Reporting from the Athens Democracy Forum, Serge Schmemann writes:

Some 60 countries held some sort of election in 2024, noted Neha Sahgal, vice president of research at the Pew Research Center, and the bottom line was that right-wing nationalism was now mainstream. “It doesn’t matter what ‘should be’ in our mind,” she said. “This is the reality right now.”

There was no sense in discussing the “defense of liberal democracy,” argued Ivan Krastev, head of the Center for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, Bulgaria. Politics is in the throes of fundamental change, taking us into a world we’ve not known before, and the nostalgia preached by populist politicians, the notion that life should return to some past idyll — as in “Make America Great Again” — was a chimera. “There is nothing more dangerous than to defend something that does not exist anymore,” Mr. Krastev said, adding the problem is not how to defend, but “how to reinvent the system. The problem is basically how to deal with this change.”

And if in bygone years new generations offered a promise of renewal, it’s not so anymore.

“We’ve seen throughout the conference examples of young people as champions of democracy,” Abigail Branford, a researcher at Oxford, told a panel. “But I think that we cannot assume that young people are going to save democracy, because unfortunately sometimes young people are the ones who are the most open to authoritarianism.”

Her assessment was underscored by Simon Morris-Lange, head of research at the Allianz Foundation, who said a study he conducted over this past summer of people under 40 in the five largest European Union countries found that a full fourth were open to anti-democratic appeals.

“They increasingly question the rule of law. They question nonviolence. They question civilized debate,” he said. Most susceptible were the millennials — a generation now in their 30s and early 40s — whose entry into adulthood was accompanied by economic crisis, then the migration crisis, then the Covid shutdown.

For the students invited to the Forum, the very definition of a populist seemed unclear. In panel discussions, a populist emerged as someone who seized on grievances and manipulated them into struggles between “us” and “them,” “the people” and “the elites.” But how can we discern whether a populist is exposing socialist inequality or exploiting it, asked the students. What institutional or societal safeguards are there to limit populism without undermining democratic principles?

Rarely referred to by name, but looming over the deliberations was President Trump, whose politics of nostalgia and grievance, punishing tariffs and disdain for the post-World War II order have rendered the United States, the erstwhile model of liberal democracy, to a case study of the new realities.

That did not mean that voting Mr. Trump or any like-minded national leader out of office would end the travails of liberal democracy. “Part of the problem in the U.S., honestly, is that we still think that if Trump loses, ‘we’ will win,” said Marjan H. Ehsassi, North America director of the Federation for Innovation in Democracy. “The moment requires that we fight. But what are we fighting for?”

That, really, is the question of our time. If disillusionment with politics is at the core of the problem, then elections and referendums will only reward the populists who feed on discontent. If technology serves equally to provide universal access to information and to undermine that information, then is dialogue useful or even possible?

At a discussion of why young Africans were not voting in elections, one woman said it was because she saw democracy as a pyramid scheme — elected officials just getting richer and richer.

“So the question is,” said Ms. Branford, the Oxford researcher, “can we give young people a reason to believe that more democracy is the answer, and not less democracy?” [Continue reading…]