Ideas - From secrecy to shamelessness: How new fascism operates

Episode Date: September 16, 2026

Historian Marci Shore doesn't hesitate to use the word 'fascism' to describe the present moment. The former Yale professor, who moved shortly after the 2024 U.S. elections to teach at the University of Toronto, tells her students why "we shouldn't fetishize" the term. She argues concepts and terminologies born from history like fascism is how we process the world. But she adds it's critical we allow for today's nuances and differences.This podcast includes Marci Shore in conversation with IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed and Shore's lecture “Thoughts From a Post Truth World," part of the series “Democracy in Peril: A Way Forward Against Authoritarianism," organized by the University of Manitoba, and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg. Marci Shore is Chair of European Intellectual History at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto.

In rural Spain, a mother raises her children in isolation, convinced God has chosen them to save the world through music. But when two of them escape, the ones left behind go viral. From Ken winning filmmakers Los Havis, LaMassias, is the acclaimed series blending family drama, thriller, and cult horror. And starting September 3rd, you'll find it exclusively on Mooby, the streaming service for great cinema. Try 30 days free at Mooby.com slash CBC.

That's Mubi.com slash CBC. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. I'm very grateful to have the chance to speak at a human rights museum, not only because there are very few of them, you know, in the world, but also because I feel like there is a crisis of a basic moral intuition of human rights. Intellectual historian Marcy's, She's Shore speaking at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg.

She is one of three American academics who are prominent critics of Donald Trump, who now teach at the University of Toronto's Monk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. I'm also quite grateful for the land acknowledgement. Being an American at a heartbreaking moment when in our own country, we've kind of gone in the opposite direction, you know, not of acknowledging the cross-eastern, of times past, but rather of, you know, attempting to pretend that they didn't happen. As I'm sure you've heard what, for instance, one is allowed to say about slavery in Florida public schools now is that sometimes slaves learn skills that were beneficial in other aspects

of their lives. And obviously, none of these things, you know, like what was done to indigenous communities, can ever be made okay. I mean, I'm a historian. I know you can't go back and fix the past. But we can acknowledge it. We can at least look at the truth with eyes wide open. And for me, that's a very important starting point. One important starting point for Marcy Shore was combing through communist archives in Poland and Czechoslovakia in the 1990s. And what she found as a fact-finding historian reminded her of a work of fiction, the last chapter of Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel, The Heardttaulder's dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale.

You shift in that last chapter to your 100 years or so in the future, and suddenly you're at an academic conference of historians who have found this document by the handmade. And they're sitting around a table discussing it, and they're doing everything right. But there's something chilling about it. Because you've just read this long, wrenching story about the handmade. And now you're in the future when it is a historical document and when it's a historical document and when these people are historical objects as opposed to subjects. And so all through the 90s, I felt like I'm in that last chapter.

You know, I'm the one sitting there in the archives reading desperate letters by people who are often going to die gruesome deaths, you know, who are writing, you know, their last words to their child or their father or their partner. And here I am kind of analyzing them, interpreting them, trying to have a kind of objective analytical distance. Coming up, you'll hear my conversation with Marcy Shore. But first, her lecture given in April 26, as part of a series titled Democracy in Peril, a Way Forward Against Authoritarianism.

It was organized by the Center for Professional and Applied Ethics at the University of Manitoba and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. Her talk is called Thoughts from a Post-Truth world. So what did we learn in all this time of digging stuff out of the archives about the totalitarian experiences of the 20th century? And the first thing I want to say is that when we talk about authoritarianism, fascism, genocide, concentration camps, imperialism, colonialism, all of these concepts that historians and social scientists use, they're all hermeneutic and heuristic devices. No two historical moments are ever exactly the same. Just like no two human beings are ever exactly the same.

Nevertheless, I think there are reasons why it's useful to use these categories. And for the philosophers out here, I'm going to use a Kantian analogy. So Kant had this idea of brokering a compromise between philosophers, who thought that knowledge comes from reason and philosophers who thought that knowledge comes from sensory data and our impressions of the world that are coming to us. And Kahn says that concepts, these concepts that our reason has,

kind of on its own, without the intuition from the sensory impressions of the world, are empty. But he says, all those sensory impressions and intuitions we get from the world, without concepts, they're both. blind. We don't have any way to process the irreducible particularity of the world without having certain kinds of frameworks and lenses that allow us to make certain kinds of comparisons. So I'm

always telling my students, you know, when we use the word fascism, and I'm comfortable using the word fascism about the present moment, we shouldn't fetishize it. You know, we can draw a list of reasons why it's not exactly the same as Mussolini's Italy or the Iron Garden, Romania. Nazi Germany, but there are reasons why these are useful hermeneutic categories that help us understand reality by means of comparison. I want to go through some of the kind of classic characteristics of these 20th century, fascist regimes, totalitarian regimes, just to kind of put them in our heads so we can think about things that are now playing themselves out. I'll start with something that might be slightly less obvious to people who haven't spent a ridiculous amount of time immersed in the 1930s, as I have as a historian of the 1930s.

