Timothy Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. He s the author of several award-winning books, including The Red Prince, Bloodlands, Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, and Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning. His latest book, On Tyranny: 20 Lessons from the 20th Century, is currently No. 1 on the New York Times Bestseller list for nonfiction in paperback. As you ll hear, this is a timely conversation, but please take my early admonishments about the nonpartisan nature of this conversation for what they are. You ll figure out what I think about that by the end, but it s actually not the core of the conversation. And now I give you Timothy Snyder, who has written a beautiful little book, on tyranny. When did he write this? because this reads as something he wrote the moment Trump became president. So I m going to give you a slightly pompous historian s answer, and maybe defend publishers a little bit too. And I m not sure that my press hasn t solved the problem of how to make money out of a short book, in fact, I don t think that they re making any profit out of making any money at all, and I think that s a problem I m sure that s going to solve it in a way that I m trying to figure out how to get a good at making money. Thanks for coming on The Making Sense Podcast. -Sam Harris Subscribe to the podcast! Learn more about the podcast by becoming a member of the mailing list or becoming a patron of the podcast, and getting access to the latest episodes of Making Sense: the Making Sense podcast wherever you get your ad-free version of the show? If you like the show, you ll get a discount on the podcast and get 20% off the entire thing, plus an extra discount when you sign up for the podcast becomes available on Audible and Audible, too get $5 or $10, you get an ad discount, and a free copy of the making sense podcasting membership starts in two weeks, starting at $19.99, plus a discount of $5 gets you get a maximum of $50 or $25, and they get two months of VIP membership gets you an ad-only course, plus they get an extra $5, and you get two weeks for two weeks of the course gets two months and a discount, they get a personalized course starting only $4, and two weeks will get two of your choice of course, they also get all of that gets $5 and a promo code, they will get all that starts at $4 and $4 gets $4 of your choices, and all they get that gets two of that will get your best bet, they receive all that gets three of your ad starts, and your ad gets a discount?
00:14:45.360How is a recoil from the world responsible for these anti-democratic tendencies?
00:14:54.360Thanks for bringing that up because that's an important part of the answer to some of your other really good questions.
00:14:59.340So if we just take a step back and think about globalization itself, that concept is a good example of how we're trapped in a present and have trouble seeing the past.
00:15:10.800The whole paradigm of globalization as we've invented it for ourselves in the 21st century assumes that it's something new.
00:15:19.520And when you assume that something is new, then you don't see that it has arc.
00:15:26.600You don't learn where it might be going.
00:15:28.140And the basic fact, and this is one of the things that historians bang their foreheads against the table about, the basic fact is that this is the second globalization.
00:15:36.660There was a very similar movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
00:15:40.100We had the same expansion of foreign trade.
00:15:45.220And interestingly, maybe most interestingly, in the late 19th century, we had much the same thing as we had in the late 20th century.
00:15:49.980We had the idea that these expansions of trade would inevitably lead to expansions of consciousness and that universal ideas would inevitably triumph.
00:16:01.500This is the intellectual history of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
00:16:04.180And that globalization ends in, as we all know, the First World War, the Great Depression, and the Second World War.
00:16:10.700So the whole point of remembering this is to be braced, on the one hand, to be braced in the sense of being sobered up, realizing that globalization can also go in these ways, that we shouldn't be surprised that there are contradictions in it and reactions to it, and that some of them can be quite extreme.
00:16:29.740But it's also bracing in the sense that it reminds us that there are people who lived through this the first time around, who are perhaps not only more experienced than we are, because they came out the other end of it, they survived, but more articulate and perhaps wiser than we are.
00:16:44.180And we can save a lot of time by drawing on what they left behind, which is the point of the book.
00:16:50.220But anyway, that's just all prologue to trying to answer your question.
00:16:53.300It's natural that globalization is going to bring, even if it brings an average improvement in some kind of abstract notion of well-being, like GDP per capita, that is going to also produce local or fractally local inequalities, and it's going to produce various kinds of resentments, because globalization also is the globalization of comparison.
00:17:14.920It means that people compare themselves to other people in ways that they hadn't done before, and can often subjectively feel themselves to be the victims, whether or not they are objectively.
