Episode description:

In our free-for-all information ecosystem, the liars have the inside track. It’s much easier to make up outrageous claims about, say, migrants than it is to send reporters into the field and check facts. The more outrage a bogus claim generates and the more often it’s repeated, the more widely it spreads. That’s human nature.

So it’s encouraging to encounter a model that tilts back in favor of truth. Today’s guest Peter Pomerantsev has identified one such model from history in his book How to Win an Information War.

Peter is a British journalist, academic, book author and long-time anti-disinformation warrior. He also co-hosts a podcast at The Atlantic called Autocracy in America. The title tells you all you need to know about what worries Peter these days. Peter and Eric talked about Peter’s book and how its hero, Sefton Delmer, countered Nazi propaganda, and a bunch of contemporary topics including: the insidious way autocrats take power; the lack of public service journalism in the US; and the true source of propaganda’s psychological power.

 

Transcript

Eric (00:01.506)
Peter, welcome to In Reality.

PP (00:04.89)
Thank you for welcoming me to reality.

Eric (00:07.384)
Well, I think you’ve been firmly planted in it. Something that we can’t say about everybody in the world and particularly in the United States at this time. But you’ve come to reality, let’s say, kind of the hard way. You’re born in Ukraine. You’ve written about disinformation for many years now. You’ve seen disinformation up close from the people who are the best at it in the world, the Russians.

And the theme of the podcast you’re doing now with Anne Applebaum, which is called Autocracy in America, Anne being someone who’s also quite familiar with Eastern Europe. The idea behind that podcast is what we’re seeing in the US is chillingly similar to the autocratic capture of places like Russia and Hungary, Belarus, not by coup, but by democratic means with a willing complicity of people who have been manipulated by propaganda to deny reality. So now we have Russians, as you’ve noted, reciting propaganda back to their Ukrainian relatives about the war. And in America, we have QAnon adherents claiming that January 6th was a heroic moment in American history. What is happening here? And how long, how far along are we in the slide towards autocracy?

PP (01:32.834)
Yeah, I wouldn’t I think a useful way of thinking about this is rather than a scale between democracy and autocracy Is to think about it in terms of autocratic practices. Yeah And and and kind of our main our main sort of like conclusion was was that you know, this isn’t about sort of like This or that pernicious presidential candidate But america has its own

long history of autocratic practices. We look to the history of Huey Long, for example, in Louisiana, or the way the IRS has been weaponized over the decades by leaders against their political enemies. It has happened in America. And the vulnerability of it to happen today. And I think the main thing to look into it, rather than seeing sort of like autocratic practices as these kind of like

Eric (02:09.664)
Mm-hmm.

PP (02:31.482)
foreign alien bodies that invade the pristine democratic body politic. What they do is they exacerbate trends that are already there, you know, and definitely that’s what I’ve seen in countries across the world. You know, so in America, you know, the things that we look at is, you know, the, not just propaganda, propaganda is everywhere, but kind of like the weaponization of alternative realities against, you know,

Eric (02:41.666)
Hmm.

PP (02:57.818)
against the people who are most vital for democracies, election officials and so on. That’s been happening now for a while. This targeted attack on the foot soldiers of democratic practices, election officials and the attacks on them by people claiming electoral fraud. And that comes from an environment where there’s really no recourse to the truth in many instances. And then there’s cases of at the local level, at the state level of gerrymandering to an extent where there’s no chance to change local government or state level government and it stops answering the demands of the public and instead you have local leaders who are following very different financial incentives and are listening to lobby groups and financial interests much more than the local population. These things are happening already, they’re already there.

Eric (03:53.474)
Mm-hmm.

PP (03:55.19)
and they’re already soft and they’re already vulnerable. And when you have characters that want to sort of use the state for their personal gain, rather than using it for democratic outcomes, they will take advantage of that. So, I mean, I hate to say it. mean, like, I do think, you know, this sort of dramatic idea that here come the fascists and they will take away our state. That’s not how it works. You you have these vulnerabilities and democracies.

that are becoming less and less responsive to the people, that are creating this sense that they’re not listening to people. And various types of malign actors will then exacerbate that and take advantage of that. So that’s what we’re talking about. wish it’s not a, and that’s what happens in country after country. mean, you mentioned, you know, you mentioned places in Eastern Europe, Orban, Hungary, but Orban is the extreme example in Europe. mean, another example we look at is the previous Polish government, which was voted in, won an election, was voted out. So in a way, democracy survived. can’t say it didn’t become a full dictatorship. But in that time, you know, media freedoms were eroded. The freedom of the justice system was eroded, independent, bureaucratic institutions were eroded. We could look at India under Modi. It’s still the world’s largest democracy. We still think of India as the world’s largest democracy. But so many democratic practices are becoming

Eric (04:53.474)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

PP (05:23.106)
well, not very democratic. So I think we have to get out of our heads this of like, you know, this sort of distinction between here’s good democracy and there’s bad dictatorship and the evil dictators going to come and take over and a coup. That’s not what we’re talking about.

