Tilly himself admitted that liberal democracies—with their “minimum set of processes that must be continuously in motion for a situation to qualify as democratic”—finally transcend the gangster character of state formation. Freedom is not an illusion; tolerance is not repression. A historically unprecedented spectrum of opinion is openly available in Western liberal democracies, and opinion still drives political action. If sophisticates sometimes treat the value of free speech as a mirage, nobody in a truly autocratic society would make that mistake. Meanwhile, our own populist demagogues lie in wait. If that happens, well, the geopolitics, not only with Russia, but all so with the Gulf states and the Middle East changes drastically. For Russia, the essence, I repeat this is a country that only exports, mostly exports oil and gas and weapons and it's a very large country with a large population. How do you provide for prosperity for this population without integrating to the world? That is the question that will define how history will judge Putin's decisions. A foreign-policy maven’s account of how recent demagogues have come to power and used the tools of our time—social media, television, the society of spectacle—to promote one-man rule and the suppression of dissent.” —Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker The Revenge of Power offers a facile premise at the book’s beginning, and then thoughtfully structures the well-organized and seamlessly presented facts and trends to support that premise. Naim’s writing style emphasizes clarity and conciseness. The book is sprinkled with wit and insight. Revenge re-opens and aggravates your emotional wounds. Even though you might be tempted to punish a wrong, you end up punishing yourself because you can’t heal.

This is a serious, even sombre, book about the global rise of populist politics. It works systematically and analytically through its 'three p's' theme of populism, polarisation and post-truth, with a wealth of empirical examples. You may not agree with all of it - and the absence of economics in thinking about why people buy into this stuff is something that bothered me. (Viz the claim for example that Brexit was non-ideological but primarily driven by populist anti-technocracy. Anyone with any familiarity with - the racist elements of the Leave campaign, the neoliberal dreaming of politicians like Farage, Truss and Kwarteng, and the mapping of the Conservatives' austerity programmes onto the geography of the Leave vote (to name but a few issues) can tell you this is nonsense.) But all that said, this is undeniably a big, important contribution in unravelling the strategies of contemporary power. Brian Lehrer: Well, you detail the autocratic leaders who try to maintain the facade of democracy in their countries and Vladimir Putin being one of them. What is the point? Does anyone out there believe Russia is a democracy under Vladimir Putin? Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC, joining me now is Moisés Naím. He's the author of a new book called The Revenge of Power: How Autocrats Are Reinventing Politics for the 21st Century. Very interesting because some of you may know he wrote a book called The End of Power a few years ago about the decentralization of power around the world. I think now he's going to say he was wrong. He's a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He's a former editor of Foreign Policy Magazine. The populist frame is too powerful to be defeated permanently. Like a virus, it reappears in outbreaks again and again throughout history. But the rhetoric is hollow. And pointing out that hollowness gives us an opening we must exploit to sell people once more on the promise of democratic life.” (Quoted from the book)A peril that is everywhere and nowhere is elusive, hard to discern, to pin down. We all sense it, but we struggle to name it. Torrents of ink are spilled describing its components and features, but it remains elusive. All of that as you said is fed by post-truth and that includes, but not only the social media and how lying and propaganda, manipulation of data, of information, of reality is part of the tool kit of these autocrats. The three Ps are essentially ways in which in the new world that we're living, autocrats that look and want to be seen as Democrats and have elections all the time. In fact, autocrats masquerading as Democrats. In that book I have 98 references to Putin's behavior aligned to the three Ps. Naim offers his readers a simple premise. There has been a global shift toward autocracy around the world in the last 20 years. According to Naim, this drifting away from democracy and into autocracy has been accomplished without one war or battle. The transition from liberal democracies to autocracies that disguise themselves as democratic institutions has been dramatic. Argentina, Brazil, Hungary, Philippines, Poland, and Turkey are all examples of nations that had subverted democracy for subterranean autocracy. Steve: Hi. Okay, so my question for you, Brian, and the guest, and everybody listening, has Vladimir Putin graduated from authoritarian dictator to a war criminal? Has he committed crimes against humanity? I think he has. If he has, if he is deemed as such, can he be held accountable at that level of despicable?

