Protecting Democracy 2021

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This event will be live-streamed on Youtube and Twitter.

The Future of Democracy Working Group at the Institute for Public Knowledge and The GovLab at NYU Tandon invite you to a conversation between Ian Bassin and Beth Simone Noveck.

Democracy is in retreat around the world and the Trump era has proven the US is no exception. Since the start of the Trump era, two former White House Associate Counsels — Ian Bassin and Justin Florence — have built the organization Protect Democracy to ensure the US does not succumb to the fates of countries like Hungary and Venezuela whose democracies have collapsed as part of this global tide of authoritarianism.  Combining their White House experience with input from the country’s leading scholars on democratic decline and the current autocratic moment, Protect Democracy has been at the forefront of many of the battles to protect democratic institutions over the past three years and has developed an agenda for the next Administration designed to better protect the country against future strongmen and get us back on a path towards perfecting our democracy.  Join us to hear from Ian on what that path forward should include.

Ian Bassin is co-founder and executive director of Protect Democracy. Ian served as Associate White House Counsel from 2009-2011. In addition to counseling the President and senior White House staff on administrative and constitutional law, his responsibilities included ensuring that White House and executive branch officials complied with the laws, rules and norms that protect the fundamentally democratic nature of our government. He received his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was an Editor of the Yale Law Journal and President of the American Constitution Society.

Beth Simone Noveck directs the Governance Lab (GovLab) and its MacArthur Research Network on Opening Governance. She is a Professor in Technology, Culture, and Society at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering and a Fellow at NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge. New Jersey governor Phil Murphy appointed her as the state’s first Chief Innovation Officer in 2018. Previously, Beth served in the White House as the first United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer and director of the White House Open Government Initiative under President Obama. UK Prime Minister David Cameron appointed her senior advisor for Open Government.