About a hundred years ago, Americans were gathering together, in the face of fascism and communism, to ask "Are we done with democracy?" At that time, alternatives to democracy were live options. Today, we're asking these questions again.

What do we do when democracy delivers outcomes we don't like? How do we live in a country with so many who deeply disagree with our worldview? These are questions citizens of modern democracies need to ask themselves.

To help us think through them, we're joined this week by Shadi Hamid, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, a professor of Islamic Studies at Fuller Seminary, and contributing writer for the Atlantic Monthly. His new book The Problem of Democracy asks what we should do when democracy produces bad outcomes. Is democracy good because of its results, or for its own sake?

Special thanks to Ethan Beacom for composing our theme music and editing this episode.