We Are Ripe for Fascism

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In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, Yale history professor Timothy Snyder talks to Jeff Schechtman about what he sees as the very real possibility that our republic will go the way of history’s other failed democracies, like Athens or even the Weimar Republic.

Both 1930s fascism and communism, Snyder warns, were responses to globalization and to rising inequality. We might be tempted to think that our democratic heritage automatically protects us from such threats, but he argues that this is a misguided reflex.

Snyder cautions that our institutions, such as the courts, the free press and Congress, cannot alone preserve democratic principles against the ways of authoritarian rulers. In Snyder’s view only a certain set of rules for resistance might save us. Some of these include not being afraid to stand out, do not obey in advance, and be calm when the unthinkable arrives.

Snyder is the author of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.

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Full Text Transcript:

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Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to Radio WhoWhatWhy. I’m Jeff Schechtman.

Indeed, we are living through complicated political times. A time when ideas like post-truth and alternative facts are seriously debated on the nightly news. A time when a private bodyguard of the President is sent to fire a member of the government, who was appropriately confirmed by the US Senate. A time when the press, the court and other institutions which support our separation of powers are under siege. But haven’t we been here before? From the earliest Alien and Sedition Acts through to the modern era and internment, McCarthyism and Nixon, we as individuals and as institutions have proven to be resilient. Sinclair Lewis has reported to have said that when fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross. But to the extent that we’re aware of it, can we be protected from it? On Wall Street, four of the scariest words you can here are: this time, it’s different. Today, we’re going to talk about how scary those four words could be, not on Wall Street, but in Washington. Joining me to talk about this is Timothy Snyder. He is the Levin professor of history at Yale University and it is my pleasure to welcome him here to talk about his new book: On Tyranny: 20 Lessons from the 20^th Century, Timothy Snyder, thanks so much for joining us.

Timothy Snyder: Very glad to be with you.

Jeff Schechtman: As we look at the political landscape today, is there anything that is fundamentally different about the dangers that we face today that are fundamentally more powerful than dangers that we have faced at other times as a democracy and as a republic?

Timothy Snyder: That’s a big question, let me take it from the other end. I think that the dominant American tendency is to imagine that whatever history is throwing at us, we’re ready for it because of who we are. What I’m trying to do in the book is to turn that around and to say that the people who founded our republic saw the world in the opposite way. The people who founded our republic were very skeptical about human nature and used the examples that they knew, which were classical examples to demonstrate that democracies and republics usually fail, usually fall to oligarchy or into an empire and they gave us the institutions that we have; flawed, though they were, flawed though they remain in order to go against the tendency of humans to lapse. What I’ve been trying to do in the book is go through the 20^th century, go through the examples that the founders couldn’t have known and try to show how modern attempts to create republics and democracies have often failed and I do that as a gesture towards to us to say look, the people in Czechoslovakia in 1948 who saw a Communist coup and the people of Germany in 1933 who saw the rise of Hitler were really not so different from us. Some of their institutions were actually not so different from ours and in some respects, they were probably better than we. They certainly had longer attention spans and in the case of Germany, a better press. What’s different and what’s the same? I think what’s largely similar with the 20^th century is globalization failure. There was a first globalization in the 19^th and 20^th century, which had its opponents, had its contradictions and which ended up in a First World War, Great Depression and a Second World War. We had a second globalization in the late 20^th century, which has now generated its own contradictions, its own inequalities, its own opponents and for me to question is so that we can learn enough from the 20^th century, they’ve been trying to dig these things off. The big difference for me would be how people think about the future. The grand opponents of liberalism, democracy, republics in the early 20^th century are people who had a very clear idea of an alternative, whether that was communism or whether that was fascism and when they would have factuality, it was the name of these grand alternatives. Fascists said your daily experience doesn’t matter because the only thing that matters is your collective experience with the larger group. Communists said that your daily experience doesn’t matter because what matters is the vision of the future. What’s different today and is threatening in a different way is that the people who are trying to destroy democracy or have destroyed democracy, whether it’s Russia, America or elsewhere, they left out the truth. Without a vision of the future, they just say I have my facts, you have your facts and maybe at the end of the day, nothing is really true and then that means that we can’t really trust each other, which means that democracy becomes impossibly in the long run and it means resistance becomes impossible in the short run.

Jeff Schechtman: That seems to be a fundamental part of the question, whether or not there is no vision of the future or that the vision of the future is so divided, is so different, that that’s a fundamental part of the problem.

Timothy Snyder: I think that if you want to see really specific about the people living in the United States right now, I think they have a vision of the future and it’s a vision of the future in which people named Trump and Kushner have an enormous amount of wealth and other people don’t. That’s not a vision of the future that you can really sell. I think if you want to be a nepotist and a kleptocrat and a post-modern authoritarian, the way you deal with time is not by generating a big, glorious vision of the future, whether it’s of national collectivity or whether it’s of class collectivity like in the past. I think what you do instead is you turn time into a kind of spiral, or kind of cycle where you talk about making America great again, or you go back to the 1930s and talk about America first. 

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