Front Burner - Trump, fascism and a warning from the past

Episode Date: December 20, 2024

After Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, historian and professor Timothy Snyder wrote a long post on Facebook. Here's how it started: "Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience."Snyder went on to share twenty lessons about authoritarianism from the 20th century. They would lay the groundwork for his 2017 book On Tyranny. Fast forward to 2024, and Snyder's warnings about authoritarianism are being amplified once again. He joins the show to look ahead to the next four years of the Trump presidency, through the lens of his latest books: the just-released On Freedom and On Tyranny.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

Happy Holidays! I'm Frank Cappadocia, Dean of Continuous Professional Learning at Humber Polytechnic. I'd like you to set a goal to drive key learning for your people in 2025. I want you to connect with Humber CPL to design a custom training solution that accelerates your team's performance and engagement. Humber works with you to hone industry-specific upskilling, enhance your leadership, and drive results. Flexible learning delivery formats are tailored to your unique needs. Adapt, evolve, and excel. To learn more, go to humber.ca slash cpl. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. After Donald Trump was elected in 2016, historian Timothy Snyder wrote a long post on Facebook.

Here's how it started. Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Snyder went on to share 20 lessons about authoritarianism from the 20th century. That post, which went completely viral, laid the groundwork for his 2017 book on tyranny. Fast forward to 2024, a month away from the start of Trump's second term in office, Snyder's warnings about authoritarianism, like do not obey in advance and defend institutions, are being amplified once again. It felt fitting, as we look ahead to the next four years of the Trump presidency, to have Timothy Snyder back on the show. He also has a new book out, it's called On Freedom. It's

a deep exploration of what freedom is, drawing from the work of philosophers, political dissidents, and contemporary thinkers. Professor Timothy Snyder, thank you so much for coming on to FrontBurner. I am very glad to be talking to you. We're so glad to have you. So you made the point in a piece for The New Yorker responding to the recent election of Donald Trump that Trump, quote, has always been a presence, not an absence, the presence of fascism.

And I wonder if you could elaborate for me on what you mean by that. could elaborate for me on what you mean by that? I think a lot of the American passivity about Trump depends on this implicit idea that thanks to the Constitution, thanks to American exceptionalism, thanks to our inherent goodness, thanks to something, we have a durable democratic system, have a durable democratic system and it will go on regardless of what one person does. And that's, I think, wrong. When you think that, like when you think that the system just exists and persists and endures, then you're going to look at Trump and you're going to say, okay, well, the problem with Trump is that he lacks A, B, and C. He lacks the ability to go on with others. He lacks patience. He lacks a traditional sort of charisma. And then you're going to dismiss him because he doesn't fit your image of how

things have to be. But of course, it's your image that's the illusion, not Trump. And so Trump brings things. He brings new kinds of politics, new ways of doing politics. And that's, I think, what we've missed. You've been warning about this for a long time. Were you surprised by how decisively he won on election night? What does that say to you? I'm going to make the persnickety point that it wasn't decisive. He didn't get a popular majority. He didn't even get to 50%. The margin is meaningful, but not huge. It's one of the smaller margins actually in American history of a victor. So I think the question is different. The question is how could he get 77 million votes?

And that's a fair question. I wasn't too surprised by it though. He's very talented. He has a special sort of charisma. He doesn't have money himself, but he's funded by people who do. And a lot of their ads were quite clever, especially towards the end. And I'm afraid a lot of Americans are tired of the idea that there could be a disaster. There have just been so many threats of disaster lately. And I think a lot of, you know, we have short memories. And I think a lot of folks had just forgotten what happened the previous time he was

president, or a lot of them were confused about what was under Trump and what was under Biden, which was a confusion which the Trump advertisements were deliberate about fostering. I just wonder what you might say to somebody who would say, look, I do remember what it was like under him last time, and it didn't look like fascism to me. Yeah. I mean, compare it to the first four years of Mussolini or whatever. I mean, I think people can be fascist without having total power, right? I mean, Mussolini had to deal with the king for a while. He had to deal with parliament for a while. Trump also had to deal with Congress for a while. So, you can be a fascist without there being a fascist system, right? You can try to get to power and it doesn't mean you're going to succeed getting into power, you know? And I think that's Trump, right?

