Thinking about...

Given where we are just now, there have been quite a few questions about my book On Tyranny, and in particular about the first lesson, which is “Do Not Obey in Advance.” The violations of that lesson of the twentieth century have been so flagrant that they are, at least, serving as an education in how not to behave. In this setting I thought I would review some of the lessons in a little talk (half an hour or so) for subscribers, taking into account events of the past few weeks. Please share this lecture with anyone who will find it interesting or who needs to hear it!

PS Sorry that these images are so large — the editing tool is not working, so I am going to post this as it as.

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Greetings from Oklahoma. Here are a few thoughts from here on video about the decisions of the owners of the Washington Post and the LA Times to suppress their editorial boards’ decisions to endorse Kamala Harris.

A problem with the very wealthy is that, alas, the least vulnerable have a tendency to think of themselves as the most vulnerable.

And from that position they harm everyone else, while proclaiming that they are simply being neutral or following business interests. But doing what Trump wants in advance only makes it more likely that Trump will have power, and only teaches him that you are easy to intimidate. You are giving the authoritarian power he would not otherwise have. The irony is that the rest of us will have to save the billionaires from their own cowardice.

But that of course is not what this is moment is about. It is about all of us doing the little things we can, the truthful things we can, to get through this moment and come out on the bright side. In the video I explain why “do not obey in advance” is the main lesson of the twentieth century. In my book On Tyranny “Do not obey in advance” is the first lesson.

Please share this video. And please act. Vote, register people to vote, phone bank, keyboard, write letters, work a poll. Do something, and think of all the others who are doing what they can. You feel feel better, and you will make a difference.

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A few thoughts for Americans for whom the survival of Ukraine is an electoral issue. Please watch and share.

If you’re in Michigan and it’s 23 October, you can catch me live in Detroit at noon and in Kalamazoo at 7:00pm.

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You have to be in a place to appreciate the television. And I think the history of fascism helps us to see what is happening in the ads.

In public, the Trump presence in Ohio is weaker than in previous elections. There are fewer signs, and the big ones are in front of the small houses. There are fewer aggressive slogans in public, and the ones personally targeted Vice-President Harris are rarer and less vicious than the ones that targeted Hillary Clinton in 2016. On the other hand, there are more Trump flags and hybrid American/Trump flags, which is a bad sign that the state has merged with the Leader in the minds of people.

And the message on television is certainly one of a much more refined fascism, which is what I am discussing in my third brief message today. The way the tv ads now follow Carl Schmitt’s advice of beginning politics by choosing an enemy follow fascist protocol by inventing imaginary crises around real human vulnerabilities. These themes are further explore in a number of my written posts.

Please share this post.

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Continuing yesterday’s theme on fascism, responding to questions about the possibility of American fascism. There have been American fascist movements in the past, and perhaps more importantly a tradition of us-and-them politics, sometimes under the surface. There are fascists in the present who continue American fascist traditions. And we invite fascism in the future by telling ourselves that it cannot happen here. Exceptionalism opens both the front and the back doors…

In these remarks I invoke directly or indirectly:

Sarah Churchwell, Behold, America

Sarah Churchwell, “It has happened here,” New York Review of Books, 22 June 2020.

Rachel Maddow, Prequel: An American Fight against Fascism

Heather Cox Richardson, “Letters from an American”

Timothy Snyder, Black Earth

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PS: Correcting myself — I said 19 October; I meant 18 October 2024. TS

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People are talking about fascism. After a New York Times article was published today, I heard both from people who are baffled that we did not been speaking of fascism more and earlier, and from people who want to know what it means — and from people who want me to explain why fascism is bad. I am on the road, so I took ten minutes to make a little video about all of this. I hope it helps. As I’ll be driving around the country for the next ten days or so, I will likely do more of these. Let me know if you like the format. And please share!

Some the ideas I talk about are expressed at greater length in this op-ed.

