The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 127. Donald Trump vs American Freedom: Who Wins? (Moises Naim)

Episode Date: March 30, 2025

Is this the end of democracy in the USA? Following the election of Trump, could democracy in America die? How did Moises Naim come up with his three p’s; Populism, Polarisation, and Post-truth?  Alastair and Rory are joined by Moises Naim, journalist and former Venezuelan minister, to answer all these questions and more.  TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. Instagram: @restispolitics  Twitter: @RestIsPolitics  Email: [e-mail] Video Editor: Josh Smith  Assistant Producer: Alice Horrell Producer: Nicole Maslen Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks for listening to The Restis Politics. Sign up to the Restis Politics Plus. To enjoy ad-free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to therestispolities.com. That's the restispolics.com. Welcome to the Restis Politics leading with me, Rory Stewart. And with me, Alistair Campbell. And to your regular listeners, the name of our guest today, Moise's name, will be very familiar. Because we talk about him regularly, mainly in the context of his coming up with the phrase three P. populism, polarisation and post-truth politics. The damage that 3P's has done and is doing to our politics

is something that we'll be talking about a lot today. But Moises, who's now 72, has a fascinating backstory. Jewish, born in Libya, amid political challenges and troubles, his family left when he was young for Italy. He ended up in Venezuela, became a Venezuelan citizen, became a member of the Venezuelan government. This was pre-Shavez, pre-Moduro, I should point out, and then went on to do all sorts of different things, executive director of the World Bank, editor of one of my and Rory's must-read media publications, Foreign Policy magazine. He's been in

academia, he's been in media. He's had a very, very, very interesting and busy life, and he's still very involved in all sorts of political debates. And I think he is actually one of those things that Rory wants to be defined as a public intellectual. So Moises, thank you very much for your intellect and for being here. Thanks for the kind words and thanks for inviting me. It's a pleasure. Moises, you've had this extraordinary life and one of the things that you've begun to focus on more is the question of populism, what's happening in our democracies and what this threat is. Can you, though, take us back to your earlier life and tell us what it was. about your own biography, where you grew up, your experiences that began to get you interested

in the subject to populism? In the mid-90s, late 90s, I was appointed the editor-in-chief foreign policy magazine, as I started with said. And I decided that I was going to read the editorial approach of the magazine was to try to understand the surprises of this thing called globalization that was very important at the time. So I went around the world with my team to look at, you know, what was happening with new ways in which places, countries, governments, companies, religions, universities were connecting across border. Everybody seemed to be going global. And I looked around and I discovered my main takeaway was early adopters, the main beneficiaries of this trend were the international criminal cartels.

The criminals were the first off, they took advantage of porous borders, of austerity measures. So you're all listed, all the things that were happening at the time. And you will see that the forefront of those things were criminal cartels of one sort of another. That were typically started being national, then became regional, then became actually global. And the examples are multiple, right? And so I wrote a book called Illicit that dealt with the five main illicit trays around the world and how governments were losing. Each of this thing had a war, had a government waging war. And governments everywhere were losing those wars.

There was not one instance of success. There was skirmishes that, you know, sometimes government gave government the upper hand. But in general, governments were losing. So I started looking at power. What made the government so powerless to deal with these groups? And I discovered that power was fragmenting everywhere in academia, in sports, in culture, in government, in business, in banks, in media. Wherever power was a currency, power was fragmenting, weakening, and dispersing. That took me to another book, which you kindly have mentioned in your program, which is the, in the,

End of Power. That doesn't mean that the power, there are not very important pockets of powers in Pentagon, the Vatican, J.P. Morgan, you know, of course, they're important, the Kremlin. There are power centers, but they are limited in the way they can do it. So the main takeaway of that book, the end of power, was that power had become easier to acquire, harder to use and easier to lose. It was more ephemeral. And I believe that is going to describe also something I'm sure we're going to touch on, which is Trump.

