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Huey: How many men ever went to a barbecue and would let one man take off the table what's intended for nine-tenths of the people to eat? The only way you'll ever be able to feed the balance of people is to make that man come back and bring back some of that grub he ain't got no business with.

Melissa Harris-Perry: This is The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry, and you're listening here to Huey Long, speaking way back in the 1930s, during some of the harshest years of the Great Depression. Huey Long served as governor of Louisiana. His rhetoric was fiery and plain-spoken and he sounded like the people. He talked to them about the ways that political elites were taking too much and leaving them with too little.

Huey Long was a classic populist. Today, the US is just one among many nations experiencing a renewed rise in populism. This 24-century populism has distinctly autocratic underpinnings.

Just last week, far-right populists and pro-Putin leaders, Viktor Orban in Hungary and Aleksandar Vucic of Serbia, both won reelections in their respective nations. Over the weekend in France's presidential election, far-right challenger Marine Le Pen finished in the top two alongside current president Emmanuel Macron, setting up a runoff election for April 24th.

Like American Southern politician Huey Long 100 years ago, these global leaders appeal to ordinary citizens. They employ rhetoric that speaks directly to their daily economic needs but in reality, these far-right populist leaders govern in a far more autocratic way. In the first three terms of president Viktor Orban, Hungary has instituted more restrictive voting laws and eroded democratic practices.

These actions have prompted the organization for security and cooperation in Europe to send election monitors to Hungary for just the second time in the history of the EU. Orban has also used official government channels to push misinformation campaigns, target school textbooks, and just last year, advanced a largely symbolic referendum called the Child Protection Act, which limits what schools can teach about sexuality and gender.

Did a chill of recognition just run up your spine? Because the similarities between far-right European and US populism are not hard to spot and understanding these trends is critical for democracy across the globe. I'm joined now by David Rothkopf, columnist for The Daily Beast and USA TODAY and host of Deep State Radio podcast. Welcome to The Takeaway, David.

David Rothkopf: Hi, how are you?

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right. Help us to understand the connection between what's happening in Ukraine, the election in Hungary, the election in Serbia, and even what's going on here in the US.

David Rothkopf: For most of the 20 years that Vladimir Putin has been in power, he has had a goal of weakening the west and specifically has chosen the past, wherever possible, of weakening Western democracies. In the case of Ukraine, he sees the democracy there and their increasingly European way of life as a threat, as a sign to his people that there's an alternative to what he is offering them in Russia, and so unable to change it and having a twisted idea of where Ukraine fits in the history of Russia and the relationship with Russia, he's invaded.

In other countries, he has funded operations to promote groups that oppose NATO, that oppose the EU, and that embrace his kind of ethno-nationalist ideology, anti-immigrant, anti-globalization, one that serves his political agenda. In Hungary, the person he's backed, Viktor Orban, just won an electro victory. In Serbia, the person he's backed, the president there, Vucic, has just won reelection. The person he's traditionally backed in France, Marine Le Pen, finished second in yesterday's election and will face President Macron in a runoff on the 24th of April.

Here in the United States, as we know, he intervened in our democracy to try to put his thumb on the scale and get Donald Trump, somebody he saw as opposed to NATO, the European Alliance, and somebody who would weaken the US, as the US president. These are all part of a campaign that's been going on for many years now.

Melissa Harris-Perry: You walked us through a bit-- kind of reminded us here in the US what it means to back a candidate in another nation. Expand that a little bit more, though, relative to these other countries. When you say that these are the candidates that Putin has backed, what does that mean in a tangible sense?

David Rothkopf: It means much the same thing that we saw it mean here in the United States, where the Russians have actively promoted information campaigns and disinformation campaigns that have supported those candidates. They have cultivated a relationship between those candidates and Putin. They have had Russian oligarchs and others who are part of the inner circle of the Russian governing mafia pump money into those campaigns. They've actually funded them.

Le Pen, years ago, received funding from Russia. That caused some controversy for her, and so in this most recent campaign, she received funding from Hungary which, as we know, Viktor Orban is Putin's biggest cheerleader in Europe and so it was one step removed, but it was the same thing, much like what we saw in the United States.

