Title: Is This Authoritarianism?

[MUSIC]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now we'll continue to ask a question that underlies many of the policy changes the Trump administration is implementing. In addition to the policies themselves, we're asking, is this what democracy looks like? Another way to ask it, is this what rising authoritarianism looks like? Back with us now is Timothy Snyder, Yale history professor and the author of many books including On Tyranny and his latest On Freedom. He also writes the Substack newsletter called "Thinking About..." He was last on the show in December in our 100 Years of 100 Things series for an episode called 100 Years of Freedom versus 100 Years of Fascism. Professor Snyder, thanks for joining us again. Welcome back to WNYC.

Professor Snyder: Very glad to be with you.

Brian: There are so many places we could start today, but let's start with your latest newsletter post called On Freedom at the Washington Post. How an editorial line fosters authoritarianism. Most of our listeners well know by now that Jeff Bezos, as owner of the post, announced he won't publish opinion pieces anymore that don't conform to his notions of personal liberties and a free market economy. That is Bezos, maybe being an ideologue, maybe being a coward at one major newspaper. Why do you link it to authoritarianism?

Professor Snyder: Thanks for that question because I think it's important to probe this as deeply as we can. I think it's pretty obvious to everyone at first glance that having an editorial line that defines what freedom is is more than problematic. What freedom is has to do with what the author wants to say and not how the editor constrains him. Which leads to the second problem. Who can decide? How do you know whether a given opinion or whether a bit of poetry or any part of culture favors freedom or not? That doesn't really make sense.

Just because I say freedom over and over again doesn't mean that I support freedom. Freedom is more a matter of people actually expressing the things that they care about without restraint. The way that it becomes authoritarian is this. The notion of freedom that he defines, personal liberties, is quite constraining in fact. Why is it only personal liberties? Why is it not also, for example, the right to assemble, which is not really a personal liberty? Why is it not the right to vote, which is also not a personal liberty? Because your vote doesn't really matter if everybody's vote doesn't matter.

Worse than this is the idea of free markets. There is no such thing as a free market. If I say that the writing in the editorial page has to support free markets, I'm obviously contradicting the idea that it has to be in favor of freedom because if I have to take some orthodox line about the economy, then my freedom has been restricted. It's even worse than this.

The whole idea of free markets is a fiction. We shouldn't be taking the word freedom and putting it in front of anything except human beings. The moment we do that, when we talk about free markets, what we're really saying is this. Human beings have a duty not to do certain things with respect to markets. At that point, the whole thing becomes Orwellian, turned on its head, and in effect authoritarian.

Brian: Some pushback might be, wouldn't proponents of free markets say they're supporting the freedom of people, actual people, to engage in commerce, to buy and sell things without the government telling them how?

Professor Snyder: No. That's ridiculous. The market only exists because of what the free marketeers call government intervention. The position is contradictory from the start. They're in favor of property rights. Property rights only exist if the government says they exist. A free market without government means that your kidneys and mine are for sale. It means that human beings are for sale. There are always some restrictions on the market which make the market possible. Otherwise, it's just theft and colonialism and barbarism.

Once one accepts that basic point, that you need a government to make a market work, then the only relevant question is, how do you set up the market in such a way as to help people be free? Having it be completely unrestrained is not the correct answer to that. Even libertarians like Hayek were aware of this. They were perfectly aware that it makes sense to have wealth redistribution, a welfare state, and to break up monopolies, at least as a minimum, to make markets work better.

Brian: All right. That's one thing you've been writing about. Moving to another topic, do you have a take on the detention for deportation of the Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, who was involved in the Columbia University protests? He finished his master's degree in December and had a green card, not just a student visa. The government says they'll deport immigrants who are supporters of Hamas because it's a terror group.

Defenders of Khalil say he's being deported for having an opinion about the war in Gaza that Trump doesn't like. Both sides are in court with that today. I also haven't seen it documented that he supported Hamas as opposed to opposing Israel's military campaign. That's a meaningful distinction. Maybe he did, I don't know, but it's not in the initial reporting that I've seen. Any take on that in the context of what you write about?

Professor Snyder: I'll give you the conventional take with which I agree, and then maybe I'll add an unconventional one. It's of course wrong to be locking people up on the basis of their opinions. It doesn't matter whether you agree with those opinions or not. It also doesn't matter whether the person is a citizen or not. The moment our government is locking people up and flying them hundreds of miles away to detention facilities because of their opinions, we've crossed a very important threshold, and we need to push ourselves back across that threshold.

Here's the unconventional opinion. The whole idea that this measure, that an arrest of someone in these circumstances, is somehow combating anti-Semitism is 180 degrees wrong. I think the exact opposite is happening. I think when the government does things like this, it's actually favoring anti-Semitism rather than fighting it, because it's taking anti-Semitism as a justification for doing tyrannical things. It's taking anti-Semitism as a justification for attacking campuses and for depriving individuals of their rights.

When you do that, you're making anti-Semitism meaningless. Of course, anti-Semitism is a real and growing problem in the world. When the government acts in such a way as to make the word meaningless, the government is actually working on behalf of anti-Semitism rather than against it.

Brian: That is a take I hadn't heard before. Does this also make a contrast for you with Vice President Vance giving his speech at the Munich Security Conference, in which he called for less censorship of hate speech from the far right there, which of course is often anti-Semitic as well as other things. Some members of the far-right party there have a history of soft-peddling the country's anti-Semitic Nazi past. It kind of scrambles my brain. Do you see a contradiction?

