Making Sense with Sam Harris - #79 — The Road to Tyranny

Episode Date: May 29, 2017

Sam Harris speaks with Timothy Snyder about his book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. My guest today is Timothy Snyder. Timothy Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. He received his doctorate from the University of Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar. Before joining the faculty at Yale in 2001, he held fellowships in Paris, Vienna, and Warsaw, and an academy scholarship at Harvard. He has spent some 10 years in Europe

and speaks five and reads 10 European languages. He's also written for the New York Review of Books, Foreign Affairs, the Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, and The New Republic, as well as for The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, and other newspapers. He is a member of the Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and 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, which is what

we focused on, is currently number one 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 non-partisan nature of this conversation for what they are. We do talk a lot about Trump, but whether or not Trump is actually an example of Snyder's thesis can definitely be held to one side. 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. I am here with Timothy Snyder. Timothy, thanks for coming on the podcast. My pleasure.

You have written this beautiful little book on tyranny. When did you write this? Because this is so, it's a very short book. I'm a huge fan of short books now, both as a reader and as a writer. Most books are far too long. Certainly argument-driven books tend to be far too long because the dirty little secret about publishing is that publishers haven't figured out how to publish short books and still make enough of a profit. A 300-page book could be

60 pages in many cases, but to publish a 60-page book just is not a profitable enterprise. But anyway, you've written a very short book on tyranny, 20 lessons from the 20th century. short book on tyranny, 20 Lessons from the 20th Century. I just want to move through this book fairly systematically. But when did you write it? Because this reads as something you wrote the moment Trump became president. When did you actually start typing? So I'm going to give you a slightly pompous historian's answer and maybe defend publishers a little bit, too. It's true that I wrote it very quickly, but it was a compression of longer spans of time, right? So it's a compression of the history of the 20th century, which in turn I've spent 25 years trying to understand. trying to understand. And along the way, many years have been invested very pleasantly in friendships with people who have lived through communism and sometimes fascism. And then fewer

years, but still more than I'd like to admit, with students from Eastern Europe who themselves have lived through the failed promise of democracy and who have learned about resistance or relearned about it. And I've tried to learn from them. So yeah, I'll tell you when I wrote the book and how quickly I wrote the book, but it's as though all these layers of time are simultaneously present. I couldn't have just sat down and written the thing without all of that previous time weighing down on me. What I was trying to do was to convert all of that into a format that would be immediately useful. So yeah, I mean, I wrote the 20 lessons in a few hours after the election. And then the book I wrote in December in a few days. But in a way like that itself demonstrates one of the points of the book, which is that we are in a

critical moment where we don't have very much time. And so whatever was going to make a difference had to appear immediately at the very beginning. And I'm not sure that my press, in fact, I'm sure that my press hasn't solved the problem of how to make money out of a short book. I don't think they're making any money. But what they did do was join in this venture very enthusiastically. And for that, I'm really appreciative. Oh, yeah. No, it's fantastic. And so you have 20 lessons here, and maybe we'll just get through the first 10 or so. But I just want to make it clear that, you know, I don't view this conversation as a surrogate for someone buying the book, no matter how comprehensive we seem to be in talking about it. And this can be generically said of the conversations I have with most

authors, I try to not put people in competition with the free versions of themselves that exist online. I want people to buy people's books. But in this case, this really is just such a satisfying read. So I just want to make it clear that our listeners should buy this book and read it. You can read it in an hour. You can probably read it more quickly than we will have this conversation. But first of all, your writing is so wonderful and so lapidary and aphoristic that it's a pleasure to read. And I'll read a few pieces from it as we talk here. One criticism of this book, and we'll get into this and people will get a sense of just how

worried you can sound about our current moment in history. One criticism is that it exaggerates the danger of Trump. And I'm wondering how you feel the book is aging over the first few months of the Trump presidency. Is there anything that has reassured you or are you exactly where you were when you hit send to your publisher? So, I mean, let me again take a slightly different angle on that. The whole point of the book is that we have to spread out our political imagination and have a broader sense of what's possible. And the danger precisely is that we just go day by day and then every day seems normal. Even if, you know, today is much worse than yesterday, we're very good at getting used to