I think power, easier to acquire, harder to use, easier to lose. So everybody was being affected by these trends, this fragmenting, weakening trends. And then I said, well, what are the people that are losing power? What are they doing to protect themselves from this onslaught of weakening policies that were making them less competitive in the global politics and global economy. And so I wrote a book called The Revenge of Power, which was looking at what the powerful did. And that's where I coined what Alistair mentioned, the concept of the three piece, populism,

polarization and post-truth. The rest is history. The rest is history. Assist the podcast there, Moises. Let me just jump in. The five wars that you talk about in the book Illicit, which I think was written a decade ago now, drugs, guns, people, money and fake goods. So you are basically saying that amid that globalization, while the politicians, people like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair

are all saying this is good for us, it's good for our economies, it's good for our people, there was this kind of undercurrent beneath it, below the radar of the public side of globalisation that was very, very bad and that we didn't tackle properly. And then alongside your three P's, it feels to me. me like the sort of characters that were exploiting globalization in that way, then start to exploit the political implications of it in a way that I think we three all agree is not necessarily good for the way that we do politics. Is that a fair assumption? Absolutely. And if I had to update the illicit book, I would play a lot of attention to the fact that now organized crime

used to be outside governments, trying to influence governments, but now in many countries they have become the government. It's not that you have an outside force that is illegal, like criminal and so on, is that the government is organized crime, the whole operations. I believe, for example, that the Kremlin is a center of organized crime in the way that coexists with the three pieces.

One of the things that's very striking is that some of the most powerful analysis of the modern world is coming out of Latin America. And you're a very good example of this. But I want you to reflect on what the experience of being a Venezuelan, of being part of Latin America is in helping you catch these trends of illicit international cartels and populism earlier, perhaps, than the rest of the world. What is it about the Latin American experience, which means you're at the front edge of the power of history? Julio Cortaster is a novelist. It was a novelist. He died and a very famous part of the Latin American literary boom.

They were interviewing him once. They asked him what was, more or less the same question you asked. And he said, well, I became a Latin American in France, where he had moved. He said, everybody in Latin America knows everything about the country and knows nothing about the adjacent countries, the neighbors. And so by moving to France, from living in France, he could have a perspective of what was lifelike in all the Latin American countries. And the same has happened to me.

I moved with my family to Washington in the early 90s. And I knew a lot about my country, a lot. But I didn't know that much about all the countries. And so I became a Latin American in Washington. But Moses, what is it about Latin America, which has made it so much, the kind of big global example of the early rise of modern populism, illicit cartels. What is it about the continent? Success. Essentially, short leaves, inflationary, and in some places causes irreversible damage. But what happened was in Latin America, for example, think about Argentina. Argentina was one of the

wealthiest countries in the world for many years. And now has become one of the poor, and more screwed up countries. They tried all kinds of reforms and nothing worked. Now there is a new initiative that seems to be working, and I really wish them well. I have to be careful because we're talking not about a country, but about a region. And the region that includes Brazil and Mexico and Argentina and other giants

also includes Haiti and Guatemala. So the diversity of Latin American experience is quite profound. And what is happening now is far from being a unified viewer or course of action is still highly fragmented among different countries that have very different politics and economics and society and culture. Well, just tell us a little bit about how you made that journey from Libya to Italy to Venezuela and how you ended up becoming a government minister. Because you weren't political, were you, sort of a technocratic minister, but just briefly take us through that whole kind of lifespan.

My family had lived in Libya for generations, and they had to escape. They were Jewish, and there was a very strong backlash against the Jews. They first went to Italy, but there was no work. So my father had a schoolmate that had gone to Venezuela with an Italian company, and C, he said that Venezuela was great.

I don't remember any of these. I was two or three or four years ago. Yeah, yeah. And then, so we went to Venezuela. We all became Venezuelans. I am deeply, deeply Venezuelan in a variety of ways. I deal with this every day. So I am a profound Venezuela that is forced to live elsewhere.