00:17:25.380That's clearly happened in the United States in the 21st century.
00:17:28.700Something similar happened in the middle of Europe in the early 20th century.
00:17:32.740And in that environment, it's very easy then for clever politicians to come around and say, look, globalization is not complicated.
00:17:46.540I will put a face on globalization for you.
00:17:49.140And the way that fascism and national socialism worked was usually to put a Jewish face on globalization and to say, look, all these problems are not the result of an unhindered process, which nobody controls completely, but they're actually a result of a particular conspiracy of a particular group.
00:18:04.560That's very powerful politically, because then you can get your hands on, figuratively and literally, you can get your hands on members of that group who are inside your country, and you can imagine that you're carrying out some kind of political change.
00:18:17.060So, similarly, although, you know, in a minor key, if we think about the U.S. in the 21st century, if we think about the campaign now, the presidency of Donald Trump, you see basically the same reaction to globalization.
00:18:28.080The problem is not that the United States can't control everything.
00:18:31.840The problem is not that globalization is always going to be full of challenges, which we need to actually face and try to address.
00:18:38.980The problem is not that we need to have state policy.
00:18:48.680And that is a familiar form of politics, because what that does is it relieves Mr. Trump and the government in general of any obligation of actually addressing the challenges of globalization.
00:19:00.460And instead, it replaces that with a form of politics in which we are we are meant to just chase after the supposed the supposed members of these various groups.
00:19:12.380And while we do that, then we forget about what the government is supposed to be doing for us, namely making us more prosperous.
00:19:17.600So the attempt at a Muslim ban is terrible for Muslims, but it's not really about Muslims.
00:19:22.740It's about getting us into the habit of seeing Muslims as a source of our problems.
00:19:26.540The new denunciation office at Homeland Security, where you're supposed to call up a bureaucrat in Washington if you think you've been a victim of a crime by an undocumented migrant.
00:19:45.880We don't have the strength to deal with this.
00:19:47.440We're going to we're going to personalize it all.
00:19:48.860And that that is that that changes politics inside the country in ways that we're starting to see.
00:19:53.260Well, when you say when you put it that way, when you say it's not about undocumented migrants, it's about ushering in a new kind of politics, right, where you have people informing on their neighbors.
00:20:04.900That seems to attribute some kind of nefarious intention or agency on the part of people who are currently in government.
00:20:13.920It's not a a system working unconsciously in this direction.
00:20:21.560It sounds like you are alleging that people are having consciously undemocratic thoughts, whether we want to call them fascistic or some other flavor of edging toward tyranny.
00:20:37.160Yes, we do have people in the White House, such as Mr. Bannon, who are quite consciously ideological and think in in far right traditions that are anti-democratic.
00:20:51.520We have a president of the United States who spent 2016 telling us that democracy is basically faked, which is one of the things that people say in the first stages of regime changes.
00:21:02.100When it comes to denunciation, I think people half understand what they're doing.
00:21:08.540And then when it happens, they take they take the next step, whether it's the administration or whether it's the citizens doing the denouncing.
00:21:15.400You you cross a certain moral threshold when you do it.
00:21:18.540But if you denounce somebody, you get praised for doing it.
00:21:21.060And then maybe you get the first crack at their property or whatever might follow.
00:21:26.680So, yes, I would say I would say quite clearly there are people who do have what you're calling anti-democratic thoughts.
00:21:33.820Absolutely. Part of the whole point of history is to recognize that democracy is not automatic and there are plenty of people who don't like it.
00:21:39.100And but also there are these processes by which both civil servants and citizens get drawn in and then find themselves in a different moral place afterwards, even if they didn't completely understand what they were doing at the beginning.
00:21:51.840Yeah. Yeah. OK, well, I want to get directly into your book and into the lessons.
00:21:57.980I just want some of this language inserted into the conversation.
00:22:01.600The first lesson is do not obey in advance.
00:22:05.460And then you have these summaries before each chapter.
00:22:09.060Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.
00:22:12.360In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want and then offer themselves without being asked.
00:22:19.440A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.
00:22:24.160And then you give it you talk about how the Nazis moved into Austria and how really the behavior of the Austrians, more or less unbidden, taught the Nazis how far they could go in victimizing the Jews.
