Steven Bartlett

So first of all, that's a pretty accurate description of what's happening in the United States.

However, you have just touched on something that I feel very strongly about, which is that I don't believe in historical inevitability.

And I think it's very dangerous.

So the idea that we are on a slippery slope—

And we can't stop it because that's the way history is going.

Or alternatively, the idea that everything is fine and it will continue to be fine because liberal democracy has triumphed, which is what we thought in the 1990s.

Anytime you think that something is inevitable, that takes away your willingness to act.

What happens tomorrow and next year is completely dependent on what we do today.

Whether the United States survives as a democracy or not depends on choices Americans make, things they say, the arguments they have, you know, the degree of civic participation, not some historical rule that some very brilliant political scientist invented.

And as I said, I think this has happened before.

I think we had this moment of complacency after the fall of the Soviet Union.

In the 90s, Americans and Europeans became convinced that everything was best in the best of all possible worlds.

And we didn't have to do anything in particular to maintain our democracies because democracy was the best system and we just won the Cold War and it was all going to be fine.

And we lost sight of the ways in which democracy was beginning to slip and we were beginning to lose things.

And I think it was just a sense of complacency.

And above all, it was a sense of inevitability.

It's inevitable.

We've won the war of ideas.

The war of ideas is over.

And that's why we missed the rise of Russia.