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Democracies today remain in a potent and protracted recession, and they have retreated from the ideological struggle against autocracy. We can renew the world's democratic momentum through power, performance, and legitimacy. Democracies must generate economic prosperity and opportunity while containing corruption, crime, and abuses of power, to reinvigorate support for democracy across regions and generations. Liberal democracies cannot be weak or retreat; they must exert their power to safeguard free and fair elections, independent media, and the rule of law. Nowhere in the world where dictatorships repress rights, censor information, and propagate disinformation can democracy be secure. Every defense of democracy is a source of inspiration and instruction. We must get serious again about promoting the values, experiences, requirements, and institutions of democracy. And we must do so on the scale, with the scope and ease of access in many languages, required to save it.

Over the last decade, a sophisticated and lucrative industry has sprung up that puts potent surveillance and intelligence capabilities in the hands of a wide range of private actors. Clandestine influence operations, targeted espionage against civil society, and political subversion—an organized activity whereby the decay of legitimate political institutions is deliberately and surreptitiously seeded—are easier to undertake than ever before. At least three contingent factors have combined to create conditions for subversion to become more widely practiced: 1) neoliberal globalization; 2) the rise and spread of businesses that offer private intelligence, surveillance, and \"black ops\"; and 3) the digital communications environment. Liberal democracies need to bring greater transparency, oversight, and public accountability to their own clandestine, law-enforcement, signals, and other intelligence agencies. If subversion continues to flourish unchecked, then the rule of law, public accountability, and even the scientific research necessary for our very survival in the face of these risks will suffer.

Rapid economic growth in China over the last four decades has failed to bring about democratization. Instead of undergoing evolutionary liberalization, the Leninist party-state has in recent years reverted to a form of neo-Stalinist rule. China's experience may appear to contradict modernization theory, which links economic development with democracy. A closer look at this experience, however, shows that democratizing a post-totalitarian regime is far more difficult than democratizing an authoritarian regime because post-totalitarian regimes, such as the one dominated by the Chinese Communist Party, possess far greater capacity and resources to resist and neutralize the liberalizing effects of modernization. However, the medium-term success of these regimes may only ensure their eventual demise through revolution. The socioeconomic transformation of societies under post-totalitarian rule empowers social forces and greatly increase the odds of revolutionary change when these regimes undergo liberalization, as shown in the former Soviet bloc.

In this article, which is adapted from the seventh annual Seymour Martin Lipset Lecture on Democracy in the World, Ivan Krastev addresses three main questions: 1) Why are authoritarian regimes surviving in the age of democratization? 2) Why did political science fail to anticipate the resilience of these regimes? and 3) Why it is so difficult to resist contemporary authoritarianism?

With the 2003 adoption of the UN Convention Against Corruption, good-governance norms have achieved—on the formal level at least—a degree of recognition that can fairly be called universal. This reflects a centuries-long struggle to establish the moral principle of \"ethical universalism,\" which brings together the ideas of equity, reciprocity, and impartiality. The West's success in promoting this norm has been extraordinary, yet there are also significant risks. Despite expectations that international concern and increased regulation would lead to less corruption, current trends suggest otherwise. Exchanges between countries perceived as corrupt and countries perceived as noncorrupt seem to lead to an increase in corruption in the noncorrupt states rather than its decrease in the corrupt ones. Direct good-governance interventions have had poor results. And anticorruption has helped populist politicians, who use anti-elite rhetoric similar to that of anticorruption campaigners.

During the Edo period, the study of Japanese antiquity, especially its religious and literary aspects, went by various names, but the two most common of these were wagaku and Kokugaku. In theory, both of these terms mostly signified the same thing, and so they should have been interchangeable. In fact, the usage of both during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries suggests just that. However, some scholars of the time did not think these terms were synonymous. These scholars recognized a fundamental difference between the two: one was coherent to individuals regardless of whether or not they resided in Japan (wagaku), while the other (Kokugaku) was only properly understood by those familiar with the intellectual context of the time. The terminological controversy between wagaku and Kokugaku was tantamount to a recognition by Tokugawa intellectuals of the differences between what Western scholars today refer to as etics and emics respectively. By understanding the terminological history of wagaku and Kokugaku, we can see how the shift from the former to the latter was a deeply ideological one. Specifically, the terminological victory of Kokugaku over wagaku signified the dominance of exceptionalism over ethnic nationalism.

Seymour Martin Lipset argued that economic development would enlarge the middle class, and that the middle class would support democracy. To what extent will this general proposition prove true of China?

The proportion of Americans who reported no religious preference doubled from 7 percent to 14 percent in the 1990s. This dramatic change may have resulted from demographic shifts, increasing religious skepticism, or the mix of politics and religion that characterized the 1990s.

Seymour Martin Lipset's thesis (1959) on the relationship between socioeconomic development and democracy is reevaluated. A reassessment now is particularly relevant, as there are many more democracies in the world, especially in less developed countries.

Today we witness not only that history has not ended, but that there has been a revival of authoritarianism. Moreover, all too often authoritarianism has adopted the trappings of democracy. We are caught in the grip of a self-generated fear of the other, leading us to question the motives, intentions, and aspirations of people deemed to be different. In Malaysia in 2018, however, people from all communities, cultures, and faiths decisively voted out a regime that had ruled the nation for more than six decades and voted into power Pakatan Harapan-the Alliance of Hope. The institutional reforms that have been set in motion are primed to take Malaysia on a new path toward greater constitutional democracy. Confronting authoritarianism entails many elements, including judicial independence; creating a system that overcomes the harmful manifestations of capitalism; ensuring greater protection for political freedoms and the dynamic exchange of views; and the further empowerment of women and the adoption of a proactive social-justice agenda. Above all, good governance must remain the touchstone.