The Munk Debates Podcast - Spring 2021 Munk Dialogue with Timothy Snyder: Episode 5

Episode Date: June 21, 2021

COVID-19 has fast-forwarded us into a confusing and uncertain future. Nowhere are the accelerating forces of the pandemic more evident than in our democracy. We are being challenged by rising authoritarian regimes, a reckoning on race, and intense debates on cancel culture, identity politics and free speech. The Spring 2021 Munk Dialogues host some of the world's brightest thinkers for in-depth, one hour conversions on the fate and future of democracy in a world remade by COVID-19. This episode features Timothy Snyder in conversation with Munk Debates Chair, Rudyard Griffiths and explores the unique dangers 21st century authoritarianism presents to the liberal world. Timothy Snyder is one of the most compelling historians writing today. He is the author of a string of bestselling books on the roots of contemporary authoritarianism and its threat to liberal democracy, including On Tyranny and The Road to Unfreedom. He is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. For more information on the Munk Dialogues visit www.munkdebates.com/dialogues. The Munk Dialogues are a project of the Munk Debates and the Peter and Melanie Munk Foundation. They are sponsored by Gluskin Sheff, Onex, Bond Brand Loyalty and Torys, LLP. If you like what the Munk Dialogues are all about consider becoming a Supporting Member of the Munk Debates at www.munkdebates.com/membership. For as little as $9.99 monthly you receive unlimited access to our 10+ year library of great debates, podcasts and dialogues, a free Munk Debates book, monthly newsletter, ticketing privileges at our live and online events and a charitable tax receipt (for Canadian residents).Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, Monk Debates Community. The following is Timothy Snyder's Monk Dialogue. The Monk Dialogues are our ongoing series of in-depth, long-form interviews with some of the world's most compelling thinkers on the big questions of our time. Timothy Snyder fits that category. He's one of the world's leading historians writing today. He's the author of a string of internationally best-selling books on the roots of contemporary authoritarianism and its threat to liberal. democracy. You may well have his number one New York Times bestseller on your shelf, on tyranny. Timothy Snyder is also a professor of history at Yale University and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. I hope you enjoy this monk dialogue. You can check out our other monk dialogues that are also published on our podcast feed or on our website, www.munkdebates.com forward slash dialogues. Thank you to the Mug Charitable Foundation for making these dialogues possible, along with our partners, Kluskin Chef, Onyx, Tories, LLP, and Bon Brand loyalty.

I hope you enjoy the program. Timothy, great to have you on the program. Very glad to be with you. Looking forward to this conversation with you. Over the course of these six events, we wanted to dedicate one evening to this topic of this challenge that authoritarianism represents to contemporary liberal democracy. And in my view, there's no one better to act as our guide to not just the challenge today, but the history, the roots of it and where it might go in the future.

What I'd like to do, Timothy, is to come back to you with some quotes from your recent writing, from your books and articles and publications to kind of move through your core ideas. And the first quote I've picked really focuses on the present and your concerns right now in this moment. You wrote recently, Trump's coup attempt of 2021, like other failed coup attempts, is a warning for those who care about the rule of law and a lesson for those who do not. His pre-fascism revealed a possibility for American politics. What is that possibility right now in the early days of the Biden presidency? And why are you still acutely worried about it? Well, partly I'm worried because of what just happened.

So before I get to the meat of your question, I just want to in a way restate it because it's a shocking thing to contemplate that there just was a cue attempt on American soil carried out by Americans. led by the president of the United States. The fact that it failed, and it was in a way a very near thing, the fact that it failed doesn't mean that all our institutions are in good shape. And as one of the very few people who was willing to come out in public and say that Mr. Trump is going to try some kind of attempt to stay in power,

I'm also disheartened by the kind of intellectual and moral decadence that I encountered when I said things. like that. It was clearly the case that he was going to try something, but almost no one was prepared to say, this is the logic. This is what's going to happen. To be fair, a lot of people were preparing for it in civil society. A lot of non-governmental organizations were preparing for the eventuality that he wouldn't accept the electoral outcome. But the idea that he might try something like this seems surprising to almost everybody. And that in itself, I'm trying to say, is discouraging because it means that we can be caught flatfoot at the second time.

And that's exactly the opposite of what we need. What we need to do is understand that historically speaking, coup attempts breed more coup attempts. The specific scenario here is related to Mr. Trump's big lie. So Mr. Trump's big lie is that he actually won the election. Once that lies out there in circulation, then fellow members of his party can say, well, since there's so much confusion about this last election, we then have to pass laws to suppress votes. That's not the term that they use, but that's the effect. We have to, we have to tighten things up. We have to make sure that people we don't like have a harder time voting. And that voter suppression

is now underway. And the voter suppression is very concerning for a couple of reasons. I mean, one, we're talking about democracy. And when people's votes are suppressed, then that's the suppression of democracy. But the other is that it's conflictual. Everybody knows that the votes that are being suppressed are those of African Americans. The people doing it know that and the people who are the victims know that. And so you risk a culture war or some kind of conflict between now and 2022. In 2024, of course, the scenario is that people who are running for president on the big lie, people who are running for president saying your votes actually don't count.

What they're communicating is, I'm going to come to power in some other way, right? If you're discrediting the presidential election while running for president, basically what you're suggesting is you want to come to power in some other way. In other words, your electoral campaign amounts to softing people up for the possibility that you're going to go for a coup the second time around. So these are the reasons I'm concerned. Talk to us a little bit more about what that scenario could look like in 2024. Because I think maybe as you've characterized it, there's a certain amount of complacency now maybe after the fact that our institutions held, your institutions held, I should be clear, we're coming from having this discussion from Toronto, Canada, but the institutions worked ultimately. The Supreme Court

functioned in the way that it needed to, Congress was able to act. The American people voted. So what's the counter-narrative to suggest, no, these institutions have been weakened. There is an imminent threat here? Yeah, number one is that the only reason our last election worked is because a lot of folks did some very good work over the course of 2020. When I started talking about how things would go wrong in 2016, you know, the very few people paid attention. But by the time Mr. Trump had been in power for four years, a lot of people were ready to say, okay, we need to make sure that we have pressure campaigns on state-level representatives. to make sure that they don't actually change the electoral outcome.

