November 14, 2024 • 55 mins
Historian Timothy Snyder and author of the books "On Tyranny" and "On Freedom" is a leading expert on fascism and the threat authoritarians pose to the future of American Democracy and the Rule of Law. In this video, he discusses the future of American Democracy and alarming rise of Authoritarianism with Timothy Snyder and Stephen Marche. 📌 Join us for an insightful conversation on democracy, the rule of law, and the future of America! This event, hosted by United to Preserve Democracy and the Rule of Law, features a discussion between Timothy Snyder—author of "On Tyranny"—and Stephen Marche. Recorded in Kalamazoo, Michigan, this event is co-sponsored by DemocracyFIRST.
🔍 What You’ll Learn:
âś… The biggest threats to democracy in the U.S. and globally
âś… How history helps us understand modern democratic decline
âś… What Americans can do to protect democracy and the rule of law
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
You're listening to the United to Preserve Democracy and the Rule of Law Speaker Series,
(00:04):
presented by Democracy First.
Join us for a conversation with author and historian Timothy Snyder.
Snyder is a leading expert on authoritarianism and the author of On Tyranny,
20 Lessons from the 20th Century.
Journalist Stephen Marsh, author of The Next Civil War,
moderated this conversation in Kalamazoo, Michigan in October 2024.
(00:31):
I think the first question, let's just get right into the core of it.
How much danger do you think America is in at the moment?
How much danger do you think American democracy is in?
I guess I'd like to think that we're all here because we recognize that we are living in history.
We are all living in history.
(00:52):
History is not a source of permanence.
It's not a source of security.
History is a reminder that things change and they don't usually change the way we expect.
And when we look back on history, when we remember history, we often think,
there were moments where people might have behaved differently, but they didn't.
(01:12):
And the history of democracy is a troubling, difficult history
because democracies usually fail.
One of the great American mistakes is to imagine that because we're America,
we're a democracy, and because we're a democracy, we're America.
That thing, which is called American exceptionalism, is very, very dangerous
because it blinds us to the very thing that the founders understood
(01:36):
and which lay behind the entire intellectual architecture of all the founding documents,
which was the understanding that democracy is difficult and people are flawed.
They were looking forward to a nation of flawed Americans,
which they hoped would last as long as it could last,
because they understood the basic answer to Stephen's question,
which is that democracy is always in danger.
(01:59):
The moment that you think it's somebody else's problem
or the institutions will come to the rescue,
you're making that danger greater than it was before.
So today in the United States, democracy is in a specific form of danger
because we have candidates who are very prominent on the national scene
who do not respect vote counts,
(02:20):
who do not believe in something which is even more fundamental than democracy itself,
which is the rule of law.
So this, our regime can change.
America can change.
That's what history teaches.
And if we think history doesn't apply to us,
then we're doing exactly the wrong thing.
What?
(02:40):
You know, this is sort of a two-part question.
I mean, obviously, we're talking about America here,
but I'd like to know what you think the source of the threat to America is
and also why this seems to be part of a dismal tide,
like all around the world,
like why there is this kind of democratic backsliding
and authoritarian impulse arising everywhere.
(03:04):
I mean, when one reads explanations,
one hears arguments, even things like COVID as explanations,
but I'd like to know, from a historical point of view,
why do you think this is happening now?
Thanks for that.
(03:25):
A lot of it really does have to do with attitudes.
So you can see me much better than I can see you.
The light is on me in such a way that I can't really see you,
which doesn't mean that you should walk out and that I won't notice.
A performer always notices that.
But it does mean that I have a general sense of the demographic
(03:48):
that I'm talking to.
So you'll remember that 35 years ago, when communism came to an end,
folks said things like,
there are no alternatives to liberal democracy now.
Folks said things like, history is over in the sense that
there are no possible systems beyond the one that we have.
(04:10):
Fascism and communism have exhausted themselves.
All that's left is what we've got.
Folks said things at the time like,
it doesn't really matter what individuals do
because the economy is going to take care of politics.
The market will bring us democracy.
That is one source of the problem today,
that the most important democracies, or some of them,
(04:32):
like the United States and Great Britain,
were dominated by those kinds of ideas.
And those ideas are not just mistaken as descriptions
of the way the world works.
They're actively anti-democratic ideas
because a democracy means the people ruling.
And there is only one historical force
which is on the side of the people ruling.
(04:54):
And that is people who want to rule.
That is it, nothing else.
The founding fathers, the constitution, the economy,
history, you name it, there is really nothing
which naturally favors democracy.
The only thing which favors democracy
are people who want to rule.
So that moment, that great moment of misunderstanding,
in my view, 35 years ago, is part of the problem
(05:16):
because we basically put the whole thing in neutral.
We let the car go where it was going to go
with the confidence that somehow there were larger forces.
And there are no larger forces,
at least not larger forces that are on your side.
There's just you.
That's it, there's just you.
And that's both good, but also a little frightening.
Second thing, which I think has clearly been a big problem
(05:38):
for democracy all over the world
is the rise of social media and associated crashes
in attention span and information.
People are overloaded with what appeals to them
and what is false.
And people are less and less capable
of face-to-face contact.
Many of the things that we'll have to say about democracy
(06:00):
were anticipated by the Greeks 2,500 years ago,
one of the few that wasn't to social media.
And the ability of a machine,
although the Greeks did have anything to say about machines,
but the ability of a machine to make you less capable
of human contact.
The Greeks, the Swiss, all of the models of democracy,
like New England, it all depends ultimately
(06:22):
on the ability to have some kind of a local conversation.
If you can't have a local conversation,
you also can't have a national one.
And what the machine has done, what social media has done,
has gotten the way of our ability
to have local conversations.
That's something which is true all over the world.
It's an international factor.
If you try to date the crash of democracy,
(06:42):
2010 is not a bad date to choose,
and that is when social media took over the internet.
And then a third one, which matters more in some places
and less in others, is inequality of wealth.
When you have titanic inequality of wealth,
as you do in certain countries,
like the United States of America,
there are countries with even greater inequality of wealth
(07:03):
like Russia, which gives us an example
of how these things can go.
If you have too great inequality of wealth,
eventually those few oligarchs end up controlling the state.
And then you have a problem, which is, of course,
oligarchs will oppose democracy always,
and that's something the Greeks did understand.
But there's another thing, which is,
and this is my last point, which is that we don't live alone.
(07:25):
We're living in a world where autocrats who have domestic
resistance want to oppose democracy everywhere else.
So if you want to know who the anti-democratic candidates are
in the US, you just have to know who does G support,
who does Putin support, right?
Because from the point of view of those autocrats,
(07:48):
democracy anywhere is a problem for them.
They want a world without democracy,
and that is part of the answer to the question,
is that whether we realize it or not,
we're not a city on a hill, we're not an island,
we're not standing alone.
There are forces around the world, which are also working
right now as we speak against our democracy.
(08:10):
As a historian, there's a famously
the historical divide between people who see history as forces
coming from society, forces coming from below,
and then the great man theory of history.
I've always seen your work as very much not the great man
theory of history.
Bloodlands was incredibly specific and localized
(08:32):
about particular and did incredible archival work
to get the incredibly granular nitty gritty of history.
I wonder if now that we have the misfortune
to be living in history, if you've reconsidered that at all.
Like, do you think that this threat to democracy
(08:54):
comes because of a public apathy, or how much do leaders
affect it?
Like, how much does the actual who is in charge, who is in power,
and the decisions they make change this?
(09:14):
Well, let me try to reconcile those two positions,
because certainly historians ought to be concerned,
in my view, both with the great forces,
but also with the individuals and their particularities.
And the individuals who do the great things
and who do the terrible things are usually
people who, in some way, understand the moment
(09:37):
and extract something from it.
So Hitler, for example, it's very convenient
to see Hitler as a kind of terrible individual, a madman,
who somehow wandered onto the scene of history
and destroyed things.
But as survivors like Julian's grandfather can tell you,
(09:59):
it wasn't like that.
There were steps.
There were stages.
Things changed from day to day, from week to week
to month to month.
But they did so because a person like Hitler understood
something not only about his people,
but about the historical moment.
Hitler understood that people were frightened
by the thing which we now call globalization.
(10:22):
Hitler understood that people could
be attracted to explanations of globalization
that were conspiracy theories.
He understood that, and he came up
with his own conspiracy theories.
They're always dangerous.
He had a very specific one, of course,
which involved, at which Jews were at the absolute center.
Hitler understood that economic insecurity
(10:45):
could be turned away from a view of prosperity for all
into a politics of us and them.
So Hitler was a man of his moment,
and he understood his moment in a certain way.
Not in the only possible way.
It would have been very possible for Germany
in the 1920s and 1930s to embrace certain technologies,
(11:06):
which Hitler rejected.
It would have been very possible for Germany in the 20s
and 1930s to recover from the Great Depression
without a big military budget and certainly
without war.
Had Germans made those choices in the 20s and 30s,
there would not have been the horrible tragedies to which
references had already been made,
but probably Germany would have dominated the 20th century.
(11:28):
But they didn't because a certain person
was able to harness a certain historical moment
and interpret it in a certain way.
So that is the kind of thing which I think
one has to watch out for.
We are living in a historical moment.
That moment is full of vulnerabilities,
some of which are a bit like the vulnerabilities
of a century ago.
(11:49):
People are afraid of globalization.
People are afraid of the way things change.
There are skillful politicians who
have conspiracy theories about that explain those changes.
There are ways to turn economic insecurity or fears
about the future into a politics of us and them.
And so what one has to watch out for
is the skillful, talented politician,
(12:12):
so to speak, the individual, the quote, unquote, great man,
who is living in a moment, but who
turns that moment in a certain way.
And the thing is, once that moment gets turned in a certain way
too far, once the dial goes past a certain point,
it's very, very hard to come back.
Usually with these kind of talks,
we try to stay away from partisan discussions,
(12:34):
but I do have to ask you.
Today, sometimes it's hard to interview people,
and then sometimes you're interviewing Tim Snyder,
and Donald Trump on that day says,
I wish I had generals like Hitler's.
Can you tell me what that meant to him,
(12:55):
and what do you think of it as a historian?
