Timothy Snyder Has Seen Tyrants Like Trump Before
Timothy Snyder, America’s most famous (living) historian, has found himself north of the border. For decades, he’s parsed the ins and outs of authoritarianism—and the tyrants who weaponize it—both in his professorial post at Yale and in 16 books, including last September’s On Freedom and On Tyranny, a 20-point guide to dictator-proofing yourself, published shortly after Donald Trump was first elected and currently back on the bestseller lists. Now on leave from Yale, Snyder was recently appointed director of the Public History Lab, a research hub at the University of Toronto, where he’ll also begin teaching this fall. His particular brand of expertise is in demand everywhere—not just in Trump’s America—for obvious, if not uplifting reasons.
Snyder is often referred to as “the leading interpreter of our dark times.” He’s addressed parliaments and inspired protests, rap songs and an opera with his writing. And yet even he admits he can’t predict exactly what’s to come. Nevertheless, his work continues. Even in our “unprecedented” age, Snyder believes an awful lot, if not everything, can be learned from looking back. And there’s nothing a tyrant hates more than a good memory.
It seems like the ideal moment for you to spend some time abroad. Asking semi-facetiously, but did you experience any culture shock when you arrived up here?
I’ll put it this way: I feel like I have a lot to learn. When I’m in Canada, I’m definitely in foreign-country or anthropological mode, like I would be if I were in Belgium or Morocco. I speak French, so I’m almost childishly excited to be in a country where there’s French-language radio. I also lived in Britain for a while, so I find myself looking for the times when Canadians are like Americans and times when you’re more like the British. One way that Canadians are like us—that I didn’t think you would be—is that you’ll walk up to someone and start asking personal questions right away.
Kind of like I’m doing today!
Yeah!
The last few years—especially the last few months—in America have been a study in how a country slides into tyranny. Given that you literally wrote the book on tyranny, were you sad to see how useful your expertise has become so close to home?
Sad is exactly right. I wrote On Tyranny in a few days at the end of 2016, as a result of the Trump victory. It was a bestseller for much of his first administration. It’s now a New York Times bestseller again—it even hit No. 1 a couple of times. I find that sad, too. I do think this is going to be a really interesting time to be Canadian; it already is. The United States is about to change rapidly, as are the ways it affects Canadians. Not just the tariffs, but the whole question of whether Canada actually exists—which, for me anyway, is reminiscent of the way Putin talked about Ukraine a decade ago.
One of the 20 lessons you provide in On Tyranny was “be calm when the unthinkable arrives.” Are you calm now?
It’s tricky because, on the one hand, of course you have to care. At the same time, you have to recognize that panic can suck away energy you might need later. Right now, I find the callousness of the current U.S. government the most upsetting—and the notion that it’s all a joke, or just part of some scheme the insiders are running. People are dying because they’re denied health care. People are being fired from their jobs for no reason whatsoever, as our government becomes more and more dysfunctional. This isn’t just a narrow political question; it’s a human question.
A fellow bestseller inspired by the first Trump era was The Cruelty Is the Point by Adam Serwer. I think about that title a lot.
The cruelty is the point. I call what’s going on “sado-populism.” What Trump’s government is trying to do is change the nature of politics. Rather than it being a relationship between citizens and the state, where the state provides something for everybody—so we can all do a bit better—they’re trying to create a situation where nobody expects anything from the state except direction on how to look at other people’s suffering. The new social contract is: we’re all going to suffer, but you are going to suffer less than this other group. And it’s your job to enjoy that other group’s suffering.
A lot of Canadians rightly have concerns about contagion, or the possibility that fascist politics will hop the border and take root here. The exceptionalists among us will insist that can’t happen here, but could it? Does Canada have any unique safeguards?
No one gets a free pass. The moment you start talking about your own exceptionalism is the moment that you’re making an authoritarian regime more likely. You let your guard down. As far as that kind of politics jumping the border, Elon Musk isn’t just interested in hollowing out the American state; he’s interested in hollowing out states in general. From a Trumpian point of view, the world isn’t made of states and laws—it just has various resources that you might want from under the ground. So, if you’re Canada, the border is no longer very important.
