>> Most diverse societies in the history of the world have gone deeply wrong.

Most democracies in the history of the world have been quite homogeneous or have treated members of minority groups as second-class citizens or worse.

♪♪ >> Hello and welcome to "GZERO World."

I'm Ian Bremmer.

And today we are looking at the state of democracy around the world.

Ukraine, of course, is front and center in the news as the nation continues to defend itself against Russian aggression.

But freedom is in jeopardy in every hemisphere and authoritarianism is rising.

I'll talk with acclaimed political scientist and author Yascha Mounk.

Later, I.T.

workers in Ukraine trying to stay connected in the chaos.

And of course, I've got your "Puppet Regime."

>> What's a fella got to do to be popular in America?

>> But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

>> Major corporate funding provided by founding sponsor First Republic.

At First Republic, our clients come first.

Taking the time to listen helps us provide customized banking and wealth-management solutions.

More on our clients at firstrepublic.com.

Additional funding provided by... ...and by... >> You've heard of the famous Hans Christian Andersen tale "The Emperor's New Clothes."

It's about a vain ruler who gets swindled into walking around naked, thinking he's wearing the finest of invisible fabrics.

Now, if that story were written today, you know the emperor would know he's in the nude and just be proud of it.

And it's something political scientist Yascha Mounk describes as a new era of naked power politics.

In other words, someone like, say, Vladimir Putin doesn't really care what you think about his blind ambition.

He doesn't think he really has to.

As Russian tanks and bombs continue to attack Ukraine, there's been much talk of this war resulting in another Iron Curtain.

For more on that, here's me.

I fear that for the foreseeable future, we are looking at a new Cold War.

That guy was right.

I like that guy.

But at the same time, this isn't 1945.

It isn't even 1985 when President Ronald Reagan said this.

>> Since the turn of the century, the number of democracies in the world has grown fourfold.

Human freedom is on the march and nowhere more so than our own hemisphere.

>> When Russia's invasion of Ukraine began, this report was rolling hot off the presses, a study on the state of democracy around the world.

While the Cold War years saw rapid growth of freedom globally, the decades since have brought the opposite.

Freedom House reports democracy has been in decline for 15 consecutive years now, experts calling it a democratic recession.

Back in 2005, 44% of the world's population lived in countries classified as free.

Today, it's just 20%.

So what does all this have to do with Ukraine?

Well, much of the world may be running away from Vladimir Putin right now, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're running toward the United States.

In fact, we could argue the greatest export from Russia and China isn't something that you can stop with sanctions -- authoritarianism and disillusionment with Western political systems.

Here's one more statistic for you.

Pew surveyed people in 16 advanced economies.

Only 17% said they believe American democracy is a good model for other countries to follow.

In every corner of the world, from Nicaragua to Belarus to the Philippines, dictators are having a moment.

Populist leaders like Brazil's Bolsonaro or former President Trump here in the United States have promoted myths of election fraud to undermine confidence in their governments.

Add to that mounting inequality, disinformation on social media, and a growing belief that elected officials don't care about average voters.

While the war in Ukraine has been a galvanizing moment for the West, Yascha Mounk says the liberal world order still has a long way to go to prevent the decline of democracy.

And that is what his new book, "The Great Experiment," is all about.

Here's our conversation.

Yascha Mounk, thanks for joining me today.

>> My pleasure.

>> So I want to start talking about Russia, of course.

It's the big topic.

And, you know, you're a global guy, but you have spent a lot of time commenting on this crisis, and one thing you've said that's been notable, I thought, was that Putin has basically stopped even trying to pretend that he's not flouting international norms.

This is a guy that always wanted to build a Potemkin democracy, wanted to at least pretend that they had the norms, that they had the trials and all the rest.

You're saying he's not doing that anymore.

What do you think caused that change?

When'd it happen?

>> Well, I think it's a broader change that we're seeing in Russia, but also in other countries.

So we're now in the 16th year of a democratic recession, the 16th year that in a row that more countries have moved away from democracy than have moved towards it.

>> The Freedom House Index, for example.

We see that every single year -- fewer democracies in the world, democracies becoming more hybrid and more authoritarian.

>> Exactly.

And I think we think about this in terms of a lack of democratic self-confidence.

We think of that in terms of domestic threats to democracy, like Donald Trump was in the United States, like many other politicians are, like Viktor Orbán in Hungary.

But one big thing that has happened is really a towering resurgence, the growth of confidence of people like Xi Jinping in China and like Vladimir Putin in Russia, who are saying "we no longer have to pretend to play by the rules of the United States, by the rules of the West, by the rules of what we used to call the liberal international order.

We will actually just be honest about our demands of international stage and our lack of respect for human rights and lack of respect for any semblance of democracy domestically."

And this, I think, is really transforming Russia in a worrying way.

