Timothy Snyder on freedom and democracy

I'm Marty Moskow and welcome to The Connection. John Kelly, President Trump's former chief of staff, told New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt that Trump "falls into the general definition of fascist." Mark Milley, retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who served in the Trump administration, told journalist Bob Woodward that Trump was "fascist to the core." This is really extraordinary coming from members of the military who generally keep their opinions about presidents to themselves. We asked historian Timothy Snyder to join us today on The Connection. He's an authority on fascism, authoritarian governments, and the Holocaust. He says, "Fascism is politics based on emotions that divide us, like fear, on contempt for the rule of law, on obedience and the need for a strong man, on conspiracy theories, lies, spectacle and violence." He wrote a slim book titled "On Tyranny" back in 2017, warning about the threats of 20th century totalitarianism. His new book is titled "On Freedom," where he writes the We Americans tend to see freedom as the right to do as we please, free from government constraints. He argues that a more empowering freedom is the freedom to build and create together. He joins us to talk about the underlying drives for freedom and for fascism. He's a professor of history at Yale University. And Timothy Snyder, nice to have you with us today on The Connection. Glad to be with you. Well, let's begin with fascism, which I described in my introduction taken largely from your description of fascism, excuse me, of fascism. So what is it the root of fascism? What drives a person, a community, even a country to embrace fascism? I think it's important we have this word because it reminds us that there are all kinds of political systems. And as you say, they're based on all kinds of personalities or psychic drives or social situations. Fascism is a response to globalization. Fascism says, okay, this globalization that we're all going through, it's not something complicated according to rules. It's very simple. We can reduce it to conspiracies. Fascism is a response to the complexity of all kind. It says, look, things are not actually so complicated. It's really a matter of us and them. And fascism says about politics, look, this doesn't have to be complicated either. Forget about the institutions, forget about the laws. We'll just have one person who's a special leader, and he's going to represent all of you directly. How much does fear drive fascism? It's essential. It's essential. What fascism generates and then relieves fear, it reacts to real fears, real problems by designating an enemy. And when there isn't actually a real problem, it generates fake crises, and then it blames those also on an enemy. The rhythm of fascism is fear, and then select an enemy. Fear and then select an enemy, and that pattern is addictive. Whether we like it or not, people get used to that. That becomes the pulse of politics. And it's a way of doing things which allows people to rule without ever actually having to address the real problems that everyday people have. On the contrary, fascism could take advantage of those problems, turn those problems into fears precisely by not solving them, and fascists stay in power by simply directing those fears against other people in the same society. I don't want to get caught up on semantics, but nonetheless, as you say, words do matter. If we use the word dictator or authoritarian, can we substitute that for fascist, or is that something else? Fascism is richer and it's more specific. So all fascist leaders are dictators, but not all dictators are fascists. You could certainly have a communist dictator, or you could have a military dictator who doesn't have a fascist ideology behind him. Fascism involves the people too, and this is important. There can't be fascism without people who like the kind of thing that I'm talking about, who want a leader cult, who want to cut through all the simplicities, who prefer to hate their neighbor rather than respecting him. We are part of fascism in a certain way. Like if we believe that our nation is a matter of everyone belonging to the same race, or if we believe that our nation is a matter of defining enemies, as opposed to believing that our nation is a matter of citizens, and that our nation is a matter of inclusion and rights, well, then we're the ones who are bringing the fascism in. So it's important not to limit the fascism to that dictator. Fascism is a phenomenon which includes the people. It has to be. I've always been reluctant to use the word fascism or to call someone a fascist or to call someone like Hitler, but let me just take a couple of things that former President Trump has done and said. He has called for the mass deportation of migrants whom he has called vermin. He has vowed to imprison his American critics whom he calls the enemy within. He's also vowed to shut down media organizations that displease him to use the military to suppress dissent. There is more. Is that the definition of fascist? I would go about this a slightly different way. I mean, there are a lot of folks who, like you, hesitate to use the word, and there are reasons for that. We may not be sure what it means, or we may think it belongs to the past, or we may know that sometimes it's just used as an insult. But what I would point out is that this is coming from the inside. It's coming from Trump himself. Mr. Trump is a product of a certain kind of American history in which it's right to try to exclude people because of their race. It's right to believe that everything is a legal cult. It's right to say that it's all about us and them. Mr. Trump is an