But one of the things that was very characteristic of what was happening in Europe in the 1930s was that there was a polarization of the political spectrum. The left was becoming more radical, the right was becoming more radical, and the center was melting into air. And one of the things that happened was that there was an old right, let's call it, this is what historians of the 1930s often call it, there was an old right, there were the old conservatives, the old traditional 19th century style conservatives. We can kind of think about them to use an imperfect, perhaps slightly inappropriate analogy, as like the kind of like the kind of, I don't know, brandy drinking, cigar smoking, stereotypical, elitist white men who belonged to the country club that has never really taken members of color or Jews or immigrants

or anything like that, but wouldn't actually go out in the streets and lynch anyone. You know, like that kind of old right conservative who believed in certain kinds of traditions and private clubs, but, you know, weren't necessarily, you know, out to, like, have orgiastic massacres. And then there's a new right, a new fascist right, that comes. And for those of you who know the 1930s, this was like the relationship between General on Tenesco and the Iron Guard or Admiral Horthy and the Arrow Cross between the old German conservatives and the Nazis, then this new right comes, the new fascist right, you know, who have

no qualms about getting their hands dirty and engaging in orgiastic violence. And it takes the old right some time to realize that the new right is not just a more animated, energetic, vigorous version of themselves. And I mentioned this to preface the fact that the first moment when I panicked about my own country, and let me first say I'm not an expert on American politics, most of my career I spent trying to explain Eastern Europe to English speakers to North Americans. You know, I'm American, but I was not trained as an Americanist. I was trained as a historian of Eastern Europe.

But the moment when I panicked about my own country was in 2008 when John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate, which some of you might remember. And to me, she was a character right out of the 1930s, and John McCaid was a classic figure of the old right. I'm a person of the left. I was never going to vote for McCain, but he was not crazy. He was not morally insane. I mean, he had many positions I disagreed with, but he did have a sense of restraint. He came from a different tradition. And it took him some time to realize what he had unleashed and to get scared.

And when I listened to him give that concession speech when Obama won, I felt like some part of him was actually relieved. Sarah Palin, in contrast to John McCain, lived in a completely fictitious world in which anything was possible, and she would happily rile up a mob to lynch someone. And I could feel that then. And then I very naively thought, you know, when they, lost, I thought, okay, like, thank God the danger has passed. And I thought at the time that

Tina Faye, some of you may know, who is a Saturday Night Live actress who was doing impersonations of Sarah Palin, which were brilliant, I thought she should have gotten the noble peace prize, you know, in all seriousness for her role, you know, and there having lost the election. But what I didn't appreciate was that something had been unleashed. That wasn't just going to go away. and that continued to percolate. And so when Trump then, eight years later, appeared on the scene, seven years later, I was an early panicker for various reasons, not because I'm smarter than other Americans,

but because I've been following Eastern Europe. You know, both the Eastern Europe of the 30s, you know, and then the post-Soviet rise of a kind of post-modern neo-fascism in Russia, which I'll talk about in a few minutes. So there was the naivity of the old right vis-a-vis the new right. which we're seeing now. There is the insight we get from Victor Kleumper, the German Jewish philologist

who survived largely thanks to his non-Jewish wife in Nazi Germany, kept a meticulous diary and published a book on the language of the Third Reich. If you haven't read it, I recommend it to everyone. I started going back and teaching it again after Trump won in 2016. And he has various famous famous

lines in that book, one of which is words can be like tiny doses of arsenic. They are swallowed unnoticed, appeared to have no effect, and after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all. And I started thinking about that a lot when Trump came on the scene, that suddenly there was a different kind of language being introduced into a mainstream political space. There was a vulgarity, there was a violence, there was a crooked Hillary, and lock her up, and and grab her by the pussy, you know, and the very fine people, you know, on both sides of the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville and the shithole countries of Haiti and Africa, drain the swamp, losers, losers, witch hunt, haters, fake news, the deep state, the immigrants were monsters, predators, the protesters were animals and traitors. This or that was sad with an exclamation point. And I could feel how that does. like this language of vulgarity, the language of violence, the language of dehumanization,

you know, how it had been unimaginable in that kind of mainstream public space, and then suddenly it was everywhere. You know, and it, in a way that, you know, people have started to normalize it before they're really aware of it. You see the cult of the leader, you know, what the Germans like to call the furor principle, that, you know, the leader is this larger than life figure. and people thought Americans were immune to that or inoculated that we somehow drank in our liberal democracy with our mother's milk.

