Molly, the question again to you, is illiberal democracy, illiberal democracy, the most common and most successful form of government?

So it's not the most common and it's not the most successful, but it's a growing political offer that is telling us that liberalism is no more the only game in town.

It was for decades.

It's no more now.

You have competition, ideological competition arriving from this.

illiberal political offer.

And I think it's a growing one.

Are liberal democracies necessarily autocratic, and do they risk tyranny and fascism, would you say?

I mean, is this part of the problem, the distribution problem? And so, you know, how, what do you do about places like that and, in which you have bad people, and it just doesn't work in this airy-fairy theoretical thing?

No, first, yeah, yeah.

I mean, it's always good to have utopia because it's give you some political imagination of something, how things could be different, but in reality it's not there, right? And so the roadmap to utopia are always the issue.

On the redistribution, I wouldn't mention only the kind of authoritarian leader.

I think all...

I mean, Elon Musk is an example of not redistributing wealth.

[laughs] So I think it's also happening in, in kind of Western, uh, uh, countries where you have really kind of companies that find themself in such a monopolistic situation that they are also contributing not to redistribute wealth.

[laughs]

That would probably be exhibit A. I don't know

Exactly.

And once you have deconstructed social groups and collective and individual identity, you need to rebuild, you need to reconstruct, right? And I think that's the core problem now of liberalism.

It's, it's always promoting deconstruction, always telling us things are relative, things can be discussed, things can be challenged.

But the societies, because we are living in a time of super fast change and really deep social economic stress, people need to feel where do they belong, what is stable, what are their identity, where are they going? And I think liberals have difficulties finding answer to that

What is the third option that you suggest?

So the third option is what I think liberalism is doing, and I don't think that's the good answer.

That's the defensive answer.

But my first question, is Russia fascist?

Yeah, of course, that's one of the big questions I got since I wrote the book on exactly that topic in 2021.

So you see, of course, I won't give you a yes or no answer because it's much more complicated than a purely yes or no.

I think it's really very much dependent on how much you want to define fascism.

And it's a very loaded, heavily loaded terms.

And so there are a lot of ways of kind of interpreting it.

It's one of the versions of far-right ideologies, but you have a large spectrum of far-right ideologies that have family, nation, and religion as the center in a different form of combination.

because there's... core issues with the liberal world order in the eyes of many is it because we've hit sort of multiple problems it's because we've perhaps had a peak and say progressive values progressive cultural values and so on or is there something else that's going on like is this truly a reactionary approach to perhaps the peaking of the liberal world order, to perhaps the peaking of progressivism, etc.