As governments turned their eyes to fostering globalization, they shifted their focus from local issues.

There was also a concomitant growth of loss of power, loss of control, feelings of helplessness at the local level.

Because if you were making stuff locally, which couldn't compete with the workforce in another country, you could be put out of business.

People who had felt left behind got organized by demagogues.

And the demagogue's basic message was, you are the people, you are the land, everything should be yours.

You're being weakened, undermined, and harmed by forces from beyond you, run by the elites who don't care about you.

And you've been left behind, and I'm going to protect you.

Can we ever go back to those good old days of rule-based competition and coordination on major pressing issues, or is that time gone for good? Jonathan Weiner sees it as a challenge.

What is that?

The PEADs, uh, Presidential Emergency Action Documents, were first created during the Eisenhower administration when people realized that if there was a nuclear exchange, it would be of fundamental importance, uh, for continuity of government to keep the US government going.

And that in that situation, you might have a need for the president to just act before courts could approve, before Congress could authorize, but just act to keep the nation together.

Same thing if a cra- if a, uh, meteor, uh, created a giant crater where Washington and New York are today, and they were... are no longer are but were.

That kind of a situation.

Ever since then, [coughs] ever since then, there have been, uh, PEADs, all of which have been secret, uh, each of which has been, um, rewritten as deemed appropriate by each incoming administration to reflect current circumstances.

And at various times, the PEADs were, up until 1971, used to create, uh, as a j- as a justification to create lists of people who would be detained as dangerous, uh, to the United States, uh, in a national emergency.

in the 2020 election.