Moises, let's then maybe use Venezuela, adds the root in to this question of what's happening to the world. So arguably, Hugo Chavez is one of the first most dramatic examples of populist, authoritarian, even proto-fascist, and the way in which a leader can emerge, facilitated by the Conservatives. So Rafael Cadera, who released him from prison, said nobody thought that Mr. Chavez had even the remotest chance of becoming president. And of course, very similar things were said by the Italians and the Germans about Mussolini and Hitler. Help us understand maybe Venezuela's experience and what Venezuela teaches us about

underestimating populism and authoritarianism. Chavez was a pioneer in a variety of ways. We can list them. But the most important area in which he reigned was in hiding his autocratic principles. The elections that he won were not well attended. Venezuela had high levels, a relatively high levels of participation in electoral politics.

But in that election, a lot of people stayed home. So only 30% of the voters went to vote and Cabus won legitimately. And he became president. And as soon as he became president, he started to undermine, constrain, weakened, limit, ignore the checks and balances that define democracy. And he was the first of making this very clear that they, you know, he wants to keep the notion that he was a Democrat. But in fact, he was an autocrat, disguising, masquerading as a Democrat. He was the innovator in this. And I watched what Donald Trump is doing in the United States.

And it's so similar. You know, he's attacking all of the sources of constraints of checks on balances, limits, weakens, reporting, accountability. All of that is being undermined. And Chavez did exactly the same. You know, if it first, he immediately took over the Supreme Court and the courts and the courts and this legal system, then the military, then the oil industry. which in Venezuela, of course, is defining and important.

So he took control all those things, but always, always hiding by the face of a Democrat. I think your first book, Moises, which I read some time ago, was about your experience as a government minister. And the description you have of Venezuela and Venezuelan government at that time is so, so different to what anybody younger than me would associate with Venezuela. because of Chavez and now because of Maduro. But was that you looking at your past through slightly rose-tinted spectacles? Or did you feel that was a good government trying to do good things?

A phrase go-making runs of the Venezuelan diaspora is we were happy and we didn't know it. Venezuela was a had a very defective democracy, have very, you know, all kinds of injustices, marginalization and so on. It also had a lot of things that worked. It did have a defective democracy, but when you went to the poll, you didn't know who was going to win. It was a functioning democracy with great flaws, but it was a democracy. And progress was being made, always, you know, behind the curve in terms of the expectations,

expectations around wild, and no government, no state was capable of keeping up with expectations and demands and needs of the people. But yes, there was. was a country that does not exist anymore. The level of destruction that Chavez and Maduroha and the Cotteri have brought is incredible. Not even wars have created and caused so much damage and destruction and irreversible. So 8 million people out of 20-something Venezuelans are just walked. Imagine that. You're just like one day I'm not taking any more because I cannot feed my children. Let me walk towards the jungle. And that's what millions of Venezuelans are.

Venezuelans have done. And Venezuela historically was a recipient of refugees. And now we are, you know, living with this tragic situation. So, Mrs. What does Venezuela teach us about the broader question of how democracies die? Don't pay attention only to the day of election. But understand that democracy happens every day in between elections. So elections are important and you need to win them in a legitimate way without tricks. But then after you win or after you lose, pay attention to what's happening to the checks and balances during the four years or five years that the governments have been elected. Paying attention to the checks and balances is less glamorous, is boring, it's technocratic, is legalese, is all of that.

and is typically hidden in some form of government bureaucratic. So, Moises, you say that, and you mentioned the Kremlin, suggesting that it's effectively a government that is as much organized crime as it is government. We'll get on to talk about Donald Trump. But given what Trump is now doing in his second term, could you see a scenario in which American democracy dies? To my surprise, yes. I never believe that the United States could reach the situation in which we are now

and towards which we are evolving. Let's pay a lot of attention to what happens to the midterm elections. These may be the finding elections. Some people that I don't agree, but some people say that there may be the last elections for a variety of reasons. So let's see what happens because one thing that will be happening in the next two years is the backlash, the reverse, the adjustment, the vision of what Trump is doing now.