today. And then tomorrow the same thing happens. So I didn't write the book, in fact, directly about Trump, although it is striking. And I'll start to answer your question is striking how many of the things I wrote about actually have happened in the meantime. I wrote the book more for us. It was clear from 2016 that we were dealing with a candidate who didn't respect basic American institutions like the rule of law or democracy, it was clear they were dealing with a man who was not tolerant, to put it very mildly, and who had a certain vision about how things should be run, which was not consistent with checks and balances or institutional constraints. It was clear that we had a man whose political heroes were foreign dictators who had precisely done away with the rule of law after being elected. So the question is not really so much Trump. The question is us. I mean, what happens in these situations is a person with the kind of character that he has who finds himself in an institutional situation that constrains him

will push against those constraints. He can't really do anything else. That's who he is. And so the relevant question is more, can those constraints hold him? And even more to the point, what can we do to make sure those constraints hold him? That's what the book is really about. So, I mean, when I first posted the 20 Lessons, there were a lot of people who thought that I was going overboard. But I have to say, as time has gone past, that has ceased to be a major reaction. And the more dominant reaction has been, hmm, how did you see this coming? And the simple answer is that history doesn't repeat, but history gives you a much broader palette of what's possible.

And the point of the book is not to go point by point and head off particular things that Trump will do, so much as to prepare ourselves to do a whole bunch of different things which make an authoritarian regime change less likely. So yeah, I mean, some things people have done, I've been reassured by. I've been reassured by lawyers filing briefs in advance. I've been reassured by the spontaneous protests at airports. I've been reassured by the marches. I've been reassured by the new non-governmental organizations that didn't exist before. I've been reassured by the civic-mindedness and patriotism of some of our civil servants. I've been reassured by the investigative journalism, especially investigative print journalism at The Washington Post. plenty of people who don't see that there's a problem at all. We have plenty of people who are doing the normal human thing of just normalizing the situation and basically taking whatever they're given from day to day. So my fundamental reaction about, you know, the notion that I'm exaggerating is Americans are super provincial. We don't really have a sense of what's possible

because we've been lucky. We overestimate how much we deserve what we get and we underestimate how much how we can just simply get unlucky. At the moment, we're unlucky, which means that at the moment, more is demanded of us than would otherwise be the case. Yeah, I don't want people to get the wrong sense of the connection between your book and this current moment, because again, it does read not as narrowly focused on Trump, but you're talking about how democracies can fail and how people can not realize that they are being pulled by the tide of history in a very unlucky direction with great consequence.

So we're going to get into this specifically now and talk about your points. this specifically now and talk about your points, even if you were wrong about Trump, if Trump just has a stroke tomorrow and becomes magically the perfect president, the generic case still holds. If not Trump, then someone. And the election of Trump has proven to many of us, certainly all of us who are alarmed by it, that our system is vulnerable to a demagogue in a way that many of us haven't anticipated. And it's scary for me to imagine someone much more competent than Trump and much more ideological, much more nefarious, but who can find the loophole in our system the way Trump did and come to power. And so I don't want to give people the wrong sense that this is narrowly focused on Trump. And you handle it beautifully because you

may mention his name once in here, but you generally just refer to the president, which I thought was very artful. And the book will age well. This is not a book that five years from now is going to read like a magazine article. I want to pick up on the point you just raised about how provincial Americans are. You say here in the beginning, Americans today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the 20th century. Then you you say, well, one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so. Why are we so blinkered? Yeah, thank you for putting the question so baldly, because it's a really important one.

If we're going to get out of this mess, we're going to have to notice some of our weaknesses. We've gotten into the habit of congratulating ourselves on our strengths. And this is what this is. This is a ritual that both Democrats and Republicans engage in in their in their different ways. I think it was one of the weaknesses of Obama rhetoric, for example, that we were constantly got in the habit of telling ourselves how good we were at certain things. I think there are three things at play here. The first is the longstanding religious tradition of exceptionalism, the notion that Americans were escaping a world of evil into a pure world, which is, of course, I mean, ridiculous on a whole number of fronts, but it's there as a tradition.

