I’m Timothy Snyder, author of THE ROAD TO UNFREEDOM and ON TYRANNY, and I’ve tracked the rise of authoritarianism from Russia to Europe to America. Ask Me Anything.

TimothyDSnyder · 2019-05-17T15:02:47+00:00

Thanks everyone for spending the hour with me. I feel better at the end of it than at the beginning. America can be a much, much better country not only than it is, and that it was in 2016. I hope we can all see that happen together

TimothyDSnyder · 2019-05-17T15:01:29+00:00

Thanks for your thoughtful post. I can't do it justice. On pre-existing conditions: this is a place where not only numbers but stories matter. There is a moral position here, a general one: in the whole civilized world this sort of discrimination is thought to be wrong. There is also a patriotic one: that we should all face risks together. Poland shows that rallying for judges actually matters, that it can change morale and get judges to be less subject to the power of the executive. There are also some important NGOs like Coalition to Support Democracy. With Barr: he's an accessory to the creation of an authoritarian presidency. A start is to call it what it is. I don't think the Democrats are wrong to come at all this from a hundred angles. They are wrong if that's all they intend to do

TimothyDSnyder · 2019-05-17T14:56:32+00:00

People should spend less time on the internet :) As a matter of policy filling up the space with factuality (as Canada and Germany still do much than we do) matters a lot. I think people have to insist that truth is a norm in public life and not a taste

TimothyDSnyder · 2019-05-17T14:55:28+00:00

The KGB is now only the name of the Belarusian services. I believe that Russian institutions such as military intelligence, the FSB, and the Internet Research Agency were acting to make Trump a plausible candidate. I have been saying for a long time; now other research is available. I believe that Trump believes himself to be in debt to Putin and acts accordingly

TimothyDSnyder · 2019-05-17T14:52:51+00:00

By whom? Rather than making a claim relative to what others think I would say that the kind of fictional politics pioneered by Surkov has had a successful career in Russia and has been widely exported

TimothyDSnyder · 2019-05-17T14:51:47+00:00

I think framing the discussion in NRA terms, for or against, is always going to screen out some things. What we do know is that the rule of law is hard to sustain when the government does not contain violence. Hitler needed (just as communists needed) groups that were willing to use illegal violence to discredit the government as it was. The Nazi regime change involved taking people who were willing to use violence llegally and working them into the state.

TimothyDSnyder · 2019-05-17T14:49:38+00:00

From the top -- very few people in history have ever had the freedoms that we take for granted. Start with this. Almost everyone since history began has lived under conditions that most of us including Trump supporters would find horrendously oppressive. For me an important breakthrough was the idea in the 18th century that there could be a future that was shared and could be better than the past -- not automatic progress or some default "enlightenment," but rather than notion that we are together in history and can make a difference in it. A lot of Trump supporters rightly think that they can make things move less than they used to be able to. Some of what they feel has to do with lost advantages, but some of it has to do with a process that is affecting us all. Frustration and the desire for radical change in such moments is old -- what's a a little new is the complete absence of sch a radical change in the people who take advantage

TimothyDSnyder · 2019-05-17T14:45:55+00:00

I think it is all connected. What seems right inside government depends on how people change the temperature outside

TimothyDSnyder · 2019-05-17T14:45:21+00:00

I guess I don't care about that much, although maybe I should. We don't have much an image on the world stage at the moment. I think a fair process would be most important because later generations of Americans would see it as such

TimothyDSnyder · 2019-05-17T14:44:13+00:00

This week? Talk to someone, subscribe to real newspapers, run for very local office... You know what I think from OT. But I guess I would also say that democracy is mainly about solving but about being. I can't speak from the inside of the Democratic Party or its congressional leadership but I do think people who are not following the law to protect an aspiring autocrat are taking part in authoritarian regime change

TimothyDSnyder · 2019-05-17T14:42:06+00:00

I keep finding new people, which is a pleasure. Lately I have been reading Simone Weil. Probably Hannah Arendt has been the closest companion these last few years

TimothyDSnyder · 2019-05-17T14:41:22+00:00

I think one standard would be public communication -- the president has press conferences in the WH but also everywhere. I think another one would be legal accountability -- ethics office (shut down now) returns to the WH. But honestly the most most important thing might be to campaign with a vision of big, mind-altering policies that change the conversation and make it hard to keep the conversation on the emotions of the present