A lot of what he's doing now is unsustainable, and he will lead with the consequences. He's ignoring the legal, the judges. We have had several experiences in which there is a ruling, a decision, a judicial decision. And Chavez and his people simply ignore it. They're ignoring the legal judicial system. So pay attention to what's happening before the mid-term.

election. I guess that connects your two last answers because you talked about how important it is to focus on checks and balances and that's kind of boring and technocratic. But in practice, how do you actually do it? I mean, J.D. Vance, the vice president, has quoted an American president from the 19th century who refused to enforce the decisions to Supreme Court. He said to the Supreme Court Justice and Vance likes this phrase, okay, Supreme Court justice, you made the decision. Now you now enforce it, right? So as the administration explicitly begins to get involved in things which are completely non-constitutional, illegal, which are not the president's prerogative, which are really to do with Congress or are supposed to operate through international treaties or law, and they

just reject it, what are the American people supposed to do in response? If the government is not respecting institutions, how do the people respond? Well, that brings us to the, the thorny subject of political parties and who they are. And when you say the American people, remember in that American people, about half of them voted for Trump. So they're not worried about the kinds of things we're worrying about. Let me just correct that, Moses, half of the people who voted, but the more people didn't vote at all than voted for Trump or Harris. That's also a problem. And that reflects the lack of enthusiasm, anybody, especially the young have about political parties. Young people are willing to join any initiative, any NGO, you know, let's go fight

the possible extinction of a butterfly in Thailand. You will get a lot of volunteers to go do that among, but then ask them, let's join a political party or let's found a political party. They will be immediately running for the hills and ignoring you. So the brand, political parties is so damaged and requires such attention, modernization, updates, revision. And again, that brings us to the issue of the resistance, who is resisting and who is going to be making accountable this administration. So it is that that we need to pay attention to. Okay, Moises, Alastair, quick break, Back for more. Hey, this is Michael and Hannah from Gollhangers. The Rest is Science.

This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. We often think of beating cancer as treatment, but imagine stopping it before it begins. After years of work, Cancer Research UK scientists are launching a clinical trial of lung vax, the first vaccine designed to prevent lung cancer. It builds on TracerX, the world's largest cancer evolution study, which tracked lung cancer cells over many years to uncover the disease's earliest warning signs. Lung Vax is designed to train the immune system to spot these signs early on, destroying 40 cells before cancer develops.

So it's not treatment, but preventative with the potential to stop lung cancer before it starts. The first stage of the trial starts this year focusing on people at higher risk. It shows what long-term research makes possible. For more information about cancer research, UK, their research breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancer research UK.org forward slash the rest is science. Hi everybody, it's Dominic Samark here from The Rest is History. Now, some of you may have heard me on your show, The Rest is Politics, when Rory was away

and I was filling in and enjoying Alistair Campbell's tremendous banter. And I'm back to tell you about our new series on The Rest is History, which is all about Britain in the 1970s, a period with a long. of uncanny resemblances to our own. So right now we're living through a moment when oil shocks generated by war in the Middle East are rippling through the world economy, when Britain feels like it's sunk in a bit of a malaise, people are arguing about Europe, the government has got a few issues with the trade unions, and we have a kind of, I suppose you'd say governing elite, a kind of political class that is really struggling to come to terms with all of these issues.

and people are asking if Britain is governable at all. So there are a lot of parallels between that Britain that I'm describing, which is our Britain, and the Britain of the mid-1970s. So in this series that's coming out on the rest is history, we'll be looking at these and other issues. We'll be talking about the rise of Margaret Thatcher, obviously a colossal figure in our political life even now, whether you love her or loathe her.

We'll be talking about the very first Brexit referendum of 1975, I have a subject that I'm sure Rory and Alistair will have strong opinions about. We'll be talking about the fall of the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson. And we'll be talking about one of the grimest moments in Britain's economic history, the moment in 1976 when we had to go cap in hand, as people said at the time, to the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, for a then record bailout. Now, if that sounds good to you, how could it not sound good to you? Of course it sounds good to you.

We have a clip for you to listen to at the end of this episode. And if you want to hear more, just search for The Rest is History wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Sarah Churchwell, author, journalist and academic. And I'm David Aldoushoga, historian and broadcaster. And together, we're the hosts of Goldhanger's latest podcast, Journey Through Time. We're going to be looking at hidden social histories behind famous chapters from the past. Like, what was it like to actually live during prohibition or to have been there on the ground for the great fire of London? We'll be uncovering it all. And we'll have characters and stories that have been forgotten but shouldn't have been. This week, we've got one of my favorites, Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for U.S. president all the way back in 1872, 50 years before American women could even vote.

