Jan-Werner Müller

Jan-Werner Müller's most recent book is Democracy Rules. He teaches at Princeton, and is writing a book on architecture and democracy.

From The Blog
31 October 2024

Analogies with 20th-century fascism are not particularly helpful for understanding our times, but one parallel is instructive: it is not ‘ordinary people’ who decide they’ve had enough of democracy; it is elites, and economic elites in particular. Blackshirts marched on Rome, but Mussolini arrived by sleeper car from Milan because the leading strata of the Italian state had invited him to govern. People today also often take their cues from business leaders, in particular a pop culture figure like Musk. All the self-serving talk of ‘disruption’ can be adapted to make Trump acceptable, as can the studied neutrality of oligarchs who not only own their own rockets, but their own newspapers: refusing to endorse Harris sends a signal that it’s rational to be intimidated by Trump.    

Protest Problems: Civil Repression

Jan-Werner Müller, 8 February 2024

InIf We Burn, a history of protest between 2010 and 2020, Vincent Bevins writes that the decade ‘surpassed any other in the history of human civilisation in its number of mass street demonstrations’. The responses to Black Lives Matter, Covid-19 restrictions and most recently the Israel-Hamas war suggest this decade may be just as tumultuous. Yet many governments are...

Poland after PiS

Jan-Werner Müller, 16 November 2023

Aliberal miracle​ on the Vistula: on 15 October, despite efforts by the reigning right-wing populists to make it an unfair contest, a motley opposition alliance ranging from left to centre-right prevailed in Poland’s parliamentary elections. Turnout was a record 74 per cent – higher than in the vote that ended communist rule in 1989. In a typical populist manoeuvre, Jarosław...

United Europe?

Jan-Werner Müller, 3 November 2022

Euro-cheerleaders liked to contrast the American way of promoting democracy – invade countries and make big profits for US companies – with the European one: make membership irresistible for neighbouring states, then peacefully transform polities from within (while making big profits for Western European companies). This sort of gloating stopped a while ago.

Germany Inc.: Europe’s Monsters

Jan-Werner Müller, 26 May 2022

In​ 1990 the heavy metal band Scorpions released ‘Wind of Change’, a song celebrating the end of the Cold War: ‘The future’s in the air/Can feel it everywhere.’ It also contained the hopeful lines: ‘Let your balalaika sing/What my guitar wants to say.’ It turns out, though, that they had it the wrong way round: it is Putin who calls the tune to which...

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