The west’s third challenge is to find solutions to the existential threats facing humanity, starting with global warming. Even without the revenge of geopolitics, this would be a steep climb. But war in Ukraine and growing tension with China have made it far more complicated. 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. 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.”

Post-truth has been defined by the Collins English Dictionary as “the disappearance of shared objective standards for truth.” It is a condition that arises in public life when the dividing line between facts and knowledge, on one side, and belief and opinion, on the other, withers away, or at least when they are used interchangeably so often that the dividing line between them is no longer widely agreed upon.” (Quoted from the aforesaid book) Brian Lehrer: I guess they could be happening at the same time and we'll get to Ukraine in a minute. I'm not sure Putin is an example of this, but in the United States a certain decentralization of power could lead to a recentralization in terms of authoritarianism in the worst case scenario, because power in terms of traditional institutions are losing respect around the country in all kinds of political corners. You cite three Ps, populism, polarization, and post-truth as the pillar of what's happening right now in The Revenge of Power.His content stealing actually gave us one of the best insights we could have ever had about our blog: 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. There is a great chapter on digital media as low cost way to introduce a ‘firehose of falsehoods’ into public debate, amplifying ‘Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD)’ and overwhelming quaint attempts to win arguments based on evidence and reason. Deepfake video is only just getting started but will take that destabilization (being used by just about every serious cyberpower) to a whole new level.

Polarisation is the age-old idea of divide and rule. The autocrats generate intense hatred against the rivals and neutralise them. Since they exploit the atavistic fears and prejudices of and the social cleavages and divisions among people, they have a huge fan-base, and hence emerge as Messiahs. 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 researchers then gave the wronged participant a chance to punish the other person, and for a full minute as the victim’s contemplated revenge, the activity in their brain was recorded. I do love a ‘big book’ – one with a grand sweep, which tries to make sense of disparate events and processes, and leaves you feeling a little wiser. Think Francis Fukuyama (on the rise of the state), Ha-Joon Chang (on economics of development) or Yuen Yuen Ang (on China). Another original book by an original thinker, offering a unique global perspective on populism and power." — Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer-prize winning historian and staff writer, The Atlantic

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 author has proposed methods of fighting the 3-P autocrats by battling against their five most used tactics. Populists portray a political realm neatly cleft in two: the corrupt, greedy elite versus the noble and pure – but betrayed and aggrieved – Volk, the people. But at the turn of the twenty-first century, unsettling transformations began to shake that postwar settlement. In a previous book, The End of Power, I examined the way power was decaying across a whole range of human institutions. Technology, demography, urbanization, information, economic and political change, globalization, and changed mindsets conspired to fragment and dilute power, making it easier to gain but harder to use and easier to lose.