She was also the first woman to address Congress and to open. in a brokerage on Wall Street where she made a fortune. It's an incredible story, but it is also full of contradictions. She was a trailblazing woman in politics, but later in life, she also turned to the pseudoscience of eugenics. So join us on Journey Through Time and hear a clip from the Victoria Woodhull story at the end of this episode. Mrs. Can I just lean into this a bit more? Because there is a sense of inevitability with Mussolini or with Chavez or with Trump. And so we say you should resist.

But what are people really expected to do? I guess if you talk to Italians in the 20s and 30s, or even you talk to Venezuelans in the 90s, early 2000s, they would say it's not so easy to resist. And that's right. Think of this as a pyramid. At the top of the mirror, a pyramid as a deeply committed, full-time devotees, activists,

people whose life is defined by politics and resisting. Then there is a second layer. that is interested, pays attention, but is less active. And then the silent majority, the base of that pyramid is people that know that there's a lot of strange things are happening, but are not ready to take to the streets. Moises, you very kindly wrote an article for the New European about all these issues a while back, and there's a line, a couple of lines you said in that, I want to just run by you. You said, a talented populist at the helm of a determined campaign of,

polarization can quickly put democratic institutions under considerable pressure. Sometimes the institutions hold, sometimes they do not. So I want to come back to that in the context of whether you think the American institutions can hold. But then you said this, the most unexpected victim of the 3P wave is Britain, yet to recover from the carnival of populism, polarisation and post-truth that led to Brexit. And you talked about Johnson, Boris Johnson being a serial liar and fantasist who undermine the fundamental principle of UK constitution that if you lie in Parliament, you have to

resign. Did you take hope from the fact that Johnson eventually, albeit over something else, did get forced out, or do you think the very fact that he got there in the first place underlines how weak our institutions are? So both America, can the institutions hold, and the UK, what do you think about us now? Yes, well, I welcome the fact that do you now have the semblance of political leaders that get to work in politics and policy and lesson theater and populist rhetoric. So I welcome that and I think that's good. But I'm still recovering from Brexit. So Latin America, right, banana republics, right?

You know, just pay attention, you know, just replay the sort of things that were happening during the Brexit and stay or go. it was horrible, horrible. No nothing, do nothing, hate everything. They are anti-politics. You know, everything is bad. Nothing works. They are all crooks. So that has worked.

And it has left, of course, a bad kind of political culture where these things are included, their proponents are celebrated, and they don't go away. So, Moses, just one of the things that is in your books is this question, of how populists perform. And a question I had reading your books is, how come, given that these guys are often so bad in government? I mean, Venezuela is an incredible example. I mean, they have really destroyed the country.

But broadly speaking, Donald Trump wasn't that great last time he was in office. How come these populists manage to survive or come back, given that they're not very good of governing? Why didn't they get found out? Because we have a problem with followers. You know, we have a problem with leaders. We have big global problems that are being tackled by leaders that are not up to the game. So we have a leadership problem.

We need better leaders capable of reconciling the multiple demands that are going on, which is so difficult. And you all know, having been in politics, how difficult is to reconcile conflicting forces. But we also have a problem with followership. The world has a problem of followership. The followers, the voters, the people don't do the job. You know, I am not expecting them to be at the top of the pyramid that I describe in which they are devoted full-time to all to this.

But I do expect them to go to the Internet and click twice. If they like somebody, you know, okay, check it out. They will not kill you to just go to the Internet and find out who is this person you're voting or you're enthusiastic. Ask any of the followers of Donald. Trump about some of the legal cases, they know nothing. And that's, there is plenty there to look at for a second and decide if you feel well being part of that coterie. So that issue of political education or the lack thereof, and I think there's been a deliberate sort of undermining of that

more elevated approach to politics. But you, the last book that I view was, what's happening to us, but you basically said what's happening to us is that we don't know what's happening. So even if you're at the top of the pyramid, you're kind of confused about what's going on. What's your take on how even the people at the top of the pyramid should be dealing with, should be managing the what has happened to our politics and to our leaders? I'm always very careful not to say that this is the first time that anything has happened. A lot of what's happening we have already seen experience, live through, etc. But I do believe that there is a lot of new going on here, that we don't understand. We know it's going to hit us, our companies, our countries, our governments, our families, our jobs, our culture.