We need to make sure that we're guarding all of the exits to make sure that nothing slips away here. So that people were not surprised by when Mr. Trump said, I won the election, even though we lost. The good guys, the people who want democracy, were not surprised by that. If there hadn't been so much preparation, things might have gone a very different way. But the basic fact is that everybody knew, or at least all the smart people knew, that he was going to announce victory for an election night, and they were ready, right? So it's not the institutions in the sense of state institutions. It's civil society in the end,

which actually kept this from going very, very far south. And then the second problem is with the state institutions themselves. So we have a very old constitutional system, as you know, and it's leaky in a lot of different ways. And one of the ways that it's leaky is that it's federal and the states run the elections, and the states are allowed to run elections in a way which is, to be blunt about it, hardly democratic.

So the scenario was not too complicated. The scenario is that the states, many of the states where the election was close are now pushing voter suppression laws. It's quite possible that the Republicans will then get a majority in both houses in 2022. If a Republican presidential candidate then comes close to winning in 2024, what can happen is this. State legislatures can have given themselves the authority to allocate presidential electoral votes independently of the actual popular vote. So if a Republican president comes close in the electoral college, a few states can simply say, we're going to shift our electoral votes to the Republican because we feel like it, or they'll just claim there was fraud. And then a Republican-controlled House and Senate say, yes, we're going to

accept that electoral college count. I'm sorry to go into all these intricacies of our odd system, but it's these intricacies plus a lot of bad will in anti-democratic sentiment, which make it very possible that in 2025, the loser of the presidential election, I mean, somebody who loses by, let's say, 10 million votes and 20 or 30 electoral college, votes, that that person could actually be sworn in his president of United States. And that's not the whole scenario. Of course, if that happens, there are a lot of people who are going to be very angry about it, right? It's hard to imagine how the United States gets through something like that. It's hard to know how the people in civil service or for that matter of the military will react

to a situation where both sides, the people who really won the election and the people who rigged the election are saying, with some justification, the Constitution is on our side. And your key point here, Timothy, is that in a sense the norm was broken in this last election cycle. So now you're having another set of elections, the midterms in 2020, the next presidential elections in 2024, with a changed psychology kind of nationally in terms of how many voters perceive elections in their fairness or legitimacy. That's a wonderful summary. I mean, it's a couple, a couple important things happen.

I mean, one important thing is that a president of the United States said that elections don't work. And that's just in itself very important because naturally a lot of people are going to believe the president of the United States. And if you, if you follow the polls, it's roughly a quarter of the population now believes that the last presidential election was fraudulent. The second thing that happened is that his political party went along with him. not in all the details, but in the general claim that something is wrong and we have to fix it. And then that has the consequence that the quote unquote fixing, which is the suppression of the votes, making it harder for people to actually have their voices heard, is going to make a lot of other people angry and make the outcome itself controversial.

We're now in a situation where, for one side at least, winning isn't about actually getting the most votes. when he's about getting away with it. And that is, I mean, a lot of other things are wrong in our system and our society, but that is Mr. Trump's influence. And Mr. Trump is a kind of anti-moralist. I mean, he's someone whose influence only goes in the direction of nihilism. He's somebody whose, you know, whose basic idea is that if you can get away with it, then it's okay.

And if your electoral system is based upon getting away with it, then you're going to have some troubles. Okay. I want to now just pull back with you a bit to some of your large, thinking about the struggle between authoritarianism and democracy. In your recent bestseller, The Road to Unfreedom, you elaborated two concepts which were very helpful to me personally in kind of understanding the contemporary mindset

within liberal democracies and within authoritarian regime. So I want to deal with these one at a time and read you the first quote, which is related to your concept, of the politics of inevitability. You write, the politics of inevitability is the sense that the future is more of the present, that the laws of progress are known

and that there are no alternatives and therefore nothing really to be done. Unpack this for us, explain to us how you feel that this kind of encapsulates the mood of many democratic Western regimes and why this kind of understanding. this metaphysics, in your view, is actually quite dangerous in terms of democracy's confrontation with authoritarianism. Yeah, thank you for that question. One of the things that I've come to

understand as a historian of the past couple of centuries is how important time is in politics. And when we look at this period we're living in, the late 20th century to the early 21st century, what's really striking is how time has narrowed, how the future has narrowed, and then in some sense, disappeared. The moment I'm trying to describe in the politics of inevitability is the moment after 1989, the moment after the end of communism, when we got ourselves persuaded that there was going to be liberalism and democracy because no one had any better ideas, or there was going to be liberalism and democracy because capitalism was going to bring it about automatically. That is a deeply, deeply dangerous idea, because liberalism is about freedom. It's about

individuals expressing themselves. Democracy is about the people ruling. In other words, both of those ideas are not meant to work on their own. They're just descriptions of people acting. The descriptions of people individually or collectively forming their ideas, taking their own interests in hand, institutionalizing them. They're not descriptions of a mechanical process. And so the very idea that history was over, that there was no alternative, was unfortunately authoritarian, because that idea says you don't have to do anything. You, the people, don't have to rule. Somehow the people ruling is going to happen automatically. You, the individuals, don't have to be active and unpredictable and thoughtful because somehow liberalism is going to happen automatically. So we

basically put it, we blindfolded ourselves, we hooded ourselves, we stopped up our ears, we convinced ourselves that we were at some kind of end point and we could just coast. And of course, that wasn't true. Alternatives presented themselves. And when they did present themselves, we were all the less prepared for them because we'd gotten ourselves into this mindset that everything was going to go our way automatically. And talk to us a little bit more about the consciousness or not of history within the mindset of the politics of inevitability. Because this seems to be one of the kind of crucial blind spots of liberal democratic culture at this moment. It's kind of a historicism.