It was always a dictatorship.

It was a dictatorship 10 years ago to an even more repressive regime in which naked power is even more central.

>> Because in China, of course, Xi Jinping actually believes that ultimately his system is a better system, where, in the case of Russia, Putin certainly doesn't have illusions of that.

>> Well, I don't know whether or not he has illusions of that.

I certainly think that Putin says and believes that the West is decadent, that traditional values are undermined in the West in worrying ways, and that actually the kind of strong leadership that he provides and the kind of supposed defense, at least, of traditional values that he provides is important.

I never underestimate people's ability to be the heroes in their own stories.

And I'm sure that -- >> Bin Laden was the hero of his own story.

I mean, if you want to go that far, sure, I agree with that.

>> Absolutely, and I'm absolutely sure that Vladimir Putin thinks that he is serving the grandeur of a Russian nation and that while he's allowing himself a little yacht here and a little bit of corruption there, this is ultimately in the interest of his people.

>> Well, now, part of the reason I say that, though, is because in the case of Russia, the country is in decline.

It's been humiliated.

He's been humiliated.

Why?

By the West, and part of the -- a big part of the reason that we see this attack is to redress those grievances.

>> Yes, it is a way of saying "you have humiliated us."

Famously, Putin thought that the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century was the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Well, this is an attempt to rebuild a new Russian empire.

>> Why do you think he's gotten it so desperately wrong?

>> Well, it's fascinating, isn't it?

He got it wrong.

A lot of Western observers got it wrong, too.

I think most "serious people" thought that Ukraine would fall within days and that Russian tanks would be in the streets of Kyiv, you know, within a week of the beginning of this cruel war.

I think we all underestimated the courage and the capability of leadership in Ukraine.

I think we also underestimated just how deeply corrosive corruption is, how deeply corrosive a kleptocratic regime is, not just for the ability of Russia to innovate or to have, you know, billion-dollar patents or to have, you know, develop its human talent.

>> But for its military.

>> But for its military, for its actual ability to make sure that tanks don't get stuck because they haven't been oiled properly.

>> And how do you think this is likely to play out, not just for Russia, but also for China, which is doing far better economically, which is not a country in decline at all, and yet has made this fateful decision to throw their lot in with Putin right at this moment?

>> Well, I mean, clearly, China has walked a careful line where they are giving some support to Russia, but they haven't done anything which would trigger the West to seriously decouple economically.

Of course, the question is whether the Chinese leadership is watching this with regard to Taiwan and whether they are seeing what Putin is doing in Ukraine as a kind of test run for whether or not they should use military means to reunify the country.

>> In which case the lesson would be no?

>> One should hope that the failure of Putin to do this in Ukraine and the serious economic consequence that Russia would have to pay is an effective form of deterrence, which makes Beijing think perhaps the price for doing this in a military way is too high and perhaps the risks are bigger than we appreciate it.

That may not be the case.

They may look at Russia and say Russia is a declining nation.

It is ironically a decadent nation.

"We are much more capable and competent and the price for the West of imposing some of the sanctions on China would be much, much higher for them as well, so we can nevertheless go ahead."

But there is at least the possibility that some of the decision makers in Beijing are looking at what's happening to Russia and the Russian elite and thinking, "We don't want the same thing to happen."

>> I mean, I appreciate that you're hopeful about this and it's a good place to be.

And your book, "The Great Experiment," ultimately is also hopeful and I think that -- and I'm glad for it, I'm glad for it.

But as you say, we have increasingly been in this democratic recession, and living in the United States, it's not just an awareness of the ways in which the system is screwed up.

It's also increasingly an awareness that it's getting more screwed up every year.

Right?

So what is for you the likely turning point that makes us start to recognize that we can be a little less screwed up?

>> Well, one of the things is that this growing international competition may, in fact, provide a little bit more unity.

I think one of the reasons why we were relatively able to deal with our strong internal divisions through the Cold War was the knowledge of the threat from autocratic countries.

And I think as this sort of strange little holiday from history, which countries did enjoy or food they enjoyed -- >> For 30 years, absolutely.

>> And we may be able to find some kind of common resolve, but the challenges are real.

The challenge that I talk about in my new book, "The Great Experiment," is about really historically unprecedented challenge of building deeply ethnically and religiously diverse democracies that actually treat their citizens as equals.

Most diverse societies in the history of the world have gone deeply wrong.

Most democracies in the history of the world have been quite homogeneous or have treated members of minority groups as second-class citizens or worse.

What we're trying to do here really is a new challenge, and it could go wrong.

And the price to pay if it does go wrong is very, very high.

We know what it looks like when diverse societies fall apart.

And it is not pretty.

It is bloody.

It is horrible.

