By Hugo Burel

Populism, polarization, post-truth. Those three words make up the core of the analysis that the Venezuelan Moisés Naim carries out in his book “The Revenge of the Powerful”, which the Debate label has just launched in bookstores. Naim is a writer and journalist, with a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and winner, in 2011, of the Ortega y Gasset Prize, the most important award in Spanish journalism. Between 1989 and 1990 he was Minister of Development of Venezuela and Director of the Central Bank during the government of Carlos Andrés Pérez. Naim is today one of the leading international analysts at El País in Madrid. This brief summary of his career is enough to point him out as an experienced man with a great academic background.

Reading Naim’s book has been revealing to me in the sense of finding an effective instrument for addressing three issues that, on the surface, seem to appear and function separately. The recipe of «the three P’s» proposed by the author to develop his thesis works for the entire ideological spectrum, from the extreme left to the extreme right. From Trump to Víctor Orbán, through Chávez, Maduro and the ineffable Berlusconi, the range of examples is overwhelming. Naim’s thesis presents a disturbing description of the world we live in and an overwhelming inventory of the threats that besiege democracy.

In the introduction to the book Naim states that all over the world free societies face a new and implacable enemy that has no army or navy, does not come from any country that can be pointed out on a map and is everywhere at once. than in any, because it is not out there, but within societies. Instead of threatening free democracies with destruction from without, as the Nazis and Communists did, the threat is to corrode them from within.

What is this new enemy that threatens freedom, prosperity and even the survival of democratic societies? Naim’s answer is power manifested in a new and evil form. The author contends that at all times there has been one or more forms of political evil, but what is being seen today is a revanchist variant that imitates democracy while undermining it and despising any limit. It seems as if the political power has studied all the methods devised by free societies for centuries to dominate them and then fight back. That is why the author speaks of the revenge of the powerful.

According to Naim, populism, polarization and post-truth are actually strategies. However, something more concrete than organizational principles and grand strategies is needed to achieve power. Today’s autocrats also need psychological, communicative, technological, legal, electoral, financial, and organizational tools and techniques to reassert their power and protect themselves from the forces that limit them. In good romance, the author describes some strategies that operate today in the world wrapped in consistent and effective inputs. In this scenario, Naim asks: “Can democracies survive the attacks of would-be autocrats bent on destroying the checks and balances that limit their power? How? Why is power in some places concentrated while in others it is being divided and degraded? And the most important question: what future does freedom have?

The «P» of the triad of strategies that implement this threat are well known. Populism has been defined in many ways. According to Ernesto Laclau -guru of Kichnerism- for thinkers like the Englishwoman Margaret Canovan, the fact that populism highlights popular sovereignty makes it a privileged expression of democracy. But at the same time, the thinkers Koen Abst and Stefan Rummens see the centrality of the leader and the mystification of the masses as a serious problem that hinders democracy, since it is characterized —following the French philosopher Claude Lefort— as the event that it grants a perpetually empty place to power. In this same sense, as events in the United States and Europe have shown, populism is not inexorably inclined towards any particular ideological tendency, much less towards any economic model. Instead, for Naim, populism must be understood above all as a strategy to obtain and exercise power. Its appeal is versatility: populism as a strategy can be useful in a wide variety of contexts and be compatible with almost any government ideology or none at all.

In relation to polarization, it is a way of referring to the gap that is being talked about more and more today, the puerile distinction between good guys and bad guys or us and them to which the radical left and right tend to appeal. The idea is to divide, separate, polarize and confront. According to Naim, polarization eliminates the possibility of middle-of-the-road solutions and forces everyone and every organization to take sides, on one side or the other. It is, without a doubt, an operation that simplifies reality and offers it in an always binary option without nuances.

When it comes to the third “P”, post-truth, many leaders do not just blatantly lie, but deny the existence of an independent reality that can be verified. Naim notes that the first to use the concept of «post-truth», in a 1992 article, was the Serbian screenwriter and novelist Steve Tesich. The main goal of post-truth is not to accept lies as truth, but to muddy the waters until it is difficult to tell the difference between what is true and what is false. Obviously, networks are the main breeding ground for post-truth.

In a time of political rancor in which the word «hate» is added as an ideological input and when the great stories have fallen or are in crisis, Moisés Naim’s book is a sharp exercise in lucidity to understand the threats to which republican and liberal democracy is exposed. Identifying where the power is today and what it is proposing is essential in order not to be confused by the media noise and false debates. This book should be read by those who still see reality through the sieve of prejudice, dogma or plain and simple political stupidity. No democracy is immune to the strategy of the three Ps and, although Uruguay still seems to be safe from this threat, Naim’s text offers clues to prove that around here we lost our innocence a long time ago.