I couldn't agree more with that assessment. So one problem with the politics of inevitability is that since you think you know where everything is going, then the past suddenly becomes not really that important. You might nod with a kind of fake respect in the direction of history. But since you know that history is kind of like a funnel, you know, which is going to ultimately end up at liberal democracy, all that stuff that happened before is not really interesting because it was going to proceed the way it was going to proceed anyway. And one can see this, unfortunately, since 1989, in the decline of the humanities, at least in the United States and many other countries in the West, and the decline in the tension that people pay to history. So because if you think that you automatically know what the process is going to lead to, then you don't see possibilities in the past. You just see ingredients. You just see things that we're going to mix together to create this inevitable future. A historian, of course, or someone who studies history or loves history, looks at the past and sees all kinds of things that did happen and also all kinds of things that might have

happened or that people thought could happen. If your historian in the past is rich and the past is constantly suggesting possibilities, both negative and positive for the future. So once you narrow down the future to one possibility, you're disarming yourself, not just politically, you're also disarming yourself mentally. And then when people come back around to you with something else, and they say, well, the past tells me that my side was always right. The past tells me that I was always the victim. The past tells me that you always did wrong. You're a little helpless because you've done away with history. And now we're in the strange age of politics. We're having done away with history, we're constantly confronted by memory and getting pushed around by memory.

Yeah. So let's go a little bit deeper on this because this is really, I think, critical stuff to understand. Your argument is that this is not simply a weakness of liberal democracy in terms of its perception and interaction with an external authoritarian threat, this is actually a threat to liberal democracy internally, in terms of its own confrontation internally with populism and authoritarianism. Do I have that right? Yeah, you have it absolutely right. I mean, the simplest way to put it is that if you've got yourself narrowed down to one future, it's very easy to then go to zero futures. What liberal democracy actually needs, what each of us needs as individual people and citizens is a broad future, which is rich in possibilities that we can

affirm and choose among and create. But if you got yourself talking to the story where there's only one future that has to happen, that one future can disappear very easily. All that has to, there's only, because there's just basically one break. There's just one barrier between you and this void. And so if you're shocked, so if you're shocked in 2008 by a financial crisis, if you're shocked by the election of Mr. Trump in 2016, if you're shocked by Brexit in the UK, if you're shocked by a pandemic in 2020, and you stop believing in this story. Or if in the case of the United States, you realize everything is not going better politically because everything is not going better in my own life. If you're in the United States and life expectancy has stagnated and social mobility

has slowed almost to a standstill and your story is not moving forward to some kind of an absolutely better future. That can also stop you from believing that there's only one good future. And then what's left. What's left is zero futures. What's left is what I call in the books, the politics of eternity, where politics starts to become a competition between people who tell you stories about the past and about how you were right in the past and other people were wrong in the past, about how greatness is not in the future, but in the past. And then slowly, the task of the state shifts from being creating possibilities for all of us in the future. And future to being a kind of referee in a continuous culture war about the past. And that's a shift

clearly towards authoritarianism, because then you're on the terrain of emotions, then you're moving towards polarization and tribalism. You're moving away from a setup where individual interests are supposed to be imagined, articulated in some sense, coagulated into policy, towards a situation where you're herded into a kind of emotional field where you're going to battle it out with other people who have different emotional commitments. And this, I mean, this may sound very abstract, but it's important for me to kind of get under what is happening with the rise of leaders like Mr. Putin or Mr. Trump, who don't have anything to offer in the future, but who do seem to be able to rise to power and hold on to power by keeping us

in a sort of conflict about who was right in the past. Perfect segue, Timothy, to the quote I wanted to share, summarizing your theory of the politics of eternity. So let's have that quote up now. The politics of eternity promises a better future for everyone. Eternity places one nation at the center of a cyclical story of victimhood. Time is no longer a line into the future, but a circle that endlessly returns the same threats from,

the past. I think it would be helpful for us to unpack this from the context of your kind of historical and analysis and understanding of Putin's Russia. Because when I read The Road to Unfreedom, it really opened my mind to how this regime has a kind of histiography, a kind of a deep theory of the past that informs their present and contextualizes their future. And I think it's a fascinating way to try to understand what in fact contemporary Russia is today. Okay, good. So let me start from the material angle before I move over to the ideological, because there's an underlying question about what government can do, which connects to the politics of eternity and this kind of futurelessness or this appeal to cycles in the past.

Russia is a very, I mean, it's a sad regime, but it's intellectually a very useful regime because it can, it's, it shows us a kind of extreme. It shows us where things might be heading and where things can go. Russia is at an extreme of inequality of wealth. It's a state where one clan of the oligarchy is in control, which has the practical effect that the state doesn't really work. So we can do certain things. It can fight wars. But it can, it can, it can, but it can't make domestic policy. So in that sense, the state can't really offer a future. So where do you go from there? How do you govern in futurelessness? And this is where Putin is extremely skillful and where we can see, as it were, from the master, how this kind of scenario can play out. If you can't have politics in the future, if you can't actually change the world such that your citizens might have a better future, what you can do is you can draw them into a story. about how things were better in the past for them in particular and how the past reveals how they were always virtuous and how they were always on the right side. And then the actions

that you do take in foreign policy can be worked into this symbolic framework. So, I mean, just take a very concrete example, the invasion of Ukraine. The invasion of Ukraine, if you're in Ukraine and you're looking at it, it's just, it's Russian hardware. It's Russian, troops, if there's nothing too complicated about it, certainly nothing metaphysical. But if you're looking at it from the point of view of the Russian media, it's a kind of, it's a kind of on Russia of historical justice. It's all about number one, how Ukraine and Russia never should have been separated in the first place because they've been spiritually together for a thousand years. It's number two, how Ukraine has always part, has been part of Russia because in the 18th century, parts of

