Down the Democratic Drain: Justin Gest on How Migration Is Unintentionally Strengthening Authoritarianism Around the World

**Andrew Keen** (0:00)
Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.
Hello, everybody. It is Thursday, the 25th of June, 2026 I'm just back from a tour of Eastern Europe, Poland, Austria. One of the people I talked to was a very distinguished Polish journalist, Bartosz Wielinski, ran the interview a couple of days ago, and he makes the argument that the fundamental division in the 21st century, in terms of ideology, in political terms at least, is between those people who believe in democracy and those that don't. That's replaced the old left-right, maybe free market communist divisions of the 20th century. My guest today, I think, might share that vision. Justin Gest, an old friend of the show, he was back on in 2022, talking about a previous book. His new book is called Democratic Drain, Global Migration and the Struggle for Democracy. Justin is joining us from Budapest, where he's teaching at the Central European University this week, old friends of mine there. Justin, congratulations on the new book. Do you share Wielinski's argument that really there are two types of people these days in the world, those who believe in democracy and those that don't?

**Justin Gest** (1:45)
I think there are other divisions, other fault lines. I think that's a good one. I think the other one are the beneficiaries of globalization, and the people who are globalization's losers.
And I think that those are fundamental divisions as well, and I think they often overlap.

**Andrew Keen** (2:03)
Yeah, and I was just going to ask that they definitely overlap. Would it be fair to say that, again, in generalized terms doesn't work for everyone, that people who tend to be beneficiaries of globalization are more sympathetic to democracy than those that aren't?

**Justin Gest** (2:20)
Yeah, I think that it doesn't have to be that way. I think that democracy can come in many different colors and shades, but I think that's where we are right now.

**Andrew Keen** (2:31)
What does that say then, Justin, about those people who believe in democracy? They tend to, in the US, of course, they're on the coasts, California, where I am, the East Coast, where you are.
Normally, at least, you're based in Washington, DC., you teach at George Mason University. Does that suggest that democracy is, to misquote Marx, the Central Committee of the ruling class?

**Justin Gest** (3:01)
Yeah, I don't think that's what democracy has to be. I think that when you have a large country and a representative democracy, I think it's an easy accusation to make because direct democracy at the most local levels, deliberative democracy in an idealist Greek sense, is logistically, practically impossible. There's always going to be some technocrats, some distance between the individual, the voter, and the state. That's always going to be a vulnerability, a key vulnerability of democracy and something that detractors are going to be able to use.
But I also think that democracies have overseen the proliferation of globalization in the late 20th century, and so democracies are getting blamed for its excesses and for its drawbacks. And so it's natural that they're going to be accountable for those things, and it's a matter of how democracies and democrats and democratic leaders navigate that.

**Andrew Keen** (4:08)
Is there a paradox, Justin, maybe even a degree of hypocrisy, in the fact that it's these elites, these beneficiaries of globalization, who tend to believe in democracy, who benefit from democracy, and who dress up their belief in democracy in the language of justice and fairness?

**Justin Gest** (4:38)
Is it hypocrisy that they dress it up?

**Andrew Keen** (4:40)
I said paradox, some people might see it as hypocrisy, others would just simply think of it in paradoxical terms.

**Justin Gest** (4:53)
No, I don't think it is.
I think that there's going to be abuses of the democracy, the democracy is going to fail, you're going to have poor leaders, bad candidates, you know, parties and interests that went out over the public interest. Democracies are flawed and they're never going to be perfect. But I don't necessarily think it's paradoxical. I think that, you know, democracies are necessarily messy. There's going to be swings of the pendulum and public opinion, popular sentiment that they're going to have to be responsive to. That's going to be exploited in the short run. But in the long run, you know, democracies are going to be your most, when they are state, when they're transparent, when they're accountable, when there's rule of law, checks and balances, you know, they're going to be the most, you know, direct path to stability and prosperity.

**Andrew Keen** (5:53)