Eric (05:40.013)
One of the things that you’ve mentioned just now about the failure of a recourse to the truth or the maligning of the foot soldiers of democracy, because I am a journalist by upbringing, I think of one of those foot soldiers as the free press. And I think one of your earlier books,

PP (05:43.386)
Thank

PP (05:51.631)
Mm-hmm.

PP (06:01.571)
Hmm.

Eric (06:07.027)
is that the title is a borrows a chilling phrase from the philosopher Hannah Arendt, everything is possible and nothing is true. That sounds to me like the undermining of one kind of foot soldier of democracy, which is the free press commemorated, singled out in the constitution, because I guess the founding fathers recognize the importance of that. What

What’s the process there and to what extent would you say the press has contributed to its own demise?

PP (06:45.562)
so yeah, look, calling the press the enemies of the people is a is an age old tactic that we’ve seen, you know, a century after, you know, since the media has been around. So that’s that’s very worrying, you know. So let’s not let’s not let’s not downplay how worrying that is when we hear when we hear words like that, you know, any kind of ruler that

wants to override democratic practices will attack the press and those that want to hold them accountable. I mean, today, I think what’s very worrying in America is this attack on on disinformation researchers. And weirdly, sort of doesn’t, you know, something we cover in the podcast, the work of Rene de Resta, one of the best researchers on sort of coordinated inauthentic

Eric (07:29.448)
Yes.

PP (07:43.95)
behaviour online and this attack on them, which may well grow, is really, really worrying. I that’s literally an attack on research on people who are trying to weed out online manipulation, often by people who want to practise more online manipulation. So I’d say that in a way that plus the attack on the media generally is highly worrying. But at the same time…

Eric (08:00.62)
Yes.

Eric (08:05.041)
Mm-hmm.

PP (08:13.178)
I find American media very weird. I can say this as a Brit or as European or somebody who’s seen not just there in many places. Look, we like to say, because I mean, I’m still attached to the media. I’m not really a fully fledged journalist, but I do a lot of media work and I work a lot of journalists. We like to say that we are the fourth estate. We represent the people in their…

Eric (08:16.289)
change

PP (08:42.156)
in their sufferings and we try to tell those stories and change something. And the question is, are we? It seems that the media in America is first and foremost about capturing a market share, which means kind of building up an identity which makes its readers feel a certain way.

Eric (09:09.026)
Mm-hmm.

PP (09:11.646)
And that’s fine. But then whose job is it to actually, you know, to actually be responsive to people’s sufferings and injustices? And whose job is it to represent them? That’s one of the roles of the media in every theory of the public sphere. And who will help them be heard?

And, and I’m not sure whose job that is right now. And in that absence, you have political actors who step in and say, I will represent you and everybody at fault for your sufferings is immigrants or the elites or whatever. So you kind of leave the space open to these political actors who will take people’s unhappiness and use it for their own very, very

Eric (09:53.654)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yes.

PP (10:09.908)
narrow political needs. That’s not great. That’s not great. And in Britain and in Europe, we do have a tradition of public service journalism, whose aim is to create a forum for the public to make sure that everybody is heard. That’s very different to the idea of public service media here, where it’s largely just about, you know, doing, you know, the boring stuff that regular media can’t do sort of science education or something. But public interest media

Eric (10:13.944)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

PP (10:38.914)
is about actually creating a public. A public is usually differentiated from the angry mob or something as a space, a forum, an agora, where everybody’s unhappinesses and concerns are addressed, listened to, and then directed towards political change. I’m not sure whose job that is in America. In Britain, we have the BBC who kind of does this, and after Brexit, the BBC.

Eric (11:01.078)
Hmm.

PP (11:06.27)
Realized that it wasn’t representing many people moved offices to the north of England Made this effort to be much more inclusive in Scandinavia. The public broadcast is the same thing So these are very clumsy Reactions, they’re not very well They’re not efficient because they’re still very centered on classic broadcasting. They haven’t really adapted to the social media space But they are a reaction Yeah, they are a reaction and they are sort of

It’s part of the immune system of democracy to kind of adapt to these challenges. And in America, I just don’t understand whose job that is. I just don’t, I keep on waiting for someone to do it. And I know there’s been a bit of a rekindling of local news, but that is one millionth of what needs to be done. And I think what’s interesting about America is actually some of the biggest innovations in how you might approach this come from America, because it is the center of innovation, but it’s completely unclear.

Eric (11:41.782)
Yes.

PP (12:01.54)
about whose job it is to scale it. And I just see everyone looking at each other going, is this your job? The donors all look at each other, are you gonna do this? Are you gonna do this? It has to be done at scale. This isn’t something that can be done in a boutique way. And it’s just really unclear where the immunity is gonna come from. And in the absence of that, you have completely, you have these very cable news,

Eric (12:23.244)
That’s.