We’ve already seen a catastrophic breakdown in Canada-U.S. relations. Economically, that’s the tariff war; socially, it’s the booing at hockey games. Is it truly possible to maintain tight interdependence when one state has fallen into fascist oligarchy and one hasn’t?
Obviously, Canada wants to diversify their trading partners—I hope in the direction of Europe, rather than China, which comes with its own political risks. I don’t doubt that Canadian-American trade will stay high, but if you’re Canada, you’re now going to have to constantly think, Which goods should we withhold to retaliate? Where else are we going to sell our lumber? That’s the key feature of the kind of government we see in the U.S.: they don’t create, they just destroy. They destroy confidence and friendship. The problem is less oligarchy than unpredictability.
At most, I’d say Canadian politicians have flirted with Trump-style politics. Pierre Poilievre, who could be our next PM, has adopted a “Canada First” motto. He’s pretty clearly populist and has expressed disdain for mainstream media—shades of Trump. When should we really worry that democracy’s taking a nosedive?
Before you get to the person, the people and the parties, you should look at the systems. If I was a Canadian, there are three things I would watch out for—number one being wealth inequality.
Okay, well, shit.
It teaches people that you have to cheat to win, and that a normal politician is somebody who cheats. Donald Trump is a talented politician—he’s charismatic in his way—but he fits a world where a lot of people have lost faith that you can “make it” in a decent, rule-abiding fashion. In that world, the fact that he’s a liar and a criminal somehow works in his favour. That has to do with too much wealth gathering at the top.
What are the other red flags?
The end of local news and the predominance of social media. When there’s no local news, people lose trust and look to national politics—which tend to be quite polarizing—and get drawn into abstract us-and-them situations or conspiracies. This leads to the third red flag, which is lies. When Trump started out, people tried to count and correct them. Now, we live in a dream (or nightmare) landscape where it’s not expected that he’ll tell the truth. The lying, which might have seemed like a curiosity at the beginning, eventually shapes reality. And that’s inconsistent with democracy, which depends on all of us having a grasp on the facts.
Speaking of social media, you advocate for practising “corporeal” or embodied politics. That could mean attending a march in-person or voting with paper ballots, all of which is bad news for keyboard warriors. How online are you?
I see social media as kind of a grim necessity—that it’s basically evil and life is elsewhere. I post, but I don’t read comments. I don’t know what my Twitter password is. If you stay offline, it’s like treading water: you may not be improving yourself, but at least you’re not sinking. I want to remember that social media is a different, non-human realm that’s calling out to us all the time, but that we don’t necessarily have to listen to it.
Like Gollum with the ring.
That’s a funny analogy because a lot of people in the tech world are big Tolkien fans. In addition to controlling our attention, like the ring does with Frodo and Bilbo and Gollum, it’s also turning us from that nice Sméagol character into that Gollum character. I dare you to print this.
You often describe freedom as a habit—something to practise in everyday life. What does a Free Tim day look like?
I feel free when I’m preparing to write my books. That’s what I really want to do: to be a historian, to write books, all the time. I also want to spend more time with my kids and do silly stuff with them.
What’s “silly” to you?
Right now, I’m reading manga in French with my daughter. Playing sports that nobody’s particularly good at is a silly activity. You know, I was just in Europe for three and a half weeks. I started at the World Economic Forum in Davos and ended up at the Munich Security Conference and, in between, I gave lectures in a bunch of European cities. The time when I felt most at ease, most free, was when I visited Ukraine.
Interesting. Why?
I think freedom has to do with a sense of consequence, that things are actually at stake. I don’t think of freedom as: I’m just kicking back because nothing matters.
There’s more on the line, maybe?
Yes. There, you see examples of people dealing with constraints, like air raid warnings. How do they decide how to react to those warnings? How do you spend your time when you end up in the bomb shelter? Do you complain? Sleep? Make new friends? The meaningfulness of little individual choices is there, you know? Ukrainians often tell me it’s because of the war that they appreciate the little things. We have a tendency in the West to look at them and say, “There’s a war going on in your country. How can you possibly want to go out to a nice restaurant?” It’s precisely because there’s a war that people want to go out to a nice restaurant. Those human indulgences—they count for more.
