WOWcast: Maria Popova

About this episode

Maria Popova knows authoritarianism when she sees it. Born in communist-era Bulgaria, she pursued her university education in the U.S. and is now a professor of political science at McGill University in Canada, specializing in democratic transformation, rule of law, and the weaponization of the judiciary in Eastern Europe and Russia. Alarmingly, and in “one of the biggest surprises” of her academic career, she’s seeing the backsliding towards authoritarianism that she studies in Eastern Europe now happening in America, a country she considered the pinnacle of democratic development. Maria talks to us about the frightening similarities between the democratic erosion happening in the U.S. and…