authentic American fascist. It's not a matter of making a comparison or even applying a term. He comes from a tradition which he himself understands. It's not something that we're putting on to him. It's just something that he is. If we go back to the general's descriptions, it's not like they're looking for some obscure analytic term. They're saying, "This is what the man is. This is what he is like." When Mr. Trump says, for example, "I want Hitler's generals," that's not us saying Trump is like Hitler. That is Trump saying that Trump wants to be Hitler, that he wants to be in the relationship to his generals, to his army, to his society, that Hitler was. Yes is the short answer, but the long answer is it's about Trump. It's about simply paying attention to what Trump himself says and how he comports himself. You have called him charismatic. You've called him smart. You say he knows exactly what he's doing. You even called him, and I'm quoting here, "a compelling saydo populist." Expand on that. I think it's important to recognize that because someone has a different talent set than the one that you expect, that doesn't mean that he's stupid. That's a mistake that people made with Mussolini. It's a mistake that people made with Hitler, and it's a mistake that people made with Trump. Trump is quite intelligent, and he's quite charismatic in his own way. By saydo populism, I mean a politics of pain. In a normal democratic system, we would say, "Okay, we all have interests. We want to have our interests represented. We all want to do better. We can probably all do better together." In an authoritarian regime or in a fascist regime, you could govern a different way. You can say, "Actually, the government can't do much for us, and that is very much Trump and J.D. Vance, especially Vance. They're not making promises about the government doing things that are at all believable." What they're saying is, "Look, if you're on our side, you're going to suffer less, and we can sit here and enjoy the suffering of others." That's what the deportations are about. They're about causing pain. Deportation isn't going to solve any problems. It's going to create new problems, but it's about causing pain. The whole notion of building walls. It's about causing pain, or it's about imagining pain. In sadopopulism, what you do is you end up hurting everybody because the government doesn't do the things that it should do for everybody, but you hurt some people more than others, and the ones who are hurt less get to think, "I'm on the right side. I get to enjoy this spectacle of pain." Is there a connection between fascism and hypermasculinity? Well, there's a very nice book by my colleague Ruth Binghiatt about strongmen, where she does the masculinity thing probably better than I can. What I would say is that fascism rests on the fiction, which tends to be a masculine fiction, that someone who doesn't apparently have any ability to do anything, in fact, can do everything. It's the extreme of a certain kind of masculine fantasy. If you think about Mr. Trump, can he do multiplication? No. Can he change attire? No. Can he run a company? No. He's bankrupted a whole bunch of them. He doesn't actually have any skills that one could name except the ability to persuade people that he can do everything. That is a certain kind of masculine pose. You kind of stand there, and in your charisma, you end up getting everyone running around you doing all of the work, and the great illusion is that you're the one who's doing it. It's certainly a kind of masculine fantasy. The way that it works in this country, I'm afraid, is that Mr. Trump does very well among men, especially among white men. I think he's appealing to a sense that it should somehow be easier for everybody. The reason this works is that it's easy for him. The guy just stands up, and he tells tall tales, and he gets lots of support. Men can think, "Wait, it could be easier for all of us, too." And of course, the reality is, if you elect somebody like that, he doesn't actually know how to do anything except persuade you that he knows how to do things. And therefore, if you elect him, things are going to stop working, and your life is in fact going to be a lot harder. We could do a whole hour on this, but he said very recently, "I'll protect women." And then he added, "Whether they like it or not." Yeah. I mean, that's the threat of causing pain, right? So male supporters know at some level, well, things aren't going to go that well for us, but they'll go worse for the women, that's for sure, and we can look forward to that. Fascism is about pain. It's about developing a taste for pain. It's about thinking, okay, people don't admit it necessarily right off the bat, but Trump permits this idea that it's okay to hurt other people. It's okay to watch people suffer. It's okay to do things to them that they don't want to have done. Let me ask you, and I'm looking at the clock here, but let me ask you about, and I'm talking more about government enablers or even business interests, broadly speaking, in fascism, taking business interests, billionaires, millionaires, what is their interest in supporting and encouraging fascism? What do they get out of it? It generally doesn't work out well for them, and this is one of the lessons of the 20th century precisely. I mean, there was a whole set of lessons about Hitler's takeover in Germany, and one of them was precisely this, that businesses didn't quite understand what it meant. They thought that it was going to mean suppressing the labor unions and suppressing democracy, and they didn't mind that that much. They wanted labor unions suppressed, but in the end, it meant most of them lost their authority, and only a few chosen ones