One event that I attended was a lecture called “Are Democracies Dying?”. It was held on Friday, September 13th in Thompson Library. The event was categorized as an Academic and I think I was able to learn so much new information from it. This lecture really impacted me in many ways. The lecturer, Dr. Steven Levitsky, mentioned that the Trump Administration has had the worst record of diplomatic outreach since the Nixon administration. Our current president has embraced autocratic leaders more than any other president and has in a sense neglected to promote democracy. However, despite this neglect, the number of true democracies in the world in the past 20 years has actually remained quite constant. In fact, the percentage of democracies has only gone down from 46% to 45%. Ever since the fall of the USSR, more developing countries have turned to democracy to rebuild, and democracy has been continuously promoted around the world. The main point of this lecture was that democracies are not currently dying, but we have to do our best to save them or things could go wrong in the future. This event impacted me a lot and made me think about democracy as an essiental value to our American perspective, and showed me how International Affairs could be essiental to the real world. I gained a new perspective on why I joined the IA group and what all of our actions could mean for the rest of the world.