But the most meaningful part of Trump from the first time, which I don't think people necessarily remember, is all the lying. And if you're a Trump supporter, it's hard to remember that because you probably believe the lies. And if you believe the lies, you can't remember them as lies. And the most important lie, of course, was the lie that he won the last election, which was a big fascist scale lie. He clearly crossed the threshold there. If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us. If you count the votes that came in late, we're looking at them very strongly. But a lot of votes came in late. And moment his supporters used violence, and he supported them for using violence to stay in power, he was crossing another really big threshold. But all that said, I think, you know, with this is unfortunately, that passes just prologue for what can come next. What do you think is different this time around?

Yeah, well, one thing which is definitely different is that people are worn out. The people who would be opposing him are worn out and they need some different kind of scheme because the previous scheme was that this is an exception, it's going to pass. A second thing which is different is that in 2016, there wasn't a big lie about how Trump was denied continuous power by a conspiracy. And now there is such a big lie and a lot of people believe it. And he's vetting his own cabinet appointments on the willingness of people to continue to spread that lie. And he's promising to persecute people who have simply told the truth about what happened in a presidential election. Another thing which is very different relatedly is he now has his people. He now has his cadres. The people he is proposing to be the cabinet

are almost all of them, not just less qualified than other cabinet proposals in American history, but they're anti-qualified. They're people who can be counted on to use those ministries, right, to use, as we call them, departments for very different purposes. Like Kash Patel, who was nominated to run the FBI, he has explicitly said he's not going to enforce the law. He is going to go after political opponents. We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government, but in the media. Yes, we're going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We're going to come after you, whether it's criminal.

Which is a very, very strong transformation of what that office has recently been. You know, a lot of these guys that he's appointed, they're also devoted Trump loyalists, right? And so how do you understand the choices vis-a-vis loyalty? I got to point out, I don't think Elon Musk is loyal at all. And I think Elon Musk is more important than Trump. And I think in a pretty obvious way, more powerful than Trump, because if this is an oligarchy, then who's the real oligarch? Well, there's one guy who has more money than all the rest of them put together by a lot. And Trump doesn't actually have money. That's all a scam.

That's all a fake. And he owes Musk. Musk paid for his campaign. And it's not just retrospective, it's also prospective, because when Trump is going to file lawsuits or when he's going to promise to run Republican elected officials out of office by supporting their opponents, it's going to be Musk who funds all of that. So Trump's power and Trump's threats depend to a large extent on somebody else. And I don't think Musk is loyal at all. There's no record of Musk being loyal. Musk sees Trump, I think, as an instrument for taking a wrecking ball to the U.S. government. After a relentless pressure campaign from billionaire Elon Musk, Washington is now barreling towards a possible government shutdown just days before Christmas. Musk calling a shutdown infinitely better than passing a horrible bill,

threatening that any lawmaker who supports it deserves to be voted out. And that's how other oligarchs see it, but it's not how all oligarchs see it. And so, you know, we're now in this different kind of regime where there are a bunch of rich guys, some of whom have real offices, some of whom don't. Musk doesn't really. But they're going to have different reasons for weakening the state or transforming the state. And I'm afraid a lot of U.S. politics is going to look like a kind of clash among these oligarchs. We're also seeing a lot of these big tech CEOs, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, make million-dollar donations to Trump's inauguration fund. I know Kamala Harris had big donors too. Bill Gates made a big donation to her campaign. But do you think there's something exceptional about what's happening here? Yeah. I mean, you're right to signal that

money ought not to have this kind of role in US politics. We should have publicly funded elections and we don't. And not just individuals, but more or less randomly assembled groups can inject infinite amounts of money, unlimited amounts of money into our campaigns. And that's just ridiculous. And that's one of the reasons why we are where we are. But that said, you're also right that this is different because these, I mean, you have the regime proximate oligarchs, the ones like Musk or Peter Thiel or David Sachs who are in on it, right? They're in on it. They see the president. They're going to have offices. And then you have the oligarchs who are not regime

proximate but who don't want to be targeted. And that's Bezos and Zuckerberg and so on. And they're basically paying fealty, right? And for them, it's a trivial amount of money. I mean, for Trump, it's real money. But for them, it's nothing. And so, you know, and so it's just, it's a way of like greasing the palm of like showing respect in some kind of mafiosi language to Trump. So because they're not aiming to be regime proximate, they're just aiming not to be the first targets. Related to that, when Bezos made the decision to pull the presidential endorsement that the Washington Post had written endorsing Kamala Harris, I saw a lot of people come back to one of your lessons on tyranny, do not obey in advance. And since then, how are we seeing people