PP (12:31.514)
channels which are not, they’re political operations, they’re political warfare operations, very little to do with media in the classic sense, or in sense that I’m talking about, in the sense of a public orientated media. You have now social media which is purely being used as political warfare. And look, that’s normal in democracy, there’s always been pamphleteers and people who treated media as political warfare, that’s fine, that’s part of the

Eric (12:41.58)
this.

PP (13:00.034)
complex ecology of democracy, but what about the other stuff? I just don’t see it anywhere.

Eric (13:05.272)
Well, that’s interesting. It is true that in places with robust public government funded or public funded taxpayer funded media, like the UK, like Germany, trust in the media is much higher than it is in the US and there is less polarization along the media spectrum. Do you think that that’s the model that is needed to restore trust in?

in professional media. has become a of a commonplace in cocktail conversation that the media is biased, whether, you know, whatever you mean by the media, probably the mainstream media, it’s left leaning if you’re looking at the New York Times or the Washington Post, it’s right leaning if you’re looking at Fox, and you can’t believe any of them. And that’s coupled, of course, with the

PP (13:46.519)
Yeah.

Eric (14:03.434)
economic model which is kind of collapsing beneath the feet of the fourth estate and the rise of not-for-profit media. going back to the question of the BBC and the ARD, does that mean that the way forward is that kind of media creation?

PP (14:20.77)
Yeah.

PP (14:24.794)
So look, every culture produces its own way of generating the public sphere. That’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about the creation of a public sphere where everybody’s voices are heard, but where they’re done so in a way that we enter into a genuine democratic debate and interaction, rather than hating each other and living in separate bubbles, which is what’s happening now.

Eric (14:36.472)
Hmm.

Eric (14:41.176)
Mm-hmm.

PP (14:53.59)
No, I think every culture produces its own way of doing this and I don’t think the American way is going to be that For many reasons historically I think in America it is going to be a civic response. I think in america it is going to be Much more much more to do with the amazing tradition of you know local civic organizations the toquevillian tradition the philanthropic tradition, the religious tradition churches have a huge role to play churches weirdly are actually a place where people do come together, my colleague Harkery Han at Harkery Han at at John Hopkins got a really good book about this about how mega churches actually bring people together. So no, I don’t I don’t think the BBC is a very British creation to counterbalance, frankly, the inequities of the British class system.

It’s a bit like we have this health service, which is also there to kind of balance our class system. You we have such huge divisions, the government kind of plays a role in balancing that out and people accept that. But that’s a very British solution. I don’t think the BBC has ever worked when it’s exported. In Germany, it’s much more about the kind of regional public broadcasters and it’s this tradition of the Bavarian public broadcaster and the Prussian, you know, don’t know if there’s a Prussian on, but the Bavarian one is really good. So it’s always going to be rooted in local culture. And there is but the main thing someone has to be doing it. Someone has to be going, okay, there’s all these different inequities, there’s all these different sufferings. How do we bring them into a common conversation where we will hear each other, where there’s no place for for for dehumanizing attitudes, yeah, which is really important, where

Eric (16:45.09)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yes.

PP (16:49.4)
we can all agree what evidence is and where this discussion leads to political change. I what’s so interesting at the moment in America is there’s there’s all these places for rage and dehumanizing language. They don’t always lead to any kind of political change. You know, it’s all very performative. I mean, so much as people accept that actually the president can’t do very much, but let’s at least give ourselves a place to really beat up on the other side.

Eric (17:09.356)
Hmm.

PP (17:19.482)
So we really want to connect it to actual change so so no I think I don’t also I think like the era of top-down Megamedia is probably over isn’t it? You know, it’s it’s definitely not the BBC was something that was Born out of You know the the turbulence of the early 20th century Would it would you create it this way now I don’t think so

Eric (17:30.188)
Hmm.

Eric (17:44.756)
Yeah, I’ll make a case for the need for institutional journalism. And the obvious reflection would be that while single creators on social media seem to enjoy an awful lot of trust from their audiences and are capable of building circulations that are the envy of mainstream media in many cases, but they don’t generate news. They don’t send reporters out to Ukraine. They don’t break news. They don’t do investigations. They basically, these single creators, comment on news that has been generated by the mainstream media while casting themselves as kind of the Davids who will bring you the truth that the Goliaths of institutional media perverts. And so I think that there is, the path forward lies in some compromise between the two. How that will happen, I don’t know. But this is my moment to segue to your latest book of how to the information war. Because in that, and you’re telling the history of Thomas Delmer, who we can describe in just a moment, you lay out a path forward for how media can rebuild trust.

But I’d like to kind of open the door for you to talk about what led you to focus on this British counter propagandist and in particular what you learned about the hold, what he learned and what you learned through him about the hold that Nazi propaganda had on the mind of the German population.