Ukraine were given the name Nohodosia by Catherine the Great. It's number three, Russia is rescuing the world from fascism yet again because Ukraine has fallen and somehow, you know, according to the Russian media, to the hands of the fascists, and therefore we're fighting the Second World War all over again. So what's, so as Russia, you know, on the surface is just invading another country, what's happening more importantly is this kind of historical resuscitation. we're looping back to the Middle Ages, we're looping back to the early modern period, we're looping back to the Second World War, we're looping back to moments which show us in harmony, which show us powerful, which show us righteous. And the things that we're doing, like bombing civilians or shooting down civilian airliners, whatever it might be, all of those things are much less important than this vision which comes from the past. And this doesn't work forever, but it did work for Mr. Putin at the time.

the time and for several years thereafter. And so I'm trying to take seriously this possibility that politics can happen in some sense in the mythical past. And that mythical past can be more important than the empirical present. Fascinating stuff. Just to give our audience a sense that this is not kind of theory and conjecture. I was struck by this post-summit press conference quote of Putin's. I mean, he said this in front of the international media, there is no happiness in life. There is only a mirage on the horizon. So cherish that. I mean, how do we interpret that, Timothy? Is that, again, a kind of evocation for a Russian audience of this politics of eternity? Is it a refutation of the West? It's a striking thing for a global

leader to say. Yeah. There are moments, there are moments when Mr. Putin is a trickster and where he's playing us. And then there are moments when he says things, which I just, which I actually take literally. And that was one of those moments. This idea of the politics of eternity that that term is my own. But it actually draws pretty closely from actual things which actual Russian thinkers and ideologues and political planners and politicians say, I came to the idea. from reading Mr. Putin's speeches and from reading an ideologist who's very close to him or was called Sorkov.

After I wrote the road on freedom, Sorkov wrote an article, which was basically the policy saying basically the politics of eternity is correct. I mean, not just that it's a description, but that is actually the way the world is. So I take Mr. Putin at his word. I think that is how they see it. And it's a dark vision, and it's also very different from the way things used to be. So if one goes back to the Cold War, which is not going back very far, there you had competing visions of the future. Communism, although it was old and stale and maybe people didn't believe it anymore,

it at least nominally had an idea of the future. And likewise, capitalism or democracy, or whatever you want to call what the West had, social democracy, it had a notion of the future, which was progress and social advancement and ever greater enlightenment and so on. And these were drooling divisions about the future. What we're faced with now with something else. We're faced with this kind of vacuum or maybe this, this, this gravitational force, this black hole, which says there is no future and there are no values and there is no truth. And we've just figured this out a little bit sooner than you have. So come with us. Let yourself be drawn in this direction. There's no point trying to halt the accumulation of wealth. You can't do it. There's no point holding up the pretext, the democracy is anything but a joke. Just do what we do, accept that it's a joke. Just drift along with us and orbit around this black hole with us because there is nothing on the horizon. There's nothing but darkness ahead. And so the only thing that you can do is be honest about that. And actually, and that's something

that you get an awful lot from the Russians, like the sense, not all the Russians, of course, but the sense that the only virtue possible is to be truthful about the absence of virtue. And therefore, people in the West who talk about truth and human rights and democracy and the rule of law and so on, we're being, we're being vicious. We're not being virtuous because that's all false, right? And they're being virtuous because they know it's all false and they're saying it's all false. And so in this world with no future, in this world where there's just a specter, a mirage at the end, the only thing you can do is like look at it honestly as you swirl downwards. And that I agree with you.

Like that's a very striking formulation. And yes, I do believe it reveals something essential. Do you worry, Timothy, that Russia in effect is the future? You know, I mean, two Americans, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, have wealth that is equivalent now to the bottom 50% of the population of your entire country of 335 million people. So to what extent just simply are the Russians through a set of circumstances further down a trajectory of modernity than we are? And it's just a matter of time before we join them in the politics of eternity, which will busterous and support an economic and power structure and order that they've simply arrived at first.

Yeah. I appreciate that question because that's precisely the concern that animated the road to freedom. I mean, on one level, the road to freedom is a story about what happens to Russia under Putin. It's an account of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Russian interference in European political processes. And then finally, the Russian rule in the U.S. presidential election in 2016. But underneath that is this attempt to characterize this new form of politics that we've been talking about, not as an opposition to the West, but as a possible future for the West.

This is what has me concerned. And the reason why it can be a possible future is that it doesn't require you to do anything. It just requires you to let go. Just let go of your attempt to create a social democracy. Let go your attempt to tax the rich. Let go of these principles and these ethics. They're hard to hold on anyway. It just requires you to let go of.