In my remarks I refer directly or obliquely to these books:

Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works

Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands

Timothy Snyder, Black Earth

Timothy Snyder, Road to Unfreedom

Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century

Zeev Sternhell, Les anti-lumières

Robert Paxton, in Anatomy of Fascism, offers this pragmatic definition of fascism: “a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”

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As a historian of forced population movements and as an American, I don’t think we are taking the consequences of the Trump-Vance deportation plan seriously enough. The reality will be much more personal and awful, and the politics more transformative and durable, than we might think.

I will write this up soon; but I was moved to do a recording by the urgency of this, and by the desire to catch the end of Hispanic Heritage Month.

Please listen and please share.

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This is the podcast version of a post from July which seemed timely now. I put the text below: what is new is the audio. You are receiving this as a subscriber, but please feel free to share!

As the United States hovers at the edge of fascism, the history of Germany can help.

To be sure, Americans have other histories to ponder, including their own.  Some American states, right now, are laboratories of authoritarian rule (and resistance).  The American 1860s and American 1930s reveal tactics authoritarians use, as well as the weaknesses of the American system, such as slavery and its legacy. At those times, though, Americans were lucky in their leadership.  Lincoln and Roosevelt were in office at the critical moments.  And so we lack the experience of the collapse of the republic.

We can certainly learn from contemporary authoritarian success, as in Russia and in Hungary, which I have written about elsewhere.  Yet the classic example of a major economic and cultural power collapsing into fascism remains Germany in 1933. The failure of the democratic experiment in Germany led to a world war as well as the Holocaust and other atrocities.

Yet today a taboo hovers around anything concerning Hitler.  As soon as the collapse of the German republic in 1933 is evoked, American voices commence a fake lament — America is uniquely good so nothing about Nazis can ever apply, and/or Hitler was uniquely evil and so nothing concerning him is relevant.

To be sure, every person and every event is in some sense unique.  But history is precisely the interaction of individuals and situations which, seen in isolation, will appear unique.  The taboo on fascist history shoves people back to a turbulent present, leaving them feeling more helpless. It is an element of the fascist takeover.

The lessons from Germany that I present below are not at all new.  We have been trained by digital media to believe that only what happens right now matters.  But the people who intend to destroy the American constitutional republic have learned from the past.  One of the basic elements of Project 2025, for example, is what the Nazis called Gleichschaltung: transforming the civil service into a fascist nest.

Those who wish to preserve the American constitutional republic should also recall the past.  A good start would be just to recall the five basic political lessons of 1933.

1.  Voting matters.  Hitler came to power after an election which enabled his appointment as head of government.  It is much easier for fascists to begin from within than to begin from without.  Hitler’s earlier coup attempt failed.  But once he had legitimate power, inside the system as chancellor (prime minister), he could manipulate it from within.  In the American system, “voting” means not just going to the polls yourself, but making donations, phone-banking, and knocking on doors.  We are still, happily, at the stage when unglamorous actions can make the difference.

2.  Coalitions are necessary.  In 1932, in the crucial German election, the far left and the center left were separated.  The reasons for this were very specific: Stalin ordered the German communists to oppose the German social democrats, thereby helping Hitler to power.  To be sure, the American political spectrum is very different, as are the times.  Yet the general lesson does suggest itself: the left has to hold together with the the center-left, and their energies have to be directed at the goal rather than at each other.

3.  Conservatives should be conservative.  Which way the center-right turns can be decisive.  In Germany in 1932, conservatives enabled the counter-revolution.  They did not see Hitler and his Nazis as something different from themselves.  They imagined, somehow, that Hitler would preserve the system rather revolutionize it.  They were wrong, and some of them paid for the mistake with their lives.  As in American today, the German “old right” was less numerous than the “new right,” the fascists.  But how the traditionalist center-right acts can very well make the difference.

