Why is power concentrating in some places while in others it is fragmenting and degrading? In his new book, Moisés Naím argues that the response to this question determines if our future will be more autocratic or democratic.
In The Revenge of Power: How Autocrats Are Reinventing Politics for the 21st Century, Moisés Naím turns to the trends, conditions, technologies and behaviors that are contributing to the concentration of power, and to the clash between those forces that weaken power and those that strengthen it. He concentrates on the three “P”s—populism, polarization, and post-truths. All of which are as old as time, but are combined by today’s autocrats to undermine democratic life in new and frightening ways. Power has not changed. But the way people go about gaining it and using it has been transformed.
Moisés Naím is a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and an internationally syndicated columnist. He served as editor in chief of Foreign Policy, as Venezuela's trade minister, and as executive director of the World Bank. He is the author of the bestselling The End of Power and a novel Two Spies in Caracas.