did well, which is the kind of thing that Trump is promising. In the US, I think it's not so much a matter of business people wanting fascism as business people sometimes, like in the case of The Washington Post and LA Times, just being cowards on an unbelievable scale, thereby inviting fascism in a way which it doesn't have to be invited, and also businessmen wanting to wait till the last minute before doing anything because they don't want to alienate people, but if you wait till the last minute, sometimes that's a little bit too late. On the bright side, we do know that in times of crisis, when a democracy is being stressed, the attitude of business people can matter a lot positively, as I would point out it did in 2020. Well, I'll tell you what, let's take a very short break and then we'll get back to our conversation. Yes, we are talking about fascism, we will be talking about freedom as well, and again, our guest is Timothy Snyder, history professor at Yale University. Much more after this short break, we'll be right back. You're listening to The Connection here on WHYY in Philadelphia. I'm Marty Moscovain, talking with historian Timothy Snyder about the threats of authoritarianism to a free society. He's got a new book. It's titled On Freedom, and that's a follow-up to a previous book titled On Tyranny. Timothy, let me just quote from your book on tyranny, and this is a 20 lessons from the 20th century. The first one is, "Do not obey in advance," and this is picking up on what you were saying right before the break. You write, "Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given." In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do. I'm thinking about Jeff Bezos and what he did at the Washington Post, which was to withhold an endorsement of Kamala Harris for president. Flesh this out for us, the idea of obeying in advance. Yeah, thank you. When we think about authoritarian rule or a dictatorship, we imagine, here's the evil person in the uniform and the jackboots, and somehow he suddenly has all the power. That's not how it works. There have to be a lot of events along the way, and one of the most important events is when people see him on the rise and they start to concede, whether consciously or subconsciously or unconsciously, they think, "Okay, I better make some adaptations so I'll be safe later on." But when you do that, what you're doing is you're helping the rise. You are now part of the dictator's movement. You're doing things which make his rise to power more likely, and also, since you've already made the psychological move of conceding in advance, you're going to keep conceding once you start going down that road. So this is anticipatory obedience, and sadly, it is exactly what Bezos did at the Washington Post. They, I mean, flagrantly, obviously, he did the exact thing that the 20th century teaches us that you're not supposed to do. Let me ask you, too, whether we have a kind of a, if I can put it this way, history channel view of fascism, that we miss all the little things that led up to Kristallnacht or the death camps or the creation of the ghettos, that the thousands of little things that led up to that we were unaware of, and whether you see that as a threat today. That's a wonderful question, because I think a way that we dismiss all of this is we say, well, there are no death camps or there is no Auschwitz, there are no ghettos right now. But the ghettos and the death camps, Auschwitz, these are things which happen in 1941, 1942, 1943. These are things that happen a decade into the process. The things that historians of Germany try to teach us are the things that were at the beginning, like precisely anticipatory obedience, which is actually coming from a German word, Kras Islande Gehorsam. They have that concept because they have that experience. They know that at the beginning, there are things that you cannot do, like teach a leader that he's beyond institutions, like tolerate lawlessness, like get in the habit of thinking of politics as a politics of us and them. These are all tendencies which we've allowed to go pretty far in our country without noticing where they could be heading. I'm thinking of Tony Hinchcliff at the rally on Sunday at Madison Square Garden. He's apparently a comedian and he talked about the floating island of garbage, referring to Puerto Rico. Let me play a clip of former President Trump speaking in a rally in Arizona last week where he compared the United States to a garbage can, and this is when he was talking about illegal immigration. Let's give it a listen. We're a dumping ground. We're like a garbage can for the world. That's what's happened. That's what's happened. We're like a garbage can. You know, it's the first time I've ever said that, and every time I come up and talk about what they've done to our country, I get angry and angry. First time I've ever said garbage can, but you know what, it's a very accurate description. Let me quote Ronald Reagan, and this was something he said in 1981, statement on the United States immigration and refugee policy. Then President Reagan said, "Our nation is a nation of immigrants. More than any other country, our strength comes from our own immigrant heritage and our capacity to welcome those from other lands. No free and prosperous nation can by itself accommodate all these who seek a better life or flee persecution." We must share this responsibility with other countries, and it's just such a shocking contrast between then President Reagan and former President Donald Trump, who obviously wants to be President of the United States again. It is really about the us and them. Of course, immigration is a political issue. It can be a policy issue. You can have various approaches