We know it's going to hit us and it's going to change profoundly some important things. But we don't know when and we don't know how. I'm thinking, for example, the impact of artificial intelligence. We don't know this is huge, which is civilizational, this is not one more software. this is something that is going to deeply, profoundly alter society as we have known in. And responding to that, other things, I don't know. Every week there is a new example of kinds of things, and artificial intelligence is creating both very good and fantastic,

the generation of no treatments, new medical procedures, the media, education, health, and so there's fantastic things. and there's horrible things that are happening, and they coexist and are quite a very, very fast speed. In your understanding of a populist, there are certain features of belief which are interesting to me. So, of course, Donald Trump, on the one hand, he is a kind of media entertainment spectacle guy. But on the other hand, there are certain consistent beliefs that he seems to have held for many years. For example, he, for many years, has talked about loving tariffs. He likes tariffs.

He believes that Americans' allies are basically moochers. He thinks that there's no point really investing in America's allies in Europe and Asia. He thinks that Ukraine is in Putin's sphere of influence. He thinks that these strong leaders are worthy of emulation. Is there a sort of family resemblance between these beliefs? And are they sort of natural parts? of populism? Power.

All of those things that you mentioned contribute to the concentration of power. Every single one that you mentioned is part of that. And yes, he may love tariffs, but he will soon, soon begin to hate them

without being able to say that. And as you know, we just recently started a trade war between the United States, China, Mexico, Canada, and others will follow. Europe will follow. And so he's going to I'm going to hate tariffs because they are important contributors to inflation, but he will

not be able to say it. So what measures will he use to save power? What power retaining tactics can he use to compensate for the damage that inflation will be doing to his credibility? Moises, just quickly, you said something very, very interesting there, that all these different policy trends are about power. Can you unpick that and explain why these apparently different things, why are tariffs about power, why are not caring about your allies about power?

One of the main features of populism is the connection to the other, the third P, which is essentially that you can lie. You can lie all the time and nothing, even if you get caught, nothing happens. So lying is a common denominator for all of these things. They essentially normalized it, made it acceptable. You just laugh of it, but lying is an important pillar of the politics of populism. And post-truth, what I call in the book, the third piece, is. You were explaining also why his tariff policy is about power, why his alliances are about power,

why his belief that Ukraine is in Putin's fear of influence is about power. Why are all these apparently separate things connected to power? Because he has a base that he has to feed. He needs to be the revolutionary. that is protecting you and your family from the attacks of the oligarchs, the Democrats, and so on. He has a machine or gobbles, a lot of these ideas. He needs to be the purveyor of populist news every day. Was that gobbles or gerbils?

Both. You said in your last book, you said that you've got this phrase minilateralism, which is the idea that countries that care, about the same things, wherever they are in the world, should get together and form alliances, that alliances are the only way forward. And you say that countries that work out how to make unnatural alliances will succeed, which sounds great. But then I say to myself, well, the most unnatural alliance in the world right now is Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. Is that not an unnatural alliance? And is that not a deeply alarming one? And it's mini-ilateralism. It's the two of them.

The notion of minilateralism is, you know, in contrast to multilateralism, multilateralism says, let's get the 192 countries, put them in a meeting room, and try to get a unanimous common policy. That hasn't worked. 190 countries debating with all the differences make it impossible. But then if you look at the problems you want to solve, migration, terrorism, drug trafficking, people trafficking, financial inequities, and so on, you will see that the solution, you know, climate change, of course, should be at the top of that list.

The solution to that rests in about five countries. Get five countries together. Get them to do the right thing on climate change, and the rest will follow. Don't try to, you know, create this minilaterally forum of three, four, five countries that will work together. forget about the 192 nation meeting. But Moses, why don't we do this? I mean, if you look at the last UN climate summit, it's an attempt to get 190 countries together.

