Yascha Mounk

Yascha Mounk (born June 10, 1982) is a German-American political scientist. He is currently Associate Professor of Practice at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington D.C.

Mounk was born in Munich. His mother is Jewish, and had been granted permission to leave Poland in 1969. 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. Mounk received a BA degree in History from Trinity College (Cambridge). He then received a PhD from Harvard University in the United States. He remained in the U.S. as a lecturer on Government and was named a Senior Fellow in the Political Reform Program at New America. Mounk became an American citizen in 2017.

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, and Slate. He runs a podcast called The Good Fight. His dissertation on the role of personal responsibility in contemporary politics and philosophy has been published by Harvard University Press.

In July 2020, he founded Persuasion, an online magazine devoted to defending the values of free societies.

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".

In a February 2018 interview that was 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. On the German television newscast Tagesthemen, he stated that Germany is on a "historically unique experiment, namely to transform a mono-ethnic and monocultural democracy into a multi-ethnic one." 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."