You also frame freedom as freedom to—as in, freedom to access health care. All of our societal conversations, meanwhile, seem to talk about freedom from: from vaccine mandates, from environmental restrictions, et cetera.
Simply having health care doesn’t make you free. But if you’re worried about losing your health insurance, you’re less free than if you’re not worried about that. The absence of government is the best thing for your body? That’s just ludicrous. But a lot of Americans think that way. As a result, our life expectancy is four years shorter than Canadians’. Americans talk about freedom a lot, but they don’t generally have anything to say about it.
And yet it’s your national brand.
The fact that we believe that freedom is just “freedom from” also means that we don’t recognize certain threats. Somebody like Elon Musk comes along and says, “Even though I’ve got $400 billion, I’m oppressed by the government, just like you!” and we go for it. Before we know it, the guy has all of our data and controls when government payments get made. Plus, if you think freedom is being against things, it’s easy for somebody to turn you against your neighbour. So now I’m against the government and also against my neighbour. That’s Trump.
On health care, you’ve spoken candidly about a near-death experience you had a few years ago…
It was appendicitis, which went undiagnosed and eventually became peritonitis. Then several mistakes were made, and I ended up septic.
People who’ve gone through those experiences occasionally talk about the fact that they live more authentic lives—or feel more free—afterwards. Was that true for you?
In that situation, it became extra clear to me that the absence of things—for example, being dead—wasn’t going to make me free. In one of his worst moments, Socrates thought like that: everything is a constraint, including the body. When you’re about to die, you realize that’s utter nonsense. I’m fortunate in that I recovered completely but, when I was very sick, I couldn’t walk and my lungs collapsed and, during the worst of it, I had really unpleasant neurological symptoms. You recognize how critical the body is for freedom. You can’t be against your body.
Ideally not.
I was at a lunch thing in Davos, and someone asked, “Is there any hope in all this, or are we all gonna die?” My answer was: we are all going to die, and that’s the hope. That limit makes life special. This fantasy of oligarchical immortality—which began 10 or 15 years ago and only applies to a few people—has been deeply harmful. If you think you might live forever, the only thing that matters is that life of yours.
Why care about Earth if we can just go to Mars?
That’s exactly it. Those are escapist fantasies. I’m sorry, but: you are gonna die and it’s gonna be on Earth.
Don’t worry, this isn’t the first time I’ve considered that.
Let’s turn this conversation around. We’re not going to colonize Mars in Elon Musk’s lifetime. It’s not gonna happen. People who are trying to achieve these things—immortality or life on Mars—are hogging the future. And there are lots of really good futures out there, but they’re being shrouded by these selfish, impossible plans.
Would you say that you’re an optimist?
I’m not an optimist. I’m not a pessimist. I’m a historian. And history shows us that the bandwidth of possibility is much wider than we think it is. The real trick is to have a broader view.
I want to know which historical figure you most dislike, but you’ve probably had your fill of villains. Instead, I’ll ask: which one do you most like?
I’ve never really thought about it because, for me, historical figures are never complete. When I engage with history, I assume I don’t understand everything about the person in question, so I might misunderstand them. I have to try to see everyone from the inside—that includes terrible people as well as admirable ones. I have to be empathetic, which isn’t the same thing as sympathetic. The result is that… I don’t have an answer for you.
Okay. Do you have a favourite president?
That’s another question—to the American in me, rather than the historian. There are clearly two greats: Lincoln and FDR. That’s super boring.
We’d all take boring right about now. So if the past is what we use to predict the future, what happens next?
I mean, there’s the easy answer: that things in the United States are going to be much worse than they are now. But let’s handle this in a deeper way. One thing history says about the future is that there’s going to be a future. Humans have been here for quite a long time—and there have been some pretty spectacular crises—yet we have a way of sticking around. There are hundreds or thousands more shapes the future can take than we recognize. One can always take heart from that, right?
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
