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Timothy Snyder is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. The Guardian wrote, “In the years since the 2016 U.S. presidential election there has been no more significant critic of the advance of Trump’s form of nihilism than Timothy Snyder.” This year, he has testified before Congress about foreign influence in the U.S. and has campaigned tirelessly in support of Ukraine in its war against Russia.
In 2017, Timothy Snyder wrote a short book, “On Tyranny: 20 Lessons from the Twentieth Century.” It was a cautionary tale drawn from Snyder’s studies of totalitarian regimes. He mused about how lessons from foreign regimes like Hungary, Russia and Eastern Europe applied to the U.S. The lessons were warning signs that signaled when a country was veering toward totalitarianism. “On Tyranny” was the New York Times bestselling nonfiction book of 2017 and stayed on bestseller lists for years.
Snyder has a new book, “On Freedom,” in which he reflects on what it means to be truly free. He talks about the difference between “freedom from” — or negative freedom — and “freedom to,” which he says is what a free society must embrace.
Snyder said that “freedom from” leads to “a clash of all against all. Because if freedom is just me against other stuff and I never have to ask who I am or what I want, then eventually I start to see you as a barrier.”
Sen. J.D. Vance is an example of someone who espouses negative freedom. “His view is that government can’t do anything and therefore it won’t do anything and therefore my oligarch friends get to run everything. And the only task that I have as a politician is a kind of performer who makes up stories that get people angry at one another and fight one another. Negative freedom leads …to a moral vacuum. It leads to political helplessness, and eventually it leads to social self-destruction.”
By contrast, “freedom to” is “not just a matter of … women not being oppressed, it’s also a matter of their having health care so they can be free.”
“There’s a positive feedback loop between doing things together and being more free as individuals.”
Is the U.S. on a glide path to fascism?
“Not a glide path, because I think history is made up of the structures and the trends but it’s also made up of the funny little bumps that nobody expected,” Snyder replied. “I think it’s fair to say that we are at a moment where things can go either way, and I think it’s quite clearly defined now, precisely because the way Kamala Harris is talking about freedom. She’s very much in a future orientation.”
By contrast, Donald Trump “is a guy who, facing prison and thinking about nothing except himself, needs to die in bed and that bed has to be in the White House and the rest of us be damned,” said Snyder. “He’s also a person who’s filled with grievance about a story that he made up himself. The internet is full now of people who use AI to generate fake images and then get mad at the fake images.”
“This is not a time to be unaware of choices or to be cynical about voting or to imagine that history or something is going to take care of us. Only we are going to take care of this for us.”
Snyder writes that “being joyous is the first step to freedom.”
“Freedom should make us happy because freedom is about caring about the little things that people care about and about being able to put those things together in our own unique ways and maybe to bring them to life, whether that’s a family or whether that’s a hobby or whether it’s a profession or whether it’s a sport or whether it’s a getaway,” said Snyder.
“Freedom is the condition in which we’re actually able to bring other values together. So it’s inherently a happy thing.”