to it, but they don't want to solve it as a policy issue. Mr. Trump personally blocked a law which would have changed our immigration policy six months ago so we could run on the issue today. The issue isn't really immigration as such. The issue is deportation. It's the fantasy that the enemy is within, and I'm quoting Mr. Trump now, and that's fascist language. It's the fantasy that the enemy is within and that we can purge ourselves of that enemy. We can cleanse ourselves and make ourselves no longer a garbage can, again using his term. That fantasy of purity is pure fascist language. The fantasy that the way you become pure is by using mass violence is also a purely fascist way of seeing the world. He's inviting us into a politics of us and them where we're supposed to see other people again to quote him as garbage or as vermin, and then we're supposed to get involved in a deportation practice, and we would be involved because it's going to involve thousands of people being deputized. It's going to involve millions of people denouncing their neighbors. We're supposed to get involved in that and think of that as the normal way of doing politics, and in that way we take steps along with this aspiring tyrant to create something which is sadly much more like a fascist regime. And the use of language like vermin or disease, is that fascist language? Yeah, and the thing is, of course, so yes, it is, that is, I mean, I hesitate to say this what I'm about to say, but that is in fact exactly how Hitler spoke. Hitler did talk about vermin and disease. He did turn the people he regarded as non-human or subhuman into beasts or bacteria or trash. That is exactly how Hitler talked, but more important than this is that Trump knows that that is how Hitler talked. We underestimate him. This is not an accident. He's not coming across these things and just picking them up like, "Oh, it's like here it's an accident. I never thought of saying garbage can before." He's been saying these kinds of things for a long time, and he knows how they work and he knows where it's going. Even the whole Madison Square Garden rally, that's a reference to an American Nazi rally, and he knows it. That's not something that people are putting on him or a comparison I'm making. He knew what he was doing when he planned to have a rally in which all of these horrifying xenophobic and fascist things were going to be said, precisely in Madison Square Garden, because that is where the biggest and most infamous rally of American Nazis was ever held. And he knows that. It's a reference. He thinks himself as being part of that. Let me play a clip from that rally, and this is Stephen Miller. He's a Trump campaign advisor at Madison Square Garden talking about this anti-immigrant message coming from former President Trump. Who's going to stand up and say, "The cartels are gone. The criminal migrants are gone. The gangs are gone. America is for Americans and Americans only." And you referenced what happened at Madison Square Garden, I think it was something like 85 years ago. The National Secretary James Wheeler Hills was quoted as saying that the group's mandate was to, quote, "Restore America to the true Americans." We are a country of immigrants, of people that were not Americans who came here, that did not speak English that came here. Walk us through the kind of thinking that goes into that. Yeah, of course, it's contradictory because purity is always a fantasy. I mean, Elon Musk, he is himself an illegal immigrant to the United States. Trump's current wife is an immigrant on a very questionable status. Trump is descended from someone who had to flee Germany because he refused to decline to perform military service and therefore ended up in the United States. If we're not descendants of natives or descendants of slaves, then we are, in fact, all descendants of immigrants. But purity is always imaginary. That's why it works because none of us really is pure. The way it works is that the people on our side are pure and the people on the other side are impure. And that means that even if you were on the, quote, unquote, "right side," you always have to worry, "Am I pure enough? Am I, is it clear enough that I'm on the right side?" And that anxiety makes you denounce the people on the other side. That anxiety draws you into using this terrible language about them. That anxiety draws you into denouncing them and taking part in things like deportation. It's precisely because the purity and purity thing is not objective but political that it works. Let me just quickly reintroduce you. That's Timothy Snyder, our guest today on The Connection. He's the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University, also a fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. He's the author of a number of books including On Tyranny and a brand new book titled On Freedom. Doing my homework for the show, I ran across this quote from psychologist Ralo May, and I think it really speaks to what we're talking about. And he wrote a book from a titled Man's Search for Himself. And he wrote, "When a nation is psychologically and spiritually empty, totalitarianism comes in to fill the vacuum, and the people sell their freedom as a necessity for getting rid of the anxiety which is too great to bear any longer." You're a historian, not a psychologist. Does that make sense to you? Well, all these things come together. I mean, I think that the big thinker on this is Hannah Arendt, who talked about the difference between solitude and loneliness and how when we're used to doing things together, then it's okay. Then solitude is fine. When we are alienated from one another, for example, when we spend all of our time in front of screens getting angry, which