So I will tell you what I think about Donald Trump.
I think, well, let me put it.
Let me start this way.
There were politicians in the 1920s and 1930s
(13:17):
who were very talented and very intelligent,
but in an unfamiliar way.
And they were often dismissed by people like me
and people like you.
They were often dismissed by the academics and the scholars
and the journalists.
They were often dismissed by the bourgeoisie.
They were often dismissed by educated people
(13:37):
because their talent and their talent
and their charisma and their intelligence
showed through in a different way, in an unfamiliar way.
It showed through in a gift for organization,
a gift for oratory, which were unconventional but effective.
And those politicians of the 1920s and 1930s
(13:58):
were underestimated, and that led to terrible, terrible results.
I've tried very hard, partly for that reason,
but also partly just out of an attempt to be objective,
not to underestimate Mr. Trump.
Mr. Trump is obviously a very intelligent individual.
He has a skill set.
(14:21):
He has essentially a theatrical skill set.
He has a skill set which is very well attuned
to an age of social media.
He obviously has a charisma which
doesn't speak to everyone, but it certainly
speaks very directly to some people.
So when you ask me what kind of historian Trump is,
it's like you're pitching me a softball,
(14:42):
and I'm supposed to say he doesn't know anything
about history.
I don't think that's exactly right.
I think Trump has a feel for history.
I think he, I mean, it's a little bit too easy picking
to point out that his family is from Germany
and that some of his relatives served in the Wehrmacht.
That's too quick.
That's too easy.
(15:02):
It's more that Trump has a feel for things.
So I actually think when he says,
I want generals like Hitler's, I think he knows what he means.
I don't think that's something to ridicule.
I don't think it's about him not understanding
the 1930s and 1940s.
I actually think it is about him understanding
the 1930s and the 1940s.
(15:25):
He doesn't know the technical details
that I'm about to share with you,
but I think he gets the general picture, which
is that generals like Hitler, even if he can't name
a single one of them, the thing that he grasps, which
is important and which is correct,
is that those generals were unbound by law
and were personally loyal to the leader.
(15:47):
And I'm using that word advisedly.
So let me now give you the technical detail,
because it's important for the kind of system we have
and the way the system could change.
What generals like Hitler's means is this.
In August 1934, Hitler was able to get the generals
(16:07):
and the officers and the military men in general
to swear a new oath.
Up to that point, the armed forces
of the Weimar Republic, which was dying,
up to that point, the armed forces of Germany
had sworn an oath to the Constitution.
(16:28):
That should be familiar, because that
is American practice today.
What Hitler was able to do was to change that
to an oath of personal loyalty to him.
Now, the immensity of that change
may not be immediately obvious.
So let me just try to point out how huge that change is.
(16:49):
First of all, you might remember,
and Julian's recollection of the Holocaust
is particularly poignant in this connection,
you might remember that in 1945, German military officers
would say things like, I was only following orders.
But they meant by that something which we might not
understand, when they said they were only following orders,
(17:11):
they meant, there was no law.
I was beyond the Constitution.
I was beyond the law.
I swore an oath of personal loyalty to Hitler.
And therefore, if Hitler wanted this to happen,
there was no law which prevented me from doing so.
And so when you take an oath of personal loyalty
(17:32):
to a leader, you're beyond the law, which means,
and here's the second point, the entire society is transformed.
Because if the military, the people
who are carrying the weapons, are no longer bound by the law,
what does that mean for the rest of you?
It means that the rule of law doesn't really apply to anyone,
(17:53):
because if someone in the armed forces
is ordered to do something by the leader, they do it.
And what they did was right, according to the new order
in which they've sworn personal loyalty.
And so the Constitution itself, constitutional regimes,
cannot survive that kind of change.
(18:14):
They cannot survive what Trump calls generals like Hitler's,
which brings me to the third point.
I've been trying really hard not to use the word ferre.
That word ferre, that word leader,
furor we say in American English, that word,
which we use to designate the leader of Nazi Germany,
that word came into force in August of 1934.
(18:37):
The moment when Hitler ceased to be just the chancellor
of Germany and became the leader, became someone who's
beyond law, beyond the government, beyond any restraint,
who was the leader, their ferre, of the German people,
this Deutsche Volks.
The moment that that happened was precisely that moment
(19:00):
when the generals swore the oath.
So when Trump says that he wants generals like Hitler's,
what he is saying is that he wants
a transformation of the kind of power that he would hold.
And in my view, he is right.
I'm not going to say that he's a bad historian.
I'm going to say that he understood what happened
(19:20):
in August of 1934, and that what he is saying
is that he desires that that happen here.
So obviously that's one moment in the breakdown
of a democracy, the swearing of personal loyalty
oaths to people.
(19:40):
Maybe since you've studied it in so many different places,
so many different countries, so many different historical
scenarios, what are the other,
what are the other signs of that breakdown?
And what are the other key moments to watch out for
in the breakdown of democracy?
(20:05):
That's, I mean, so there are a lot of ways to answer that.
One of them we've already talked about in different ways,
which is the notion that democracy itself is natural,
like the weather, right?
That's a sign, that's a danger.
It often goes together with suspicion of democracy,
taking democracy for granted often goes together
(20:26):
with a youthful rebellion against democracy,
like this system is flawed, it's not really democracy,
therefore tyranny couldn't be worse, right?
That's the youthful variant, and the more mature variant
is something like democracy is just the way things are,
it can't really change.
And we've got a lot of both of those things
in the US right now, unfortunately.
(20:47):
A second sign that democracy is in trouble
is we also referenced, which is the difficulty
of having conversations, and that bears
on the importance of truth.
So we all have different values, right?
You and I have different values.
You and your neighbor, whoever your neighbor is,
if it's your spouse, maybe especially if it's your spouse,
(21:08):
you have different values, right?
And that's normal, that's good,
that's the way it's supposed to be.
But if you have different values,
if you have different values, you can come to an agreement,
you can do something, right?
Like you may care about water pollution
for a different reason than your neighbor,
but you both may want to get rid of water pollution.
(21:29):
But if you don't agree whether there is water pollution,
or if you don't agree whether there's global warming,
if you don't agree about basic facts,
then there can't be local agreement.
If there's not local agreement, there can't be democracy,
because it starts to seem senseless.
If we can't do things together locally,
then we start to think, well,
what's the whole national democratic project about?
(21:51):
So difficulty in conversation,
which is wedded to a crash in factuality,
that's another problem.
And it's familiar from collapse of democracy
around fascist and communist takeovers, both,
where those who wish to bring down democratic systems,
which are always flawed, they're never perfect,
they take advantage of that seam in a flawed democratic system,
(22:14):
which is the weakness of the press.
They'll attack the press, they'll say that,
journalists are the enemies of the people,
they'll try to use, they'll use what they could,
they'll use freedom of speech as an excuse
to denigrate their opponents and to slander them,
and they'll try themselves to turn public media
into platforms for their own propaganda, right?
(22:36):
So to overwhelm all of our ability to communicate
with propaganda, which tends to anger us
and turn us one against the other.
At the level of leaders, this is a slightly technical point,
which Levitsky and Zoblat make very well in their book
about how democracies fail, it has to do with norms.
So you can't, like, I don't even know,
(22:58):
I imagine I'm a parent,
so like parenting is on my mind a lot.
And you can try to parent by making rules, which I do,
like I make rules all the time, rules are great,
I love to write those rules on that whiteboard.
In the end, you can't actually legislate childhood, right?
In the end, like, they're the rules,
(23:20):
but then they're also the norms.
Like, following the rules, for example, is a norm, right?
It's a norm.
And so, you see a crisis of democracy
at the level of elites when the norms
that we kind of all thought people were gonna follow
are not being followed anymore.
Or when people start to look for reasons
to circumvent the rules,
(23:41):
and the way you circumvent the rules
is you break the norms.
And around an election,
this is, of course, particularly concerning,
because you can't make rules which say down to,
you know, the microsecond,
exactly how an election is supposed to work.
At a certain point, you're gonna rely,
you have to rely on people's good faith at a certain point.
And when that's gone, you have a real problem.
(24:04):
And then another problem I've already mentioned,
and then we can move on, is inequality.
So, if well, and this is a problem
which played to an Aristotle notice
and has been noticed all along the way,
the founding fathers noticed it as well,
pretty much every interesting advocate of democracy
(24:27):
or student of freedom has noticed this problem,
whether we regard them as left wing or as conservative.
John Stuart Mill noticed this problem,
Isaiah Berlin noticed this problem,
Friedrich Hayek noticed this problem,
Mark Twain noticed this problem,
Martin Luther King noticed this problem.
If you allow too much of the wealth
to be in the hands of too few people,
(24:48):
then those too few people end up having control
over too much of the oratorical space,
too much of the rhetorical space,
too much of the media space,
and then it becomes very hard
to have a normal democratic conversation
because one person, let's say,
with one big media platform
or one big social platform,
ends up directing what we all talk about,
(25:09):
and that's a problem, it's a historical problem.
I mean, I said the Greeks didn't anticipate social media,
but they certainly did anticipate a situation
where wealthy people would make democracy difficult
because of propaganda,
and they were right to worry about that,
and that's a sign we should be paying attention to as well.
Well, I think, I mean, that leads us really to the,
(25:30):
you know, one of the thorniest problems,
I think of understanding this whole moment,
which is, you know, as you said,
the breakdown of democracy,
if you charted it from 2010,
you can draw pretty clear parallel
between the rise of social media
and the kind of polluted informational networks
we now inhabit and the politics that comes out of that,
(25:51):
but on the other hand, this has happened before, right?
Like you have the, you know,
you have the Nazi-controlled press
in the 30s in Germany,
you have the advent of the radio and the rise of fascism,
and then you also have, even before then,
the rise of pamphlet culture in England
and the Civil War there,
(26:12):
and the suppression of the pamphlets all across Europe.
I mean, is this just something inherent
to freedom of speech, really,
that it kind of eats itself in some sense?
Because if there is this explosion of information
and it becomes uncontrollable,
you essentially fracture society that way.
(26:34):
Yeah.
That is a very, very interesting point,
and I just want to make two very different comments about it.
