One of the very interesting aspects of what's going on is how extremely different political regimes end up having very similar reactions. And the reactions were quite similar, even though the people reacting were very different. Naím: Those who had power were not just waiting and looking at how their power was being eroded or undermined. You've now had the rise of a countervailing set of forces, precisely to respond to the problems posed by the “end of power.” You call this response the “revenge of power.” Tell us about what that means. Mounk: My sense is that you describe the world very differently today than you did ten years ago. I did recognize in The End of Power nine years ago that that didn't mean that there were not huge pockets of concentrated power, from Goldman Sachs to the Pentagon to the Vatican to the larger culture-but even those were fraying and had more limits than in the past. So the three revolutions were fragmenting and constraining power. The World Values Survey continues to report how very basic fundamental mores-cultural, religious, social-are drastically changing. And the third revolution is what I call the mentality revolution: there were profound changes in values, in attitudes. But if everything moves and borders are porous, and the costs of traveling, connecting, and communicating are almost nil, then that also has a consequence for power. Power often needs a perimeter in which you exercise power, and those in that perimeter respond to your desires. And therefore I added my second revolution: a mobility revolution. And that “more” was not just there, it was very mobile. There was more of everything: more people, of course, but also more nations, more currencies, more guns, more computers, more technology, more transnational criminals and more NGOs. There's a long list of factors that were driving that, which I grouped in three categories that I boldly called “revolutions.” I said that there was a revolution of more. There were forces that were limiting and constraining power, and denying those who had power the possibility of continuing to do whatever they wanted. My observation was that power was failing, fragmenting, and weakening as a result of a variety of forces-including, of course, the internet and social media. And people typically thought about that as a result of the internet and social media-that it was just an internet-driven conversation. Moisés Naím: Because you could see all around how power was fragmenting, disseminating.
Tell us about why you thought, at the time, that we were witnessing the “end of power.” Your sense at the time was that power is becoming easier to win, but harder to keep and harder to wield.
Yascha Mounk: You wrote a really influential book nearly a decade ago called The End of Power.
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