Yascha Mounk

In a February 2018 interview that was published in Süddeutsche Zeitung, Mounk stated that he had changed his position on nationalism. He initially considered it a relic of the past that must be overcome, but he now advocates an "inclusive nationalism" to head off the threat of aggressive nationalism. On the German television newscast Tagesthemen, he stated that Germany is on a "historically unique experiment, namely to transform a mono-ethnic and monocultural democracy into a multi-ethnic one." In the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Mounk advised the "liberal camp" to adopt this inclusive nationalism, to foster a multi-ethnic and democratic society. "The key... is the adoption of the populist demand that people and nations should again feel they have control of their lives or their destiny."

Mounk authored “The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It”, published by Harvard University Press in 2018. Mounk argues that liberal democracy is, at present, concretely in danger of coming apart and contextually giving rise to illiberal democracy on the one side and undemocratic liberalism on the other side, because of three main drivers of socio-political discontent: namely, the economic stagnation experienced globally since about 1989 with regard to the standards of living of the wider population; the advent of the Internet and social media as platforms of technological information and communication; the demographic change of many western societies, which has modified and fractured the “monoethnic” base of almost all world’s democracies. Therefore, Mounk's thesis is that because of stagnating economic growth, fear of multi-ethnic societies and the rise of digital media, many previously successful and stable liberal democratic systems have started to degenerate and decompose into either of their two basic components, with the potential risk of actually coming apart for good.

Mounk joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) as a teenager. In 2015 he resigned from the party, doing so by publishing an open letter to then-chairman Sigmar Gabriel. He cited the lack of helpfulness of German institutions to refugees, the passive attitude of SPD leaders and other parts of the party during the Crimea crisis in 2014, and the SPD's policy on Greece, which he called a "betrayal of the social democratic dream of a united Europe".

Yascha Mounk (born June 10, 1982) is a German-American political scientist specializing in political theory and democracy. He is currently Associate Professor of Practice at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington D.C. He is also a lecturer on political theory in Harvard University’s Government Department and a senior Carnegie Fellow in the Political Reform Program at New America, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

Mounk was born in Munich. His mother is Jewish, and had been granted permission to leave Poland in 1969. He has said he felt like a stranger in Germany, and though German is his native language, he never felt accepted as a “true German“ by his peers.