Hello my name is David Ronson and this is Talking Politics. Today we have a podcast mashup.

We're joined by the Broadcaster and writer Dan Snow who also hosts the number one history podcast.

Dan Snow's history hit and we're going to discuss something we love talking about on Talking Politics.

Can history explain the current state of politics and if so, which history?

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Helen Thompson is with us as well today.

Helen and I talk about this quite a lot on and off this podcast so we have views about which bit of history we should be drawing on and we'll try and cover quite a lot of history if we can.

But Dan, so on your podcast you have every type of historian and most of them I think it's fair to say just love history.

So they're not coming on to kind of explain Trump, they're coming on because they want to talk about medieval kings or whatever.

But there is a strand and it's not just on your podcast obviously there is a strand in contemporary history which is the kind of warnings from history genre,

particularly people who study the first half of the 20th century and they want to say there are obvious parallels whether it's with Trump or with European populism,

maybe what's happening in Hungary or Poland, they hear these kind of dark echoes.

And I guess the claim is that if we miss them there's a risk that history at some level will repeat. Do you buy it?

I'm afraid I do. You are a warning from history. I'm all about warnings from history and I think it's really I spent the 90s listening to things.

What is it? History had finished and there was nothing used to be learned from it because of the because of computers and because of Franco Chiarmour and history had finished.

Now it's great liberal democracy and one and even Russia was democracy and China was sort of joined the WTO and it was all fine.

We all remember that. And then there was a second strand though that was usually right wing military historians spending all their time going.

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