Liberal democracies are under siege worldwide and a range of thinkers have been probing the reasons why.
John Keane, a professor of politics at the University of Sydney, has a new book explaining the threat, an allegedly new type of regime, The New Despotism. What are its characteristics? How does it differ from despotisms of the past? How does it threaten to unfold at home?
I explore these themes and offer a bit of my take in this review in the new print edition of the Washington Monthly.
My last review for the Monthly was of Jason DeParle’s A Good Provider is One Who Leaves, an intimate portrait of global migration.
COLIN WOODARD is a New York Times bestselling author, historian and award-winning journalist. He is the author of seven books that have been translated into a dozen foreign languages and inspired an NBC television drama. He is currently Director of Nationhood Lab at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Affairs at Salve Regina University. As State and National Affairs Writer at Maine's Portland Press Herald, he won a 2012 George Polk Award and was a finalist for a 2016 Pulitzer Prize. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, The Economist, Smithsonian and dozens of other major publications.