things and then you go and then you move in that direction. And I appreciate also that you specifically mentioned the issue of wealth. I think that's critically, critically important. If you let, I mean, thinkers from Bemo Nathom to George Orwell have made this point, not just left-wing thinkers I'm trying to say, have made this point that if you allow Plato made this point, if you allow, if you allow wealth to become too concentrated, then communication becomes impossible. And not just in the obvious sense that some people are living very different lives and other people, but also in the sense that there's a kind of whole warping of the linguistic field where words start to get sucked into the wealth. Like, for example, when we talk about freedom of expression or

freedom of speech in the U.S., we're very often talking about the ability of a billionaire to use algorithms to get his message out. Whereas what freedom of speech is supposed to be about is the ability of people to speak truth to power. That's the sense of freedom of speech. And that's basically gotten lost. So I think it's really important to think of inequality of wealth in itself as something which is system altering. It's not just a matter of numbers. It's not just a matter of some people doing better than others. It's a matter of a kind of break in the fabric of a system which is meant to be which is meant to be pluralist and which is meant to be democratic. It's a problem in and of itself, which has to be addressed in and of itself. And Russia is helpful here, as you say, because it shows,

it shows us where it shows us the extreme where communication has become totally impossible, where public communication or political communication is entirely about myths, where everybody believes it's all about myths, where everyone understands that there's nothing beyond public relations, that there's no authenticity, that there's, that there's, that there's, that there's, that's no truth. That's, that's what follows. And, you know, we can, and we can follow that. And so you're, you're, you're, you're right. And I agree with the premise of question. We're going to turn to your ideas about solutions because those are important. But I want to throw one other quote at you because it relates to an issue that's come up over the

course of these dialogues that we've been having on the future of democracy. And it, it has to deal with the role of truth in society. You recently wrote, post-truth is pre-fascism. When we give up on the truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place. Without agreement about some basic facts, citizens cannot form the society that would allow them to defend themselves. So where do you see, Timothy, this post-truth?

I think we understand the mouthpieces that it emerges from in our democracies, But what are the institutional kind of structures and conduits of distribution that are allowing a kind of post-truth pre-fascism to replace what we all have understood is at the core of liberal democracy, which is some set of shared normative horizons about who we are as a people and what we want to accomplish together? So let me please, Redo to start with the back of that question and talk about what the positive structures are and then I'll say a word about how things fall apart. So I think there is a certain naivete in the Anglo-Saxon tradition about truth,

which goes back to Milton and to Mill, and which we hear in the notion of a free market of ideas where the good ideas will win out. unfortunately that that's just not true good ideas or truth does not win out there's no natural mechanism or natural selection which brings the good ideas to the top or the truth to the top enlightenment is very much a social project and institutional project and human minds require an awful lot of care and attention before they can be attuned to the idea of factuality or to the horizon of truth so that you know that's that's that's that's

that's where I start. And then that enlightenment, you know, in my country, one can see that enlightenment institutionalized in local reporting all the way through the Cold War. When the Cold War took place, we had international reporting. And when the Cold War took place, we had local reporting. People had some sense of what was going on in their own communities. And that's incredibly important now shifting to your question about where things go wrong and how post-truths of sin. If people in their own daily lives don't have a kind of cushion of factuality provided by the local news, if there's not an extension of a credible extension of their own experience into the press, if they can't make a connection, a personal connection with a reporter who's

writing about the schools or the water quality or the basketball team or whatever it is, If they don't have that, then they're not going to have a positive idea about press, about media. They're not going to believe in it. They're not going to be prepared for a world where there's national press and international press. That's going to be too distant. And understandably, people are going to believe that they've been looked over and that they might as well just pick, you know, just choose a horse, just pick an international

and nationalist Jews, just pick the thing which makes you feel good because why not? And so institutionally, what's happened is that we've lost the local news. In the peak year for U.S. newspaper subscriptions, ironically, if you read Orwell, it was 1984. And since then, it's declined. Right now, I'll know how it is in Canada. I've been interested to learn. But right now, the territorial majority of the United States is a news desert. So in most counties of the United States, there is no reporter writing about what's actually happening.

And for me, that's one side of what's going wrong. other side of what's going wrong is what's what's what's filled that vacuum which is social media so social media is constructed in a way to de-enlighten us if enlightenment is a project it's a fragile project and and if you understand how the mind works even a very simple way you can apply huge amounts of computing power to get at the to get at our vulnerabilities let's call them that to get that to get at the cracks in our rationality, which are big. You know, we're not, we're not, we're not perfect. And when we, we face up to the screens and we're on social media, what we're dealing with are, our clever algorithms, which, which find their ways into the cracks in our rationality, and just pry those cracks open a little bit

bigger, a little bit bigger, a little bit bigger, a little bit bigger, a little bit bigger, a little bit bigger, all the time. So that we very quickly get used to hearing the things that we already thought. We very quickly get used to thinking that what we feel is the same thing as what is actually the case. And we very quickly collapse this distinction between what we want to be true and what is actually true. And the content of that can vary. The content can be crazy conspiracy theories. It can be whatever. But the fundamental issue is you not only have lost the ground truths around you, those ground truths have been replaced by convictions, which, you have been replaced by convictions, which seem very personal to you, but which have actually been generated by your own vulnerabilities

in combination with incredibly well-organized computing power. And then before you know it, you're storming the capital of the United States on the basis of things that you have not experienced yourself, but on the basis of false news items that have been selected for you on the basis of your vulnerabilities by a computer screen. So those are some of the forces. And then, of course, they're the human forces. And here I'm going to say the things which sound most naive. We have to bear the responsibility for the value of truth.

If we shrug our shoulders and say, hey, what's truth? Who knows what truth is? Your opinion, my opinion, then you're going to lose out to spectacle because somebody is always going to have a better funded slicker opinion than your opinion. You have to assert the value of truth. I mean, it might be truth is a horizon. You never get there, but it's worth pursuing. You have to assert the value of it as a value.

you because if you give it away, you're giving away the terrain on which you can contest power. If you give away truth, you can't have law. Law depends upon truth. You can't have civil society. Civil society depends upon agreement about basic facts. You can't really have democracy either at the end of the day. But most fundamentally, you're giving away your ability as an individual to challenge the world around you.