And then suddenly you see, you know, J.D. Vance stand up and say, we can't ignore the president's desires for Greenland. We can't ignore the president's desires. He has a whim. He has an impulse. Like suddenly we need to invade Greenland. We need to take Greenland, you know, which is greeted enthusiastically by some 25% of the American population, which I strongly suspect overlaps with the 25% of the American population,

who a year earlier had had no idea there was such a place as Greenland. And suddenly, well, we can't ignore the president's desires. We're in this Nero-like, Chowchesco-like world. People would call Chowchesco the genius of the Carpathians, the Danube of thought. And then you have, you know, Trump's own social media post. I am the greatest president ever. I have stopped eight wars. I have created the greatest economy. All the doctors give me perfect marks. I've aced all the cognitive tense. He renames everything after himself. This has happened before. Like we have, if you go back, even as late as the 1980s and like read about Chachesco's Romania, it's very, very similar. You have another aspect. You have a mythologization of the past, this idea that

there was some glorious past in which naturally our own nation was always innocent, martyred, grand, you know, destined for greatness. In Polish, you call this Politica Historicna historical policy. There was even an attempt, there is an attempt to make it a criminal act punishable by imprisonment to so-called impute to the Polish nation participation in or organization of or responsibility for communist or Nazi crimes. So this failure to look at the past with eyes wide opened, you know, and to acknowledge crimes just plays directly into these, these fascist-like regimes, you know, in the present. And I'm watching this in a really heartbreaking way play out in my own country as,

you know, books are purged from libraries. They took away, they purged from libraries. They, they perged from libraries, Harper Lees to Kill a Mockingbird, which for those of you who don't know it, it's a Bildungsroman. It's a coming-of-age novel that received the Pulitzer Prize in 61, told by a young girl who is living in a small town in Alabama, where a black man is faced falsely accused of raping a white woman. And it is a classic of American literature. You know, and it speaks to a moment that is desperately relevant and all too real. And I look at this mythologization of the past as a kind of classic characteristic, both of fascism as it comes to us from the 20th century, and as something that is at the heart of the current pathology of Russia, which is something else that is wrenching and heartbreaking.

You know, what one of my Ukrainian friends is called the anthropological catastrophe of Russia, and what some really brilliant Russian thinkers like Sergei Lebedev said that the fundamental underlying factor is a failure to look Soviet crimes in the eye, you know, and say we did this. We did this or we were complicit or we were implicated even if we are victims and we have to grapple with that. Otherwise, we can't move forward. Two of my Ukrainian philosopher friends of Vladimir Yomelenko and Tanya Ogarkova wrote recently about the problem. problem in Russia is there's crime without punishment and punishment without crime. So you have one class of people who are like these uber-mentioned oligarchs who can commit the most egregious crimes, you know, and do whatever they want to people with impunity because there's no accountability.

And then you have the masses of ordinary people who can be taken away, you know, and punished and abused for no reason at any moment because they're helpless. And in both cases, you're lacking a responsible subjectivity. In both cases, you're lacking. cases you have a crisis of subjectivity, that you don't have a population of people that feels a sense of agency and responsibility and accountability for individual actions. And I worry this is where we're going in my country. Victor Klempur writes, you know, how effortlessly people with harmless average dispositions adapt to their environment.

I thought one of the most profound things that was said after the first Trump election in 2016 was by the British comedian John Oliver. who right after the election said, on his weekly show, he said, and this is political satire, but it was also very serious, he said, everybody, get out a Post-it note, and write, this is not normal, and put it on your refrigerator, because a few months from now you're going to start thinking things are normal, and you're going to forget that they're not. And I thought it was actually one of the most profound observations, because historically that's how it happens. The borders recede, the thing that was completely inconceivable, suddenly becomes the new

normal, and suddenly you can wrench a three-year-old away from their parents on the U.S. Mexican border and throw that kid in a cage, you know, and people accept it as normal. One final aspect of these fascists like these totalitarian regimes is that they are regimes in which there are no longer innocent choices because everyone is implicated. The line between resistance and collaboration can become very fluid that results in a kind of widespread moral compromise and demoralization. It's part of the demonic nature of these regimes, that it can implicate everybody, that it can make people feel that in order to get along, in order to protect one's children, in order to protect one's student, you have to make compromises with the forces of evil. And therefore,

nobody has a clean space in which to stand, and it sucks away. people's ability to kind of mobilize their moral and dignity. Okay, so that's all that's old. Let me now spend a few minutes telling you what I think is new, because one of the things I've been thinking a lot about the current moment is, okay, like what is a kind of historical recurrence if in an altered form and what really is a break from what we saw before? I think we have something fundamentally different and fundamentally postmodern,