obey in advance here? I mean, let me just take a tiny step back if I can and try to explain the lesson because the way that like people who live in democracies and watch movies, you know, will tend to think that the way authoritarianism comes is because a lot of guys show up with weapons wearing, you know, black shiny boots and uniforms and suddenly everything changes and there's a dictator who can do everything. I mean, there are coups, there are people in uniforms, that all matters, but most of the power is still in the people and people choose to give it away. And they choose to give it away because they look around, they see other people giving it away. And that's why you need the lesson, don't obey in advance. Because Trump and Musk, however powerful they are, they need you to think about what they want because they can't actually issue orders to everyone. They can't think of everything. They need you to fill in the gap. And that's why you shouldn't obey in advance. And it's going to be tense. This is important because despite Ayn Rand and despite the way that Americans want to lionize their oligarchs, you can't actually expect the billionaires to be the courageous people. They're not. Not obeying in advance means precisely not doing what everybody else is doing, including what all the people with money are doing. I wonder if you could give me some examples of how you see people, even institutions, now obeying in advance. ABC News deciding that it wasn't going to contest a pretty ridiculous lawsuit by Trump.

The fallout from a bombshell settlement in President-elect Trump's defamation suit against ABC News. Endorsed Donald Trump for president. Judges and two separate juries have found him liable for rape and for defaming the victim of that rape. In the settlement, ABC agreeing to donate $15 million to Trump's presidential library, pay $1 million to his legal team, and add a statement to their article on the interview reading, ABC News and George Stephanopoulos regret statements regarding President Donald J. Trump made during the interview. Which, of course, that's a good example, unfortunately, because when ABC News obeys in advance, that gives Trump power he didn't have

otherwise to try to sue anybody, right, who says anything critical of him. And I think, you know, given the American particularities, it's going to be those weird lawsuits rather than direct state censorship, which is going to matter. Because if you're Musk, if you're Musk, you could literally sue a meaningful proportion of the entire American population without noticing the costs. whereas the million people that you sue are going to feel the costs because the difference in wealth is so extraordinarily grotesque. Even by the better media, the both sides, it's a kind of obeying in advance. The kind of day-by-day normalizing is a kind of obeying in advance. And there's a real desire. I mean,

I don't think it's going to last. There's a real desire right now for this to be normal because people just feel battered, even the people who are opposed to Trump. And I think the real test is going to be a few months down the line when some of this stuff he's threatening to do actually happens. And then we'll see another decision point about obeying advance or not. Happy holidays. I'm Frank Cappadocia, Dean of Continuous Professional Learning at Humber Polytechnic, and I'd like you to set a goal for 2025 to sharpen your skills and get promoted. Register for a professional designation, micro-credential, or certificate with Humber's continuous professional learning and ignite your career journey this new year.

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To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. Maybe worth noting here, one very recent example of this might also be that he's suing the Des Moines Register for running a poll before the election that showed him trailing Harris. And he's accused the woman who did the poll, Ann Seltzer, of election, brazen election interference. So, you know, there's another one. Yeah, that's important. I mean, another lesson of on tyranny is believe in truth. Another one is investigate.

That's important. I mean, another lesson of on tyranny is believe in truth. Another one is investigate. This goes pretty deep into like the history of Stalinism because it's not election interference. And that's related to his claim that he won the 2020 election. So the public version is going to be Trump is a hero, Trump can never lose, Trump always has the support of everybody, right? And if you contest that, even the most minor way, then you're going to be targeted. That's the message of all of this. And so it's not just the repression or the attempt to repress and deter an individual member of the press. It's the attempt to deter all the press, but it's even more than that. It's not just deterrence. It's the attempt to create and to force into the public mind a big lie. And if everybody gets used to that, if we normalize that, then other big lies come down the line. And that's a way that politics are transformed in the direction of fascism.

Just sticking with this concept of truth, I know in your new book on freedom, you talk about these five forms of freedom that help create free individuals in society, and one of them is factuality. And you describe it, I really loved this, as the grip on the world that allows us to change it. And looking to history, I wonder if you could just tell me a bit more about how these liberties with the truth evolve, and what we could see in the next four years. Yeah, I mean, I think it's important just to stress as a matter of practice why facts matter so much. Facts allow us to agree with one another even when our values are different.

