Five years ago, Timothy Snyder began work on The Road to Unfreedom, a book examining a modern political transformation: What happens when factual truth is upended? When wealth is concentrated? When battlefronts are online as well as on the ground? The Yale history professor had drafted the book — a book about Russia and Ukraine — by November 2016, but then Donald Trump was elected president.
Instead of submitting the book he’d planned, Snyder, perhaps best known up to that point for his critically acclaimed histories Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin and Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, published a slim, best-selling volume called On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century. He continued work on The Road to Unfreedom, expanding it to consider how ideas germinated in Russia in the early 2010s had spread through Ukraine and Europe to the United States.
The Road to Unfreedom offers a brief, potent and carefully documented history of Vladimir Putin’s consolidation of power in Russia, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election. Snyder centres on the notion that the world may be lurching from a “politics of inevitability” — the notion, as Snyder writes, that a better future is ahead, “the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing to be done” — and a “politics of eternity,” or the idea that time is “a circle that endlessly returns to the same threats from the past … (that posits) that government cannot aid society as a whole, but can only guard against threats.”
Framing the book with six political virtues, Snyder offers alternatives in his chapter titles: Individualism or Totalitarianism; Truth or Lies. “(I)ndividuality, endurance, co-operation, novelty, honesty and justice figure as political virtues. These qualities are not mere platitudes or preferences, but facts of history,” he writes. “Virtues are inseparable from the institutions they inspire and nourish.”
The Tribune spoke with Snyder by phone; the following is an edited transcript of the chat, condensed and edited for clarity.


You are best known as a historian; why did you write a book about our contemporary moment?
When I look around at what the economists and the political scientists are saying about the world — look, I’m just not sure that they’re covering everything that needs to be covered. I think history is really helpful. History can help you to see when people are lying to you about the past and history can give you a sense of what’s possible and what’s not.
My specific motivation in writing The Road to Unfreedom is I think we really are passing through a crucial moment in the 2010s when things can go one way or things can go another way, and that’s what history’s all about. History isn’t about how things have to go a certain way. History is about what’s possible within the given structures, so what I’m trying to do — and it’s ambitious — I’m trying to write a kind of history of a moment as it is unfolding, so we see how it unfolds and so we can see how much agency, how much freedom, how much power we have in this moment.


Your book is framed by what you term the “politics of inevitability” and the “politics of eternity.” How do these ideas intersect with economic factors?
It’s really easy to look around and just experience what’s happening to us as chaotic or emotional or somehow inexplicable, and I think what’s been revealed to us is just how important time is in politics.
The American version of (the politics of inevitability) is something like, the free market’s going to bring about democracy and happiness, and those are just the rules and there’s not really much that can be done one way or the other. Eventually you hit some sort of a crisis where it dawns on you that progress is not automatic. It dawns on you that there aren’t really rules to history. In the US, you could say this started in 2008 for a lot of folks and then in 2016 it caught up to a lot of different people, but in the last decade or so, I think it’s fair to say this notion that things are just automatically going to get better has fallen away.
What can come next is what I call in the book the politics of eternity, which is this notion that there really isn’t a future, there’s just kind of a hazy past where things were better. And what’s cut us off from that hazy past is not ourselves or our policies or our rulers, but other people — foreign enemies, native enemies. A slogan like “America First” reflects this, because it loops back to the 1930s. The idea of making America great again: You don’t give anyone a future, you deny the future exists.
I’d say economic inequality has everything to do with this. If you thought in our politics of inevitability that there were no alternatives to capitalism or that you can’t even modify capitalism, you can’t even dream about having a welfare state, that itself generates economic inequality both of income and of wealth. And when you get too much economic inequality, then people stop believing in progress. They stop believing in the future.


You note that certain uniquely American institutions may be viewed as vulnerabilities by foreign agents — particularly the electoral college and the Second Amendment. Can you explain?
We have these institutional restrictions — the electoral college is built into the system, gerrymandering is permitted by the system — and those things move us away from being a democratic system. But from the point of view of a foreign adversary, they look like vulnerabilities because they make it easier to throw the election. It’s odd from any point of view, except ours, that the president can win, even though he gets 3 million fewer votes than his opponent. But from the point of someone who’s trying to harm us, it makes it easier or more plausible to throw your weight. At the end (of the 2016 election, Russian agents) time this flood of fake news in places like Michigan and Wisconsin, which everyone thinks (Hillary) Clinton is going to win, and which she doesn’t, but they can target that wave because it’s not a national election. It’s an election that’s going to be determined by a few states at the last moment, and once others understand our system that way, they can try to manipulate our system that way — which is what actually happened.
Sovereignty means that the state has a monopoly on legitimate violence, and that violence is an exception and not a rule. When you look at the US from the outside, it’s odd that tens of thousands of people die in gun violence every year. It’s odd that in critical tender public places, like schools, we would have these regular shootings. If you’re hostile to the United States, that looks like a place you could just push, you could just expand, you could try to make it worse, and that of course means supporting the NRA, which of course Russia does. 


There have been reports that some Russians believe the influence of meddling in the US election has been overblown. What do you think about that?
I guess if you’re in Russia it’s hard to imagine what an open society is like. In particular, it’s hard to imagine what an unregulated Internet would look like. Our Internet is so unregulated that it’s just sort of extraordinary. Mr Putin’s original line about the Internet was that it was a CIA plot. It took him a long time to figure out that it wasn’t a CIA plot, that it was actually just what it looked like. And because it was just what it looked like, they could use it to get into American politics and change our reality.


You end the book with a call for a “politics of responsibility.” What do you mean by that?
I’m trying to think seriously about politics on the scale of one life or one generation. My premise in this book is there really is good and evil. Some things really are better and some things really are worse, and that being a good citizen isn’t just a matter of doing what everybody else does. It’s a matter of having some idea of virtue and trying to live up to that idea of virtue in public. The book is not just about things falling apart; it’s about the virtues you lose when things fall apart. — The Chicago Tribune/TNS



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