Whether we call it neo-fascism or neo-totalitarianism or post-truth or, you know, this idea that you're not instilling, you know, you're an alternative, seamless, internally coherent teleological vision of reality. You are undermining people's faith that there is any such thing as truth at all. You know, leaders like Trump and Putin are not telling us where we're going. There's no real eschatological vision. I remember being a graduate student in the 90s and some of these senior historians of communism saying, okay, the big secret we find out when they open the Stalinist archives about the communist,

they were actually communist. They actually believed in this vision. I mean, now we have a different kind of assault on truth. Now we have an attempt to undermine any belief that there is such a thing as truth. people are being so overwhelmed that okay there are these facts there are alternative facts there's reality there's AI generated reality there's things that maybe started out reality but were kind of AI enhanced and you kind of just like you know give up on the fact that there is even any distinction anymore it's a very different kind of propaganda another thing that goes with this post-truth is something that in Slavic languages is called obnagena which is laying bare and in which the anthropologists Natalia Rudakova called cynical disinhibition, which is like you no longer try to hide the atrocities and the crimes. You just lay it all out there. When there was a nuclear submarine in Russia that

sank in August 2000 after exploding in the Barents Sea and Putin refused rescue offers from foreign countries, Larry King asked him, you know, what happened? And he's like, ahead, thank. And this is what, basically how Trump responded very recently, you know, when he had Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, who's been determined to have ordered the murder of Jamal Khashaghi, and a reporter said to him when he was, you know, hosting him and fawning over him at the Oval Office and asked him about Khashoggi's murder, you know, and Trump is like, well, things happen.

things happen like you assassinate people. So this cynical disinhibition, this like you're not even attempting, you know, to pretend that you're not doing these disgusting things. You're just laying it all out there. I mean, Trump comes out and says that like, oh, Robert Mueller just died.

Good. I'm glad he's dead. You know, and then very recently, in fact, I think just, you know, a week or so ago, Trump tweets, a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. Speaking about Iran, of course. I mean, this, of course, is admissible evidence of intention to genocide in the hay. And he's just throwing it out there.

And I think this paradoxically has crippled the opposition because you're used to digging up the thing that's hidden. But the thing that's frightening is not the details that we don't yet know, but what has been normalized into this shamelessness. And so this boundary that has been dissolved, you know, between truth and lies, which I think is connected to the dissolution of other boundaries, to the dissolution of the boundary between the real and the unreal and the human and the non-human and life and death, you know, we're in this world where people like Putin

and the Chinese president's Xi Jinping, you know, are on this hot mic talking about how they're going to live forever. There's going to be immortality. And Elon Musk thinks that we're all just living in a simulation. and Peter Thiel has arranged to have his body cryonically preserved so it can be resuscitated. I mean, we're in this world inhabited by people who don't actually believe in death, and so life has no weight. When Trump screams that at Zelensky in the Oval Office, you're not holding any cards. And Zelensky is like, we're not playing cards.

This is actually a very profound exchange. Because for Zelensky, life is real because death is real, because he's facing it every day. And he knows that these people's lives are his responsibility. And I think this absence of a boundary has taken us into this realm of nihilism that is terrifying. Hannah Arendt wrote that grasping the essence of Nazism meant understanding the creation of factories to produce corpses. And I feel like today grasping the essence of Putinism and Trumpism means understanding the creation of factories to produce fictions, understanding the troll factories. When Karl Marx observed that history tends to repeat itself first as tragedy, then as farce, he arguably had a good observation, but the problem is that the farcical in no way excludes the tragic

because the corpses keep piling up pitilessly. Okay, thank you. Historian Marcy Shaw, her talk was titled Thoughts from a Post-Truth world, delivered at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg. This is ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. In rural Spain, a mother raises her children in isolation, convinced God has chosen them to save the world through music. But when two of them escape, the ones left behind go viral.

From Cannes winning filmmakers Los Havis, LaMassias, is the acclaimed series blending family drama, thriller, and cult horror. And starting September 3rd, you'll find it exclusively on Mooby, the streaming service for great cinema. Try 30 days free at Mooby.com slash CBC. That's Mubi.com slash CBC. At Athabasca University, we understand that your path to success is unique. Our graduates all have one thing in common.

They chose university experience that worked for them. With flexible scheduling, affordable fees, 24-7 online course access, and personalized support, we empower you to achieve your dreams on your terms. Open your options with an online degree and choose an education that works for you. Not the other way around. Find out how at Athabascau.com.cau.com. Options. Marcy Shore is the chair in European intellectual history

at the Monk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. As you have heard in her lecture, Marcy Shore is highly attuned to the signs of fascism and authoritarianism, signs she has been witnessing in the news, in the United States for nearly two decades. The term must be starting? Yes.

