A Conversation with Timothy Snyder: Winning is Essential…But it is Not Enough

DSR's Words Matter

Historian Timothy Snyder joins hosts David Rothkopf and Norm Ornstein to discuss the existential threats facing American democracy. The conv

Key takeaways

• Timothy Snyder rejects the metaphor of 'resilience' as a rubber band, arguing instead that society must 'jump forward' into a new way of governing.
• The concept of 'Broligarchs' is introduced to describe how billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos exert power akin to nation-states.

Main topics

• American Democratic Resilience
• Influence of Billionaires (Bemma/Broligarchs)

Notable quotes

I personally try to resist the term resilience because I don't think we're rubber bands.

Conclusion

The episode concludes that saving democracy requires more than just wi

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:04) Nine. 12. 10 28. Two. Speaker 2 (0:14) 53 Speaker 2 (0:17) This is Deep State Radio, coming to you direct from our super-secret studio in the third sub-basement of the Ministry of SNARK in Washington, D.C., and from other undisclosed locations across America and around the world. Hello and welcome to DSR's Words Matter. I am David Rothkopf, one of your hosts, you know, the quiet, shy, unassuming one. Of course, the other one is Norm Ornstein, the Oracle of Washington. How are you doing today, Norm? About as well as usual. I'm sorry. Speaker 4 (0:50) Well, you know, the Eric Schmidt show, and call it a Schmidt show, got me more riled up than usual. And as you know, David, I'm always pretty riled up. Speaker 2 (1:05) Yeah, no, you're pretty riled. On a scale of 10, you're usually about a 9.5. So we'll have to visit that a little bit later. Fortunately, to mix things up a little bit, we have a real special guest with us, somebody both Norm and I admire a lot. Timothy Snyder holds the inaugural Temerty Chair in Modern European History at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. He is the author of On Tyranny, On Freedom, and more. You can find his sub stack, Thinking About. on Snyder.substack.com. Welcome, Tim. Thanks for joining us. Glad Speaker 3 (1:44) to be with you both. Speaker 2 (1:46) Given Norm's predispositions, Tim, I'm going to mix things up a little bit here with my first question, and then we can get into the grim stuff that usually occupies us. But I just had a thought. It was a passing thought. I was sitting in the sun in the backyard, so maybe I was having sunstroke. It's four and a half weeks to go before the election. Speaker 2 (2:13) And there are several stories that can be written after the end of the election in the United States. And we talk a lot about the ones that worry us. But some of the courts are holding firm against Trump. and some of the state legislatures are holding firm against Trump. And the polls certainly suggest that people are fed up, not just with the results of Trump policies, but with the policies themselves. There are even Republicans that are beginning to distance themselves from the president to a much greater degree than we have seen. in the past, not just two years, but in the past six years of his presidency. And so, again, I could have been sunstroke, but I had like a moment of hope. And the moment was based on the idea that, you know, sometimes the body politic gets sick. But sometimes the immune system works. And we discover within a democracy like ours a degree of resilience, a sort of sense to cling to life that is what helps people get through medical crises. And I was just wondering if when you look at what's going on here, you ever share that sense that the sinews... the strengths of American democracy may actually be stronger than those that are attacking. Speaker 3 (3:51) I'm going to say a couple of things. I mean, first, I feel good a lot of the time, but I feel good when I'm doing things. And so like there are different kinds of knowledge, right? There's a knowledge that we get from analyzing what we take to be cold data. And then there's the knowledge that we get from working together with other, you know, warm human beings. And each of those has their problems, right? But when I certainly feel when I am at a rally. or when I'm talking to local organizers, that we got a chance because there are lots of good people and they're willing to take risks. I think that is the X factor in what you're saying is the human agency. Because yeah, we've gotten through a bunch of bad things before, but we only get through the next bad thing if we really try. It doesn't happen on its own, right? Which is why I... I personally try to resist the term resilience because I don't think we're rubber bands. I don't think it's automatic. And I think each time you have to be resilient, it's more like scar tissue, right? Like there's a wound and you recover, but you're not quite the same. You might be better afterwards. You probably are better. And then going to your illness metaphor, from the time when I was very sick and got better, I didn't feel like I was recovering. I felt like I was somewhere else than where I started. And I think if we're going to get through October, November, December, it's going to be more like that. That it's not that we're bouncing back to American democracy. It's that we're jumping forward. And so just to add one more thought to what's probably already too many thoughts, I think part of getting through October, November, December is people having the sense not just that we're getting rid of Trump or pushing Trump back, but that we're taking a couple steps towards something better. And then and what that means is that the Democrats, when they win, have to signal very strongly that they're going to try to do some pretty substantial stuff. Speaker 2 (5:54) Yeah, super important point. I do want to return to it. But Norm, I'd like, you know, you to struggle to to to to grapple with the idea that I just dredged up. And then, of course, you can pose the first question to Tim. Speaker 4 (6:12) So, Tim, you should know that I spend a fair amount of my time on this podcast trying to puncture whatever optimism David has, and usually pretty successfully on that front. So I would say that while the election outcome looks pretty good. If the Democrats do not win. Speaker 4 (6:37) pretty comfortable majorities in both houses, then the last