The first has to do,
first I want to pick up your point about technology
where you left it, because what Stephen says
is completely correct and worth pondering,
(26:54):
that I wouldn't say freedom of speech so much
as I would say changes in media technology,
because when the printing press was invented,
so now, I mean, I can't see you,
but I can see the cover of my book because it's white
and it reflects whatever ultraviolet light
that is that's on you.
So you're all holding books and that's very nice,
(27:15):
and I think we probably are people
who in general think that books are positive,
that it's good to read books, it's good to have books,
but the printing press, as Stephen suggested,
actually wrought terrible havoc for about 150 years.
It was one of the major causes of the religious wars
in Europe, which killed about a third of the population
of the continent, and that was because the printing press
(27:39):
allowed information to be spread so much more quickly
than people were ready for,
but also because the printing press
allowed people to plagiarize and copy and slander
to cut and paste, right?
The printing press, in a way, is a kind of preparation
for what social media did, but it also suggests the answer,
which is that when you have a new technology,
(28:01):
you then have to come up with norms and conventions and laws.
So copyright, which seems like the most boring thing
in the world, enables the book.
Without copyright, I can't write that book or publish it.
Copyright makes the book possible,
and then laws about plagiarism make it possible
for this thing which we call freedom of speech to function.
(28:23):
So when technology changes, you have to rethink
what you mean by freedom of speech,
which leads me to the second point.
Freedom of speech, even as we think about the technology,
is not about the technology, it's about the human being.
So again, going all the way back to the Greeks,
there is a very long and strong tradition
(28:44):
about freedom of speech, about why we have it,
and the why we have it is really important,
because in America, we have kind of gotten to the point
where we just run around, and not you,
you're all kind, reasonable, thoughtful people,
but Americans in general have the tendency
to think of the most obnoxious thing they can say,
something they know is offensive and probably untrue,
(29:06):
and then they say it, and then afterwards they say,
free speech, free speech, as though somehow the right
to freedom of speech ennobles saying things
that are obnoxious and untrue.
We've gotten to that point.
We've also gotten to the point where,
going back to the technology, we've gotten to the point
where we invoke free speech in order to,
(29:29):
because we invoke free speech when a billionaire
who owns a social media platform wants to transmit lies
on a massive scale, and that's a sign
that something has gone really, really wrong
with the way we're thinking about freedom of speech,
because it doesn't really matter whether Elon Musk
can transmit a lie five quadrillion times
(29:51):
or 5.5 quadrillion times.
That's not what freedom of speech is about.
It's not about the wealthy people.
It's not about the powerful people.
It never was.
It's about the powerless people.
The reason why we have freedom of speech,
and this is the entire tradition of freedom of speech,
is that it is dangerous to speak truth to power.
(30:12):
Freedom of speech is about the person.
Freedom of speech is about the least fortunate.
That's what freedom of speech is about.
And we've gotten ourselves turned around to thinking
that freedom of speech is about the algorithms.
It's about the stuff which where no human
is actually behind it.
But freedom of speech is all about the person
and the very specific risk you run,
(30:33):
which is harm to yourself, harm to your body,
risk of death or injury, the risk you run
when you speak truth to power.
So I think in this country, we have to be thinking
about how we cultivate free speakers.
You don't have to worry about the wealthy
and the powerful, right?
Their rights to free speech,
although they will naturally be constitutionally protected,
(30:53):
they're not the issue.
The issue is, are we all well informed enough?
Are we all confident enough?
Are we all protected enough
that we feel like we can express ourselves freely?
And of course, the answer to that is no.
And not just for minorities or people
who are at risk for other reasons,
there are lots of people in many counties
(31:14):
in the Midwest, which I've been visiting,
who do not put out, who will not put out yard signs
indicating which candidate they are for
because they are physically afraid.
That's a problem of freedom of speech
and that's where we are.
I wonder if you've been thinking,
(31:37):
like a lot of the intellectuals I've been talking to
and in this talk series about the founding of America,
about the beginnings of it,
because it's interesting you bring up these pamphlets
and the origin of print culture
and they were pamphleteers, right?
They're like the original pamphleteer rebels, really.
(31:57):
Maybe I say that because I'm a Canadian
so I can see it with a little distance.
But I wonder as a historian,
like if you find that the trouble
that America is in now was kind of,
George Washington's farewell address
where he explicitly talks about,
I mean to me it's like he's describing today,
(32:19):
just 240 years ago.
If you feel like there are certain seeds planted
in those early days of glory that are kind of
becoming seeds of flame now,
or if the very beauty of the country
and its founding is actually kind of
(32:40):
creating the crises that America's in right now.
I mean one of the most extraordinary things about America
is that it's still in its first republic, right?
I mean France is in its fifth republic.
Like in my country I'm in,
like we wrote our constitution in 1982, right?
Like you're still operating on a constitution
that's from the 18th century.
(33:01):
Is that part of the problem
that America finds itself in now?
Yes, France is on its fifth republic, but who's counting?
Yeah, they'll probably be on the seventh by the time.
Yeah, by the time the conversation's over.
Yeah.
(33:22):
There is a really great irony.
So I'm an American and a historian,
but not an American historian if you see what I mean.
I'm a historian of Europe.
But looking at it from the point of view of Europe,
there's a really interesting irony
about US constitutional history,
(33:43):
which is that when we have a chance
to influence the design of other people's constitutions,
we allow things to happen or do things
which are not present in our own constitution.
So if you look at the constitutions
that emerged in Europe after the Second World War,
(34:04):
those documents include lots of rights
which Americans don't enjoy.
And in particular, they're designed around
the government providing services
which Americans very often find questionable.
And the constitutional design in favor of the welfare state
has to do precisely with creating a society
(34:26):
where people are going to feel that they're free
after the depredations of fascism,
after the Second World War.
So I'm thinking of a very specific moment
of constitutional design.
And so what I wanna say,
I guess I'm making kind of an optimistic point here,
which is that, yeah, it is a bit of a mixed bag
that our founding documents are so old,
(34:48):
but that doesn't mean that Americans themselves
aren't aware of these things.
Americans in the 1940s or even in the 1920s,
the American political scientists and lawyers
who took part in constitutional discussions
after the First World War,
they were all keenly aware of the limits
of our constitutional documents.
So it's true, but it's not that all Americans
(35:11):
are unaware of this, and it's not that we have to be slaves
to those documents in a negative way.
So, I mean, of course, some of our problems
are rooted in the constitution.
The constitution allows for things like gerrymandering,
which better constitutional design would have ruled out.
The electoral college, no doubt comprehensible
(35:33):
in the debates of the time, is, let's face it, laughable.
I mean, it really makes no sense whatsoever.
We just have it because we have it.
There are basic design problems like that, but...
But beyond that, there's the spirit
in which we treat the document,
which is where I wanna try to land.
(35:57):
In 1852, on the 76th anniversary
of the First War of July, Frederick Douglass gave a famous
speech in which I think he gave the founders their due.
The essence of the speech, of course,
had to do with a basic problem
(36:17):
of the American Republic at that time, which was slavery.
But Frederick Douglass, I think, said something very wise.
He said, the founders were rebels in their own time.
So like Stephen says, they were troublemakers, pamphleteers.
Frederick Douglass says, these were people
who at the time were running great risks.
(36:39):
Their cause for a while was a minoritarian cause.
They were the oddballs, they were the outcasts,
they were on the fringe for a while before they got support,
before they improbably won a war.
And that phrase, rebels in their own time,
I think is the right way to think about it,
because the people who framed America's founding documents
(37:01):
were aware that we would have to be rebels in our own time,
which of course also means being rebels
with respect to them.
There were no founders who thought what we are writing now
in the 18th century, two hundred and fifty years later,
should lock everybody down.
They were trying to write the documents in such a way
(37:22):
that they could be changed over history,
because they understood two very important things.
One I already mentioned, we're flawed, we're flawed.
That's the whole point of our founding documents,
is that we're flawed, democracy is hard,
you need the documents to channel our energies
in the right directions.
And the second thing they understood
is that we're going to need a constant revival of democracy,
(37:43):
and a constant revival of democracy,
always involves recognizing mistakes
that you've made in the past.
I've heard a lot of defenses of the US Constitution,
that's probably the best one I've ever heard.
But it brings us back to the question of norms.
And I think that analogy you brought up,
where you're writing the rules on the whiteboard,
(38:05):
but you really want your children to have norms.
The reason you write that is because you can't go to your kids,
be normal, have these values.
I've got to say, go into my kids and say,
be normal is an approach I hadn't thought of.
Well, try it, see if it works.
(38:27):
Maybe it hasn't worked for me.
But I guess, because I totally understand
that the problem is one of norms,
but that also seems like such a hard problem to face.
I have my norms, I have friends and they all have norms,
and how do you actually, as citizens, affect
(38:48):
that such a crucial sense of like,
hey, aren't we all, we all believe in democracy, right?
Like it seems like, it seems such a vague,
indistinct demand, and yet at the same time, so urgent.
Yeah, that's a beautiful question.
(39:09):
And let me try to get at it from a couple
of different angles.
One more immediate and maybe one,
a little bit more profound.
I'll start with a profound one.
Democracy is not, freedom is not about how anything goes.
It's not.
Freedom is about how there are good things in life
(39:31):
and how we have different understandings
of what those good things are,
and how we should all have a chance
to be able to realize some of the good things in our lives.
That's what freedom is about.
Freedom is not about how nothing is true.
It's not about nihilism.
And I think we make a mistake when we say
that freedom is about how anything goes
(39:53):
or nothing really matters, and therefore,
and therefore, democracy is just what happens
when you say anything goes and nothing matters.
It can't work like that.
I mean, that's very tempting, and we see a lot
of folks with attitudes like that
in very high positions in American society
and running for office right now,
(40:14):
but that can't be what freedom is
and that can't be what democracy is.
Democracy isn't just what happens
when you say anything goes.
Democracy has to be built upon certain positive affirmations
and the positive affirmations are the things
which the norms can't do without, right?
Because of course, norms are how we behave.
Like norms are the invisible rules we follow, right?