Melissa Harris-Perry: David, help me to understand your point here that Vladimir Putin sees democracy as fundamentally a threat to the alternative governing structures that he's offering, but is there truly a complete inconsistency between autocracy and democracy, or might someone be living in what they understand be a democratic nation and nonetheless be experiencing a more autocratic governance?

David Rothkopf: I don't think there's an inconsistency. First of all, let me say that one of Putin's objections to all these countries is that they're part of an alliance that opposes Putin. He sees NATO, the EU, the North Atlantic relationship as a direct security threat.

Secondly, in terms of democracy, he also sees that as a threat because were his own country to become more democratic, it would, of course, create the opportunity for his opponents to have free speech, to mobilize people in opposition to him and that's an existential threat to his desire to hold on to power for his entire life.

In a democracy, of course, the people get to choose, and in an autocracy, they don't. Now, in Putin's autocracy and in many autocracies, and I think this gets to your point, sometimes autocrats like to create the illusion of democracy, they hold elections, but they're not free and fair. They sometimes have campaigns, but they suppress alternative points of view. Some democracies show very worrying signs of becoming more autocratic and of course, a democracy can transition to a point where it's not truly having free and fair elections.

We see in the United States an effort to exclude certain communities from being able to vote easily, that's an example of it. We see in places like Hungary and in Serbia desire to suppress opposition views and to deny opposition voices access to the media. That's another way that we see autocrats undermining democracy. There are plenty of autocrats in the world who suggest and would like the world to believe that they're living in a democracy, but it's far from the case.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Say a bit more about how illiberalism and ethnonationalism are making steady gains. It's something you wrote about in your most recent Daily Beast column.

David Rothkopf: Illiberalism, which is this tendency towards more authoritarian forms of government and away from forms of government that are based on the idea that people have inalienable rights has gained in the places that we've discussed it. With the rise, for example, of China, as the world's other superpower to the United States, China, of course, has a liberal undemocratic form of government, a very repressive, and is becoming increasingly influential, and in different parts of the world, we've seen sometimes democracy elevate people who then want to shift more in an authoritarian direction, and so two examples of that might be in India Narendra Modi. India's the world's largest democracy, but he is suppressing voices of opposition. He is promoting nationalism, Indian Hindu nationalism, and the two go hand in hand because, very often, the authoritarians like to present the other as a scapegoat, whether it's Uighurs in China or in France, it's immigrants or Islamists.

Another place where we've seen this authoritarian type of leader emerge, who's trying to move things in that direction is Brazil with Jair Bolsonaro. Here you've got the biggest emerging countries in the world. Remember the BRICs, which was Brazil, Russia, India, and China and Brazil, Russia, India, and China are now all heading in a more authoritarian direction, or they are fully arrived there and trying to proselytize that their view, which is anti-globalist, intolerant, and promotes the power of the state over the power of the individual is-- they're trying to promote that as the better approach.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, as a good southerner and as a political scientist, I grew up intellectually with a bit of a training that populism was 'a good'. Maybe not an absolute good, but a Huey Long, every man is the king sense of populism. That to say populism was to encourage exactly the kinds of democratic participatory pushback against the corrupt elites' notion that democracy was presumably founded on. How is it that populism now seems to have this far more illiberal perspective?

David Rothkopf: There's a fine line between listening to everybody in society and trying to reflect their needs and trying to exploit large groups in society to provide political impetus for smaller groups to take control. It comes down to whether you're actually doing what you're doing out of concern for everybody, or whether you're going through the motions in order to maintain power for an elite or an oligarchy, or an individual.

Populism in the South, for a long time, was used to help promote a white supremacist society. American populism today where you've got the mega movement actually doesn't do very much good for the people who are living in rural areas or are in the bottom two-fifths of society who've seen their access to mobility decrease, who've seen most of the gains post the 2008-2009 financial crisis go to the top 10%, and even more of them go to the top 1% of the population.

The populism has actually been used to justify moves that have promoted inequality, and in countries like France, they stir up the fears of the bottom of society that foreigners are coming in and stealing their jobs, and they use that to gain political power, but that political power doesn't often serve the needs of the people who are being exploited.

Melissa Harris-Perry: David Rothkopf is a columnist for the Daily Beast and host of the Deep State Radio Podcast. David, thank you so much for joining us today.

David Rothkopf: My pleasure.

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