is the Great American pastime now, then we're not solitary. We're lonely. And when we're lonely, then we can be mobilized into a mob. And something like that has happened. Freedom is hard, but it's impossible to do alone. And our whole American image of the free person on top of the mountaintop all by himself, it's very misleading. How did he get to the top of the mountaintop? Who equipped him? Who taught him decline? Freedom is something that you have to do together. And if leaders or machines or whatever can get us to the point where we're alone and anxious, then it's not freedom that we're going to want. What we're going to call freedom is submission to this sort of leader figure, which is where we are now. We talk about American exceptionalism, whether it's true or not. But what do you say to people who say, look, we're America, fascism just can't happen in this country. Are they right? Are they wrong? I mean, they're taking an action which makes fascism more likely. I mean, that's like saying, I can never catch measles. If you think something which is incorrect about yourself, then you're making that thing more likely. It's like saying, I can never get hit by a car. If you seriously believe that, you're much more likely to get hit by a car because you're going to walk out in the middle of the street. That's what American exceptionalism amounts to in this form. When you say, oh, we're invulnerable because we're Americans, that just means that after you become fascist, you're going to say, OK, we're fascist, but it's a better sort of fascism because it's American fascism. I just want to say that all American exceptionalism is always counterproductive because it always invites the very thing which you say can't happen. It makes it more likely. Historically speaking, of course, it's also incorrect. We've had plenty of fascist currents in our society. We have many of the ingredients of fascism in our history, as Mr. Trump knows very well and he's trying to build on them. The idea that black people are inferior is a classic element on which you can build a fascist regime. In the 1920s and 1930s, we had a number of prominent people with fascist ideas. We had a good run of the welfare state plus the Second World War, thanks to Roosevelt, which you can think of as a long anti-fascist period. That's great, but it was working against something which it defeated around the world and also at home. That doesn't mean that it went away forever. There are a lot of foundations in the US on which you could build something like fascism. By the way, just the third point, the whole notion that your nation is so great that bad things can't happen to it, that in itself is very suspicious because when you are in a fascist regime, you never say, "Oh, hey, we're in a fascist regime just like any other." You say, "Oh, this is wonderful. What's happened to us?" Let me ask you about misinformation and disinformation and even lying. You write in your new book, A Big Lie, "It's more than the absence of truth and the presence of deception. It is the power to shape our minds and therefore society's work. A big lie can bring down a whole country." I think with lies and misinformation, we just lose track of what is true or what is not. I find this true even with myself. I have to Google things all the time because I cannot remember. I remember a lot of things that are true and not true, but there are certain things that just seem to slip through my fingers. To put it another way, freedom depends on factuality. Freedom depends on our belief that there are truths out there and it believes in our habit of looking for facts. It depends on reporters and other people whose job it is to find those facts. It depends on newspapers and subscriptions to newspapers. Factuality is like the richness and the texture. It's what gives us a place to stand. It creates the traction on which we can walk as citizens, essentially. If you take away the facts, as we have done, most American counties no longer have a reporter in them. If you try to assault the very idea that there are facts which Trump and other politicians do, like that there are alternative facts or my factor is good as your facts, if you take away facts or the belief in facts, you're opening the way for spectacle. You're saying, okay, fine, whoever has the best story who has the brightest spotlight who has the loudest megaphone, then they win and that opens the door to someone like Mr. Trump. It was very skillful in an environment like that. The way you fill the vacuum of factuality is with a big lie. You tell a lie which is so big that your supporters won't believe that you would deceive them on that scale, which, by the way, was Hitler's advice in Mein Kampf. You do it that way. That story, because it's such a big lie, it envelops all of reality and the people who bought into it, it's painful for them once they're inside it to admit that they were deceived on such a scale. They prefer to think that everyone else is mistaken, everyone else is a liar, everyone else is the enemy, and to adjust everything else to fit that big lie. The big lie that a lot of Americans are in right now is that Trump won in 2020, and we're seeing the consequences of that. Again, we're about a minute and a half from our second break here, but let me just throw something quickly at you. You say that fascist states really don't last. In a sense, they betray their followers because the leaders will fall, they'll fail. People end up being worse off, people will have regrets, we'll be living someone else's story, and both us and them will suffer. Again, Timothy Snyder, just flesh that out for us. With the Constitution, you can make things better. If you can vote for a new leader, you've got a chance. Open