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Anne-Marie Slaughter on How To Fix Democracy
In our second How to Fix Democracy series, we’ve been focusing on the complex, thorny & convoluted relationship between capitalism and democracy. Anne-Marie Slaughter is a distinguished political scientist who has taught for many years at Princeton University. And she’s the CEO of New America, which is a think tank focusing on renewing the promise of America. So, she’s a good person to talk to not only about the promise of American capitalism, but also of American democracy.
Andrew Keen: Anne-Marie welcome to How to Fix Democracy. What do you think of this relationship between democracy and capitalism? How do we untangle it?
Anne-Marie Slaughter: [Laughs] Well, it’s a pleasure to be talking to you. I love big ideas and thorny subjects, and this is certainly both. You know I think that you have to start by saying capitalism and democracy are combined in many, many different ways. Americans traditionally have thought of themselves both as exceptional and as trailblazers, you know that our way of combining a relatively unregulated capitalism and a highly individualist democracy was the best way. And so, you put us probably at one end of the spectrum and some of the European countries at the other and the Scandinavian countries probably a little bit in the middle because they have very flexible systems. But I think you have to start from the…