The second is the obvious fact that we are in many ways a world unto ourselves. And so people who work on American history rarely venture beyond American history. So it's a lot to expect that the American citizen could do better. And the third thing, and maybe the most relevant, is that in a move which I think is going to be remembered as one of metaphysical laziness, we decided after 1989 that history was over. And therefore, we disarmed ourselves against the very threats which history ought to have been reminding us of. And we prevented ourselves from seeing some of the weaknesses in our own system. So after 1989, I mentioned 1989 because that's the year when communism came to an end, of course. After that, many of us got ourselves worked into various versions of a story

whereby human nature would lead to a market which would lead to democracy and enlightenment, which would lead to peace or something like that, which is basically a historical nonsense. I mean, there are more left-wing versions of this as well, but all of these theological stories are basically wrong. History is always going to be full of surprises and structural forces that we don't anticipate and accidents. And the very fact of claiming that history is over is itself a historical choice. It's a historical choice to be ignorant, to forget the concepts which were once useful. And it's a historical choice to be vulnerable when threats start to seep up on you again. That's what's happened to us. You know, that was part of the perfect storm of 2016 is that it happened a full generation after 1989. In a way, it's the payback for deciding that history was over. That's part

of what happened. And you describe fascism and communism both as responses to globalization. And this antipathy for globalization obviously played an important role in the 2016 election. Talk about that a little bit. How is a recoil from the world responsible for these anti-democratic tendencies? Thanks for bringing that up, because that's an important part of the answer to some of your other really good questions. So if we just take a step back and think about globalization itself, So 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. The whole paradigm of globalization, as we've invented it for ourselves in the 21st century, assumes that it's something new.

And when you assume that something is new, then you don't see that it has arc. You don't see that it has patterns. You don't see that it has patterns. You don't learn where it might be going. And 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. There was a very similar movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We had the same expansion of foreign trade. We had the same export-driven growth.

And interestingly, maybe most interestingly, in the late 19th century, we had much the same thing as we had in the late 20th century. We had the idea that these expansions of trade would inevitably lead to expansions of consciousness and that universal ideas would inevitably triumph. this road before. This is the intellectual history of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And that globalization ends in, as we all know, the First World War, the Great Depression, and the Second World War. So 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 reactions, contradictions in it and reactions to it, and that some of them can be quite extreme. But 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.

And we can save a lot of time by drawing on what they left behind, which is the point of the book. But anyway, that's just all prologue to trying to answer your question. It'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 is going to produce various kinds of resentments because globalization also is the globalization of comparison. It 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. That's clearly happened in the United States in the 21st century. Something similar happened in the middle of Europe in the early 20th century. And in that environment, it's very easy then for clever politicians to come around and say, look, globalization is not complicated. It's actually simple. It's not a multi-vector challenge. It's actually a conspiracy. I will put a face on globalization for you. And 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. That's very powerfully 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. So similarly, although in a minor key, if we think about the US in the 21st century, think about the campaign, now the presidency of Donald Trump, you see basically the same reaction to globalization. The problem is not that the United States can't control everything. The problem is not that globalization is always going to be full of challenges which we need to actually face and try to address.

The problem is not that we need to have state policy. No, no, no, says Mr. Trump. The problem is that globalization has a face. It has a Chinese face. It has a Mexican face. It has a Jewish face. And 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. And instead, it replaces that with a form of politics in which we are meant to just chase after the supposed members of these various groups. And while we do that, then we forget about what the government is supposed to be doing for us, namely making us more prosperous. So the attempt at a Muslim ban is terrible for Muslims, but it's not really about Muslims. It's about getting us into the habit of seeing Muslims as a source of our problems. The 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, that's not about the migrants. It's about getting you into the habit of denouncing your neighbors. It's about bringing in a new form of politics. So this is how anti-globalization politics works. You give up. You say, we can't handle it. We don't have the strength to deal with this. We're going to personalize it all. And that changes politics inside the country in ways that we're starting to see. Well, 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. That seems to attribute some kind of nefarious intention or agency on the part of people who are currently

in government. It's not a system working unconsciously in this direction. This is people, and correct me if I'm wrong, it sounds like you're alleging that people are quite consciously ideological and think in far right traditions that are anti-democratic. We 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. When it comes to denunciation, I think people half understand what they're doing. And then when it happens, they take the next step, whether it's the administration or whether it's the citizens doing the denouncing. You cross a certain moral threshold when you do it. But if you denounce somebody, you get praised for doing it. And then

maybe you get the first crack at their property or whatever might follow. And then a new cycle begins. So yes, I would say quite clearly there are people who do have what you're calling anti-democratic thoughts. Absolutely. 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. 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. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, I want to get directly into your book and into the lessons. I just want some of this language inserted into the conversation. The first lesson is do not obey in advance. And then you have these

