Joe Biden was declared the next President of the United States over a month ago now, but Donald Trump has not yet conceded his own defeat. Claiming voter fraud, he has launched legal battles to try to undo the results of the election, to no avail. What mechanisms, institutions and narratives has he used? And to what long term effects?
In the sixth episode of our podcast Democracy in Question? Shalini Randeria is joined by Professor Timothy Snyder (Yale University) and Ivan Krastev (Centre for Liberal Strategies and IWM) to understand what will remain of Trumpism going forward and how it will impact democratic legitimacy the world over. Professor Snyder argues that Trump has been pushing “a kind of authoritarian normality” in the United States. For Professor Krastev, Trump’s claims of voter fraud “normalized” the United States abroad – in that prior to this, the argument was that fraudulent elections could not happen in the United States. Their conversation spans the long genealogy of this election as well as its more novel elements.
Download the podcast's transcript HERE.
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Shalini Randeria is the Director of the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, Rector of the Institute of Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna and Excellence Chair, University of Bremen (Research Group: Soft Authoritarianism).
Timothy Snyder is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna. He is a historian of totalitarianism, and the author many books, including Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010), Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (2015), and most recently, The Road to Unfreedom (2018) and Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary (2020).
Ivan Krastev is the chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, Bulgaria, and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. A widely regarded expert on Balkan and European affairs, he sits on the board of trustees of the European Council on Foreign Relations and the Erste Foundation, as well as the advisory councils of the Open Society Foundations, the Center for European Policy Analysis and the European Cultural Foundation. His latest book is “Democracy Disrupted: The Politics of Global Protest”.
DETAILS AND LINKS TO ALL EPISODES
This podcast series is co-produced by the Graduate Institute’s Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy and the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) Vienna, in cooperation with the Excellence Chair, University of Bremen (Research Group: Soft Authoritarianism).