And so then there's an overlap that can be constructive in terms of policy. Facts allow a judiciary to function because without findings of fact, you can't have findings of law. Facts are the last defense of a citizen against wealth and power because if there are no facts or if we don't believe in truth, then it doesn't matter if you take a stand. And if we take the position that facts don't matter, there's no truth, then it's always going to be spectacle, which is what we see now, right? Musk and Trump pretty much think they can say anything and get away with it because the philosophy that everything is just an opinion aligns so well with the bullhorns that they have in their social media.

So historically in the 20th century, when people try to change regimes, they first try to change regimes of knowledge. And that's not new. That's to be expected. And if you're in Canada or in some other democracy, one of the things you should be thinking is, it may not seem glamorous, but do we still have local news? Do we still have people covering the things that matter to people in their everyday lives? Because it's when you start to lose that, people start to lose confidence in factuality generally, and then that has pretty immediate political consequences. Yeah.

I want to turn from domestic policy to foreign policy quickly, if you don't mind. Trump promised to end the Russia-Ukraine war within 24 hours of being in office. His incoming Ukraine envoy will be traveling to Kiev in January. And I know that you have spent a lot of time in Ukraine. And how do you see those efforts playing out? What do you think is going to happen? I mean, so in fairness, there are nice, you know, there are the Republicans whose views on foreign policy, I don't completely disagree with who have a nice story. And that story is, Trump is going to feel bullied by Putin, he's going to understand that to stop the war, he has to help Ukraine. And that, of course, is totally logical. Like if you if you posit an American president who cared about

American national interests or even about his own image, then it would be logical. It's just completely logical. If you want to end a war, you have to make it harder for the aggressor rather than harder for the country that's defending itself. Now, in the real world, all Trump has ever done in his political career is be submissive to Putin. And in the real world, all Trump has proposed so far is hurting Ukrainians by taking their weapons away. So I don't expect anything good. I would be very happy to be wrong. But if Trump does what he says he's going to do, his strategy is going to be to apply pressure on the weaker side, which the stronger side is going

to rejoice in, continue the war, and also expect more from Trump. Because from the Russian point of view, Trump's a submissive. And whatever he offers in the beginning, they're going to think that's as strong as he's going to get. We push it more, we're just going to get more. So I hope the Russians are wrong, but the evidence unfortunately isn't there. Before we go today, I wonder if I could come back to the five forms of freedom that you talk about in your book. We talked about factuality, but another one that you highlight is solidarity. And you describe it as the recognition that freedom is for everyone.

base that Trump has that elected him, as he talked about mass deportations, dismantling government institutions, given how people do not agree on a set of facts here. How hard do you think it will be in the U.S. to get to any form of solidarity? Is it even possible? First of all, I want to thank you for coming back twice to On Freedom, which is meant to be a constructive, hopeful book about freedom as an organizing principle for politics, which is something that I deeply believe in. Because like what they think freedom is, is the freedom to make government go away so they can be even wealthier and the freedom to turn one person against another, which is consistent with a kind of negative idea of freedom where you think freedom is just about me getting my way and whoever's around me, whether it's the government or my neighbor, they're the problem, not me, I'm of the free in order to have a free society, you have to have people who are capable of empathizing with others who recognize that the freedom is for me, it also has to be for you. And solidarity is, I think, not just a nice sentiment, it's something which is necessary to have a society of free people. And factuality works the same way because factuality is something which allows us to recognize one another as being in the world as opposed to my saying, I know all the truth and therefore it follows that you're the enemy because you don't share all of my truths.

But yeah, how can America do it? I mean, we need to have local news. We need to regulate social media. We need to spend more time with one another. We need to have less wealth inequality. So all of these things which have happened in the US, if you're a neighbor to the US or if you're another democracy, there are warning signs here. When I wrote my previous books, I was trying to describe Russia as a set of warning signs for the US. And now we're reaching the point where the US can be regarded as a set of warning signs for neighboring or other democracies. Right. Timothy Snyder, I want to thank you very much for this. It was such a pleasure to have you on. Pleasure was mine.

Thank you. That is all for this week. Front Burner was produced this week by Joytha Sengupta, Kieran Oudshorn, Matt Omha, Laura Donnelly, and Mackenzie Cameron. Music is by Joseph Chavison. Our senior producer is Elaine Chao. Our executive producer is Nick McCabe-Locos. I'm Jamie Poisson. Talk to you next week. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.