Populism is a set of practices and strategies. Through this, the autocrats become not only the sole voice and face of the government but also of the state. It empties the meaning of the authentic exercise of the will of the people as it weakens popular and civic organisations, and eliminates the function of political parties as channels of alternative ideologies. His content stealing actually gave us one of the best insights we could have ever had about our blog:Ece Temelkuran, author of Together: 10 Choices for a Better Now, has pointed out that the west has been used to thinking they’re more advanced than the rest of the world. But the recent slide towards populism shows that we’re actually behind countries like her native Turkey, and are being offered a glimpse of our near-future. In Together, she shows how resisting this rise of polarisation and hatred means adopting a new mindset – reacquainting ourselves with community, finding better strategies than anger, and learning to have faith rather than easily undermined hope. Temelkuran’s work cuts through easy reactions like cynicism and rage, and shows us how to engage again. Get the reward center of your brain pumping by thinking about how sweet it will feel when you meet your goals. This shifts the focus onto you and your mission and makes your perpetrator irrelevant–which is exactly where they should be. A Happy Non-Revenge Ending Second, the elite-eye view of politics. This is about those holding formal power. The masses appear from time to time as shapeless blobs of protest, but these soon subside and normal service is resumed.

An authoritative and intelligent portrait of the global spread of authoritarianism and its dangers. On 23 April, a day in which Sant Jordi is celebrated in Catalonia (the day of the book and the rose), I recommended the following book to a person during a conversation: The Four Agreements: A Toltec Wisdom Book by Miguel Ruiz. It is a book that I read more than 15 years ago. It helped me a lot because it made me aware of things that were not working quite well in my life and allowed me to change and my perspective. For me, it was and still is a very powerful book. It is easy to understand, although not easy to apply. The good thing is that it has no age and that it goes directly to its essence with clarity. We know that there are no miracle recipes, but at least for me, trying to put some of these agreements into practice helped me transform things at an individual level. In some way, each of us is seeking our own path, and I believe that it is through the sum of individual changes and shared efforts that we can achieve a more global collective change.

The Brian Lehrer Show

Moisés Naím: The legal infrastructure and the legal setting institution of setting to declare somebody guilty of war crimes is slow, unpredictable, and very often ignored by those that are accused and found guilty. On the other hand, we have seen some surprising good outcomes in which people, the leaders and bad actors that are guilty of crimes against humanity have been brought to trial but those are small countries and there is always the asymmetry of behavior in the international system. At this point, one can wish that, of course, but I don't see that becoming a priority at this point. But it’s also possible that dictators represent an ever-changing category, shaped by local specifics. In the twenty-first century, the story would be that, say, globalization produces inequality (or that immigration produces panic), and that the resulting anxiety intersects with the siloing of social media. This account has continuities with the old ones, but insists that the particulars of a moment matter, and create authoritarian leaders of a specific mold. We find ourselves using the same names—dictator, tyranny, fascism—to designate very different people and processes. Anyone can write about studies. Anyone can make bullet points. But not everyone can share stories. Not everyone can do original research. Not everyone can have cool videos.

I came away from Moises Naim’s latest book, The Revenge of Power, feeling like I had a better grasp of the causes and consequences of the craziness of politics over the last few years – Brexit, Trump, Bolsonaro, Orban, internet trolls and disinformation, Q-Anon and all the rest.Naím delivers a cogent and accessible overview of the new authoritarianism. Readers will agree that the matter is of urgent concern.” —Publishers Weekly But what do you do if you were wronged? How can you deal with the intense emotional feelings of retribution? What do you do if you feel an intense need for revenge? As I finished reading the book, I realised that we had found the local antidote to the 3-P autocrats. It is our own way of dealing with our own variety of 3-P autocrats. It is what emerged as Aragalaya in April this year, climaxed in July and is still simmering like live coals in the ashes. Proudly, I called it the Beautiful Revolution. However much its detractors howl against it, it is now a historical fact. Aragalaya happened and nobody can deny, delete or forget it. Our youth led it and were responsible for it and all, their mothers, fathers even little children joined them whole heartedly. The world was stunned by its success. Not a drop of blood was shed by the protesters. Naim observes that when political differences become identity based, debate shifts from a discussion of ideas to being a conflict over incompatible visions of a good life. The author busts a myth about the poor being attracted to autocrat leaders, noting, “3P Autocrats find acolytes among the disappointed, not the poor.” You cannot deny the existence of important power holders, but those coexistence, those forces that fragmented power coexist with the forces that concentrate power, because what happened in this nine years is that those that saw power being challenged by newcomers, micro powers, new players that are using a different script were not going to take it standing just sitting down and watching how they lost their power, they reacted and that reaction is a subject of the book, The Revenge of Power.