Yes, I taught my first class yesterday. Oh, did you? How did that feel? I found the classroom, which was good. Sometimes that's the success, isn't it? Yeah. She joined me in our Toronto studio, just as the 26th school year was beginning.

Okay. Are you good to go? I'm good to go. Welcome back to the Idea Studio. Oh, thank you so much for inviting me back. It's great to have you back. I think when we spoke last time, you had just recently moved to Canada. Yes.

How's it going? I am very grateful to be in Canada. I do feel guilty for having absconded from my own country at a moment of fascist takeover, but I'm very grateful to be here. And I'm very grateful to the bunk school has given me a really good structure to do what I can do. I want to go to the beginning of your lecture that you gave in Winnipeg, which is my birthplace. by the way. Oh.

Yeah. I love when a peg is my home. So I want to go to your talk at the very beginning of your talk, you say that while no two historical moments are exactly the same, you are now comfortable, as you just demonstrated, using the word fascism to describe what we've been seeing on the world stage. Are you able to take me to the moment, the very moment, that you decided that you are comfortable using that word?

I was comfortable quite early. I can't remember the first time I used fascism vis-à-vis Trump, but I definitely remember using it the morning after the 2016 election because a colleague in Poland asked me if I could write something immediately with my unmediated raw thoughts after the election. So this was a Wednesday in 2016. I was writing this in Polish. but I remember saying, I have to confront the fact that this was a legitimate election and Americans voted for this fascist. I distinctly remember writing that. And not with any ambivalence at that point of using the word. Now, I would have to dissect my notes and journals from the months beforehand to know the moment

when it came to me, but it was not difficult for me to do. It came easily. It came easily in the sense that all of these concepts, let's say, fascism, colonialism, imperialism, genocide, authoritarianism, totalitarianism, they are hermeneutic devices and heuristic devices. They allow us to mediate between the singular and the universal. And without these mediating devices, we are, we drown in the iridistant. reducible particularity. So we need these frameworks.

We shouldn't fetishize them. Why not? Because when we fetishize them, then we don't see the differences and we don't see the nuances. You know, there's, we have to work with them as, it's a very, it's a very Kantian concept. So Kant had this idea that, that concepts without intuition by which Kant meant the, the, the sensory data that we're getting from the world. Concepts without intuitions are empty. And he said, intuitions without concepts are blind, that we need concepts to structure our sensory impressions, otherwise we are lost in the irreducible particularity. And that's just part of how we think.

Like when the Holocaust Museum decided after AOC called the camps at the U.S. Mexican border where we were taking children from their parents and locking them up, she called them concentration camps. And the Holocaust Museum say you were not allowed to use analogies. To say you're not allowed to use analogies is to say you're not allowed to think. Metaphors, analogies, concepts, all of this terminology categories. That's how we process the world. It's always imperfect. Always. It's necessarily imperfect, so we have to be aware of that.

But that doesn't mean we can't use it. Yeah. Our colleague Jeff Goldfarb, who is a sociologist at the New School, co-c curated this forum with us, which was called the uses and disadvantages of historical comparisons for life. And we talked about, well, okay, if you come up with 12 classic characteristics of fascism, say you take a case like Italian fascism, or Croatian fascism or Nazism, you know, do you need all 12 in order to use the word 10 out of 12, six out of 12?

Is there a checklist? Is there a checklist? You know, we can, I mean, that's a little bit what I'd be by not fetishizing. Like, we need to be able to use these insights into what's similar to give us an intuition for the moments when things can go dark. You know, and there are things you know from these historical examples like the way that things go step by step. You know, that when Alexander van der Bellin, the Austrian president was present several years ago

to commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz. You know, Auschwitz is Nietzsch von Himmelgafalit, which means Auschwitz did not fall from the sky. It was one step and then another step and then another step. Tony Morrison talks about this. And so it's not that you make the first step and you know you're going to be in the gas chamber, but you know where it could go. And that's enough that I think we're justified in sounding an alarm.

Yeah. I'm glad you bring up knowing and awareness, because that is one of my biggest questions. We are likely more aware of these step-by-steps today. I'm hazarding a guess here than our forebearers, that we have some kind of edge in this incredible information environment to know that we are going step by step in a certain direction. So let me ask you kind of a stark question.

Does the awareness even matter in our moment right now? It's an excellent question, and I ask myself that constantly. You would think that the fact that we know things should be able to prevent it from happening again. That famous slogan of never again, you think, well, now that we know, that should make it stop. but it turns out that knowing doesn't make it stop. Is that inevitable as a state of being? I like to think that nothing is inevitable. As a historian, I try to believe that nothing is inevitable.