But nevertheless, I do think that we also have real strengths and when we look at what the United States, what Germany, what Australia look like today compared to 25 or 50 years ago, they are actually doing much, much better at building these diverse democracies than most people predicted a few decades ago.

>> Can you say that the United States, United States is doing a better job building its democracy today than was predicted 25 years ago?

>> Well, I'm speaking specifically about the question of ethnic and religious diversity.

I think in the question of how do we deal with this transition of a society in which one group really was dominant -- white Protestants in the past -- in which they enjoyed very deep advantages over every other group in which other groups were both numerically much smaller than they are now, and subordinate in a way that they no longer are, I think on both counts we really are making very big progress.

So let me just give you a few examples of that.

The first is that racism was quite open and very widespread in the past.

50, even 30 years ago, a majority of Americans openly said that they think that interracial marriage is wrong.

Today, that is in the single digits.

It used to be that about 1 in 33 marriages were interracial.

Now it is about one seventh.

So the number of mixed-race kids has gone up very, very rapidly.

So prejudice is much lower than it it was.

>> And yet black wealth in the United States is just off-the-charts horrible compared to white wealth right now.

And so can we explain why you would be more tolerant in terms of, again, intermarriage between races, but that you would see this yawning gap in terms of wealth accumulation and economic capacity?

>> You know, after centuries of that kind of system of injustice, it is unsurprising... >> It's sticky.

>> ...that the descendants of that system continue to have much less wealth, for example, than descendants of people who have been able to go about economic productivity and freedom for centuries.

But there, too, it is important to see the nuances.

So wealth takes longer.

The gap in income has substantively reduced over the last decades.

And black women born into the the poorest quintile of the population, for example, actually have more socioeconomic mobility than white women who are born in similar circumstances today.

There is a real pocket of poverty because of the long-term structural impact of all the injustice in American history.

But the model experience of African-Americans today is hopeful.

And actually, when you ask African-Americans how they feel about the American dream, how they feel about the future of America, they are more optimistic than white Americans.

>> I'm wondering for those in democracies that are watching what's happening in Russia -- and Russia's falling apart right now -- and they're watching what's happening in China -- and China with a very different system, is doing quite well economically and in other ways -- which is the more powerful lesson and what kind of lessons are being taken away in democracies today?

>> Well, I think one of the lessons that we should take from the pandemic and the last few years is that we need to become more serious about solving our problems, that we are in a real ideological competition with autocratic countries, that we're seeing in Russia and North Korea, in Ukraine, what it means to live under an autocratic ruler or what it means to be subject to the power of his resurgent autocracy.

So we all should want to make sure that the 21st century remains safe for democracy, that these fundamental values of individual freedom and collective self-determination actually win the day.

But to do that, it's not enough to wax poetic about our beautiful values or to rely on the idea that somehow our system is always proven strong in the past so it's going to do so again.

We need to make sure that our system actually delivers for its own citizens and remains a model where people in rising nations like India, like Nigeria, like Kenya look around the world and say, "we would rather be more like Germany or the United States than like Russia or China."

And that is up to us and the decisions we make here.

>> And the end of the 20th century was safe for democracy.

Looking forward, increasingly, you would argue, and I agree, the 21st century increasingly is less safe for democracy.

If it turns out that we fail, that the great experiment fails, why will that have been?

>> I think for two reasons.

The first is that there is a basic human instinct towards group business.

There's a basic instinct to form groups and to discriminate in favor of the members of the in-group and against the members of the out-group.

This is particularly salient in ethnically and religiously diverse democracies where it's very easy to say, "I don't care about being American.

I care about being X, Y and Z."

Now, thankfully, there is a way to respond to that, which is that it depends on the social context on the framing, on the incentives, what groups you give importance to.

And I think if our societies fall apart, it's because we end up giving more importance to our ethnic belonging, to our cultural roots or to our partisan identity than to our common interests, than to the things that we actually share as Americans here in the United States, as Germans in Germany, as Indians in India.

And so I think if we fail, it's because a lot of the institutions that are influential in society, from politics to education to the media, haven't tried hard enough to emphasize the importance of discovering and seeing those commonalities.

>> And that was reason one.

You said there were two.

>> Well, the second goes to partisan identity.

When the Founding Fathers started the first great experiment -- in a way, my book's about the second great experiment -- when they founded the United States, it seemed like a foolhardy project.

When you looked around in 1776, there really weren't many countries that had succeeded in governing themselves because people formed these groups, not necessarily ethnic or religious groups but just partisan groups of one family, one clan, one party, one faction fighting the other.

We have a set of institutions to try and manage that tension, but it always depends on the choices of individuals on how we frame our politics, whether we manage to stop those factions from becoming so bitter that they would rather win against the enemy than preserve the system.

And so the two great dangers is that we fail to build diverse democracies that work, that manage to build commonality between different ethnic religious groups.