institutions, you can always correct yourself, but once you put everything, once you embody all of your hopes in one person, that person is going to disappoint you. The story's not going to end happily, it never does. As I mentioned, I was driving around, and I saw a banner hanging on someone's porch and said, "Donald Trump is right about everything, and I can't get that out of my head." That is what fascists think, that we don't have to investigate. The truth is the person. Well, let's take that short break, and then we'll get back to our conversation. Talking with Timothy Snyder, and we've been spending most of the show talking about fascism. We'll be talking about freedom after this very short break, and he's got a new book. It's titled "On Freedom," and again, he's a professor of history at Yale University, and a fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. Much more after the short break, we'll be right back. You're listening to The Connection here on WKYY in Philadelphia. I'm Marty Moskowane, talking with historian Timothy Snyder. In his new book titled, "On Freedom," he asks Americans to expand our understanding of liberty by embracing a more inclusive freedom that connects us rather than divides us, that builds bridges and not barriers. Timothy Snyder, you described in writing this new book, you said, "If I can describe the worst, can I not describe the best?" We've been spending most of the time talking about fascism, so I do want to give freedom. The difference between freedom from and freedom to, which sounds semantic, but it's more than that. Help us understand what you're trying to say here. Yeah. It's okay that we're talking about fascism and freedom together because I think things are either going to get a lot better or they're going to get a lot worse. What's not going to happen is the status quo. That's not going to continue. In America, we tend to think that freedom is just freedom from. Freedom from oppression, freedom then becomes about the barrier that blocks us or the government that's somehow in our way. That's simple and elegant and appealing, but it's only a step in the right direction because once the government's not oppressing you or the barrier is down, there's still the fundamental question for freedom which remains, which is, who are you? What do you want? What do you value? How do you want to change the world? Freedom has to be not just about removing the barriers, but about creating the conditions in which we can become the kind of people who can ask those questions, care about things, admit that we care about things, and work together to create a situation in which children can grow up to become free people in the United States. The from and the to invites us into a much bigger notion of what freedom actually is. How do you create those conditions with the political system that we have? I think the political system that we have only makes sense to us because we're in the wrong notion of freedom. If you think that freedom is just freedom from and that government is the problem, then you find yourself unable to accept or endorse actions by the government which would in fact make you more free. So to take an easy example, very low hanging fruit, if the federal government said we should all have seven weeks of vacation every year, we would be a lot freer. And the only reason that seems wrong to us somehow is we think, well, wait, that would be the government acting, but the government can act to make you more free. The whole point is to create a positive cycle where government is legitimated by the things it does that make us more free and that's possible. If we think in terms of negative freedom, we shrink the government down so that going back to Elon Musk, the monopolies and the oligarchs end up governing us, which doesn't make us more free. It makes us less free. So the right idea can inform and enliven the political system thereby making us more free. Thinking of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, though, that that has brought government into women's lives and in ways that we haven't seen in generations, how do you see then the role of government? Yeah, I mean, the body is really important. I appreciate you're bringing that up because it's something like overturning Roe v. Wade depends upon not acknowledging women's positions, not acknowledging the way that women have to go through life, not acknowledging the actual situations in which they find themselves. And that's negative freedom is like that because negative freedom involves an abstract situation where it's me against the world, me against the government. It never is about birth. It's never about illness. It's never about the things that really matter. The right way to think about freedom is to say, okay, we all start as babies. We all face these traumas that have to do with our bodies. What can we do together to make those traumas as small as possible? What can we do together to make life as easy as possible, as predictable as possible? And so, of course, you can say the government shouldn't intervene in women's bodies that way. Absolutely. But that's a first step towards saying what government should be doing is making sure that everyone has healthcare for those kinds of situations and for other kinds of situations so that all of us can be less anxious and all of us can live more easily together and more freely together. How though do you get, I guess, money out of government? I mean, very practical here, but so much of our tax laws and our government is underwritten by wealthy people, by connected people, people with vested interests for their own well-being and not for the common good. Yeah, and that's normal and natural, and everyone since Aristotle has