(40:35):
They're like, they're the bits of furniture
in the room of politics that are invisible,
but we know how to move around them.
That's what norms are.
But without the positive affirmations of values,
of the sort which we heard from Julian earlier,
those kinds of values that we accept
peaceful transitions of power.
In other words, we affirm that political violence
(40:58):
is not just one thing among other things,
but that political violence is basically
inconsistent with democracy, which it is,
and I should have mentioned it earlier
when you asked about the signs that democracy has gone wrong.
Political violence is a very powerful sign.
Usually when people attempt political violence once,
that means they're going to attempt it a second time.
That's a historian's point that one can make.
(41:20):
So how do you get to the norms?
You can only get to the norms when you affirm
some positive values, when you affirm some positive values.
And you have to think about what those values are
because there are different values out there
and some of them are anti-democratic, not just non-democratic,
but actually anti-democratic.
So to believe that there should be a leader
(41:42):
whom we should all follow, that's a norm.
It's just an anti-democratic norm.
To believe that the law doesn't apply to everybody,
that's a norm, right?
The law only applies to some people.
That's a norm.
It's just an anti-democratic norm.
And so when it doesn't really have a choice here,
(42:03):
you're gonna be affirming some kinds of norms or others.
And now the more immediate point, if I could,
it's you can judge people by what kind of norms
they're following.
There's nobody out there who isn't following a norm
in the political contests that we see
before our eyes right now.
(42:24):
You can ask yourself, what kind of norms are they?
Are they norms that are consistent with democracy
or are they norms that are consistent with some other
kind of political system?
And so the norms are things we have to project,
but they're also a perfectly legitimate basis
on which to judge.
And it's a different basis than policy, right?
(42:45):
Like I can think, I can be in favor of one kind of policy
on monopolies or another kind of policy on meat inspection
or a third kind of policy on railroads.
And you can disagree with me,
but you can take different positions on those policies,
but we could still agree on the basic norms, right?
(43:09):
We can still agree on those norms
and we can make judgments about candidates
on the basis of those norms.
There may be our elections where it's the disagreement
about meat inspection and the disagreement about the roads,
the disagreements about policy,
which would divide you and me.
I don't personally think that this is that kind of election.
(43:31):
I think that the election that we're having now in 2024,
I think is about the norms.
You know, I think that brings me to the question
of political violence,
which I always find a very hard one to deal with.
I wonder if you feel this way.
I mean, I wrote a book called The Next Civil War,
which is obviously a very dark approach.
(43:53):
I mean, I wrote it as a sort of warning
about what I felt was the risk of political violence
in the United States,
but at the same time,
exactly this question of norms that you brought up,
I sometimes ask myself if this darkness that I'm pointing out
is actually counterproductive
and that the affirmative,
(44:15):
like affirming what is good would perhaps be a better strategy
to actually prevent this backsliding,
because it seems to me like once you enter this phase
of like democracy is in real danger,
that in itself is a driver of it.
It's a driver of the sense of despair that creates it.
(44:35):
And I guess, I mean, not for these people,
but also for me personally,
if I could use you as a therapist,
how do you get out of this loop
and get into some kind of affirmation?
I think that's enough.
I think, I mean, if I were your therapist,
I would say that's an amazingly good question, right?
It's $250.
(44:56):
Right, because that's what therapists do, right?
Like wherever you're coming from,
you're coming from a good place.
Everyone laughed except the therapist.
And now even the therapists laugh, thank you.
So I'm gonna start that in a,
I'm gonna start that in an even darker place
(45:18):
and then try to climb out.
So this book on freedom that I wrote
is actually a very warm and hopeful book.
It's about freedom as the best of all the good things.
And it's about a vision of America,
which is much, much better than the America we actually have.
(45:39):
But I wrote the book, knowing what I know about history,
which we've discussed a little bit,
and knowing what I know about other situations,
which are even more challenging than our own.
So the very first discussion like this,
two people, where I was talking about my book,
not what we're talking about tonight,
but just the book, was underground in Kharkiv,
(46:01):
in the city of Kharkiv, in northeastern Ukraine,
about 35 miles from the Russian border,
a few miles from the front.
And we were underground because the city of Kharkiv
is regularly attacked by missiles,
and you don't have time to get underground.
So if you're gonna have some kind of big gathering
like this one, you have to have it underground.
And I'm thinking of it partly
because I'm wearing the same clothes now
(46:23):
that I was wearing in that discussion,
that I've been thinking the whole time
how different this is that I can sit not underground.
And Stephen and I knew we're not worried about missile attacks.
We know that we come out of the theater,
more buildings in Kalamazoo won't have been destroyed
in the meantime.
I'm thinking about all that.
I can't help but think about all of that.
(46:44):
And yet, and yet, so Kharkiv, eastern Ukraine,
southern Ukraine, those are examples
of horrifying political violence,
horrifying political violence on the part of Russia,
which is designed precisely to bring democracy to an end.
That is what it is all about.
It's about showing Russians that democracy is impossible
(47:08):
by crushing democracy in Ukraine.
And the Ukrainians who are resisting
are paying a terrible price for resisting.
But here's where my thinking about this
turns around a little bit.
Because in my experience, even with the people,
in fact, especially with the people
(47:28):
who are resisting in the name of democracy,
who are taking risks in the name of democracy,
resistance is always creative.
We didn't have to be talking about freedom
in that underground facility, right?
Everybody could have just been at home
or listening to watching the internet and being frightened.
But they didn't.
They came out and they had a discussion,
(47:49):
like you came out to have a discussion.
Resistance is always creative.
Resistance is always affirmative.
When I think about the people, again, in other settings,
which are more dangerous settings
than the one most of us are in right now,
one thing that people tell me over and over again
from people who have protested and taking risks
is I feel less afraid when I'm protesting
(48:13):
than when I'm watching television, right?
So even taking that little risk is actually more affirming.
It gets you out doing things with other people is affirming.
It makes you feel better, right?
And this is part of the answer to your question.
Also therapeutically, and now I'm being completely serious,
the people who are trying to do democracy to death,
(48:35):
they want you alone and they want you frightened
and they want you thinking that there is no hope.
They want that.
That is a method.
They are aiming for that because democracy cannot work
if we are alone, if we're not working together,
if we're not communicating.
Democracy cannot work if we're frightened.
It's true what you say, that the fear itself
(48:56):
can bring about the bad result,
but that's not an argument for giving into the fear.
It's an argument for always making sure
that we're doing the little things that we can do
because everyone can always do at least some little thing.
And usually we can always do a little bit more
than we're doing right now.
And the little bit more that we're doing
(49:17):
than we're doing right now,
especially if we do it with other people,
it dissipates that feeling of helplessness.
And this is, again, I mean, it's something that I've seen
in settings which are much harsher
than the setting we're in now.
If you don't do anything, then you start to feel
it's inevitable that the dark is gonna come.
But if you're with other people, then you're hopeful,
(49:39):
you're both more productive and you're more hopeful,
and you get into a virtuous cycle
where the productivity and the hope
start to build on one another.
I...
I'd like to ask one final question,
which is one of the things that I really took from your books,
(50:02):
one of the many things I took,
was that people think democracy doesn't work,
but then if you try autocracy, it really doesn't work.
Right?
Like, they...
It really falls apart pretty quickly
and gets pretty horrible pretty fast.
We are in one of the maybe four or five places
in the United States where the future of democracy
(50:24):
is going to be decided for the world.
And I would like you to make a case
to this corner of the world on why democracy
is better than the alternative.
Okay?
(50:48):
There's the easy point,
and it's a point that you just made.
I'm gonna make it first, then I'll make another point.
The easy point is that all the things
that we complain about can be made better in a democracy.
So Stephen made the point, and it's quite right,
that things generally go south in a bad way,
(51:12):
in autocracy.
If we look at the dictators who some of our political leaders
express admiration for, like Putin
or Victor Orban in Hungary,
those are poor countries compared to the United States,
and they're not ever going to become
less poor countries, they're stuck.
Even though Hungary is in the middle of the European Union,
(51:34):
it's in the middle of the biggest richest trade zone
in the history of the world,
it's always gonna be poor,
because, or it's gonna be poor so long as Orban is in power,
because Orban in power means a single strongman,
crony oligarchs who get all the funding from the EU,
economic dysfunction, leaving aside the lack of the free press,
(51:55):
leaving aside the crushing of universities and so forth.
Things don't work and they're not fixable.
Russia is a very similar example,
Russia's swimming in hydrocarbon wealth,
but that hydrocarbon wealth is controlled by a single person,
a few cronies around that single person,
the vast majority of the country is incredibly poor,
(52:17):
very few things work well in Russia at all,
and that can't be changed, it can't be changed.
So it's beginning from Stephen's point
that a lot of things that we complain about in democracy
are worse in autocracy, that's true, that's true,
but the worst part is you can't do anything about it,
(52:41):
you can't do anything about it,
and I think this is one of the negative things
which I fear Americans don't understand,
if you vote against democracy,
if you vote for the norm breakers,
if you vote for the people who say they wanna be dictators,
if you vote for the people who admire the dictators,
it might seem fun and liberating in that moment,
(53:01):
like you've done something different,
but once you go across a certain line, you can't come back,
it's not something which is easily fixable,
the way that we think things are fixable,
democracies are slow and awkward
and they don't always produce the results we want,
but you can always in some way go back and start again,
when you vote against democracy, and we should be clear,
(53:22):
that's what a lot of Americans are thinking
about doing right now, if we vote against democracy,
we can't come back.
The bright point, which is the second point,
the way that things are going now in the US,
it isn't gonna continue, this status quo of polarization,
this status quo of anger and anxiety,
(53:43):
this status quo of 50-50 elections,
this status quo of social media domination of everything,
this status quo is not gonna go on, it isn't,
it's not sustainable for a whole lot of different reasons,
things are either going to get, in my view,
as a historian of these kinds of things,
who's written about a lot of these moments
(54:03):
of regime change and what follows,
in my view, things are either going to get much worse
or they could get much better,
they could get much better,
the United States in the 2030s could be a wealthier,
more generous, more equitable,
more successful country than it is now, a lot more.