And the second is that the partisans of one political party become so obsessed with victory, vilify their partisan opponents to such an extent that they're willing to blow up a system to gain power, to remain in power.

>> Yascha Mounk, his group is American.

His book is "The Great Experiment."

Thanks for joining on "GZERO World."

>> Thank you, Ian.

♪♪ >> Before the Russian invasion, one of Ukraine's biggest industries was technology.

The nation exported nearly $7 billion in tech services just last year.

"GZERO's" Alex Kliment has the story of Ukraine's tech workers and the international companies that depend on them.

>> If you've ever used a ride hailing app, ordered food with your phone, or even done something as basic as sending an e-mail, there's a good chance you've used software designed or maintained by someone in Ukraine.

Over the past 10 years, the country has become a leading supplier of talent and outsourcing in I.T.

and software development.

On the eve of Russia's invasion, there were close to 300,000 I.T.

specialists in the country, according to a local I.T.

association.

And outsourcing giant Daxx reports that a fifth of Fortune 500 companies had development teams there.

Now, even with Russian rockets and artillery raining down on Ukrainian cities, many of those professionals are still hard at work.

>> As you see, my window is decorated with this paper because we needed to cover the windows.

So there is no lights outside and it's dark.

>> Alina Kravchenko is a developer for RebelMouse, a web design firm that works with many U.S. companies, including GZERO Media.

Her home is in Myrhorod, a once bustling resort town in central Ukraine.

She says that while many of her fellow developers left for Poland when the war started, she stayed put because her husband, who is of fighting age, would not be allowed to leave with her.

>> I'm the lucky one that I have chosen exactly this profession and that I'm working for a foreign country.

If you have Internet and if you have electricity, you are able to work and you will get your income.

>> Some Ukrainian technology leaders have actually gone back to the country.

Oleksandr Kosovan, CEO of the company MacPaw, left the country with his family in January amid rumors of war.

But he returned just before the Russian assault began.

Although half of his 400 employees have left since then, he has stayed.

>> I decided that it would be really difficult to explain to my kids, to look into their eyes and explain why did we lose our home?

Why did we lose our country?

And I think it was -- Oh, like one of the bravest decision in my life.

>> Kosovan says he's prepared his company for war, setting up fully automatable backup systems and securing data in case the unthinkable happens.

>> We limited some access to the code base, to customer data for our employees in case -- if they are captured by the Russian forces, stuff like that.

>> For now, so long as the power is on, these programmers continue to work and they have high hopes for the recovery of their country and their industry after the war.

>> The business is still running, so after the war I think this will even increase because the easiest way to recover the economy will be through businesses that are easy to scale.

I still think that it will be a big major industry for Ukraine and even bigger in the future.

>> For "GZERO World," I'm Alex Kliment.

♪♪ >> Today on "Puppet Regime," want to be a more popular president?

Just ask Puppet Zelenskyy.

>> A new poll shows that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is more popular in America than Joe Biden.

>> Oh, for Pete's sake.

What's a fella got to do to be popular in America?

Get Zelenskyy on the phone.

[ Ringtone plays ] >> Hello?

>> Hey, kiddo.

It's your pal, Joe.

How's it going?

>> Ah, President Biden.

It's very, very bad.

We need help.

As Abraham Lincoln wrote in his final letter -- >> Tell me about it.

My approval rating is shot.

I need some help, too.

And I was wondering if you have any tips for me.

>> Tips?

>> You know, what's your secret sauce, Jack?

What makes you so darn lovable?

>> Well, first, you need impeccable feel for social media.

>> Well, I got a phonograph in the West Wing.

Ha!

>> Okay, then get invaded by a ruthless, horrible, neighboring dictator.

>> Ah, geez, I don't know if Justin Trudeau has that in him.

>> Well, okay, fine, then just wear cool, green T-shirt to show off endearing dad bod.

>> Anyway, what else?

>> Look, in exchange for these tips, I would love to ask you for something.

A quid pro quo, if you will.

>> I will.

We are ready to do whatever is necessary to help you in your existential struggle, which has so deeply moved the American people.

>> Well, great.

As I said, we need more weapons, no-fly zone, EU membership, security guarantees.

>> Oh, man, would you look at the time?

I got another colonoscopy on deck here, so I got to run.

But hey, good luck to ya.

>> "Puppet Regime"!

>> That's our show this week.

Come back next week if you like what you see, you're just worried about the state of democracy, you know, you can join me in that.

Why don't you check us out at gzeromedia.com?

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ >> Major corporate funding provided by founding sponsor First Republic.

At First Republic, our clients come first.

Taking the time to listen helps us provide customized banking and wealth-management solutions.

More on our clients at firstrepublic.com.

Additional funding provided by... ...and by...