PP (19:37.668)
Yeah, mean, that’s, Seth and Delma, just for those who haven’t read my book yet, it was, yeah, he ran the British kind of like special operations to subvert Nazi propaganda inside Germany and occupied Europe. So he was really focused on the, the whole, the authoritarian propaganda has on people. And, and he was dealing, he was working in a context that was very similar to ours.

in some senses. And one of the main senses was that his despair, that liberal media, in this case, sort of German opposition media and the BBC German service were essentially just, you know, in a liberal bubble. They were preaching about, you know, the dangers to democracy and how bad fascism was. And meanwhile, Hitler had conquered half of Europe. So it was like he was like, no, no, no, if you’re going to if you want to compete, you have to sort of dive into the, as you said, the appeal.

of authoritarian propaganda to evil. And just to be clear, like obviously Nazi propaganda exists in its own category of evil, but Delma really saw the same tendencies in propaganda throughout the 20th century. You the Nazis were an extreme example of something that was in democracies and dictatorships. It was just how authoritarian propaganda works. And it’s got kind of three main parts. One is, you know, you get to

express your most repressed and violent and often unpleasant emotions, anger, sadism, the desire for superiority. Two, in a time of confusion, it gives people a communal identity. So, you know, in a time when old social identities, social classes, types of work, professions, nations, genders were being questioned, as they were in Germany in the 1920s and are now across the world.

It gave you like a common us, you know, all bound in by a conspiratorial propaganda that says us, we, the people, which is a creative concept, yeah, are under threat from them, you know, the Jews, the outsiders, the British, whatever it was. It almost doesn’t matter. What matters is creating us and them. And thirdly, and if the first two are much discussed, frankly,

Eric (21:45.922)
Mm-hmm.

PP (22:01.39)
The third one, and here I do think Delmar is unique, and I think he’s incredibly relevant, is that he saw propaganda and just life-generating in a very theatrical way. In this time of confusion, in this time when people wanted to express all this unpleasant emotion, propaganda gave you an identity and a role to perform in a very personal way.

It gave you a language to use, a uniform to wear. It gave you some attitudes to strike and poses to adopt. So, Delma was fascinated by how at propaganda rallies, people would take on a certain persona and then drop it again. But that persona was highly satisfying because it gave you a common identity, because…

Eric (22:51.596)
Hmm.

PP (22:57.41)
it told you who you were at a time of confusion because it expressed all these emotions. But it was just a role, yeah? And the effect of propagandist was almost like a director who gave people someone to be. But that was also the vulnerability. You could give people a different role to perform, yeah? And that’s what he saw as the essence of his counterpropaganda.

If you could give people a different role to perform that was also satisfying, that also got to express strong emotions, that also gave them a communal identity, but that broke their relationship to the authoritarian leader, then you were in the right sort of space. So the media that he created was very unlike, you know, the BBC or the sort of, you know, pro-democratic opposition media in Germany. It was…

all about disruption, really. It was all about disrupting the relationship between the authoritarian leader and his audience. he created dozens of radio stations, which were full of pornography and anger and suffering and humor and spoke in the language of the ordinary German soldier and the ordinary German working class person, depends who the target audience was. And they were full of these visceral accounts of

of the corruption of Nazi officials. And they were an attempt to, in his words, turn onto the Nazis themselves the layer of slime with which they’d covered the Jews. And they created alternative identities for people, or they tapped into alternative identities, regional identities, religious identities, the identity of the army, actually older identities than the Nazi one. And they…

most interestingly, changed the way people could perform who they were. And, and then here, I think is the most interesting part is all about how can you act in your own self interest? How can you take agency again? How can you be the director of your own life, rather than outsource it to the great, you know, leader?

PP (25:21.882)
So it’s almost like a different type of performance, all about taking back agency, taking back control of your own life. So those were kind of the sort of like the things that he was trying to do and to a lot of success in the sense of around 40 % of German soldiers listened to him, his stations, the Nazi leadership were in kind of anger and disarray, internal SS documents showed there were

Eric (25:50.776)
Mm-hmm.

PP (25:51.738)
You know, they were very concerned about these stations. They’re around the top three stations in Munich. I mean, imagine if today we were able to get 40 % of Russian soldiers to listen to our media or we could compete with Fox News among conservative voters. So I think he definitely showed that you could break through and reach people if you address those concerns of identity, emotion and

Eric (26:01.611)
Mm-hmm.

PP (26:20.888)
and a different type of performance.

Eric (26:23.574)
So it’s, are many parallels that occur to me as I listen to you talk about the role playing. There is certainly a sense among say the January 6th insurgents that they were replaying 1776. think that’s actual kind of meme among them. And that Ashley Babbitt, the person who broke into the Capitol and was shot by a Capitol policeman is a martyr.

PP (26:52.26)
Hmm

Eric (26:54.693)
And that whole narrative is very much a role playing, sort of a make your own adventure kind of thing. so I certainly see the power of that. And of course, right wing media from the days of talk radio has very much been about creating an identity that was in opposition to the people who are the elites who are making your life miserable.

PP (27:04.058)
Totally. Yeah.

Eric (27:23.12)
How do you translate that Dumber’s propaganda techniques to the U.S. to counter the kind of, to create a new reality or at least to bring Americans back to a shared reality?