The traction you have in the world around you is factuality. If you give it up, then you don't have any place to plant your feet. There's no possibility for you to take a stand. Let's, before we go to audience questions, one more quote for you that kind of pushes this discussion towards solutions and maybe here really to get your ideas of what are some of the big policy ideas that we could embrace to kind of shore up the things that we value so dearly about our liberal democratic order. That quote is the following. America will not survive the big lie just because a lie. is separated from power. It will need a thoughtful re-pluralization of the media and a commitment to facts as a public good. So these are, I think, concepts, Timothy, that all of us would support. How do we

actually go about doing this? Do you have some specific concrete suggestions as to how we re-pluralize and how we kind of shore up our commitment to facts as a public good? I think that the first part is the commitment itself. I mean, the naive part, which I'm trying to repeat as often as I can, that we have to say that truth is part of democracy. That democracy isn't just about individual impulses. I mean, that's what the worst part of American political conversation would have us believe, that, you know, you have your impulses, I have my impulses, and somehow all those impulses

are going to add up to democracy, I just don't think that's true. I think democracy depends upon a sense that people have a future and the future can only be built upon facts. Impulses are just going to drive us around in circles or drive us around, that drive us back to a mythical past. So I think that commitment, that democracy isn't just this passive thing that arises out of collective emotion, you know, of collective emotion that's generated by the screen or whatever, but the democracy actually depends upon facts. So facts are a public good. And so therefore, we're going to expend, this is the important part, we're going to spend resources on these things. I mean, if the United States can have a $700 billion defense budget, which is ostensibly

to protect a democracy, then surely we can extend some resources on generating facts, which are actually much more essential than aircraft carriers to protecting democracy. The way to do that, I can imagine ways of doing that, which actually don't cost very much money. We have these incredibly profitable social media companies, which you think about it in economic terms, generate the negative externality of falsehood, right? Once we've established the facts are good, then falsehood is a negative externality. And therefore, they should be paying some kind of price for that, right, just like a polluter pays a price. The tax that they pay for that can be used to support commercial and non-commercial local regional media across the country. I think that's the kind

of balance that one has to seek. You have these incredibly powerful countries, which have companies which have done down the newspapers, which publish their reporting without paying for it, and which make political life much harder. I think that is the place where you have to go immediately for the cash that you would need to build up local news reporting. I also think, I mean, now I'm going to get very old fashioned. I think that the idea of going out into the world and reporting should be an integral part of public education from kindergarten through 12th grade, that there should be fewer screens in the classroom. Actually, I don't think it should be any screens in the classroom except in classes that are specifically about programming and that

kids should be taught to go out and report stories so that they have some idea like of what it means to go to go out and physically move your body and figure something out so that you respect the other people who are doing that. And so that it seems like a life or at least a part of a life that you might choose for yourself. So I think we have to tilt the whole matrix. You have to say this is a central value of democracy, therefore we're going to spend some resources. We're not going to say the market is going to give us the truth. The market doesn't give us the truth. You have to adjust the market. You have to nudge the market. So the market does more the things you want to do. And history is behind you if you want to do that. I mean, the book,

for example, was a very chaotic medium when it was created. It led to 100 plus years of religious war. The internet now is a very chaotic medium. But if we know what we would, want from it, we can push it in the right direction. And if what we really want is democracy, and I appreciate that throughout this conversation, you've been valuing democracy and saying it's describing it as something that we need and want. If we want it, then we have to say, look, we can't, going back to the very beginning of conversation, we can't trust history to bring it to us, we can't trust capitalism to bring it to us. We can't trust impersonal processes to bring it to us. That's not how it works. If you want democracy, you have to say,

okay, that means that you have to make this adjustment, this adjustment, and this adjustment, and put resources and state power behind those things to recalibrate. Yeah, critical point. Agency. We need a sense of agency, not just as democratic citizens, but in our own attitude towards democracy and its building blocks or the lack of it in our lives. Time to go to questions. Timothy, there were a number that came in.

We're always pressed for time. And so we've just selected some of the most interesting. The first is from Sprockets. I assume that is a nom de plume, but we'll work with that. It's that Sprockets writes, authoritarian governments employ ruthless, uncompromising measures to hold and expand powers. How can our current democratic society so reluctant or unable to engage in similar approaches contain and curtail the threat of the authoritarian right. Is this possible?

So an interesting question. I mean, how do we fight an opponent that, as you've described, really has abandoned a lot of basic morality, who is willing to pursue power for power's sake? In some ways, isn't this the worst opponent for us at the worst time? Well, I mean, the way that I think, I think you're talking about Russia, which is kind of I know a little bit about, the way that I think about Russia is like, it's like a malevolent physician. So what Russia diagnoses in American society is actually correct or it's, it's helpful. What it, what it prescribes, of course, is poison.

And so one way to think about this issue is that the problem for us is not only that authoritarian regimes are oppressive at home. The problem is that they seek out our weaknesses now in this digital age and try to make our weaknesses worse. So if you consider what Russia did to the U.S. in 2016, you can say, well, that was unfair, no one of there had done it before. But you can read it another way. You can read it as a physician's diagnosis and say, aha, this shows we are far too dependent. on digital media. This shows we have a tremendous problem with the weakness of print media. This shows we are far too little committed to factualities of issue. This shows, you know, going to the details of found the stuff they did, this shows that we have a problem with race

relations, which is maybe more important than we thought. We can read the way that authoritarian regimes get to us as the problems at home that we have to solve if you want to have a democracy. That's the constructive way to react. And then getting to the heart of the question about how they're willing to do things that we're not. That's absolutely true. I think the main thing we have to be able to do is win what the Russians call the evaluative war. They talk about evaluation a lot. And again, they have a point. What they're trying to do is to say, look, democracy is a joke. You might as well admit it's a joke and kind of enjoy yourself in this sort of moral and intellectual decadence. Why not? Why not? And you see that with Mr. Putin and the meeting with Mr. Biden