summaries before each chapter. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do. And then 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. You seem to suggest that this was, there was something to learn from how readily people acquiesced to this project. Yeah. So thank you. So number, that's lesson number one, don't obey in advance. And it's, it's number one for, for a bunch of reasons. One, 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, whether it's the takeover in Germany itself or whether it's the Anschluss in Austria, at the very beginning, authoritarian leaders require consent. This is a really important thought because when we think of, you know, authoritarians, we then think of villains, and then we think of super villains, then we think of superpowers. You know, we imagine these guys in uniforms who can just stride across the stage of history and do whatever they want. And maybe towards the end, something like that is true. But at the beginning, it's not. At the beginning, interestingly, people have, in a sense, more power than they do normally, because they also have the power to resist. The 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. Our little needle compasses look for the new true north and align ourselves to it. We follow along, we drift. And most of the time that's appropriate, but sometimes it's an, it's an absolute disaster. So, 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. The 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. Because 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. 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 would have seemed abnormal to an earlier version of you will start to seem normal now. The point to start doing anything will never seem to come. You'll keep saying tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. In fact, you'll just be internally adjusting, adjusting, adjusting. And psychologically, you become a different person. And then the final reason why that's lesson number one is political. 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. So 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. At the moment, these things require just a tiny bit of courage, right? Not very much. But later, when these things start to become illegal or even dangerous, they require much more courage. So politically, you have to get out front and do these things, even if you're not sure exactly what you're holding off. You have to do these things at the beginning. So yeah, I mean, I bring up these examples, as you rightly say, 1938 in Austria,

because they really powerfully convey this dynamic. Hitler did not know that he could absorb Austria in a few days. He did it because of the messages he got from below. Austrian Jews did not know they were in such a position of threat. They found out because of how people reacted to the arrival of German force. These actions that the population chooses or doesn't choose to take at the beginning are really crucial to authoritarianism. It means that we have power. It also means that we have responsibility.

It means that you don't have the option of doing nothing. In America, in spring of 2017, if you're doing nothing, you're actually doing something. If you're doing nothing, you're helping a regime change come about. So I want to flag the reaction that I know is occurring in some percentage of our listeners, which is that everything you just said, when mapped onto the present, sounds like a symptom of paranoia, right? That this is just like, we're fundamentally not in the situation we just described. And we can remain somewhat agnostic about that. I mean, I can't name a person really now who is more critical of Trump than I am. To some percentage

of my listeners, I have completely lost my mind on this point. But I want to try to maintain what will be viewed as a less partisan line through this conversation, because everything you're saying here generically applies. Again, if not now, sometime this applies. And 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, given what has happened in the White House. But again, this is not, even if you're a fan of Trump, these dynamics are in play potentially everywhere all the time, no matter how stable your democracy seems. It's vulnerable to this kind of thing. So I want to move to point two, which is defend institutions.

And you say that institutions do not protect themselves. They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning. And then you use Nazi Germany as an example. And then you quote from an editorial that I had never read. I've read a lot about the Holocaust. I had never seen. I've read a lot about the Holocaust. I had never seen an editorial like this. And this was written in a newspaper for German Jews. And this is the editorial from the newspaper. This is the editorial's position. So imagine, you know, the New York Times writing an

editorial like this in 1933 on the eve of the decade that would usher in the final solution. eve of the decade that would usher in the final solution. This is the perspective of German Jews in 1933. We do not subscribe to the view that Mr. Hitler and his friends, now finally in possession of the power that they have so long desired, will implement the proposals circulating in Nazi newspapers. They will not suddenly deprive German Jews of their constitutional rights, nor enclose them in ghettos, nor subject them to the jealous and murderous impulses of the mob.

They cannot do this because a number of crucial factors hold powers in check, and they clearly do not want to go down that road. When one acts as a European power, the whole atmosphere tends towards ethical reflection upon one's better self and away from revisiting one's earlier oppositional posture. And then you say, such was the view of many reasonable people in 1933, just as is the view

of many reasonable people now. The mistake is to assume that rulers who come to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions, even when that is exactly what they've announced they will do. So, I mean, this is just the phrase, cautionary tale doesn't really do this moment justice. It's just amazing to put yourself in the position of people before the Holocaust was ever known to be possible, right? Before that kind of implosion of a very cosmopolitan society was thinkable. You could even dimly imagine that people would start marking places of business as Jewish-owned, and that would be the precursor to your neighbors coming and seizing your property out of this kind of ecstasy of reappropriation of wealth based on tribal hatred. Anyway, talk about

the defense of institutions and, again, this kind of natural myopia that people don't see that they're swimming in history. So let me start with history. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.