warned about it, but we have allowed ourselves to be brought into that situation by the wrong notion of freedom. If you roll back the clock to 1979, things were very different. We chose this tax system on the basis of the idea that small government makes everybody more free. It turns out that small government means a few hundred people having as much wealth as everybody else in the country. So that was a mistake, wrong idea of freedom, the right idea of freedom, which would actually be closer to what we were working with from the 1940s through the 1970s, would say something like, "It's the government's job to make sure that as many Americans as possible have the conditions in which they can grow up to be free." And if we had that idea, then we wouldn't be stopped from taxing billionaires. And frankly, that's where the problem is. It's not that we don't have enough money, it's that we don't tax the people who have the money who could be taxed at much higher rates without noticing, wouldn't change their lives at all, but it would change the lives of 300 million Americans and for the better. Ronald, I'm paraphrasing here, and I'm going to butcher it a little bit, but Ronald Reagan famously said, "Government is the problem." And I saw a recent poll, I think it was New York Times, Sienna polls, saying that almost half, maybe even more than half of the country just feels like the government doesn't work. I mean, how do you build back confidence to say the government can work for people? Yeah. I mean, that illustrates how this politics of dysfunctionality functions. You say, "Government can't do anything," and then you starve the government of resources, and then it really can't do anything. And then people say, "Oh, look, government can't do anything." The way to build back up from there is to have a different idea of freedom, recognize we can only be free by working together, understand that that means taxing some people and paying for some programs, and then you start to build up virtuous cycles where you realize, "Oh, actually, government can do certain things for us. Government does actually work." And so we've fallen very far on a certain logic, and we have to swap out that logic for one which allows us to rise up again. And how do you connect people that see, especially during a political season, and one such as this, where people really view each other as if not the enemy, certainly something close to that? Well, I mean, there's one thing that many of us have right, and that is the word freedom. I think that is, in fact, the one place where you can start an American conversation. People mean different things by it, but you can reconcile a lot of those things. I'm not saying you can reconcile everybody, but think of how we've been talking about freedom. I've been talking about freedom as the good things in life, in other words, the virtues. That's a conservative position that there are virtues and that they matter. But I've also been saying there are a lot of different virtues, and you have to combine them and work your way through them. That's a liberal position, a pluralist position. And I've also been saying, in order to become the kind of person who can acknowledge virtues and balance them, we have to have institutions of the welfare state. That's a socialist position or a social democratic position. You need all three of those positions to get to a land of the free. You need a little bit from what seem to be opposing or incompatible positions. But in fact, they're not incompatible. In fact, they only work when you try to bring them together. And I think freedom is the only way, the only heading under which you can bring them together. You have spent a fair amount of time in Ukraine during the war, and you begin your book by a conversation that you had with a woman who was surrounded by the devastation of this war, and she talked about deoccupation. She didn't talk about liberation. She talked about deoccupation. And you write, "Freedom is not just an absence of evil, but a presence of good." And deoccupation, I wasn't sure what that meant when she first said it. It's really helpful to be confronted with the extremes, because the extremes can bring you towards common sense. Maria's entire village had been destroyed. Every single house had been destroyed. She was living in a corrugated metal shack, but her village had been, as the Ukrainians say, "deoccupied," the Russians had been driven out. But the point of "deoccupied" is that even when you remove terrible things, and what Maria's village suffered without going into too much detail was absolutely awful. What the Russians do involves torture or the deportation of children, the murder of local elites. But even in evil that great, the removal of it is not the same thing as freedom, which is why the Ukrainians hesitate before using the word "liberation." For Maria to be free, Maria was 85 years old, she needs to have the rubble cleared between her shack and the road. She needs the buses to be running again. She needs to be able to get to the grocery store. There are things besides removing evil, right? Our notion of freedom is negative. It's just about removing evil. That's not enough. And if you stop there, you end up in a perversity. It also has to be about imagining and creating the good, or else you don't end up in a free society. That's what the word "deoccupation" reminds us of. You can, no matter how evil the evil is, pushing it away is still not the same thing as freedom. It's just a necessary condition. It's nothing more. You say Zelensky is an example of freedom too. Yeah. I mean, I think he's not a political theorist, but when he's speaking of "deoccupation," he once said, "When we preoccupy a village, we bring both freedom