the other day where Mr. Putin celebrates January 6th and the storming of the Capitol and, you know, this is the kind of thing that he likes. You know, why not? This just shows how the world really, really is. And that, again, demonstrates what you have to do in response. If you're going to defeat that kind of opponent, you have to say, actually, democracy's better. It's not just a matter of, on the one hand, on the other hand. It's not just a matter of cynicism and emptiness and nihilism and we pretend. You have to say, no, we're actually not pretending. We think democracy is superior to the absence of democracy. We think equality is superior to oligarchy. And we can actually make these things happen, right? And this is why going back to one of your earlier questions,

the politics of eternity is so dangerous because the politics of eternity takes the future away from us. And the future is a terrain that democracy can win on. Democracy can say, hey, we know that we're going to exist in two years and four years and eight years because we have elections. We know that our country can survive a bad leader or a dying leader because we're going to have elections. We know we're going to be there in 50 years or 100 years. And you, the authoritarian regimes, you don't know that. And we the democracies can think up better futures for ourselves. That's why that politics of eternity is so poisonous and so dangerous and so threatening and why we have to get ourselves out of it. Perfect segue to our second audience question for you coming up now is from

Walter. He asks, empires and authoritarians don't last forever. The USSR collapsed without much advanced morning. What possible collapse scenarios do you envision for Putin and his regime? I mean, this is the succession problem, right? These regimes concentrate power to such an extent that succession becomes an incredibly risky endeavor and possibly risky for the world in the context of Russia's large arsenal of nuclear weapons, its malevolence towards its neighbors. How could we conceivably see this playing out an end to the Putin era in Russia? Yeah. This gets back to a real advantage that democracies have, which you've already named, which I talked about a second ago, which is that we have a principle of succession. You know, you know that if a prime,

if there's a scandal and a prime minister falls, you're going to have another prime minister. In the worst case, you're going to have another election, a new coalition. There's going to be prime minister. Canada is going to go on. And the U.S. political system is a little crankier. But we know that if if the president, you know, God forbid, dies, then there's a vice president. And in the worst case, there's a succession. There's another set of elections. And so long as you believe in those elections, and that's another issue, which, of course, Russia goes after.

And opponents of democracy in the U.S. go after as well. But if you believe in those elections, then you can keep having a state. And that state can go on. What authoritarian do is they try to act like what they're doing is fun. So, I mean, this is, like, again, Mr. Putin's body language at the summit. Like, he's just, like, he's chilling. You know, he's like slouching. He's having a nice time. He's telling stories for the Russian public that don't really make any sense. He's, you know, the whole idea is like, it's more fun to be me than it is to be you. It's more fun to be an authoritarian than it is to be a prime minister. It's more fun to be a dictator than it is to be an elected president. It's fun. But that's cover. It's not really true. It's actually immensely stressful and demanding to be an authoritarian ruler because you don't know what the future holds. You may wake up a tomorrow morning and you're no longer in power, right? That can happen. And the thing is,

you don't know when it's going to happen, but you know with certainty that it is going to happen. So what they do is they always talk the talk about how this is so much easier in the democracy. Look, democracy, it's a big mess. Whereas in fact, their messiness is much, much greater than ours. It's just under the surface. And it all comes out at the moment when the leader is ill or the leader dies or there's a coup attempt. So you can't say with certainty just how the Putin regime is going to end, but it is under tremendous pressure at the moment. Number one, corona has been a disaster in Russia and everybody knows it. Number two, Mr. Putin's personal popularity and the popularity of his party are way down. Number three, they're running out of foreign adventures. So there was Ukraine

and there was Syria. And this summer, it's not to be excluded that there will be Belarus. There are Russian military maneuvers happening about the same time on the Belarusian territory and about the same time as the Russian parliamentary elections at September. That combination, it worries me. But even if they do something in Belarus, they're still running out of foreign adventures they can use to distract the population with. And you can feel this desperation in Russian politics now. I mean, it's sad that Alexei Navalny is in prison. It's also a sign of desperation. It's sad that the anti-corruption organizations have been labeled extremists. It's also a sign of desperation. It's sad that so many Russians are going to be disenfranchised between now and September.

It's also a sign of desperation. The election is becoming entirely implausible. And this is, I mean, this is I'm trying to get to the point now. In these fake democracies, what you're doing is, you're undermining the succession principle. You're carrying out elections, but you're doing it a way which is increasingly unbelievable. And so what you're then doing to your country is you're taking away the succession principle. You're not just ruling badly now.

You're taking away your country's future because you're lining it up for this disaster where when something happens to you or when you're simply too old to rule or when someone tries to take you out and replace you, people aren't really sure if they can believe in the democratic succession because elections have been faked for so long.

And so it's like you're sucking the air out of your country's future. And the smirk on your face comes from that moment where you're sucking the air out of your country's future. And that's like that's the sadness of these authoritarian regimes. So I mean, the specific scenario I'm not going to name. It always comes. The thing about authoritarian regimes is they always, they seem like going to go on forever until the moment when they don't.

Right. And then it all comes crashing down very quickly. And when the Putin regime comes crashing down. and I personally think it's going to be sooner rather than later. When it comes crashing down, we're all going to be shaking our heads and saying, wow, how could that have happened so fast? Is there a possibility for some kind of succession to another version of Putin? In other words, a continuation of the politics of eternity refashioned around an individual

that represents the clique that is Putin's clique? I think an attempt at that is the most likely. possible next scenario, whether it's friendly or hostile to Mr. Putin or whether it comes after Mr. Putin's death. I don't know, but I think that's the most likely scenario. I think it's going to be hard to carry off something like this a second time, partly because Mr. Putin is, in fact, talented, partly because the system has been built around him personally. And also partly because there is the question of the Russian people, which, you know, the thing I didn't mention the last question is that the protest potential of the Russian people is actually extremely high.

