This is a lightly edited transcript of the March 11 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon . You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack . Thomas Zimmer: Thank you so much for having me—and again, apologies for keeping people waiting. Bacon: That’s all right. So what we’re going to do today is talk about the democracy-versus-authoritarianism question, but I want to talk through it historically, because you’re a historian. I want to go through this first year of