(54:27):
We could be looking at a change
which is like the 40s to the 50s
or the 50s to the 60s.
This is a country which has the wealth, the technology,
the educated population, it has everything it needs
except some bad leaders, some bad ideas,
some cranky institutions.
We could break through into something
which is much brighter and much better,
(54:49):
but the only way we can break through to that,
the only way we can break through to a third century
of this first American republic
which is much better and much brighter
is to keep the democracy going.
Tim Steiner.
Thank you.
You're listening to the United to Preserve Democracy and the Rule of Law Speaker Series,
(00:04):
presented by Democracy First.
Join us for a conversation with author and historian Timothy Snyder.
Snyder is a leading expert on authoritarianism and the author of On Tyranny,
20 Lessons from the 20th Century.
Journalist Stephen Marsh, author of The Next Civil War,
moderated this conversation in Kalamazoo, Michigan in October 2024.
(00:31):
I think the first question, let's just get right into the core of it.
How much danger do you think America is in at the moment?
How much danger do you think American democracy is in?
I guess I'd like to think that we're all here because we recognize that we are living in history.
We are all living in history.
(00:52):
History is not a source of permanence.
It's not a source of security.
History is a reminder that things change and they don't usually change the way we expect.
And when we look back on history, when we remember history, we often think,
there were moments where people might have behaved differently, but they didn't.
(01:12):
And the history of democracy is a troubling, difficult history
because democracies usually fail.
One of the great American mistakes is to imagine that because we're America,
we're a democracy, and because we're a democracy, we're America.
That thing, which is called American exceptionalism, is very, very dangerous
because it blinds us to the very thing that the founders understood
(01:36):
and which lay behind the entire intellectual architecture of all the founding documents,
which was the understanding that democracy is difficult and people are flawed.
They were looking forward to a nation of flawed Americans,
which they hoped would last as long as it could last,
because they understood the basic answer to Stephen's question,
which is that democracy is always in danger.
(01:59):
The moment that you think it's somebody else's problem
or the institutions will come to the rescue,
you're making that danger greater than it was before.
So today in the United States, democracy is in a specific form of danger
because we have candidates who are very prominent on the national scene
who do not respect vote counts,
(02:20):
who do not believe in something which is even more fundamental than democracy itself,
which is the rule of law.
So this, our regime can change.
America can change.
That's what history teaches.
And if we think history doesn't apply to us,
then we're doing exactly the wrong thing.
What?
(02:40):
You know, this is sort of a two-part question.
I mean, obviously, we're talking about America here,
but I'd like to know what you think the source of the threat to America is
and also why this seems to be part of a dismal tide,
like all around the world,
like why there is this kind of democratic backsliding
and authoritarian impulse arising everywhere.
(03:04):
I mean, when one reads explanations,
one hears arguments, even things like COVID as explanations,
but I'd like to know, from a historical point of view,
why do you think this is happening now?
Thanks for that.
(03:25):
A lot of it really does have to do with attitudes.
So you can see me much better than I can see you.
The light is on me in such a way that I can't really see you,
which doesn't mean that you should walk out and that I won't notice.
A performer always notices that.
But it does mean that I have a general sense of the demographic
(03:48):
that I'm talking to.
So you'll remember that 35 years ago, when communism came to an end,
folks said things like,
there are no alternatives to liberal democracy now.
Folks said things like, history is over in the sense that
there are no possible systems beyond the one that we have.
(04:10):
Fascism and communism have exhausted themselves.
All that's left is what we've got.
Folks said things at the time like,
it doesn't really matter what individuals do
because the economy is going to take care of politics.
The market will bring us democracy.
That is one source of the problem today,
that the most important democracies, or some of them,
(04:32):
like the United States and Great Britain,
were dominated by those kinds of ideas.
And those ideas are not just mistaken as descriptions
of the way the world works.
They're actively anti-democratic ideas
because a democracy means the people ruling.
And there is only one historical force
which is on the side of the people ruling.
(04:54):
And that is people who want to rule.
That is it, nothing else.
The founding fathers, the constitution, the economy,
history, you name it, there is really nothing
which naturally favors democracy.
The only thing which favors democracy
are people who want to rule.
So that moment, that great moment of misunderstanding,
in my view, 35 years ago, is part of the problem
(05:16):
because we basically put the whole thing in neutral.
We let the car go where it was going to go
with the confidence that somehow there were larger forces.
And there are no larger forces,
at least not larger forces that are on your side.
There's just you.
That's it, there's just you.
And that's both good, but also a little frightening.
Second thing, which I think has clearly been a big problem
(05:38):
for democracy all over the world
is the rise of social media and associated crashes
in attention span and information.
People are overloaded with what appeals to them
and what is false.
And people are less and less capable
of face-to-face contact.
Many of the things that we'll have to say about democracy
(06:00):
were anticipated by the Greeks 2,500 years ago,
one of the few that wasn't to social media.
And the ability of a machine,
although the Greeks did have anything to say about machines,
but the ability of a machine to make you less capable
of human contact.
The Greeks, the Swiss, all of the models of democracy,
like New England, it all depends ultimately
(06:22):
on the ability to have some kind of a local conversation.
If you can't have a local conversation,
you also can't have a national one.
And what the machine has done, what social media has done,
has gotten the way of our ability
to have local conversations.
That's something which is true all over the world.
It's an international factor.
If you try to date the crash of democracy,
(06:42):
2010 is not a bad date to choose,
and that is when social media took over the internet.
And then a third one, which matters more in some places
and less in others, is inequality of wealth.
When you have titanic inequality of wealth,
as you do in certain countries,
like the United States of America,
there are countries with even greater inequality of wealth
(07:03):
like Russia, which gives us an example
of how these things can go.
If you have too great inequality of wealth,
eventually those few oligarchs end up controlling the state.
And then you have a problem, which is, of course,
oligarchs will oppose democracy always,
and that's something the Greeks did understand.
But there's another thing, which is,
and this is my last point, which is that we don't live alone.
(07:25):
We're living in a world where autocrats who have domestic
resistance want to oppose democracy everywhere else.
So if you want to know who the anti-democratic candidates are
in the US, you just have to know who does G support,
who does Putin support, right?
Because from the point of view of those autocrats,
(07:48):
democracy anywhere is a problem for them.
They want a world without democracy,
and that is part of the answer to the question,
is that whether we realize it or not,
we're not a city on a hill, we're not an island,
we're not standing alone.
There are forces around the world, which are also working
right now as we speak against our democracy.
(08:10):
As a historian, there's a famously
the historical divide between people who see history as forces
coming from society, forces coming from below,
and then the great man theory of history.
I've always seen your work as very much not the great man
theory of history.
Bloodlands was incredibly specific and localized
(08:32):
about particular and did incredible archival work
to get the incredibly granular nitty gritty of history.
I wonder if now that we have the misfortune
to be living in history, if you've reconsidered that at all.
Like, do you think that this threat to democracy
(08:54):
comes because of a public apathy, or how much do leaders
affect it?
Like, how much does the actual who is in charge, who is in power,
and the decisions they make change this?
(09:14):
Well, let me try to reconcile those two positions,
because certainly historians ought to be concerned,
in my view, both with the great forces,
but also with the individuals and their particularities.
And the individuals who do the great things
and who do the terrible things are usually
people who, in some way, understand the moment
(09:37):
and extract something from it.
So Hitler, for example, it's very convenient
to see Hitler as a kind of terrible individual, a madman,
who somehow wandered onto the scene of history
and destroyed things.
But as survivors like Julian's grandfather can tell you,
(09:59):
it wasn't like that.
There were steps.
There were stages.
Things changed from day to day, from week to week
to month to month.
But they did so because a person like Hitler understood
something not only about his people,
but about the historical moment.
Hitler understood that people were frightened
by the thing which we now call globalization.
(10:22):
Hitler understood that people could
be attracted to explanations of globalization
that were conspiracy theories.
He understood that, and he came up
with his own conspiracy theories.
They're always dangerous.
He had a very specific one, of course,
which involved, at which Jews were at the absolute center.
Hitler understood that economic insecurity
(10:45):
could be turned away from a view of prosperity for all
into a politics of us and them.
So Hitler was a man of his moment,
and he understood his moment in a certain way.
Not in the only possible way.
It would have been very possible for Germany
in the 1920s and 1930s to embrace certain technologies,
(11:06):
which Hitler rejected.
It would have been very possible for Germany in the 20s
and 1930s to recover from the Great Depression
without a big military budget and certainly
without war.
Had Germans made those choices in the 20s and 30s,
there would not have been the horrible tragedies to which
references had already been made,
but probably Germany would have dominated the 20th century.
(11:28):
But they didn't because a certain person
was able to harness a certain historical moment
and interpret it in a certain way.
So that is the kind of thing which I think
one has to watch out for.
We are living in a historical moment.
That moment is full of vulnerabilities,
some of which are a bit like the vulnerabilities
of a century ago.
(11:49):
People are afraid of globalization.
People are afraid of the way things change.
There are skillful politicians who
have conspiracy theories about that explain those changes.
There are ways to turn economic insecurity or fears
about the future into a politics of us and them.
And so what one has to watch out for
is the skillful, talented politician,
(12:12):
so to speak, the individual, the quote, unquote, great man,
who is living in a moment, but who
turns that moment in a certain way.
And the thing is, once that moment gets turned in a certain way
too far, once the dial goes past a certain point,
it's very, very hard to come back.
Usually with these kind of talks,
we try to stay away from partisan discussions,
(12:34):
but I do have to ask you.
Today, sometimes it's hard to interview people,
and then sometimes you're interviewing Tim Snyder,
and Donald Trump on that day says,
I wish I had generals like Hitler's.
Can you tell me what that meant to him,
(12:55):
and what do you think of it as a historian?
So I will tell you what I think about Donald Trump.
I think, well, let me put it.
Let me start this way.
There were politicians in the 1920s and 1930s
(13:17):
who were very talented and very intelligent,
but in an unfamiliar way.
And they were often dismissed by people like me
and people like you.
They were often dismissed by the academics and the scholars
and the journalists.
They were often dismissed by the bourgeoisie.
