Yascha Benjamin Mounk (born 10 June 1982) is a German-born American political scientist. , he is currently Associate Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D. C. Early life Mounk was born and raised in Munich. His mother was Jewish and a socialist, and was forced to leave Poland in 1969 due to anti-Semitism. He wrote that much of his mother's side of the family was killed in the Holocaust. 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 the University of Cambridge, where he was a member of Trinity College. 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. 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. Mounk became an American citizen in 2017. 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, 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. 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". 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