and safety." And that's correct. When you bring safety, you bring freedom. When you bring freedom, you bring safety. We Americans tend to think you have to choose between the two, and that's almost never true. In fact, when you make people more safe, you're making them more free. When you make them more free, you're also making them more safe. But his notion of freedom was positive in the moral way that I've been talking about, that freedom is about choosing among virtues. And then as you do that over the course of a life, you sometimes find yourself in a position where because you are a free person, it's clear to you what you have to do. And that resolves the mystery, for example, of why he chose to stay in Kiev in February of 2022. He thought it was what he had to do in order to be himself, in order to remain himself. And for me, that's a sign of a free person because you've made free decisions over the course of your life about what you think is right. Then at certain moments, you can't run. You mentioned this earlier about social media. Let me ask you, do you see social media as fascist? I'm on the side of the humans. I'm on the side of the humans in this. I'm going to openly say I'm on the side of the humans. I don't care how the photons are doing. I don't care how the electrons are doing. I don't care how the screens are doing. I care about us. And so I don't care how many messages that algorithms are unknowingly pushing on us. I care about what it's doing to us. And the worst of us is the predictable part, as we talked about before, the fear. The worst of us is when our fears are known and catalogued and then generated algorithmically. That is terrible and that is what a lot of social media, in fact, does and is meant to do. And in that sense, yes, social media is fascist or pushes fascism along or is a tool for fascists because it allows people with ill intent to know what we are afraid of and to classify it and then to make us more afraid of those things. I think the sheer fact that we spend so many hours a day in front of the screen has changed us more than probably anything else in the last few years. It's prepared us for a politics of us and them because what the algorithms do is they tell us, you're right, you're right, you're right, you're right, oh, look, there's something that's terrifying, you're right, you're right, that's terrifying. And that pattern teaches you that you're right, you're with the right people and the people who disagree with you, they're the other, they're not really human, they don't belong to your country. And so, yeah, in that way, that binary algorithm is pushing us towards a binary form of politics, which is us and them. I'm shaking my head, but at the same time, I do see the connective abilities and features of social media as well. Yeah, for sure. But that's when you think about the human purposes, right, so you can use social media to organize a demonstration, but that's using the digital to get out into the human. And that's the point. I'm going to ask, am I using it as a tool to empower humans, or am I letting other people use its algorithms to disempower me as a human? I think so long as we ask those questions, we're okay. Almost out of time here. You were raised Quaker, correct? That's true. Are you still a Quaker? Aspirational. Quaker-light. I'm going to try to go to a meeting this Sunday. Yeah, I think I do think of myself that way. How is that influenced your thinking? Oh, I don't think we understand ourselves that well. I think the Quakers have it right. I mean, I think the Quakers are generally, you know, the friends, as I should say, if I were a Quaker, are generally more open about the presence of metaphysical good in life. And I think that's helpful. I mean, I think few of us would deny that some things are better than others. Few of us would deny that there are good things like integrity or grace. Few of us would deny that. I think the Quakers might be slightly better at putting that in the center of things. And I think that's courageous, right? And it does have to do with freedom because a conformist can always bully and a bully can always say, "Nothing is really true." But if you face up to the fact that some things are better than others, that there really are virtues, that's a first little courageous step towards freedom. If you don't acknowledge that there are good things, you can't be free because freedom involves balancing the good things and bringing them into life. When you dismiss them, then you can't be a free person. You'll just be looking for somebody to follow, somebody else to tell you what to do. You'll already miss the point where you can step into a world of values and try to make values of your own. So maybe it helped me in that way. Well, Timothy Snyder, we have to leave it there. Thank you so much for joining us today on The Connection. So glad to be with you. Thank you. You're very welcome. And again, he's a professor of history at Yale University, a fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. He's written a number of books, including On Tyranny, which he wrote back in 2017. And he's got a new book and it's titled On Freedom. And thank you for joining us on The Connection. It airs every Friday and Sunday at noon right here on WKYY. You can download a podcast of the show wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen on the WKYY app. You can follow us on Instagram and find us on Facebook. Also, check out our website, whyy.org/theconnection, for information about upcoming shows and how to sign up for our newsletter. Charlie Kyer, the engineer for today's edition of the show, it's produced by Debbie Builder and Paige Murray-Bessler. I'm Marty Moskowayne. Thanks for joining us. (dramatic music)