They were often dismissed by educated people
(13:37):
because their talent and their talent
and their charisma and their intelligence
showed through in a different way, in an unfamiliar way.
It showed through in a gift for organization,
a gift for oratory, which were unconventional but effective.
And those politicians of the 1920s and 1930s
(13:58):
were underestimated, and that led to terrible, terrible results.
I've tried very hard, partly for that reason,
but also partly just out of an attempt to be objective,
not to underestimate Mr. Trump.
Mr. Trump is obviously a very intelligent individual.
He has a skill set.
(14:21):
He has essentially a theatrical skill set.
He has a skill set which is very well attuned
to an age of social media.
He obviously has a charisma which
doesn't speak to everyone, but it certainly
speaks very directly to some people.
So when you ask me what kind of historian Trump is,
it's like you're pitching me a softball,
(14:42):
and I'm supposed to say he doesn't know anything
about history.
I don't think that's exactly right.
I think Trump has a feel for history.
I think he, I mean, it's a little bit too easy picking
to point out that his family is from Germany
and that some of his relatives served in the Wehrmacht.
That's too quick.
That's too easy.
(15:02):
It's more that Trump has a feel for things.
So I actually think when he says,
I want generals like Hitler's, I think he knows what he means.
I don't think that's something to ridicule.
I don't think it's about him not understanding
the 1930s and 1940s.
I actually think it is about him understanding
the 1930s and the 1940s.
(15:25):
He doesn't know the technical details
that I'm about to share with you,
but I think he gets the general picture, which
is that generals like Hitler, even if he can't name
a single one of them, the thing that he grasps, which
is important and which is correct,
is that those generals were unbound by law
and were personally loyal to the leader.
(15:47):
And I'm using that word advisedly.
So let me now give you the technical detail,
because it's important for the kind of system we have
and the way the system could change.
What generals like Hitler's means is this.
In August 1934, Hitler was able to get the generals
(16:07):
and the officers and the military men in general
to swear a new oath.
Up to that point, the armed forces
of the Weimar Republic, which was dying,
up to that point, the armed forces of Germany
had sworn an oath to the Constitution.
(16:28):
That should be familiar, because that
is American practice today.
What Hitler was able to do was to change that
to an oath of personal loyalty to him.
Now, the immensity of that change
may not be immediately obvious.
So let me just try to point out how huge that change is.
(16:49):
First of all, you might remember,
and Julian's recollection of the Holocaust
is particularly poignant in this connection,
you might remember that in 1945, German military officers
would say things like, I was only following orders.
But they meant by that something which we might not
understand, when they said they were only following orders,
(17:11):
they meant, there was no law.
I was beyond the Constitution.
I was beyond the law.
I swore an oath of personal loyalty to Hitler.
And therefore, if Hitler wanted this to happen,
there was no law which prevented me from doing so.
And so when you take an oath of personal loyalty
(17:32):
to a leader, you're beyond the law, which means,
and here's the second point, the entire society is transformed.
Because if the military, the people
who are carrying the weapons, are no longer bound by the law,
what does that mean for the rest of you?
It means that the rule of law doesn't really apply to anyone,
(17:53):
because if someone in the armed forces
is ordered to do something by the leader, they do it.
And what they did was right, according to the new order
in which they've sworn personal loyalty.
And so the Constitution itself, constitutional regimes,
cannot survive that kind of change.
(18:14):
They cannot survive what Trump calls generals like Hitler's,
which brings me to the third point.
I've been trying really hard not to use the word ferre.
That word ferre, that word leader,
furor we say in American English, that word,
which we use to designate the leader of Nazi Germany,
that word came into force in August of 1934.
(18:37):
The moment when Hitler ceased to be just the chancellor
of Germany and became the leader, became someone who's
beyond law, beyond the government, beyond any restraint,
who was the leader, their ferre, of the German people,
this Deutsche Volks.
The moment that that happened was precisely that moment
(19:00):
when the generals swore the oath.
So when Trump says that he wants generals like Hitler's,
what he is saying is that he wants
a transformation of the kind of power that he would hold.
And in my view, he is right.
I'm not going to say that he's a bad historian.
I'm going to say that he understood what happened
(19:20):
in August of 1934, and that what he is saying
is that he desires that that happen here.
So obviously that's one moment in the breakdown
of a democracy, the swearing of personal loyalty
oaths to people.
(19:40):
Maybe since you've studied it in so many different places,
so many different countries, so many different historical
scenarios, what are the other,
what are the other signs of that breakdown?
And what are the other key moments to watch out for
in the breakdown of democracy?
(20:05):
That's, I mean, so there are a lot of ways to answer that.
One of them we've already talked about in different ways,
which is the notion that democracy itself is natural,
like the weather, right?
That's a sign, that's a danger.
It often goes together with suspicion of democracy,
taking democracy for granted often goes together
(20:26):
with a youthful rebellion against democracy,
like this system is flawed, it's not really democracy,
therefore tyranny couldn't be worse, right?
That's the youthful variant, and the more mature variant
is something like democracy is just the way things are,
it can't really change.
And we've got a lot of both of those things
in the US right now, unfortunately.
(20:47):
A second sign that democracy is in trouble
is we also referenced, which is the difficulty
of having conversations, and that bears
on the importance of truth.
So we all have different values, right?
You and I have different values.
You and your neighbor, whoever your neighbor is,
if it's your spouse, maybe especially if it's your spouse,
(21:08):
you have different values, right?
And that's normal, that's good,
that's the way it's supposed to be.
But if you have different values,
if you have different values, you can come to an agreement,
you can do something, right?
Like you may care about water pollution
for a different reason than your neighbor,
but you both may want to get rid of water pollution.
(21:29):
But if you don't agree whether there is water pollution,
or if you don't agree whether there's global warming,
if you don't agree about basic facts,
then there can't be local agreement.
If there's not local agreement, there can't be democracy,
because it starts to seem senseless.
If we can't do things together locally,
then we start to think, well,
what's the whole national democratic project about?
(21:51):
So difficulty in conversation,
which is wedded to a crash in factuality,
that's another problem.
And it's familiar from collapse of democracy
around fascist and communist takeovers, both,
where those who wish to bring down democratic systems,
which are always flawed, they're never perfect,
they take advantage of that seam in a flawed democratic system,
(22:14):
which is the weakness of the press.
They'll attack the press, they'll say that,
journalists are the enemies of the people,
they'll try to use, they'll use what they could,
they'll use freedom of speech as an excuse
to denigrate their opponents and to slander them,
and they'll try themselves to turn public media
into platforms for their own propaganda, right?
(22:36):
So to overwhelm all of our ability to communicate
with propaganda, which tends to anger us
and turn us one against the other.
At the level of leaders, this is a slightly technical point,
which Levitsky and Zoblat make very well in their book
about how democracies fail, it has to do with norms.
So you can't, like, I don't even know,
(22:58):
I imagine I'm a parent,
so like parenting is on my mind a lot.
And you can try to parent by making rules, which I do,
like I make rules all the time, rules are great,
I love to write those rules on that whiteboard.
In the end, you can't actually legislate childhood, right?
In the end, like, they're the rules,
(23:20):
but then they're also the norms.
Like, following the rules, for example, is a norm, right?
It's a norm.
And so, you see a crisis of democracy
at the level of elites when the norms
that we kind of all thought people were gonna follow
are not being followed anymore.
Or when people start to look for reasons
to circumvent the rules,
(23:41):
and the way you circumvent the rules
is you break the norms.
And around an election,
this is, of course, particularly concerning,
because you can't make rules which say down to,
you know, the microsecond,
exactly how an election is supposed to work.
At a certain point, you're gonna rely,
you have to rely on people's good faith at a certain point.
And when that's gone, you have a real problem.
(24:04):
And then another problem I've already mentioned,
and then we can move on, is inequality.
So, if well, and this is a problem
which played to an Aristotle notice
and has been noticed all along the way,
the founding fathers noticed it as well,
pretty much every interesting advocate of democracy
(24:27):
or student of freedom has noticed this problem,
whether we regard them as left wing or as conservative.
John Stuart Mill noticed this problem,
Isaiah Berlin noticed this problem,
Friedrich Hayek noticed this problem,
Mark Twain noticed this problem,
Martin Luther King noticed this problem.
If you allow too much of the wealth
to be in the hands of too few people,
(24:48):
then those too few people end up having control
over too much of the oratorical space,
too much of the rhetorical space,
too much of the media space,
and then it becomes very hard
to have a normal democratic conversation
because one person, let's say,
with one big media platform
or one big social platform,
ends up directing what we all talk about,
(25:09):
and that's a problem, it's a historical problem.
I mean, I said the Greeks didn't anticipate social media,
but they certainly did anticipate a situation
where wealthy people would make democracy difficult
because of propaganda,
and they were right to worry about that,
and that's a sign we should be paying attention to as well.
Well, I think, I mean, that leads us really to the,
(25:30):
you know, one of the thorniest problems,
I think of understanding this whole moment,
which is, you know, as you said,
the breakdown of democracy,
if you charted it from 2010,
you can draw pretty clear parallel
between the rise of social media
and the kind of polluted informational networks
we now inhabit and the politics that comes out of that,
(25:51):
but on the other hand, this has happened before, right?
Like you have the, you know,
you have the Nazi-controlled press
in the 30s in Germany,
you have the advent of the radio and the rise of fascism,
and then you also have, even before then,
the rise of pamphlet culture in England
and the Civil War there,
(26:12):
and the suppression of the pamphlets all across Europe.
I mean, is this just something inherent
to freedom of speech, really,
that it kind of eats itself in some sense?
Because if there is this explosion of information
and it becomes uncontrollable,
you essentially fracture society that way.
(26:34):
Yeah.
That is a very, very interesting point,
and I just want to make two very different comments about it.
The first has to do,
first I want to pick up your point about technology
where you left it, because what Stephen says
is completely correct and worth pondering,
(26:54):
that I wouldn't say freedom of speech so much
as I would say changes in media technology,
because when the printing press was invented,
so now, I mean, I can't see you,
but I can see the cover of my book because it's white
and it reflects whatever ultraviolet light
that is that's on you.
