The intoxicating power of nostalgia

There is really no shared political ideology, there is no general set of policies, that are common among populists like Vladimir Putin to Donald Trump, or Viktor Orban, or Jair Bolsonaro and so on. What unites them is that they are all nostalgists, that they have mobilized an imagined version of each country's historical past greatness and put that at the core of their political messaging, argues author Peter Pomerantsev in a discussion with Robert Amsterdam. According to Pomerantsev, none of these leaders have any coherent vision of the future that they present to voters, and this absence of any conception of future is a problem deeply rooted in the information wars which have moved from the obscurity of the post-Soviet space into the mainstream of U.S. politics. Pomerantsev's excellent new book, "This Is Not Propaganda," explores these theories and looks at how the manipulation of media, memory, and reality is having a direct personal and social impact on the lives of everyone living in these countries.