And it's, you know, it's sad that so many of them are being, like their photographs are being taken, going back to the earlier question about authoritarian means. Their photographs are being taken. They're being arrested afterwards using facial recognition technology. But there's a great deal of potential for protests in Russian society. And it's not clear to me that one oligarch mass. can hand off power to another oligarch master without the Russians having something to say about it. I agree with the premise of the question that that's the most likely thing that people will try to do next.

And Alexi Navalny in this sporadic attempt, you're a student of history. You know how many times Russia has attempted and had genuinely democratic movements and moments, yet they seem, for whatever reason, incapable of building on those ideas, on those moments to create some kind of enduring more democratic orders. Democracy is somehow incompatible with Russia? I mean, I hate that type of determinism, but history seems to suggest it is infertile ground. I think we all have to be modest about this. I mean, as an American, I believe my own democracy is.

a work in progress. I look at our history of voter suppression and think, you know, democracy is something which we partially have in the present, which I very much like to completely have in the future. The striking thing for me about democracy in 2020 is how, I mean, thanks to Belarus, actually, we've been reminded how people just like to have their votes counted, it doesn't have to do with East and it doesn't have to do with West. People just like it. People like the idea that their vote isn't being thrown away. And I mentioned Belarus because if you had to name a country where, you know, people were going to protest in the hundreds of thousands, that probably wouldn't have been the country that you would name. And nevertheless,

it happened. And it wasn't about like Belarus joining the EU or NATO or the West. It wasn't about anything like that. It was just about the simple idea of democracy. And this is where a little bit of optimism come in because you do get these surprising moments like Slovakia a few years ago as well, where you realize actually people don't like oligarchy. They may be held down by or fooled by it, but they don't identify with it. And people do like to have their votes counted. So I certainly Russia has a host of problems. It leads the way in this problem, media centralization we were talking about before. There's a terrific problem, I mean, terrific in the sense of huge, with trust in society. But there are a lot of really courageous Russians as well.

There are a lot of Russians who behave with such dignity and uprightness in the present situation. There are a lot of Russians who, you know, demonstrate courage in a way that I honestly am not sure how many Americans I know could do. That that does, it does, for me, that keeps up the hope. You know, I'm not sure it's going to be this time or the next time or the time after that. But I don't want to exclude that Russia is going to be democracy. But by the way, Belarus one more time, together with Ukraine, the hope for democracy in Russia comes with the hope for democracy around the world. And in particular, it comes from, it comes with the hope for democracy incomparable neighboring countries where people speak Russian. And this is why, you know,

if Russia's too big, like if you're Canada or if you're America for that matter, you can't really make a difference inside Russia, but you can make a difference inside Ukraine. And for me, practically, the best Russian policy is usually a good Ukrainian policy. If we can show, and Ukraine is a mess in many ways right now, but it's also, it also functions as a free society in many ways right now. If we can show, if we can make Ukraine work, which is, that's a project on the scale of Canada or a project on the scale of, you know, of the U.S. or the EU, like that we should be able to do. If we can do that, then we're contributing to democracy in Russia because it's hard for Russians to look at Ukraine and say, huh, Ukrainians can travel to the EU, but we can't, why not?

Ukrainians can have free elections and we can't, why not? Right now, Russian propaganda insists that Ukraine is a total disaster. And the reason why it does that is because the Russian authorities can't allow Russians to believe, aha, look, our neighbors, our fellow-Islavs, they actually can vote for their rulers. That actually is possible. So Russia is living together with what it calls the Russian-speaking world. And there are a lot of people in that Russian-speaking world in Russia, outside of Russia, do want to have their votes counted.

And so as you say, there are a lot of barriers, but I'm not actually hopeless about that. That's a nice positive note for us to sum up on Timothy. And I want to leave by taking the liberty as the host and moderator of the show to make my own book recommendation to our audience for this summer, for your reading. And that's Timothy's book, The Road to Unfreedom. I just can't stress enough, Timothy, how this book influenced me. It really opened my mind to contemporary Russia, to the dynamics within it. There are parts of it, I thought, you know, they're almost read like science fiction. But when you dig into the actual factual basis that you build the narrative of the book around,

it is just eerily truthful in its conclusions. And again, the facts that you've marshaled in what I think is really a masterful, a masterful text. So thank you for that book. Thank you for your wisdom and insights today. And thank you for this opportunity to be in dialogue. It's been my pleasure. Thank you for your preparation. Thank you for the thoughtful questions. I'm very glad we could do this. Terrific, Timothy. Well, ladies and gentlemen, that wraps up the fifth of our six spring 2021 dialogues on the fate and future of our democracy. Our final dialogue is in two weeks time approximately, a little bit earlier in that. We're going to squeeze it in before Canada Day.

June 29th at 8 p.m. We have Irshad Mangi on to talk about her ideas about how we create a plural. realistic, rich conversation in our democracy that respects people's differences, but also allows us to move forward to common ideals, common actions together. So join me on June 29th at 8 p.m. Eastern for my conversation with Irshad Manji. Finally, I just want to thank all the groups and individuals who have helped make these dialogues come together. First and foremost, the peer Melanie Monk Charitable Foundation, really the driving force behind the monk dialogue. Our presenting sponsors, Gluskin Chef and Onyx. Our friends at Bond Brand Loyalty and Tories are supporting sponsors, Facebook, Canada.

Thank you. And also our production partners, Amber MacMedia and Creative Harbor. Well, I'm Rudyard Griffith. Thank you for joining me for this, a monk dialogue. We'll do this all again in two weeks time. In the meantime, be well, be safe. And check out Timothy Snyder's Road to Unfreedom. We'll talk to you then.

Bye-bye.