There is a widespread perception that democracies are experiencing a global recession. In this lecture, Daniel Ziblatt, co-author of How Democracies Die, comes to a surprising, opposite conclusion: though some prominent countries  in Central Europe, Asia, and Latin America have experienced democratic backsliding in recent years, the number of democracies in the world has actually remained surprisingly robust. But Ziblatt argues that this finding should not distract us from a different challenge facing the old democracies of Western Europe and North America: the rise of powerful illiberal movements and parties that threaten to make Western democracy itself unrecognizable.