4.  Big business should support democracy.  In the Germany of the 1930s, business leaders were not necessarily enthusiastic about Hitler as a person.  But they associated democracy with labor unions and wanted to break them.  Seeing Hitler as an instrument of their own profit, business leaders enabled the Nazi regime.  This was, in the end, very bad for business.  Although the circumstances today are different, the general lesson is the same: whether they like it or not, business leaders bear responsibility for whether a republic endures or is destroyed.

5.  Citizens should not obey in advance.  Much of fascism is a bluff — look at our loyal cult, listen to our outrageous language, heed our threats of violence, we are inevitable!  Hitler was good at that sort of propaganda.  Yet to gain power he needed luck and the errors of others.  American fascism, likewise, is far from inevitable.  It too is largely bluff, most of it digital.  The internet is much more fascist than real life, which is discouraging.  But we vote in the real world.  The crucial thing is the individual decision to act, along with others, a little something each day, regardless of the atmospherics and the polls and the media and the moods.

It’s simple: recalling history, we act in the present, for a future that can and will be much better.

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I thought this piece on our media religion, which I meant entirely seriously but which I hope is also fun, might be a useful preparation for the media this weekend and in weeks to come. This is the podcast version of a written post from July. I paste the text in below; what is new is the podcast. You receive it as a subscriber, but you are welcome to share it.

Why does American television and press “both-sides” our politics?  Why are such different presidential candidates presented as equally flawed?  Why do the outrages of Trump, for example at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, lead to the humiliation of Biden?

Both-Sidesism is the habit of reducing the world into two perspectives, treating the two as fundamentally alike, and then ignoring or adjusting the data.  One cause of this odd behavior is the ownership of media companies.  Another is fear.   

But Both-Sidesism is not just a practice.  It passes in the United States for a principle of journalism.  Indeed, the dualism is almost unquestionable. Americans tends to take it for granted.

But it makes no sense.  No data from the world around us indicates that two is the correct number of perspectives, nor that any two perspectives, once chosen, would be equal. 

These are, rather, articles of faith.  Once accepted, they enable the public performance we wrongly call “media.”  Both-Sideism does not mediate but mystify.  Its practitioners, called “anchors” or “publishers,” are shamans or priests. Mystifiers.

To be sure, “media” people do not think that they are mystifying.  Nor are we in the habit of seeing them as practicing a religion. 

But let us step back.  Let us consider, for the sake of argument, that Both-Sidesism might be a dualist cult.  Let us place its beliefs and practices in the context of the history of religion, and see what happens.

The number two has helped humans make sense of the world, from distant times to the present.  It has had a powerful sway over human minds. 

The number two can address the mystery of creation.  In Indo-European societies, the universe sometimes began as a coupling of two entities, for example the Earth and the Sky.  Or the first Being could be of two sexes, or twinned.  In several myths, twin gods ride to the rescue of early humans in peril.

Duality can also help humans to frame the problem of evil, as in Manicheanism.  Its founder Mani (enlightened by a spiritual twin) claimed that the universe was divided into darkness and light.  Human action is then understood as struggle between these two forces.

The number two can also help us handle time. The Romans had a two-faced god, Janus, who was in charge of doors, passages, and thus transitions in general, beginnings and endings. He is very much present with us at the beginning of each year; January is named for him.

In Daoism we find something of all of the above in the notion of yin-yang: dark and light, chthonic and lively, female and male, wet and dry, which constantly join and give way to one another.  Their interaction brings the world into being, and also enables natural and guides human action.

Both-Sidesism is another dualism.  When confronting a phenomenon, for example an election or a party convention, the acolytes of Both Sides perform two steps.  They reduce events to two personalities, then treat them as equal aspects of the two-headed divinity known as Both Sides. 

Again: that there only two sides, and that the two aspects are the same, are unspoken articles of faith.

Once this initial ritual has been performed, the task of the priesthood is to sense disturbances that disrupt the apparent equality of the two aspects of Both Sides. The mythic utterances of the priests of Both Sides – bad journalism -- resolve the cultic tension that appears when a difference between the two aspects emerges. 

