American-German political scientist Yascha Mounk, a professor at Johns-Hopkins University, published The People vs. Democracy in 2018, before denouncing the excesses of the radical left in The Identity Trap in 2023.

How do you explain Donald Trump's sweeping victory?

The American left is in a profound epistemological crisis. The Democrats have fundamentally misunderstood their country and the political trend of the world. They applied an identity-based way of thinking that cut them off from reality. They thought that the country was divided between White people and people of color, that they would always benefit from the ethnic minority vote and that the way to mobilize them was to accept rather identity-based language. This turned out to be a big mistake. It's a fundamentally flawed perception of the realities of society. Donald Trump's victory is also due to young voters, who come from ethnic minorities and who have lost, in a profound way, confidence in institutions.

Is it a vote against the elites?

It's a vote against part of the American elite, against institutions that had the confidence of the majority of the population until recently, but which lost it very quickly. If we look at American universities, for example, 10 years ago a clear majority of Americans said: They're doing a good job, we can trust them, they accept students from different ideological points of view. Today, they no longer have this perception.

In the aftermath of the US presidential election, you pointed out on the Persuasion website that the argument of defending democracy didn't work in this election. What happened to make such an appeal unappealing to voters?

If we look at the exit polls in Pennsylvania, we see that a majority of voters consider democracy to be in danger. And a good proportion of them are Trump voters! I've been trying for 10 years to warn against the very real dangers posed by authoritarian populists like Donald Trump. But the left needs to start looking in the mirror.

If not only does this argument not influence people, but those who embody this threat are able to appropriate it, it's because voters distrust the current elites so much that they'll do anything to bring them down. This shows that the problem is not just the existence of populists but the unpopularity of alternatives to populism.

Democracy is defended by winning elections against dangerous candidates. To do this, we need to be able to reorient political, ideological and cultural discourse by developing a narrative for the country and offering a vision capable of uniting a majority of voters. The American left has failed to do this.

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