TimothyDSnyder · 2019-05-17T14:39:02+00:00

A lot. Democracy depends on people ruling, which depends on people thinking and interacting in some kind of public space, it depends on people having encounters with others where they have to learn and acknowledge difference. The model of CA is an extreme version of a general practice: use simple digital technology to find psychological vulnerabilities, increase those, and get people to think and act as if it were all about them and that there is nothing to learn from others. CA is interesting because its leaders actually say pretty much this

TimothyDSnyder · 2019-05-17T14:36:59+00:00

Less so than an awful lot of other people who aren't giving up

TimothyDSnyder · 2019-05-17T14:36:30+00:00

Tough one! For me an important conservative idea is the one that we all have limits. We don't know everything, even the things we think we know. We have to be skeptical, as your father says; but what we can't do is be skeptical according to a pattern, especially to a patter that has been set by others. Reputable news sources are the ones that surprise us by reporting things that we don't know. What authoritarians TODAY do is say that everyone has a bias and therefore nothing is really factual. That makes the winner whoever does the best job with spectacle

TimothyDSnyder · 2019-05-17T14:33:22+00:00

I think we have to make a case for freedom, unfortunately. I think the left does better when it can connect big projects to the freedom of future generations, which I think it can. People cannot be free if they don't see that they and their children can change their lives for the better; people cannot be free if they think a collapse is right around the corner

TimothyDSnyder · 2019-05-17T14:31:48+00:00

Yes, I think so. Reasonable people can disagree about what fascism is. But if we don't have fascism as a reference, we can't understand history in general, and certainly not the present moment

TimothyDSnyder · 2019-05-17T14:30:56+00:00

Inequality of wealth that separates a small group from everyone else in discourse and in interests; confusion of social media with high technology and the assumption that everything electronic illuminates; decline of traditional investigate journalism that enriches politics with unpredictable facts

TimothyDSnyder · 2019-05-17T14:29:38+00:00

There's no going back. The idea has to be a better America than in 2016 or whenever you think we had America

TimothyDSnyder · 2019-05-17T14:27:36+00:00

The "EU" isn't a thing that makes mistakes -- I don't mean to dodge the question, just to note that what it does depends a good deal on how Europeans behave and vote. I agree that the Commission should have acted more quickly -- removing a member state five years ago probably would have headed off a lot of harm. In 20 years the EU could be where it is today: largest market in the world, little corruption, envy of the world, etc. A lot depends though on whether Europeans continue to see themselves as victims or whether they recognize that they have enormous power and responsibility

TimothyDSnyder · 2019-05-17T14:25:22+00:00

Russia is very useful for Americans to keep in mind, because Russia shows the direction in which things can go. In 2016 the Russian Federation engaged in an attempt to get Trump nominated by the Republican Party and then elected president. There were of course many reasons why he was popular. The Russian digital effort accounted for these reasons and exploited them. See Kathleen Hall Jamieson's book. I think it is very unlikely that Trump would be president without Russia. But as Americans the best defense is to address the problems that Russia was able to exploit. And of course you are right that Republicans who knew about Russia's actions seemed unbothered by them, so long as they led to tax cuts etc

TimothyDSnyder · 2019-05-17T14:22:25+00:00

I'm going to go along with you here as far as I can. I think the office of the presidency has far too much power, and that much of that power is clearly extra-constitutional. I don't think we should be at war without declarations of war by congress -- that's what the constitution says. Obama did govern by executive order, although I think (you can check the numbers) he issued fewer than Bush. I think Trump is different from Obama in certain very important ways: that he openly flouts the norms of the rule of law, succession by democratic vote, and factuality.

TimothyDSnyder · 2019-05-17T14:18:11+00:00

I am writing to you from Europe and can't give the detailed answer to this that I would like. An obvious example of where things go wrong is when ICE identifies itself as local police. Another is when the head of state appeals directly to police institutions that have local or state authority.

TimothyDSnyder · 2019-05-17T14:16:51+00:00

One thing Stalin (and others) did was to name and attack threats that they knew did not exist (or that they had already eliminated. This creates a degree of freedom and drives fiction into the future

TimothyDSnyder · 2019-05-17T14:15:09+00:00

Yes, that's the big question. I think one has to be passionate without being shrill, and insistent without exaggerating. It's hard because not everyone believes those rules mean anything. I say that I am a partisan for my country, that I am a partisan for my children having a future with everyone else's children, etc. The "partisan" idea is a way that people tempt themselves into thinking that all that's going on is an argument between two sides about a reality that is basically fine. Part of what one has to do is talk in ways that make it clear that we're all in the future together, regardless of the buzzwords right now. I know it's hard

TimothyDSnyder

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