So you're all holding books and that's very nice,
(27:15):
and I think we probably are people
who in general think that books are positive,
that it's good to read books, it's good to have books,
but the printing press, as Stephen suggested,
actually wrought terrible havoc for about 150 years.
It was one of the major causes of the religious wars
in Europe, which killed about a third of the population
of the continent, and that was because the printing press
(27:39):
allowed information to be spread so much more quickly
than people were ready for,
but also because the printing press
allowed people to plagiarize and copy and slander
to cut and paste, right?
The printing press, in a way, is a kind of preparation
for what social media did, but it also suggests the answer,
which is that when you have a new technology,
(28:01):
you then have to come up with norms and conventions and laws.
So copyright, which seems like the most boring thing
in the world, enables the book.
Without copyright, I can't write that book or publish it.
Copyright makes the book possible,
and then laws about plagiarism make it possible
for this thing which we call freedom of speech to function.
(28:23):
So when technology changes, you have to rethink
what you mean by freedom of speech,
which leads me to the second point.
Freedom of speech, even as we think about the technology,
is not about the technology, it's about the human being.
So again, going all the way back to the Greeks,
there is a very long and strong tradition
(28:44):
about freedom of speech, about why we have it,
and the why we have it is really important,
because in America, we have kind of gotten to the point
where we just run around, and not you,
you're all kind, reasonable, thoughtful people,
but Americans in general have the tendency
to think of the most obnoxious thing they can say,
something they know is offensive and probably untrue,
(29:06):
and then they say it, and then afterwards they say,
free speech, free speech, as though somehow the right
to freedom of speech ennobles saying things
that are obnoxious and untrue.
We've gotten to that point.
We've also gotten to the point where,
going back to the technology, we've gotten to the point
where we invoke free speech in order to,
(29:29):
because we invoke free speech when a billionaire
who owns a social media platform wants to transmit lies
on a massive scale, and that's a sign
that something has gone really, really wrong
with the way we're thinking about freedom of speech,
because it doesn't really matter whether Elon Musk
can transmit a lie five quadrillion times
(29:51):
or 5.5 quadrillion times.
That's not what freedom of speech is about.
It's not about the wealthy people.
It's not about the powerful people.
It never was.
It's about the powerless people.
The reason why we have freedom of speech,
and this is the entire tradition of freedom of speech,
is that it is dangerous to speak truth to power.
(30:12):
Freedom of speech is about the person.
Freedom of speech is about the least fortunate.
That's what freedom of speech is about.
And we've gotten ourselves turned around to thinking
that freedom of speech is about the algorithms.
It's about the stuff which where no human
is actually behind it.
But freedom of speech is all about the person
and the very specific risk you run,
(30:33):
which is harm to yourself, harm to your body,
risk of death or injury, the risk you run
when you speak truth to power.
So I think in this country, we have to be thinking
about how we cultivate free speakers.
You don't have to worry about the wealthy
and the powerful, right?
Their rights to free speech,
although they will naturally be constitutionally protected,
(30:53):
they're not the issue.
The issue is, are we all well informed enough?
Are we all confident enough?
Are we all protected enough
that we feel like we can express ourselves freely?
And of course, the answer to that is no.
And not just for minorities or people
who are at risk for other reasons,
there are lots of people in many counties
(31:14):
in the Midwest, which I've been visiting,
who do not put out, who will not put out yard signs
indicating which candidate they are for
because they are physically afraid.
That's a problem of freedom of speech
and that's where we are.
I wonder if you've been thinking,
(31:37):
like a lot of the intellectuals I've been talking to
and in this talk series about the founding of America,
about the beginnings of it,
because it's interesting you bring up these pamphlets
and the origin of print culture
and they were pamphleteers, right?
They're like the original pamphleteer rebels, really.
(31:57):
Maybe I say that because I'm a Canadian
so I can see it with a little distance.
But I wonder as a historian,
like if you find that the trouble
that America is in now was kind of,
George Washington's farewell address
where he explicitly talks about,
I mean to me it's like he's describing today,
(32:19):
just 240 years ago.
If you feel like there are certain seeds planted
in those early days of glory that are kind of
becoming seeds of flame now,
or if the very beauty of the country
and its founding is actually kind of
(32:40):
creating the crises that America's in right now.
I mean one of the most extraordinary things about America
is that it's still in its first republic, right?
I mean France is in its fifth republic.
Like in my country I'm in,
like we wrote our constitution in 1982, right?
Like you're still operating on a constitution
that's from the 18th century.
(33:01):
Is that part of the problem
that America finds itself in now?
Yes, France is on its fifth republic, but who's counting?
Yeah, they'll probably be on the seventh by the time.
Yeah, by the time the conversation's over.
Yeah.
(33:22):
There is a really great irony.
So I'm an American and a historian,
but not an American historian if you see what I mean.
I'm a historian of Europe.
But looking at it from the point of view of Europe,
there's a really interesting irony
about US constitutional history,
(33:43):
which is that when we have a chance
to influence the design of other people's constitutions,
we allow things to happen or do things
which are not present in our own constitution.
So if you look at the constitutions
that emerged in Europe after the Second World War,
(34:04):
those documents include lots of rights
which Americans don't enjoy.
And in particular, they're designed around
the government providing services
which Americans very often find questionable.
And the constitutional design in favor of the welfare state
has to do precisely with creating a society
(34:26):
where people are going to feel that they're free
after the depredations of fascism,
after the Second World War.
So I'm thinking of a very specific moment
of constitutional design.
And so what I wanna say,
I guess I'm making kind of an optimistic point here,
which is that, yeah, it is a bit of a mixed bag
that our founding documents are so old,
(34:48):
but that doesn't mean that Americans themselves
aren't aware of these things.
Americans in the 1940s or even in the 1920s,
the American political scientists and lawyers
who took part in constitutional discussions
after the First World War,
they were all keenly aware of the limits
of our constitutional documents.
So it's true, but it's not that all Americans
(35:11):
are unaware of this, and it's not that we have to be slaves
to those documents in a negative way.
So, I mean, of course, some of our problems
are rooted in the constitution.
The constitution allows for things like gerrymandering,
which better constitutional design would have ruled out.
The electoral college, no doubt comprehensible
(35:33):
in the debates of the time, is, let's face it, laughable.
I mean, it really makes no sense whatsoever.
We just have it because we have it.
There are basic design problems like that, but...
But beyond that, there's the spirit
in which we treat the document,
which is where I wanna try to land.
(35:57):
In 1852, on the 76th anniversary
of the First War of July, Frederick Douglass gave a famous
speech in which I think he gave the founders their due.
The essence of the speech, of course,
had to do with a basic problem
(36:17):
of the American Republic at that time, which was slavery.
But Frederick Douglass, I think, said something very wise.
He said, the founders were rebels in their own time.
So like Stephen says, they were troublemakers, pamphleteers.
Frederick Douglass says, these were people
who at the time were running great risks.
(36:39):
Their cause for a while was a minoritarian cause.
They were the oddballs, they were the outcasts,
they were on the fringe for a while before they got support,
before they improbably won a war.
And that phrase, rebels in their own time,
I think is the right way to think about it,
because the people who framed America's founding documents
(37:01):
were aware that we would have to be rebels in our own time,
which of course also means being rebels
with respect to them.
There were no founders who thought what we are writing now
in the 18th century, two hundred and fifty years later,
should lock everybody down.
They were trying to write the documents in such a way
(37:22):
that they could be changed over history,
because they understood two very important things.
One I already mentioned, we're flawed, we're flawed.
That's the whole point of our founding documents,
is that we're flawed, democracy is hard,
you need the documents to channel our energies
in the right directions.
And the second thing they understood
is that we're going to need a constant revival of democracy,
(37:43):
and a constant revival of democracy,
always involves recognizing mistakes
that you've made in the past.
I've heard a lot of defenses of the US Constitution,
that's probably the best one I've ever heard.
But it brings us back to the question of norms.
And I think that analogy you brought up,
where you're writing the rules on the whiteboard,
(38:05):
but you really want your children to have norms.
The reason you write that is because you can't go to your kids,
be normal, have these values.
I've got to say, go into my kids and say,
be normal is an approach I hadn't thought of.
Well, try it, see if it works.
(38:27):
Maybe it hasn't worked for me.
But I guess, because I totally understand
that the problem is one of norms,
but that also seems like such a hard problem to face.
I have my norms, I have friends and they all have norms,
and how do you actually, as citizens, affect
(38:48):
that such a crucial sense of like,
hey, aren't we all, we all believe in democracy, right?
Like it seems like, it seems such a vague,
indistinct demand, and yet at the same time, so urgent.
Yeah, that's a beautiful question.
(39:09):
And let me try to get at it from a couple
of different angles.
One more immediate and maybe one,
a little bit more profound.
I'll start with a profound one.
Democracy is not, freedom is not about how anything goes.
It's not.
Freedom is about how there are good things in life
(39:31):
and how we have different understandings
of what those good things are,
and how we should all have a chance
to be able to realize some of the good things in our lives.
That's what freedom is about.
Freedom is not about how nothing is true.
It's not about nihilism.
And I think we make a mistake when we say
that freedom is about how anything goes
(39:53):
or nothing really matters, and therefore,
and therefore, democracy is just what happens
when you say anything goes and nothing matters.
It can't work like that.
I mean, that's very tempting, and we see a lot
of folks with attitudes like that
in very high positions in American society
and running for office right now,
(40:14):
but that can't be what freedom is
and that can't be what democracy is.
Democracy isn't just what happens
when you say anything goes.
Democracy has to be built upon certain positive affirmations
and the positive affirmations are the things
which the norms can't do without, right?
Because of course, norms are how we behave.
Like norms are the invisible rules we follow, right?
(40:35):
They're like, they're the bits of furniture
in the room of politics that are invisible,
but we know how to move around them.
That's what norms are.
But without the positive affirmations of values,
of the sort which we heard from Julian earlier,
those kinds of values that we accept
peaceful transitions of power.
In other words, we affirm that political violence
(40:58):
is not just one thing among other things,
but that political violence is basically
inconsistent with democracy, which it is,
and I should have mentioned it earlier
when you asked about the signs that democracy has gone wrong.