PP (27:36.794)
Sure. Well, I mean, his, you need more than what Delma did, you know, for the shared reality. Shared reality is a bigger process. Delma is just an expert at that sort of first disruption where you bring people, where you turn them away from the authoritarian alternative reality. you know, there’s always, there’s roles for many things. And, you know, we’re talking about the shared reality. You know, we do have to get.

Eric (27:43.596)
Mm-hmm.

PP (28:06.426)
back to this question of a public media for everyone. But in order to even get to that point, you have to first rupture the relationship between the authoritarian leader and their followers. You’ve got to at least reach them. So Delmar is very good for that first step of reaching them. So I mean, look, again, all these things are there these days. I mean, they’re never in one place. You know, there is a…

PP (28:32.952)
Delmer, when he wasn’t doing counter propaganda, wrote for the British tabloids. And you would want to start off with, well, imagine a media, let’s imagine it, that is full of the anger and the sexual titillation, frankly, of the tabloids. So it’s not the New York Times or the Washington Post.

Eric (28:57.464)
Mm-hmm.

PP (29:02.02)
boringly or maybe or rather in this sort of, you know, very, very elitist way talking about dangerous democracy. is something that is full of anger and sexual energy and so on. So that’s the first thing. You’d be tapping into that. You’d be sort of breaking the monopoly of the far right echo chamber on

on strong emotions. So it would be full of that. Secondly, it would, and it’s not as if American media don’t know how to do that, but it’s sort of in its own place at the moment. You want to unite that with a really targeted, campain-y

Eric (29:47.468)
Mm-hmm.

PP (30:00.408)
directioned investigations, because Delma’s media was actually very, very good at investigating corruption and iniquity and who is really to blame for your suffering. Alexei Navalny is good example of this as well in Russia, sort of creating this activist media that showed the corruption of the Putin elites. I you want to break the cause and effect that right-wing media has created, which basically says all your problems are

Eric (30:12.791)
Mm-hmm.

PP (30:29.818)
because of immigrants or something, you actually show why people suffer the iniquities they face, but not in a kind of theoretical way, but in a very kind of name, shame, expose, direct people’s feeling of injustice towards the people who are actually causing the injustice. So you want that there as well. So it would have, you know,

Eric (30:46.124)
Mm-hmm.

PP (30:56.196)
Thirdly, the language has to be the language that people speak around the issues that they face. Delmer’s media, in remarkable detail and through remarkably complex research methods, could talk about the sufferings of the German soldier on the front. Most of his work was gathering research to be able to tell those stories. Today, we know so much more. We know what people find emotional by doing sentiment analysis online. I mean, it’s so much easier to understand what people really care about.

Eric (31:16.842)
Mm-hmm.

PP (31:26.426)
when you’ve reached them, when you haven’t. And you want to put that together also though, with not just saying, look, here’s all your anger, believe in another type of authoritarian leader. You don’t want to switch out a right-wing authoritarian leader for a left-wing one or one type of populism for another one. Don’t want to have been very against that. You want to combine that with…

really some of the great innovations that we see in America that empower people. So everything from, I don’t know, participatory budget making through to all sorts of media innovations like Harkin, which allow people to tell media which things they most complain about and most unhappy about, and then help develop that into policies. So you want to get out of just like, here’s some anger, here’s a new authoritarian leader to solve it for you.

but actually say, how are we gonna work together to change this? We wanna put that all together. All these things are happening, by the way. There’s all these experiments with what’s known as sort of like media as a social service, engagement media. There’s even a sort of a faculty at the City University of New York that is dedicated to this, yeah? But it’s very, very worthy. It’s very, very worthy and a little bit goody-goody.

Eric (32:46.36)
Mm-hmm.

PP (32:52.484)
But you want to take that, the innovations of that, connect that with tabloid entertainment and sexual energy, and combine that with kind of visceral investigations into the people who are actually responsible for injustice, and with a kind of rebuilding cause and effect, you know, so people can really understand what is keeping them down. And you want to put it together.

Eric (33:21.016)
Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

PP (33:23.69)
All these things exist already. They all exist already. Yeah, but no one puts them together And once you put them together You have a really explosive cocktail In a way british tabloids are not a bad example, you know, Somebody when I talked about this somebody said gorka wasn’t a bad example of this in america. I just wasn’t around for that I don’t know so I can’t I can’t comment on it

Eric (33:27.532)
Mm-hmm.

Eric (33:47.092)
Ha!

PP (33:49.882)
But again, none of this is beyond the realm of possibility at all. But you’ve got to put it together. And that’s what isn’t happening. So put together the understanding what people really care about, the really hard-hitting investigations, the tabloid fun and titillation and energy, and these tools to empower people. And suddenly, you’re in a very, very interesting space.

Eric (33:58.722)
there.

Eric (34:18.082)
This is very, yeah.

PP (34:18.362)
So it’s all doable, all doable.

Eric (34:21.824)
It’s interesting and I was thinking as you were speaking about many different organizations that take a bite of that you mentioned Harkin, there is an organization called Courier News, which is a kind of disguised left wing propaganda local news organization that that turns pink slime that sort of right wing insinuation on its head and does the left wing version.