You issued another warning for us in your lecture about the dangers of mythologizing the past. The extreme right often fixates on the past, either kind of as a humiliated victim or as a glorious victor, whereas often the extreme left seems to fixate on the future. So the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia starting from year zero or Chinese communist overturning the old world order. Why do you think these political extremes look in these opposite directions? It's a very interesting question, the way that they use temporality. The left in many ways, especially coming from Marxism, And that comes from Hegel. It comes from a teleological notion of history, that history is not just meandering here and there, that it has a direction, that it is proceeding towards a kind of telos.

And for Hegel, you know, history is a slaughter bench at which things have to be sacrificed, you know, in order for its rational direction to play itself out. So a lot of that in the left-wing tradition comes from Hegel and comes from that idea of seeing things move. It also comes from an enlightenment idea of historical progress, which was very cheerful, which was very optimistic. You know, nationalism comes much more from a romantic rebellion against enlightenment. But enlightenment had this idea that you could model all of human history and social and political life, basically on the hard sciences. You know, like physics, you know, Newton was the model for everything. And I can give you an example about this.

Sure. I was, so at the Winnipeg Human Rights Museum, which was just a phenomenally constructed museum, it was beautiful. And clearly they wanted to tell a story about the historical progress of human rights. You know, and they have a whole exhibit that tries to take you through this history. But they were unfortunately thwarted because. it's a situation in which you want to tell a story about an arc of progress. But really, it's a one step forward, half a step back.

Sometimes it's two steps forward, three steps back. Like, things are not going the way you want them to go. Human rights are not in fashion right now. No, they're not. And that was clearly like that was what they were dreaming about telling that they could not in good conscience tell. And coincidentally, right around the time that I was in Winnipeg, my father-in-law had to have a pacemaker installed. And it was a fairly minor procedure, and he's fine, and everything was okay. But my daughter was worried about her grandfather.

The word pacemaker sounded kind of scary. And about two weeks later, right after I was in Winnipeg, we were in Pennsylvania visiting her other grandfather, my father. And my father is a retired physician. And it suddenly came into my head. I said, Dad, can you tell Talia how pacemaker works? Maybe she'll feel better. It will seem less scary.

The idea of it sounded scary will seem less scary if you explain how it works. And my father loves medical history. So he immediately launches into this lecture on the history of the pacemaker, starting with these big, clumsy, awkward models that he was using as a young physician in the 1970s and going through step by step until these high-tech little digital chip things that my father-in-law got that are barely noticeable and connect to an app on your phone. Progress. Progress. And listening to this, I thought, like, each step in the history of the pace mace. was an unambiguous improvement on the previous step. Like each stage of development, reduce suffering,

improve the quality of people's lives, built on previous developments. It was this beautiful, it was an exquisite arc, teleological arc of progress. Precisely the kind of teleological arc of progress that they were dreaming about being able to tell at the Winnipeg Human Rights Museum, but unfortunately does not work for human rights the way it works for the history of the pacemaker. And this was what Enlightenment thought. They thought you could, the way technology develops, the way science develops, that's the way human life is going to develop.

But tragically, it doesn't seem to be working that way. What does it say, do you think, that that kind of thinking isn't the prevailing way of thinking, I guess, by many of the regimes that ruled the Western world today? That is something I also bang my head against the law every day about. I mean, Freud would say eros and thanatose hardwired. in the human condition, that there's nothing that's going to get rid of that death drive, that drive for aggression. Civilization is always going to be about repression.

You know, there's always, there's always going to be attempts to liberate oneself for oppression. But it is very, I mean, I have, I personally know quite well people who were tortured in Russian captivity. So it's not abstract to me. and you just how do you get your mind around that kind of barbarism? It's a kind of sadism and barbarism that you think we're in the 21st. How is that possible that there's been no progress? Like how is it? And how do you answer that?

That I have found myself unable to answer that. But I do, it's one of the things that made me not hesitant to use the word fascism in the American context because I, felt like Americans feel like we have some kind of genetic immunity, you know, to these things. And what you know is that, unfortunately, that these vulnerabilities, these susceptibilities, these include, they seem to be hardwired in the human condition. So on that theme, I'm wondering if we could come back to the current moment or this past spring where an extraordinary development in European politics arrived.

when Victor Orban's 16-year rule as Prime Minister of Hungary came to an end in landslide defeat in April 2026. What in your mind was the tipping point of that defeat? That was astounding to me. And I honestly don't know, but I was skeptical until the very last moment. By the time the elections came around, I thought it was very likely he would lose, but very unlikely he would concede. And I was texting that morning with a Hungarian friend who is in Budapest, and I said, Judith, what do you think is going to happen? You're there. And she said, he's going to lose by a lot, and he's going to concede. She's like, this is not Belarus. He's going to concede. We're going to make him concede. He's going to concede.