00:22:40.980And just you seem to suggest that this was there was something to learn from how readily people acquiesced to this project.
00:22:56.380And it's it's number one for for a bunch of reasons.
00:23:00.400One, as you suggest, it is right at the core of what historians think we understand about authoritarian regime changes, Nazi Germany in particular, but also in general, namely that at the very beginning,
00:23:14.100whether it's the takeover in Germany itself or whether it's the Anschluss in Austria, at the very beginning, authoritarian leaders require consent.
00:23:22.960This is a really important thought, because when we think of, you know, authoritarians, we then think of villains and then we think of supervillains.
00:23:32.500You know, we imagine these guys in uniforms who can just stride across the stage of history and do whatever they want.
00:23:36.660And maybe towards the end, something like that is true.
00:23:39.080But at the beginning, it's not at the beginning.
00:23:41.720Interestingly, people have, in a sense, more power than they do normally because they also have they have the power to resist.
00:23:48.820The problem is that we don't usually realize that the problem is that we tend as human beings to take new situations as normal and then to align ourselves with them.
00:23:57.160Our little our little needle compasses look for the new, you know, look for the new true north and align ourselves to it.
00:24:05.120And most of the time, that's appropriate.
00:24:06.980But sometimes it's an it's an absolute disaster.
00:24:09.980So, you know, historians generally agree about that, which is notable because historians, particularly historians of Nazi Germany, don't always agree about everything, to put it mildly.
00:24:20.160The other reason it's at the front of the book is that if you blow it, if you blow number one, then you can forget about the rest.
00:24:28.100Because if you if you can't do don't obey in advance, which is harder than it sounds, if you can't do that, then the rest of them will become impossible because the rest of them will seem psychologically senseless to you.
00:24:37.900If you fail not to obey in advance, if instead you normalize and you drift, then the rest of it won't make any sense to you because you'll already be drifting things which had seen which would have seemed abnormal to an earlier version of you will start to seem normal.
00:24:53.340Now, the point to start doing anything will never seem to come.
00:24:59.320In fact, you'll just be internally adjusting, adjusting, adjusting.
00:25:02.360And psychologically, you become a different person.
00:25:04.760And then the final reason why that's lesson number one is political.
00:25:07.000If people if people if people don't take advantage of the moment they have in the first weeks, months and maybe at the outside the first year, if you don't do anything, then then the system changes and the costs of resistance become much, much higher.
00:25:21.480So right now, like the little things that we do that would make a difference, like looking people in the eye, subscribing to newspapers, making small talk, founding a neighborhood organization, running for local office, protesting, having political conversations like the one you and I are having.
00:25:36.920At the moment, these things require just a tiny bit of courage, right?
00:26:38.060If you're doing nothing, you're helping a regime change come about.
00:26:40.720So, I want to flag the reaction that I know is occurring in some percentage of our listeners,
00:26:49.060which is that everything you just said, when mapped onto the present, sounds like a symptom of paranoia, right?
00:26:57.040That this is just like we're not, we're fundamentally not in the situation we just described.
00:27:01.820And we can remain somewhat agnostic about that.
00:27:06.160I mean, I can't name a person really now who is more critical of Trump than I am.
00:27:13.040To some percentage of my listeners, I have completely lost my mind on this point.
00:27:18.160But I want to try to maintain what will be viewed as a less partisan line through this conversation,
00:27:26.760because everything you're saying here generically applies.
00:27:30.680Again, if not now, sometime this applies.
00:27:34.300And certainly, you know, you and I are going to be in large agreement about how much we should be taking seriously these concerns right now,
00:27:43.400given what has happened in the White House.
00:27:45.660But, again, this is not, even if you're a fan of Trump, these dynamics are in play potentially everywhere all the time,
00:27:55.620no matter how stable your democracy seems.
00:27:59.900It's vulnerable to this kind of thing.
00:28:02.020So, I want to move to point two, which is defend institutions.
00:28:06.460And you say that institutions do not protect themselves.
00:28:09.200They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning.
00:28:12.640And then you use Nazi Germany as an example.
00:28:17.580And then you quote from an editorial that I had never read.