PP (34:31.034)
Mm-hmm.

Eric (34:50.548)
Local news is another way to do that. You’re starting from a level of trust and camaraderie with your audience that you don’t get with a sort of national cable network. But you’re right, all of them are splintered.

PP (34:58.394)
Mmm.

PP (35:07.108)
But I wouldn’t do, mean, here Delmer, here it’s very important to note something. So Delmer wasn’t interested in creating a different, like left-wing populist movement. That wasn’t his aim. His aim was for people to start thinking for themselves. He really was. I mean, he was doing that because he wanted people to sort of break away from the Nazis. But I think that’s…

Eric (35:19.341)
Mm-hmm.

Eric (35:25.208)
Mm-hmm.

PP (35:33.322)
Mistake frankly swapping in one authoritarian populism for another authoritarian populism is Well firstly whenever left-wing and right-wing populism compete guess which one wins Also because there is no such thing I mean if we’re really gonna get into theories of populism effective populism isn’t left the right wing is just like you know, it just finds enemies and the one that sort of like seeped through with with

Eric (35:46.188)
Mm-hmm.

PP (36:01.85)
nationalism tends to do better. So I don’t think that

I don’t think the solution is a left-wing one. think there’s space for a left-wing one. There should be a right-wing one, a left-wing one. That’s normal. But the real counterbalance is not that. And as long as you’re sublimating your agency to some sort of leader that promises to solve everything for you,

that’s anti-democratic. So I don’t think it’s about like, let’s get rid of one and put in a slightly, let’s get rid of, I don’t know, let’s get rid of Bolsonaro and put in Chávez is not the solution.

Eric (36:36.492)
Yes, yes.

Eric (36:47.702)
Right. I, by the way, I did not mean to malign Courier News. I don’t believe that it’s.

PP (36:52.506)
Yeah, I just don’t know the match I should go and look them up but So so yeah

Eric (36:58.62)
Well, Peter, that is your vision of a solution on the supply side of the information marketplace. Is there a solution on the demand side? People talk about education or civic organizations teaching media literacy. If people were better able to steel themselves against disinformation, would we have a more less polluted, I guess I would say, information environment?
PP (37:25.998)
Yeah, that’s a great question. You’ve got to look at the demand side. You’ve got to understand why people want, why people are seduced and attracted to authoritarian propaganda. So you’ve got to be very, you’ve got to understand that. But at the end of the day, once you’ve understood that, you do then have to think of interventions. So all interventions have to take that into account.

Eric (37:55.862)
Mm-hmm.

PP (37:56.506)
In terms of media literacy, I think that’s just basic civics. I totally agree. I think it’s very But I think one has to be a little bit more Firstly, this is that’s very long-term solution

Eric (38:07.222)
Yes.

PP (38:10.734)
of sort of almost month by month fight for the future of democracy. but if we are going to talk about that, there’s, I do think we have to think quite deeply about it. One is, I think in America, especially the fact that people who design the technology of media have no grounding in

Eric (38:16.536)
Mm-hmm.

PP (38:41.602)
any deep understanding of democratic values, which you can tell by the way tech people throw around words like free speech with absolutely zero understanding of what that means, is really worrying. So I think you really need to build into the science and STEM space the democratic values piece. Yeah, so basically everyone who does computer science to go through like

Eric (38:50.828)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

PP (39:08.57)
basic course in what is liberal democracy, which has, by the way, enabled them to be what they are. Yeah, so they have a debt towards it. Let’s be very clear here. You know, if they’re working in China, they would have a very, very different path. Or in Russia. So liberal democracy is what allows them to express their talents and make a shit ton of money. And they have zero understanding of it. I mean, it’s quite embarrassing. And then scary reading.

Eric (39:16.799)
Mm-hmm. Yes, right.

Yes.

Eric (39:38.829)
Mm-hmm.

PP (39:38.903)
Peter Thiel’s musings and the nature of democracy. That is very, very scary. the fact that the, I suppose we go back to the two cultures and this initial split between the humanities and the sciences, that’s very dangerous. So you’d want to build it into that. And sure, media literacy, analyzing the media environment, but look, you can’t analyze a media environment that is a black box. It’s pointless telling people to be,

Eric (39:43.402)
Yes.

Eric (40:06.168)
Mm-hmm.

PP (40:08.004)
critical about the sort of stuff they see online when we have no idea.

PP (40:16.29)
about the black box of the algorithms. If I cannot understand why, you know, X or Facebook or whatever is showing me one piece of content and not another. If I don’t understand how it’s using my own data to influence me, if I do not understand anything about how my information environment is shaped, how on earth am I meant to criticize it? All I can have is these, you know, feelings, you know, and those feelings go in all sorts of directions. You know, you’ve had…

Eric (40:18.005)
Mm-hmm.