And I was very skeptical. And I was flying back from New York that day with my son right as the results were coming in. And so I had my phone turned off during the flight. And when the flight landings, the flight landed it in Toronto and I turned the phone on. The first thing I have was a message in Judith saying he just conceded. You were surprised. I was. I was very happily surprised. And I when I later talked to Judith about it, you know, she said we'd worked on this for years. It was years of canvassing, of campaigning, of large numbers of people going out of the city, into the countryside, talking to people every day, building things up. It was a time when the, you know, economic cost of this kind of dictatorship

had begun to go up, that people were becoming more dissatisfied. It was pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing, but it was all like one step and then another step and then another step. It was gradual. Do you see any lessons that can be learned from Hungary when it comes to confronting authoritarianism on a

wider scale? There was a lot of grassroots organizing. There was a lot of good political organizing. That was something. There was not giving up. There was not saying like it's inevitable, like we just have to go along with it. But it's exhausting. And political organizing is exhausting. But also, I mean, I think about Poland and the roundtable talks, you know, and solidarity, you know, and these step by

steps. Like sometimes you do have people being voted out at the ballot box, you know, and sometimes you do have people walking away from power who you don't think would walk away from power. So I have to ask this, as perilous as this question may be, and knowing full while you've said many times you're not an Americanist, you're a historian. But still, I wonder with your knowledge of the past, whether you do see signs that suggest perhaps there's a turn happening in the U.S. As we sit here in a moment just before the midterm elections. Yeah. No, the thing I've worried about, I mean, I go back and forth to the U.S. fairly frequently. I mean, it's not that I'm so alienated, but I'm not living there anymore.

The thing that in some ways feels darkest to me is the way that so many people who do not at all support Trump, but have kind of grown quiet and gotten in line. I gave a talk at a fancy private school last year, which, I mean, I don't often talk to high school students, but I feel more and more like it's important because that's the front line. line. It is. And then I had teachers who were asking me things like, well, could you, could you teach in my history class or in my ethics class? Could you teach Eichmann's, could you teach Hannah Arend's Eichmann in Jerusalem? Could you teach the Milgram study? And the fact that they were asking me such specific things suggested that they had these references because they were just as capable as I was of teaching them, but they felt like their hands were tied because they have, it's a very expensive school. They have donors

who are Trump supporters, you know, and they have kids who are there. They have students who are there who are on scholarships for those donors. So you might say, I want to be brave for myself. I'm going to say whatever I want to say, you know, but then you're also, you're putting

somebody else at risk. You know, this is what, you know, they would call collective hostage taking in the Soviets. And so you exploit people's desire to do the right thing by putting them in situations in which there are no innocent choices because taking a risk for oneself

is sacrificing someone else. And this is something I knew intuitively from having studied the communist period. It's a classic mechanism that totalitarian regimes use. You put people in situations. There was a great interview Arkady Ostrowski did with Chulpan Hakmatova,

the Russian Caribbean Tatars, actress who had a project years ago that she was taking care of child cancer patients. She had created a hospital for them or some kind of home or a structure. And she was supporting these kids. And in fact, it kind of thought of them all as her kids. And at a certain point, 20 years ago, she went to Putin to get this building or get this structure, get this license, you know, for this project to support child cancer patients, which he did. And then comes Bolotnaya, 2011, 2012. All her friends are out there protest. And he says, okay, you don't want those kids to be out in the street.

You're going to go on television and you're going to declare your support for me. Wow. And when she gives this interview later after the full-scale invasion to Arkady Ostrowski, she's telling this story. And you feel for her in that that's exactly the classic demonic nature of totalitarianism. She did it. She went on television. She declared support for Putin.

She knew it was wrong, but she didn't do it for selfish reasons. didn't do it because she had become a bad person. She didn't want to sell her soul to the devil. She felt responsible for those kids. So you can exploit people's very good impulses to maintain an evil regime. And you see that. I see that. And I see that and I see it so quickly because I'm historically familiar with it. In your lecture, you cite Hannah Arendt, the political theorist and philosopher who wrote that grasping the essence of Nazi, meant understanding the creation of factories to produce corpses. And then you add that grasping the essence of Putinism and Trumpism means understanding the creation of factories to produce fictions, understanding the troll factories effectively.