point that Tim made is going to be an important but troubling one. Are they going to have enough support to actually do significant things? And those significant things are unlikely to include major legislative accomplishments, although they can put out some markers. Certainly winning the Senate and blocking more horrible judges or cringeworthy cabinet or sub-cabinet members worth a lot. I actually just finished a 3,000-word roadmap for Congress that will be in the New Republic in the next couple of days, giving a series of things that they should do. But if the margin is one in the Senate and you're dealing with a John Fetterman, Not so great. If the margin is three or four in the House, and what I worry about with the, particularly the DSA people coming in, it's not that they hold radical views, and in many cases they're not so radical. It's that they're not coming in with an expectation that they're there to govern. They're there to fight. And that's good up to a point. But you have to put it into a context of where you can use your legislative levers. And then I would add one more point before I pivot to asking Tim a question. For all the good things that you talked about, David. The Supreme Court, first of all, just did something that I find so sadistic and cruel and almost beyond belief, which is to give the administration for several months at least a free hand to take people, immigrants who are here, many of them who are here legally. and send them without any due process to countries where they have no relationship, often which will put them into hellhole prisons or torture them with no due process after multiple lower courts had said, no, you can't do this, even to put a stay on this until they could argue the case. And then they just decided to take up. A case of whether for that larger group of immigrants who they're rounding up, throwing into detention camps, some of them no better than concentration camps, without any hearings or due process, which hundreds of cases in courts have said, no, you can't do that. That is against the Constitution. Why the Supreme Court is taking this up? Given its history, what it suggests is they're going to say he's the president. He can do it if he wants. So the guardrails of the courts are there. We have so many courageous lower court judges, state court judges doing the right thing, including many Trump judges. But we have six partisan hacks on the Supreme Court who are willing to do. what it seems to me was more appropriate for a Russian court than it is for ours. So with that, I hope I brought you down a little bit. You have. Speaker 2 (10:15) You Speaker 4 (10:15) have it now. And I could talk about a press corps that continues to sit there while Trump bars CNN from pools and insults reporters that just shrugs his shoulders and does nothing about it. But let me move on and ask Tim something. And Tim? I went to Cedarvale Elementary School in Toronto. So good for you for being in this and that wonderful city. So. Speaker 4 (10:44) Let me take a big picture question. As you have looked at countries that have moved into autocracies and countries that have had tribal, bitter, violent internal wars among their own citizens, former Yugoslavia being a prime example. uh Looking at what you've seen with Russia, what you've seen through history with the rise of authoritarian totalitarian regimes, what's different with what we're doing now in the United States in the path that we're taking? And is there anything that would suggest, and this gets right back to David's question, whether, not that we can retard the movement in the direction we're heading, but whether we can fend it off entirely and return to a society where people see themselves as human beings first, Americans second, and not a part of one tribe where the others are evil and trying to destroy our way of life. Speaker 4 (11:56) So Speaker 3 (11:57) I take the point, and I think it's one of your points, Norm, that a lot of what's happening here is pretty generic. And one of our problems as Americans is exceptionalism. So we think everything that happens here is good because we're American. And then when things aren't good, we also think, well, no one else has any idea how we suffer. None Speaker 4 (12:21) of this has happened Speaker 3 (12:22) before. But there is almost nothing. that's new in Trump. Everything is very familiar. And insofar as any of the guidance I've been giving to people has been useful, it's not because I'm such a close student of American politics. It's because the things that Trump does have already all been done before. Either you can look at it in the East European moment since 1991, which I'm a student of, or in the longer 20th century, which I try to be a student of. Most of it's pretty familiar. And what that means is that You want to focus and think on the example which is most relevant for the perpetrators themselves, which I think is Russian Federation, 1990s, early 2000s. I think that's the master model because the fascism of these guys is always already intertwined with the oligarchy as it was with Putin. So the concentration camps, the deportations, the us and them. the racism, it's all bound up together with the broligarchs, the extractive industries, the concentration of wealth. That's not true of the historical fascism of the 20s and 30s generally, but it is true of the Russian Federation in the 90s and the 21st century. And I think that's not just a comparison. I think it's actually a model. I think that's how they see the United States. And I think to understand these guys, you have to think that they think of us kind of like the Soviet Union, like it's going to fall apart anyway. Like it's, it's, it's not a real thing. And the question is, what can we grab for ourselves? And I think once you get that, then everything they do both in foreign and domestic policy becomes less surprising. Like it's not, it's not that there are, it's not that, I mean, I worry about the future of the United States. But I'm not the one who's kind of putting that at the center. It's these guys who are putting it at the center because they don't believe in the United States. They just see a kind of, they see a vast junkyard in which there are some shiny objects, which they'd like to get control of. And that's it. So where does one go from there? I mean, conceptually, it means that