PP (40:42.84)
the right safer for years that they feel they’re being censored online. know, frankly, they should, they have a right to know, you know? And we’re in this sort of festering space where, which breeds cynicism and that breeding of cynicism has, I think, contributed to the narrative that everything is corrupt, everything is rotten, democracy is rigged, therefore we need an authoritarian style leadership to solve it.

Eric (40:50.828)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Eric (41:10.892)
Yes. Yes.

PP (41:11.404)
which is the great danger of where we’re in. So I think it’s unfair throwing things onto people when people don’t have a kind of a shot at making sense of what’s all around us.

Eric (41:23.704)
Well, I think that it is important. The way I would conclude from what you’ve just said is that it’s important to not be a passive consumer of news. You cannot assume that whatever the algorithm serves up to you as news is the news or the only news or the truth. It is simply a delivery in service of a goal created by an engineer or a corporation to

Maximize your engagement and it has nothing, no relation, only coincidental with the actual truth.

PP (42:02.106)

Yes, but I think people have become… Yes, and I think that there’s a deep issue here. One of the things that really worries me in the US and has for many years is this sort of corrosive sense of cynicism, which has grown and grown and grown. And I’ve seen that that’s what made Putinism possible or Orbanism possible. There’s a sense that everything is rotten, everything is corrupt, therefore let’s burn the whole thing down.

Eric (42:21.858)
Yes. Yes.

PP (42:34.294)
And therefore we can vote for people who have criminal convictions, but who cares if the whole system is criminal What does it matter therefore? it’s okay for corruption to be normalized because if the whole thing is corrupt who cares and And that that that cynicism is is deeply worrying I wanted to ask So so so how do we get over that feeling of cynicism, you know, one way is to to just

Eric (42:35.437)
this.

PP (43:04.57)
invest into a strong man leader who will solve everything for you, who will make you feel empowered in this dark and dismal world. And the other one is to actually help people feel that they’re really taking control of their lives. So that’s the competition. When people talk about, what’s the difference between democracy and non-democracy? I think it’s that sense that you, the citizen, can do things. And then I think media have to rethink how do they help.

people do that while remaining, you know, the purveyors of fact based truth and all that lovely stuff. Now that’s very hard for most media. Many media feel it is their job just to be information purveyors. And that’s fine. That media can remain. I think we’ll need a sort of movement in media which thinks about the connection between information and democracy. Yeah.

Eric (43:48.439)
Mm-hmm.

PP (44:04.536)
and does something about it. So again, I’m not saying we should get rid of Reuters or AP or these organizations which see themselves purely as purveyors of a information product, almost like a thing. I do think we’re gonna need a new generation of media. Call this maybe civil society with a media component. I don’t know what you wanna call them. I don’t wanna get too hung up on words, but who do that? Who both?

explain what’s going on and then help people do something about it.

Eric (44:38.584)
One of the earlier guests in reality was the founder of David Bornstein, founder of Solutions Journalism Network, which is certainly an antidote to rampant cynicism.

PP (44:48.024)
Yeah.

PP (44:53.922)
Yeah, totally, totally. just think I think the the and I think he does amazing work and they’ve learned so much. I always get sad when when solutions journalism just becomes like, like one more little folder in this one is one more tab in in in legacy media, when actually it should be a type of media in and of itself. Yeah. Because it’s a whole philosophy.

Eric (45:19.488)
Yes, it should. Yes, it should be much more widely practiced. Yes.

PP (45:24.698)
Well, it’s a whole philosophy that needs to sort of that affects how which information you choose to collect, how you communicate it, how you follow up on it. It’s not just like. It’s it’s has sort of permeate everything and permeates how you do presidential debates, it permeates how you do cartoons, it permeates how you direct your investigations. It’s not like, you know, and here’s another here’s a solutions bit as well. It’s like it’s actually becomes.

the motivator about how you think about everything that you do. And then I think it can really scale to impact. Because at the moment it feels as if it’s just one more type of things when actually it should be a philosophy that motivates everything.

Eric (46:01.074)
Yes.

Eric (46:11.156)
I agree with you and it does, it has a sense that it is just a particular cult within the journalism profession that you, sect, if you will, but it’s not the doctrine.

PP (46:21.69)
I don’t know. Well, sometimes sects, the history of cults and sects is sometimes when they’re based on a great truth, they can take over the whole system.

Eric (46:32.648)
Well, yes, it takes millennia. I’m not sure we have that much time. Peter, let me ask you one last question before I turn you loose to save the world from autocracy. Generally speaking, if you look out forward for the next five years, are you optimistic or pessimistic?

PP (46:57.722)
Yeah, I don’t know if pessimism is optimism with the two poles that I swing between. I swing between anxiety and inspiration. And I would say at the moment I am at the moment I am 40 % anxiety.

30 % inspiration and 20 % shall I just take up gardening? What I will say is that the inspiration is less than the anxiety, but it’s more, it’s more. The anxiety is kind of a low level like, my God. While the inspiration is more like woohoo and the gardening is there.

Eric (47:30.892)
Yeah.

Quickly, what?

Eric (47:46.924)
Yeah.

