German-American political scientist and journalist (born 1982)
Yascha Benjamin Mounk[2] (born 10 June 1982) is a German-American political scientist and author. He is Associate Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. In July 2020, he founded Persuasion, an online magazine devoted to defending the values of free societies.
As a freelance journalist, Mounk has written for the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Slate, and German weekly newspaper Die Zeit, of which he has been co-editor since 2023.
Biography
Early life
Mounk was born and raised in Munich. His mother was Jewish and a socialist, and left Poland in 1969 after the purge of Jews from positions in the Communist apparatus. Much of his mother's side of the family was killed in the Holocaust.[3] 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.[4]
Mounk read history at Trinity College, Cambridge, and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 2003.[5] He then received a PhD from Harvard University in the United States, with the dissertation The Age of Responsibility: On the Role of Choice, Luck, and Personal Responsibility in Contemporary Politics and Philosophy.[2] He remained in the US as a lecturer on government, and was named a senior fellow in the Political Reform Program at the think tank New America.[6] Mounk became an American citizen in 2017.[7]
Career
He was executive director of the Renewing the Centre team at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. As a freelance journalist, he has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, Slate, and Die Zeit. Since April 2023 he is a member of the latter's editorial board.[8]
He runs a podcast called The Good Fight.[citation needed]
In July 2020, he founded Persuasion, an online magazine.[9]
In January 2024, writer Celeste Marcus published an article about dealing with the aftermath of rape, in which she detailed her own sexual assault story.[10] On February 4, 2024, she named Yascha Mounk as her alleged rapist. He issued a statement in response: “I am aware of the horrendous allegation against me. It is categorically untrue.”[11]
Political views
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".[12][13]
In a February 2018 interview 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.[14] On the German television newscast Tagesthemen, he stated that Germany is on a "historically unique experiment, namely to transform a mono-ethnic and mono-cultural democracy into a multi-ethnic one".[15] 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."[16]
