Yascha Mounk

Yascha Mounk discusses The Age of Responsibility for New America in 2017

Yascha Mounk (born October 6, 1982) is a German-American political scientist who works as a lecturer at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts and as an Executive Director at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. As a freelance journalist he has written for the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, and Slate. He also runs a podcast called "The Good Fight." Mounk became an American citizen in 2017.

Early Years

Yascha Mounk was born in 1982 in the Bavarian capital of Munich, the son of a Jewish woman, who was granted permission to leave Poland in 1969. Due to various experiences, he always felt like a stranger in his native country, and though German was his native language, he never saw his peers accept him as a "true German." He graduated from Cambridge University and Harvard University.

SPD Membership

Yascha Mounk had joined the SPD at 13 years old, but left in 2015 via an open letter to then-chairman Sigmar Gabriel. Among other reasons, he cited the lack of helpfulness of German institutions to refugees, the passive attitude of SPD leaders and other parts of the party during the Crimea crisis in 2014, and the SPD's policy on Greece, which he called a "betrayal of the social democratic dream of a united Europe".

Political Positions

In an interview in the Süddeutsche Zeitung in February 2018, Mounk stated that he had changed his position on nationalism. While he had previously regarded it as a relic of the past that must be overcome, he now advocates an "inclusive nationalism" to head off the threat of aggressive nationalism. On Tagesthemen he expressed that Germany is in the middle of a "historically unique experiment, namely to transform a mono-ethnic and monocultural democracy into a multi-ethnic one." In Haaretz he advised the "liberal camp" to adopt the so-understood nationalism in order to make it easier for people to live in a multi-ethnic and democratic society. "The key," he says, "with an ironic smile," is the adoption of the populist demand that people and nations should again feel they have control of their lives or their destiny. Mounk's research has led to studies of cultural attachment to the system of democracy, and how as cultures become more affluent, they become less committed to specific forms of governments. The cultural shifts become much more politically profound than one may originally suspect, and may in fact break from what many consider a "necessity" to the American way of life.

Books

• Stranger in My Own Country. A Jewish Family in Modern Germany. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2014, ISBN 0-374-53553-1
• The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It. Harvard University Press, 2018, ISBN 978-0674976825

Interviews

• sueddeutsche.de, 15. Februar 2018, von Sebastian Gierke: "Die liberale Demokratie zerfällt gerade"
• deutschlandfunkkultur.de, 17. Februar 2018: Der Prophet des Untergangs der Demokratie (29:54 Minuten)
• deutschlandfunk.de, 25. März 2018: Demokratie in Gefahr? (29:06 Minuten)

External links

• yaschamounk.com: Personal Website
• Department of Government, Harvard University, scholar.harvard.edu: Academic Website
• Slate: article collection
• twitter.com: Yascha_Mounk