What do we need most urgently to understand about the analogy that you make there? This is something I've been working very hard to get my mind around because this is what is new. This is post-truth, post-modern version. You know, if we could call it neo-fascism, neototototilitarianism, neo-authoritarianism, whatever we're going to call it. This is something that's new. And this was something that was very, could have consciously developed by, you know, spin doctors

like, you know, Vladislav Zirko, Vengla Pavlovsky, you know, in Russia, you know, in the 1990s and the early 2000s. It was something that was arguably technologically not possible before. I mean, it used to be that if you were an authoritarian regime, you censored the truth. Now it was no longer about censoring the truth. It was about drowning it out. Steve Bannon calls this flooding the zone, which is a phrase I've found impossible to translate into any other language. It seems to be dependent on some kind of American sports analogy.

But the idea that you throw so many ridiculous things at people that they just kind of give up on the idea that there is any sense. thing as a kind of grounded empirical reality. And so rather than shaping them or trying to maneuver them to believe passionately in an ideology that is false, you try to undermine their ability to hold on to anything that seems certain or grounded or dependable at all. So it's definitely a different technique. And I don't see how it could have been done before. I mean, you couldn't, 30 years ago, could you have even conceived of a troll factory?

In your lecture, you spoke chillingly about the dissolution of that boundary between the real and the unreal and the human and the non-human. So with powerful people like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and Vladimir Putin, who don't, as you point out, even appear to believe in death because they aspire to immortality. So what do you think happens when you look forward to their ideas when inevitably these people do die? That's a good question. And the question is, is it the fact of death or is it the belief in death? And is that fooling around with the boundary between reality and unreality? And this first struck me. I was at a feshiref conference for one of my former advisors, Hans Orlik-Gunbrecht.

This must have been it was first Trump administration. It must have been maybe seven years ago or so at Stanford. People flew in from all over the world, his colleagues, his former students, and we were having this discussion about Heidegger's notion of being towards death. And for Heidegger's is one of the things that defined the human condition that we're always proceeding towards our own death, and to look at that with eyes wide open, shakes us into living authentically for Heidegger. And at a certain point in this discussion, one of Zepgelbrecht's current undergraduate,

at Stanford, who was also there, who was a double major in the humanities and computer science. So one of these kind of kids who was also moonlining in Silicon Valley. And he stood up in the question-answer period and said, you know, I don't understand this whole conversation. I live in Silicon Valley. I, for one, have no expectation that I will ever die. Death is just one more problem we here in Silicon Valley are working on a technological solution for. And it was not a gratuitous provocation. It was not sarcastic. It was straight up.

Straight face. Like absolutely. Wow. Wow. You know, and I was, I didn't know what to think. I was like, wow, okay, I've missed something essential because this is clearly a very smart kid and he clearly believes this and he's clearly not the only one. And he is in a milieu, an environment here in Silicon Valley with people who do not believe they are going to die. we've all missed something.

We're all right. And what does that, what does that mean for the value of life? Yeah. Yeah. This is an open question. Yes. I won't end our conversation by revisiting your story when you began your career, digging through the communist archives and feeling like you were in the last chapter of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.

Wondering, even for historian, I think maybe this is a useful exercise, is 100 years, years forward from now, what you think, what is your best best on how historians might view this period? That's a great question. I'm so hopeful that there will actually be, you know, there will actually be 100 years from now. And one of the projects I'm doing now at Monk is I'm running a project-based class on Ukrainian reconstruction, you know, which is, you know,

in some sense, psychologically therapeutic for me because it involves imagining a better world. Because it's not happening right now. Because it's not happening right now. And my fantasy is that tyranny is defeated, you know, that these horrific regimes fall. Putin falls, Trump falls, Lukashenko, all these bad guys, Netanyahu falls, all the bad guys fall. And that Ukraine is going to rebuild itself, not trying to catch up with the West because the West has burned and crashed, but as the new avant-garde. and that is going to be rebuilt in clean energy with disability accessible infrastructure, you know, and cutting-edge PTSD treatment.

So that is my fantasy. You know, my fantasy is that there's going to be a young generation. They're going to be thinking outside the box. They're going to just see how deadly it is, and they're going to think forward. And that my fantasy is that 100 years from now, people are going to look back and say, like, okay, thank God we weren't living then because it's so much better now. I hope your fantasy comes true. I do too. I don't know how realistic that is, but we have to hold on to some hope.

I'm really grateful to you for the work you do and for being here today. Thank you so much. I'm grateful for the invitation. Thank you. I was speaking with Marcy Shore, Chair of European Intellectual History at the Monk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy in Toronto. She joined me in the Ideas Studio in Toronto in September, 26. You also heard her lecture, thoughts from a post-reveillance. Most Truth World, part of the series, Democracy in Peril, a way forward against authoritarianism,

organized by the University of Manitoba and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg. This episode was produced by Suzanne Dufrain and edited by Sean Foley. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer for ideas, technical production, Emily Kiervezio and Danielle Duval. Our senior producer is Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. and I'm Nala Ayyad.