And then when the G8 meets a week later, it doesn't really talk about climate. So there's this very strange situation where, you know, if you're Australia, for example, and you're a conservative running in Australia, you say, listen, okay, it's true. I have wildfires, I have floods. and it's true that humans are creating climate change, but it's not Australia.

We're, you know, 1% of the problem. The problem is being created by China, the United States, India. So how do you make those countries focus rather than a situation where Denmark and Australia are the people giving the lead? Start by recognizing that a feature of global politics today is that there is a lot of consensus about what needs to be done and a lot of failure on how to do it or acting. Everybody agrees that the war on drugs, for example, needs to be revised. Everybody, closer to home, Latin America, believes that the embargo on Cuba doesn't work. So there is a long list of things that don't work, and for which there is consensus on what is the problem and how it can be solved. Then you agree to go, let's go do this with, you know, happily ahead, go ahead.

And then you discover that nothing happens. So there is a list of difficult problems, but existential problems like climate change, that everybody agrees that things need to be done and then nothing happens. That was the start of your question. All I'm doing is amplifying and saying that that it has become not a bug, but a feature of current global politics. Okay, Moises, my last question in two parts. Give me an example of good minilateralism that we've seen.

seen in recent years. And secondly, give our listeners and viewers something to be hopeful about. One of the surprises, after Putin invaded Ukraine, he created something that people could not believe was happening. And that is that a bunch of European countries got together and acted in ways that were not characteristic of European decision-making. They were superpowers. They didn't know it. And the central point of the country was. power of that was acting together. If they get their act together and coordinate and speed and efficiency and less talks and less speeches and more action and more precise coordination and synchronization and an alliance, you know, alliance, that's minilaterals. That's not a 190

countries. That was a very good example of minilateralism. And it didn't hold for long, but, you know, it may be back now. One of the things that Trump has done is perhaps unify enable politics in Europe to go this way. My final question was this, is many, many of our episodes. We quote you religiously for the three peas. So my question is, will you please explain to an international audience in simple terms, what are your three peas, how they connect, why they matter, and how we can see them evolving around the world?

Populism, polarization and post-truth. Populism has always a very important. existed. It is essentially promising what you know that cannot be delivered, but essentially dividing the nation into the two caste of dishonest oligarchs that takes advantage of the brave, noble people. They embody the Avengers of these things. So they are the protectors of the people, and those are the populists. And then they use polarization that has always existed. And in fact, is a feature of democracy. We want that.

We want polarized. We want debate. We want to see debates that stay within limits and then generate the best possible option and compromise. We want that. But then now it has acquired a potency that didn't have before. Now with all of the digital ways of doing politics of attack, we have a new reality in which polarization has acquired

an unparalleled potency thanks to technology and other features. And one of these features, of course, is post-truth. You don't anymore long, any longer know who to believe, what to believe, who said what, is this true? And now with the deep fakes, artificial intelligence, you really get to this very confusing world. You have no idea who to believe and what to believe. Well, thank you.

Thanks for all your books. Thanks for all your writing. Thanks for all your thinking. And just keep on keeping on. It's all I can say. It was a pleasure. I am very honored that you haven't read my books. And I have a new book coming out in October.

His title is Charlottance. And that tells you everything you need to know about the new book. I can guess who might be in it. Thank you very much, Moses. Bye-bye. Thank you. So, Alistair, Moses, one of your great heroes, you've given us the three P's many times over the last three years.