PP (47:53.144)
And actually, think that it’s the gardening one, which is the most dangerous one, by the way, because that’s the one that makes you go. It’s what the Russians call it, internal immigration, you just give up on the world and you decide to just retire into your private space and paint, paint, you know, paint flowers. And actually, of all the feelings that I have, that’s the one that worries me the most, because that’s perfectly possible. And frankly, these.

Eric (48:02.338)
Yes.

PP (48:22.282)
not quite, you know, these various shades of liberal regimes allow you to do that. You know, they don’t come to you at home. They don’t come into your private life. If you just want to go live your private life and do your private business and just not think about the public good, you can. And I wonder whether that 20 % is the most is the worst one.

Eric (48:28.973)
Yes. Leave us with something from the 30 % of inspiration, something that does inspire you right now.

PP (48:51.33)
Well, it’s funny. I I wrote a, you know, it’s all up for grabs. Well, clearly, I think the main thing is to the courage to say the old has gone, the old set of assumptions around liberal democracy that were born in the post-World War II either that were really built on the memories of the horrors of the rise of totalitarianism, the Holocaust as its great taboo moment.

with all the guardrails around language and types of political behavior that we put in place, we have to admit that it’s gone. I mean, we just have to admit that it’s gone. In that sense, the people who want to disrupt and destroy have done so, but also I think it may have just gone because of time and the memory of that has gone. So we have to admit that’s gone. We’ve got to maybe stop using words like defend democracy. People do not understand what we are defending.

Yeah. So that takes a deep breath. However, a lot of it was.

old, not particularly functional. And the fact that it could be destroyed so easily means that maybe it’s, it had become, it had become like a, like a beautiful piece of clothes that, you know, starts to just come apart in your hands. It’s been washed so many times. The fabric just starts to come apart. It’s your favorite jacket and it was a beautiful jacket. And maybe you got it from your father, but you can just see that the threads are just coming apart and you can’t actually fix it.

You can patch it up, you can put some more patches on it, but you know that it’s gone. We’ve got to remember why it was built in the first place. Before the cant around liberal democracy, no pun intended, why was it there? What were we actually trying to do? So that is we do have to remember.

PP (50:57.824)
In that sense, I’m not saying cast off history, I might go back to the origins. Why did we build these sort of like, you know, why did we come up with the idea of international justice? What we’re trying to achieve? Why did we come up with like the UN, which now does seem so counter to its own impulses? Why were we so precious around these limits around political speech? Why was it taboo to say somebody is vermin?

Because for a lot of people it’s like, you know, what’s the big deal? You just said vermin. It’s just a word. You know, like why did some of us start going?

You just don’t do that. We have to almost remember why we were so insistent on these things. And then we have to face the new and rebuild it all afresh. And that means, well, why did we want media? Why did we think we were the tribunes of the people and the fourth estate? And what does that mean? And we’ve got to start again. And that’s exhilarating. That’s incredibly hard work.

and it’s exhilarating. But yeah, I do think we have to stop. The fact that we’re in this crouch, this defensive crouch, means that we’re trying to defend something that many, people don’t see as worthwhile or worth defending. So that can be exhilarating, you know? People always quote the Yeats poem, The Second Coming, which is…

probably a very good poem, but it’s been repeated so many times. The center cannot hold, know, the, full can cannot hear the full can, you know, what’s that the great lines that the worst are full of passionate intensity and the best are crap, whatever it is that by the, that, that Yates says, everyone quotes that poem. And there’s another poem that Yates has called Lapis Lazuli, which I much prefer, which is all about how

Eric (52:47.948)
Yes.

PP (53:02.666)
things fall apart, you know, everything that was worthwhile and beautiful has to be destroyed. But those that rebuild the new are actually the happiest people, you know, they’re, they’re the ones who get to enjoy the creation of the new. And, know, I was writing a column about Trump the other day, and I’m talking about Trump as a symptom rather than a cause here. And he is a symptom in many ways.

Eric (53:18.956)
Hmm.

Eric (53:32.632)
Mm-hmm.

PP (53:33.326)
and how, you know, what infuriates us who come from the old order about his use of language where, you know, every word is up for negotiation with Trump. Everything he says could mean a million things. What does he mean by build a wall? What does he mean by, I’m going to, you know, end the Russo-Ukrainian war in one day. Everything he says is up for negotiation. You know.

And that cultural moment where all language is up for negotiation is also an exhilarating moment. It means we get to define the new. And we’re just going to have to embrace that. Because there’s no choice.

Eric (54:12.824)
All right.

Eric (54:16.696)
That is a great place to end it with the exhilaration of building something new, which reminds me of another line from Yeats, a terrible beauty is born. So let it happen.

Peter, thank you very much. Thanks for joining us. Peter Pomeretz, if your book is How to Win an Information War and your podcast with Ann Applebaum is Autocracy in America. Thank you for joining us.

PP (54:55.63)
Ciao.

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Created & produced by: Podcast Partners / Published: Dec 5 2024

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