John Prideaux

speaker

643 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 19 Jun

John Prideaux’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.

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The Intelligence from The Economist · Tocqueville Road Trip: 1. Game of chance · 13 Jun 2026 podcast

It's a belief system, a faith even.

And its gospel has been shared around the world.

Growing up in Britain in the eighties and nineties, I absorbed it without thinking.

Television introduced me and my sister to a galaxy of American stars, from Madonna to Michael Jackson, Marty McFly to Michael Jordan.

They all seemed about a thousand times cooler than anyone in Britain.

And the TV News only confirmed what we already knew.

Americans were the good guys.

They'd defeated an evil empire and won the Cold War.

We all wanted in on it.

Now it's not so simple.

People inside and outside America are questioning the vitality of its democracy and its right to lead the world.

For the past ten years, I've been the editor in charge of The Economist's coverage of America.

In that time, I've written or edited more than a hundred cover stories on the country.

Often when Donald Trump has done something crazed or alarming.

Usually I'm the person in the room advocating for optimism, arguing that America's checks and balances were built to withstand tougher challenges than this.

But a year and a half into the wildest presidency any of us have ever seen, I'm starting to have my doubts.

And the best way I could think of dealing with them was to go back to Tocqueville to try to see this America through his eyes.

He saw a system that could be chaotic on the surface, but that remained stable and resilient underneath.

A form of government that would generate more prosperity and enable more happiness than any of its rivals.

Two centuries on from Tocville's journey, I want to know if that's still true.

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