And we finally got him on the show. what did you think hearing your your hero in practice rather than the book? He was exactly as I expected him to be. Very charming, very erudite, straight-talking, passionate about it all. Do you know the thing that really struck me? Because, of course, I've talked to him on and off for quite a few years. But because I always think of him as Venezuela, I forget that he's one of that eight million who feels that he can't live in Venezuela.

and so he's based in Washington, D.C. But he's got a great take on the world, but I think he's also honest enough to know he doesn't necessarily have all the answers. I like his theme of minilateralism, but he did sort of slightly swerve the question about whether Trump Putin wasn't a really bad example of minilateralism. So he was basically saying towards the end,

look, you know, we know what the problems are, therefore we ought to be able to solve them. But actually, if you have this political breed that sees problems as things to be exploited, rather than resolved, I think that's a problem. Yeah, I mean, I think he is very good, and I think it's probably the most interesting subject of our age. And I think it's really interesting how much Latin Americans are making the running on this,

partly because populism got going there quite early. But I also agree with you that there are things that we're all struggling with, and I'm not sure he's got any better answers to than the rest of us. I mean, we can broadly see where populism came from, which includes 2008 financial crisis, inequality, failures of governments, Iraq, Afghanistan. But there's something else going on, which makes it very, very strange historically. And part of me thinks that must be social media. Because despite all the failures of the governments, they're not quite as extreme as the failures of the government. were in the 1920s and 30s. So I think it's the very, very strange modern culture, age tech.

I kept trying to get into this also in our interview with Michael Wolfe, I really wanted to know, what is it about our culture that makes people like Trump come to the fore? And what does it tell us about us, about our historical moment? And why is it that we find it so difficult to quite believe it. I mean, you pointed this out in some of our interviews. I remember with Michael Wolf, for example, how much the conventional wisdom after Trump lost last time was that he was over and done and that he couldn't make it back. And very, very few people admit to that because few people unlike me have been quite so public in their statements about Trump not winning again. But the fact is I was not quite as much of an outlier as I now appear. I now appear to be the only person in the

entire world who thought Kamala Harris was going to win. But it is, it's interesting. that there are quite a lot, quite a lot of others out there. So what is it you think? And when you think about this and we're deluged in this stuff, are the things that you think about our age, our moment, that makes this possible? So I think social media has been a driver of all this, but not necessarily it's creator.

I think there were trends happening that were, that have been accelerated. I actually do think partly it's been a sense of complacency. We've been doing this podcast now for three years, and I'd love to go back and track when the first time was that I said, I think the real coming battle is between democracy and dictatorship. Social media is seen as a democratizing thing or was seen as a democratizing thing, but we now have one of its most famous proponents, Mr. Musk, talking about entering

the post-democratic era. So I think social media is the driver of this. I don't think it's the creator. Yeah. Well, listen, thank you. I think we can do more of these sort of more thought. I'm trying to look at some of the underlying politics. But my goodness, what a life. I mean, I would have liked to hear more, to be honest. I mean, because he's so sort of intellectual, academic, he didn't really give us as much as I would have liked on Libya and presumably Gaddafi and Chavez and Venezuela.

Yeah, I'd like a bit more there. He clearly has no memory of Libya, though. But that must have been, his parents must have talked about what it must have been like to be a Jew living in Libya when it was all starting to go, you know, quite tits up. I really am looking forward to his next book, though, charlatans. It sort of underlies the fact that he's really good at telling what and who the problems are.

Here they are, the charlatans. It's a great title. I wish I thought of that. It's good. It's everything for the title, isn't it? Right. Well, much love, Alas. So thank you for that.

Bye-bye. Bye. of working its way up the social hierarchy, up the ladder of respectability, because people are desperate, and they will cling to anything. And remember that we're still in an age of great religiosity. And so if kind of traditional Christian messages are not enough consolation, then you might seek something more direct, like trying to speak to a lost loved one. It's also worth saying that historians have pointed out, I think this is really interesting, that in an age where telegraphy had just been invented, you suddenly have telegraphs,

which can send invisible messages across the ether, apparently. Almost magically. Almost magically. And suddenly people can receive them. It's not really that much of a stretch to then start to imagine people receiving messages clairvoyantly. You start to think about telekinesis. You start to think about the idea of invisible movement of messages, invisible transmission. I've never thought about that.

It's a really interesting idea, isn't it? I think it's a really, really smart idea. And it suggests the ways in which other cultural factors, can help influence those kinds of trends. Why would you suddenly believe in spiritualism? Well, if telegraphs, well, why not? Who says it's not possible, right? If you want to hear the full episode,

listen to Journey Through Time wherever you get your podcasts.