Professor Snyder: I see a consistency, actually. There are a number of things which the highest officials of this government have done, which are hard to characterize in any other way except anti-Semitic. When Elon Musk gives the Hitler salute, if that's not anti-Semitic, then what on earth possibly could be? When Donald Trump says--

Brian: There's debate about whether that's really the Hitler salute, but certainly there were instances of, I think, people at the CPAC, Conservative Political Action Conference, mimicking it as if to say, "This may not have been the Nazi salute, but we like the fact that it's being taken as a kind of Heil Trump in some respect or another. We're mocking you liberals."

Professor Snyder: I'm not a psychoanalyst of people who go to CPAC, but I am a historian. I can tell you with 100% certainty that if that particular salute were given on the street in Germany after 1933, it would be returned with the same salute, and no one would have any difficulty recognizing it for what it was. I think that's the common sense. Beyond that, Musk has made his platform much more accessible to anti-Semites. As you say, Vance has intervened in German politics to favor the party which is furthest to the right.

Trump said back in the fall that if Jews didn't vote for him, it would be on them what happened afterwards. The way that Trump and Musk and Brian Glenn encircled and harassed Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who was, of course, of Jewish origin in the Oval Office, I think was very telling. These are all things which lend credibility to the idea that what the administration is doing is deliberately using anti-Semitism as a weapon which ends up undermining the concept of anti-Semitism itself.

Brian: Changing topics again, we talked on the show the morning after Trump's speech to Congress about some of the lies that he told. We did some fact-checking here. I want to play one little clip that we used a week ago, and that I want to get your take on in terms of a potential authoritarian project. This is that stuff that seemed completely made up about people who are like 130, 140 years old receiving fraudulent Social Security checks or someone receiving it in their name. Listen.

President Trump: 3.9 million people from ages 130 to 139. 3.5 million people from ages 140 to 149, and money is being paid to many of them.

Brian: Which is not true, that money is being paid to many people who are listed as those ages, but my question to you as a historian of authoritarianism is, is that just another politician lying or exaggerating to make a point and win some advantage, or does that kind of blatantly post-truth statement lean towards something bigger and more scary?

Professor Snyder: I think that's a wonderful question. The answer is yes. Essentially, what they do is attach some kind of grotesque, unbelievable fiction to all of their major policy initiatives. For example, the idea that we're tilting towards Russia because Zelenskyy wasn't wearing a tie, or the idea that we're starting a trade war with Canada because of fentanyl, when the total amount of fentanyl that came across the border from Canada was 43 pounds last year, and with 0.2%, and when the fentanyl problem is mainly an American problem, these are things that are intentionally absurd.

They're put out there, as it were, to pollute the story from the beginning. They're put out there as loyalty tests to see who will repeat them, because people around Trump have to, although they know they're not true. They're put out there for journalists as a trap, because if a journalist frames the story about Canada in terms of fentanyl or Ukraine in terms of etiquette, or for that matter, Colombia in terms of anti-Semitism, you're accepting the regime framing, and after that, you're basically trapped in it.

These fictions are meant to define reality, to give them the power to change it. With Social Security, if we end up debating whether 145-year-olds are getting it or not, then we've accepted the framing, and where that framing is going to lead is to the disappearance or the privatization of Social Security, which is, of course, what they're after.

Brian: Last thing. You wrote something optimistic on Bluesky a few weeks ago, which might surprise some people who may be hearing you for the first time in this conversation. You wrote, "Something is shifting. They are still breaking things and stealing things, and they will keep trying to break and to steal, but the propaganda magic around the oligarchical coup is fading. Nervous Musk, Trump, Vance have all been outclassed in public arguments these last few days.

Government failure, stock market crash, and dictatorial alliances are not popular. People are starting to realize that there is no truth here beyond the desire for personal wealth and power." I hope I got that quote right because I didn't get it directly from your Bluesky. Confirm the accuracy of that, if it's accurate, and tell us how much optimism, based on that, you're feeling.

Professor Snyder: Absolutely accurate word-for-word, and I continue to feel that way. That was a moment when, I think, there was a moment then when people realized, this momentum is based on fiction, or it's based on journalists wanting there to be an interesting story about momentum. I think beyond that we're now at a stage where some of the people around Trump are beginning to see the contradictions of what he is trying to do.

I think this affects not only Republicans, but it affects people who are paying a price, like Musk himself, who's paid a price of about $100 billion thus far for the craziness that he and Trump and others are up to. I'm afraid that the very real consequences of the trade wars, like the recession and the inflation, are reaching more people who are drawing the correct conclusions about where they come from, which is the inane combination of trade and foreign policy which we've had for these last, whatever it is now, eight, seven, or eight weeks.

I am optimistic because the spell is breaking. I'm optimistic because some of the courts are doing their jobs. I'm optimistic because people are getting out there and protesting in creative ways, which is what has to happen. This has to be slowed down. We have to name things by their names, and we have to think creatively and actively about what we are going to do.

Brian: Timothy Snyder, Yale history professor, focused not on partisan politics, but on the history and present threats from authoritarianism. He's the author of many books, including On Tyranny and his latest On Freedom. He also writes the Substack newsletter called "Thinking About..." He was last on the show in December in our 100 Years of 100 Things series for an episode called 100 Years of Freedom versus 100 Years of Fascism, and back today. Thank you so much.

Professor Snyder: It's been my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Brian: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. More to come.

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