Equality is restored in a peculiar way, one that emphasizes the sacred character of the dual god, at the expense of understanding reality.  The priests cannot undo the deeds of one aspect of Both Sides – for example a coup attempt or a call to deport millions.  And if they described it accurately, they would only be deepening the mystical inequality between Both Sides’ two aspects.  They must normalize.

Our Both-Sides priests correct the mystical imbalance with two mantric maneuvers.  The first is to proclaim, groundlessly, that the perpetrator of the crime has learned his lesson, executed a pivot, turned a corner.  The second is to humiliate the other side, the one that did nothing.  And thus the mystical equilibrium between the two aspects of Both Sides is restored. 

This normalization has consequences.  If one of the two aspects of Both Sides seems to have done a great evil, the priests of Both Sides always ritually vituperate the other side.  The price of the restoration of mystical equality is the rehabilitation of the criminal and the degradation of the blameless.   

Our media people do not see it this way, of course.  The restoration of the mystical equilibrium of Both Sides brings our priests a pious satisfaction, visible on the red faces of correspondents in Milwaukee this last week.

If pressed, the shamans of Both Sides insists that their dualistic dances are nothing other than correct method to describe the universe.  The cult and its performance is protected from critique by the totemic terms “objectivity” and “balance.” 

All shamans do this: they insist that their dogma must be our reality.   But when we allow the cult of Both Sides to shape our own minds, ethical judgement and factual investigation disappear, and with them any chance for constitutional order and democracy.

Ethical judgement would involve a notion of right and wrong, which the activity of the priests erodes.  The worse the evil of one side, the more artfully it must be forgiven, and the more viciously the other side must be berated.  Believers in the cult of Both Sides experience this as moral action, whereas in fact the performative relativism erodes all morality.

Factual investigation would involve identifying other perspectives which the cult of Both Sides disregards.  It would necessitate separating the two aspects Both Sides from each other and confronting their words with the facts of the world.  To believers in the cult of Both Sides, it is a relief clothed in righteousness never to have to perform such labor.

Earlier dualistic faiths were no more outlandish than our own cult of Both Sides.  Indeed, they had something to say about foundational issues.  The Indo-European, Near Eastern and East Asian beliefs, to which I briefly referred above, generated stories about the world that inspired philosophy and science.  The cult of Both Sides is the dogmatic distraction from the bloody sacrifice of a republic.

PS  I want to be clear: this essay concerns the dominant both-sides ritual in the American “media,” and not the work of actual investigative journalists, who follow very different methods, and whose work stands at the basis of what we now about Trump’s ongoing attempt at regime change.  I dedicated Road to Unfreedom to reporters as “the heroes of our time.”  They are.

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After more than a year and a half of war, it can be hard to imagine it ending.  And yet it can, and will.  The Ukrainians can win this war, provided that we do not let them down. 

What they cannot do is constantly remind us how important the war is. We have do some of that work for ourselves.

This history lecture, the Lax lecture delivered at Mt. Holyoke, is about the origins of Ukraine, in a deep sense.  It begins with the observation that the war is of global significance.  Its thesis is that this is true because, in a number of ways, the lands of Ukraine have been central to global history.

You'll maybe need earphones for this one.  The audio is not great.  And the subjects might not be familiar.  I am starting with the prehistory, working through the bronze age, and into the beginning of the historical record.  I am trying to make European and global history make more sense on the basis of what we can learn about Ukraine.

So take some time. 

In the constant blitz of particular events, I hope this will help.  I always find Ukrainian history extraordinarily interesting in itself.  And this deep history, if we attend to it a bit, also suggests what the war is about, and how it can be won.

My next book, which I am finishing now, will be about freedom.  After that I am hoping to write a brief but global history of Ukraine.  This gives you a very preliminary sense of some of what I am thinking about.  Thank you for coming along.

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