the present reality and they find things in it which they have reason to be pissed off about, like the stagnation of living standards and other things. And so they say, ‘Why not try something new? How bad can things get?’

“That doesn’t mean they will like whatever system will emerge if we do lose liberal democracy, but I think it makes them much more willing to go down a path that might result in democracy’s ultimate demise.”

In a book to be published next spring, The People Versus Democracy, Mounk identifies three factors that are undermining people’s faith in democracy. Living standards for ordinary citizens in the West have stood still since 1985. At the same time, Europe, and to a lesser degree North America, is undergoing a gradual transition “from mono-ethnic and mono-cultural countries to multi-ethnic ones, which part of the population is embracing, but another part is rebelling against.” Finally, the rise of social media has reduced the technological advantage that political, financial and academic elites have over the rest of the population. That levelling can be a godsend to people resisting dictatorship, Mounk said, but in a democracy it “erodes a kind of consensus that made racist speech inappropriate, that insisted on politicians telling the truth to some degree.”