27 Quotes by Yascha Mounk

Especially in the world’s biggest cities, the explosion of housing prices has been staggering. In New York, for example, the average rent on an apartment in the 1960s was $200 per month, and a square foot of residential real estate cost $25 to buy. By the 2010s, average rent had grown to $3,500 and a square foot sold at $1,070.

In short, the exorbitant cost of housing is now one of the most important reasons for the stagnation of livingstandards across North America and Western Europe. If defeating populism hinges in part on making citizens more optimistic about the future, a radical reorientation of housing policy is urgently needed.

In the American context, this is especially striking in individual states: infamously, for example, California now spends a lot more on its prisons than it does on its world-class universities.

At the core of this nostalgia stands a double desire for control: Citizens want their nation to be able to make its own decisions, unencumbered by the constraints of the global economy.

Over the past decades, countries across North America and Western Europe have become less democratic. Our political system promises to let the people rule. But in practice, it ignores the popular will with disheartening frequency. Unnoticed by most political scientists, a system of rights without democracy has taken hold.

In this book, a liberal is somebody who is committed to basic values like freedom of speech, the separation of powers, or the protection of individual rights.

In each of these places, they took strikingly similar steps to consolidate their power: they ratcheted up tensions with perceived enemies at home and abroad; packed courts and electoral commissions with their cronies; and took control of the media.

Populists are highly skilled at weaponizing these forms of resentment: their rhetoric simultaneously aims to turn the growing anger at affluent people against the ruling elite and to turn the growing focus on ascriptive identity against immigrants as well as ethnic and religious minorities.

This worldview breeds two political desires, and most populists are savvy enough to embrace both. First, populists claim, an honest leader—one who shares the pure outlook of the people and is willing to fight on their behalf—needs to win high office. And second, once this honest leader is in charge, he needs to abolish the institutional roadblocks that might stop him from carrying out the will of the people.