Political violence is a very powerful sign.
Usually when people attempt political violence once,
that means they're going to attempt it a second time.
That's a historian's point that one can make.
(41:20):
So how do you get to the norms?
You can only get to the norms when you affirm
some positive values, when you affirm some positive values.
And you have to think about what those values are
because there are different values out there
and some of them are anti-democratic, not just non-democratic,
but actually anti-democratic.
So to believe that there should be a leader
(41:42):
whom we should all follow, that's a norm.
It's just an anti-democratic norm.
To believe that the law doesn't apply to everybody,
that's a norm, right?
The law only applies to some people.
That's a norm.
It's just an anti-democratic norm.
And so when it doesn't really have a choice here,
(42:03):
you're gonna be affirming some kinds of norms or others.
And now the more immediate point, if I could,
it's you can judge people by what kind of norms
they're following.
There's nobody out there who isn't following a norm
in the political contests that we see
before our eyes right now.
(42:24):
You can ask yourself, what kind of norms are they?
Are they norms that are consistent with democracy
or are they norms that are consistent with some other
kind of political system?
And so the norms are things we have to project,
but they're also a perfectly legitimate basis
on which to judge.
And it's a different basis than policy, right?
(42:45):
Like I can think, I can be in favor of one kind of policy
on monopolies or another kind of policy on meat inspection
or a third kind of policy on railroads.
And you can disagree with me,
but you can take different positions on those policies,
but we could still agree on the basic norms, right?
(43:09):
We can still agree on those norms
and we can make judgments about candidates
on the basis of those norms.
There may be our elections where it's the disagreement
about meat inspection and the disagreement about the roads,
the disagreements about policy,
which would divide you and me.
I don't personally think that this is that kind of election.
(43:31):
I think that the election that we're having now in 2024,
I think is about the norms.
You know, I think that brings me to the question
of political violence,
which I always find a very hard one to deal with.
I wonder if you feel this way.
I mean, I wrote a book called The Next Civil War,
which is obviously a very dark approach.
(43:53):
I mean, I wrote it as a sort of warning
about what I felt was the risk of political violence
in the United States,
but at the same time,
exactly this question of norms that you brought up,
I sometimes ask myself if this darkness that I'm pointing out
is actually counterproductive
and that the affirmative,
(44:15):
like affirming what is good would perhaps be a better strategy
to actually prevent this backsliding,
because it seems to me like once you enter this phase
of like democracy is in real danger,
that in itself is a driver of it.
It's a driver of the sense of despair that creates it.
(44:35):
And I guess, I mean, not for these people,
but also for me personally,
if I could use you as a therapist,
how do you get out of this loop
and get into some kind of affirmation?
I think that's enough.
I think, I mean, if I were your therapist,
I would say that's an amazingly good question, right?
It's $250.
(44:56):
Right, because that's what therapists do, right?
Like wherever you're coming from,
you're coming from a good place.
Everyone laughed except the therapist.
And now even the therapists laugh, thank you.
So I'm gonna start that in a,
I'm gonna start that in an even darker place
(45:18):
and then try to climb out.
So this book on freedom that I wrote
is actually a very warm and hopeful book.
It's about freedom as the best of all the good things.
And it's about a vision of America,
which is much, much better than the America we actually have.
(45:39):
But I wrote the book, knowing what I know about history,
which we've discussed a little bit,
and knowing what I know about other situations,
which are even more challenging than our own.
So the very first discussion like this,
two people, where I was talking about my book,
not what we're talking about tonight,
but just the book, was underground in Kharkiv,
(46:01):
in the city of Kharkiv, in northeastern Ukraine,
about 35 miles from the Russian border,
a few miles from the front.
And we were underground because the city of Kharkiv
is regularly attacked by missiles,
and you don't have time to get underground.
So if you're gonna have some kind of big gathering
like this one, you have to have it underground.
And I'm thinking of it partly
because I'm wearing the same clothes now
(46:23):
that I was wearing in that discussion,
that I've been thinking the whole time
how different this is that I can sit not underground.
And Stephen and I knew we're not worried about missile attacks.
We know that we come out of the theater,
more buildings in Kalamazoo won't have been destroyed
in the meantime.
I'm thinking about all that.
I can't help but think about all of that.
(46:44):
And yet, and yet, so Kharkiv, eastern Ukraine,
southern Ukraine, those are examples
of horrifying political violence,
horrifying political violence on the part of Russia,
which is designed precisely to bring democracy to an end.
That is what it is all about.
It's about showing Russians that democracy is impossible
(47:08):
by crushing democracy in Ukraine.
And the Ukrainians who are resisting
are paying a terrible price for resisting.
But here's where my thinking about this
turns around a little bit.
Because in my experience, even with the people,
in fact, especially with the people
(47:28):
who are resisting in the name of democracy,
who are taking risks in the name of democracy,
resistance is always creative.
We didn't have to be talking about freedom
in that underground facility, right?
Everybody could have just been at home
or listening to watching the internet and being frightened.
But they didn't.
They came out and they had a discussion,
(47:49):
like you came out to have a discussion.
Resistance is always creative.
Resistance is always affirmative.
When I think about the people, again, in other settings,
which are more dangerous settings
than the one most of us are in right now,
one thing that people tell me over and over again
from people who have protested and taking risks
is I feel less afraid when I'm protesting
(48:13):
than when I'm watching television, right?
So even taking that little risk is actually more affirming.
It gets you out doing things with other people is affirming.
It makes you feel better, right?
And this is part of the answer to your question.
Also therapeutically, and now I'm being completely serious,
the people who are trying to do democracy to death,
(48:35):
they want you alone and they want you frightened
and they want you thinking that there is no hope.
They want that.
That is a method.
They are aiming for that because democracy cannot work
if we are alone, if we're not working together,
if we're not communicating.
Democracy cannot work if we're frightened.
It's true what you say, that the fear itself
(48:56):
can bring about the bad result,
but that's not an argument for giving into the fear.
It's an argument for always making sure
that we're doing the little things that we can do
because everyone can always do at least some little thing.
And usually we can always do a little bit more
than we're doing right now.
And the little bit more that we're doing
(49:17):
than we're doing right now,
especially if we do it with other people,
it dissipates that feeling of helplessness.
And this is, again, I mean, it's something that I've seen
in settings which are much harsher
than the setting we're in now.
If you don't do anything, then you start to feel
it's inevitable that the dark is gonna come.
But if you're with other people, then you're hopeful,
(49:39):
you're both more productive and you're more hopeful,
and you get into a virtuous cycle
where the productivity and the hope
start to build on one another.
I...
I'd like to ask one final question,
which is one of the things that I really took from your books,
(50:02):
one of the many things I took,
was that people think democracy doesn't work,
but then if you try autocracy, it really doesn't work.
Right?
Like, they...
It really falls apart pretty quickly
and gets pretty horrible pretty fast.
We are in one of the maybe four or five places
in the United States where the future of democracy
(50:24):
is going to be decided for the world.
And I would like you to make a case
to this corner of the world on why democracy
is better than the alternative.
Okay?
(50:48):
There's the easy point,
and it's a point that you just made.
I'm gonna make it first, then I'll make another point.
The easy point is that all the things
that we complain about can be made better in a democracy.
So Stephen made the point, and it's quite right,
that things generally go south in a bad way,
(51:12):
in autocracy.
If we look at the dictators who some of our political leaders
express admiration for, like Putin
or Victor Orban in Hungary,
those are poor countries compared to the United States,
and they're not ever going to become
less poor countries, they're stuck.
Even though Hungary is in the middle of the European Union,
(51:34):
it's in the middle of the biggest richest trade zone
in the history of the world,
it's always gonna be poor,
because, or it's gonna be poor so long as Orban is in power,
because Orban in power means a single strongman,
crony oligarchs who get all the funding from the EU,
economic dysfunction, leaving aside the lack of the free press,
(51:55):
leaving aside the crushing of universities and so forth.
Things don't work and they're not fixable.
Russia is a very similar example,
Russia's swimming in hydrocarbon wealth,
but that hydrocarbon wealth is controlled by a single person,
a few cronies around that single person,
the vast majority of the country is incredibly poor,
(52:17):
very few things work well in Russia at all,
and that can't be changed, it can't be changed.
So it's beginning from Stephen's point
that a lot of things that we complain about in democracy
are worse in autocracy, that's true, that's true,
but the worst part is you can't do anything about it,
(52:41):
you can't do anything about it,
and I think this is one of the negative things
which I fear Americans don't understand,
if you vote against democracy,
if you vote for the norm breakers,
if you vote for the people who say they wanna be dictators,
if you vote for the people who admire the dictators,
it might seem fun and liberating in that moment,
(53:01):
like you've done something different,
but once you go across a certain line, you can't come back,
it's not something which is easily fixable,
the way that we think things are fixable,
democracies are slow and awkward
and they don't always produce the results we want,
but you can always in some way go back and start again,
when you vote against democracy, and we should be clear,
(53:22):
that's what a lot of Americans are thinking
about doing right now, if we vote against democracy,
we can't come back.
The bright point, which is the second point,
the way that things are going now in the US,
it isn't gonna continue, this status quo of polarization,
this status quo of anger and anxiety,
(53:43):
this status quo of 50-50 elections,
this status quo of social media domination of everything,
this status quo is not gonna go on, it isn't,
it's not sustainable for a whole lot of different reasons,
things are either going to get, in my view,
as a historian of these kinds of things,
who's written about a lot of these moments
(54:03):
of regime change and what follows,
in my view, things are either going to get much worse
or they could get much better,
they could get much better,
the United States in the 2030s could be a wealthier,
more generous, more equitable,
more successful country than it is now, a lot more.
(54:27):
We could be looking at a change
which is like the 40s to the 50s
or the 50s to the 60s.
This is a country which has the wealth, the technology,
the educated population, it has everything it needs
except some bad leaders, some bad ideas,
some cranky institutions.
We could break through into something
which is much brighter and much better,
(54:49):
but the only way we can break through to that,
the only way we can break through to a third century
of this first American republic
which is much better and much brighter
is to keep the democracy going.
Tim Steiner.
Thank you.
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