Democracy Imperiled in America

Journalist Jane Mayer of The New Yorker and Kim Lane Scheppele will discuss current threats against U.S. democracy in this hybrid public talk. Mayer is The New Yorker’s chief Washington correspondent and covers politics, culture, and national security. She is the author of the 2016 New York Times best-seller “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right,” which the Times named as one of the ten best books of the year.

Previously, Mayer worked at The Wall Street Journal, where she covered the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, the Gulf War, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. In 1984, she became the paper’s first female White House correspondent.

Scheppele is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and the University Center for Human Values. Her work focuses on the intersection of constitutional and international law, particularly in constitutional systems under stress. Since 2010, she has been documenting the rise of autocratic legalism first in Hungary and then in Poland within the European Union, as well as its spread around the world.