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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, again, everyone. In post-insurrection America, my next guest sees two types of Republicans. What he calls the gamers and the breakers. The gamers, like Mitch McConnell, he names McConnell in this model, used Trumpism and his big lie about the election being stolen to game the political system into getting what they wanted, for more power and for their special interests donors. They didn't actually want to break democracy because it's been working for them.

The breakers, including Josh Hawley, says my guests, New York Times essay this week would actually be happy to break democracy and gain power without it. The writer is Timothy Snyder, a historian of fascism, maybe his book On Tyranny. His New York Times essay is called The American Abyss. Another central tenant is that Trump's big lie that the election was stolen does what conspiracy theories often do, claim that perpetrators are victims and victims are perpetrators.

In this case, the false claim that black people in cities committed election fraud against white people, when really, the electoral system makes it harder in general for black people to vote. Timothy Snyder joins us now. Thanks so much for your essay and for coming on to share it with us. Welcome to WNYC today.

Timothy Snyder: Very glad to be with you. Thanks.

Brian: Can we start with that last idea first, that conspiracy theories turned victims into perps and perps into victims and how it applies in this case?

Timothy: Yes. We're in this interesting moment in American history where sometimes it can help to look abroad or to look a little bit back in time and remember that the kind of lie that we're being told, the lie that Mr. Trump won the election is familiar in its scale. This is a big lie. It can't be supported by facts. It's obviously self-contradictory. After all, why would there be fraud against him, but not against others? It speaks directly to the worst traditions of the country which had rose because the idea of fraud, of course, is that black people voting is fraud. That's the basic idea here.

The thing about a lie like this, which is so grand in scale and which is so evil and inspiration, is that it becomes a matter of belief. If you believe that you have to disbelieve everyone and everything else because the world is against, the facts of the world and a lot of the people in the world are against this lie. You end up yourself in a world of belief with like-minded people who are willing to take risks, because if you really think this lie is true, then, of course, it demands action. It demands that things be put right.

Brian: You write, "This particular big lie reverses the moral field of American history and we should see it as part of the long American argument about who deserves representation." Do you see the insurrection last week that way too?

Timothy: Look, it's all one story. It all has the same logic. Mr. Trump's big lie is that he won an election that he lost. The undertone, of course, is if you didn't count those votes in Detroit, you didn't count those votes in Philadelphia, you didn't count those votes in Atlanta, then I win. The undertone of that is, if you didn't count those black people's votes, then I win. When he says he wins by a landslide, what he means is, if you only count the white people, then I win in a landslide. These things that he's saying in 2020, 2021 go way back into American history, into the deepest most problematic part of American history, which is, who really gets to be represented in our democracy.

Mr. Cruz, when he supported Mr. Trump on January 6th, he issued a statement before that about 1877 and the compromise, which historians know, and, of course, many African-Americans will know is the moment when it became legitimate in the United States to apply policies of segregation and discrimination and voter suppression against African-Americans. That's no coincidence. Of course, Mr Trump's big lie led to, not just a mass or a mob swarming or invading the Capitol, it led to specifically white supremacists storming the Capitol and claiming that it's theirs.

That's what I meant by an old American argument about who gets to be represented. Do you get to be represented because you're a citizen and you have a vote, or do you get to be represented because you're an angry white person?

Brian: It's a piece of history that more Americans should know more about and some compromise. It's called the Compromise of 1877. As you point out in the article, in that case, there really was a dispute over whose Electoral College members should be seated in some cases, but some compromise, I'll let your state's electoral vote count. In exchange, we're going to end reconstruction and start Jim Crow.

Timothy: Yes. We'll let your guy be president, but in exchange, federal power is going to be withdrawn from the South, and we're going to institute a regime, basically, have a party which is going to last for the better part of a century in which is going to haunt the American conscious and American politics up to the present day. That's the Compromise of 1877.

Brian: My guest is Timothy Snyder, historian of fascism. His book is On Tyranny. His New York Times essay is The American Abyss. Maybe you read it this week. You're right that the lie outlasts the liar. You use a Hitler analogy regarding his biggest, big lie about German Jews and you wonder how Trump's myth of victimhood will function in American life 15 years from now. Can you describe first that particular part of the Hitler story and then why you brought it up in relation to this?

Timothy: The big lie that I had in mind with Interwar Germany is the idea of a stab in the back. Germany lost the First World War for simple reasons. It lost the First World War because it had to fight a war on two fronts, because the Americans joined the war. Even though Germany basically won on the Eastern front, they got beat on the Western front in 1918 by the Americans supporting the French and the British and a number of other allies. It's not that complicated. They lost 1 million men in the summer and fall of 1918. 1 million Americans were arriving at the same time. They were beaten.

The story that the German commanders told was, "We didn't lose. We never lost the war. We were betrayed on the homefront by the left. We were betrayed on the homefront by the Jews." This story which became known as the Stab in the Back starts in 1918. The reason, of course, it's troubling for me and what I think about the American future is that that story is still present 15 years on. When those commanders are no longer commanding a war, when we are in a different situation, when we are in a great depression, when the Nazis are rising to power, that stab in the back story is part of Hitler's antisemitism. It's a part of an even bigger lie that Hitler tells about the Jews being responsible for everything which is wrong for Germany.

That's why I'm wondering about this. That's why I think America, in a way, is at a crossroads for a lot of reasons, but also with respect to simple truth and lies. If Republicans, because they bear a particular responsibility here, if Republican leaders succeed in keeping this lie going past the Trump era, then, Republican politics can become a competition to see who gets to be the bearer of the story of martyrdom. This is what Mr. Cruz and Mr. Hawley are clearly trying to do. Who gets to tell their voters that they were the martyrs, that they were the ones who were betrayed, they were the ones who were stabbed in the back, they were the ones who deserve revenge.

This is what I worry about because history tells us that the person who invents the lie isn't necessarily the person who then later brings it to terrible fruition.

Brian: Listeners, we can take some phone calls for Timothy Snyder. I see some of you are calling in already. That's great. 646-435-7280. 646-435-7280. I want to let him layout a little bit more of the argument from his essay before we go to the phones. To follow up on what you just said, on the model of the gamers versus the breakers in the Republican party, do you think people like Senator Josh Hawley, who you name, really want to break democracy?

Timothy: It seems to me that there's a pattern here. The pattern, not just today with Hawley, Cruz, McConnell, and so on, but the pattern going back to Reagan really, is that you have this tension in the Republican Party between people who are angry at the system, so-called and the fact that the Republican Party basically exists by managing the system. That's a tension. The tension has been overcome by various kinds of ideological maneuvers by saying, "We're governing against the government," or "We're governing against the elites," or "we're going to go work for government to make government smaller," but the tension is always there.

Inherently, the Republican Party is a managing party. It manages elections. It manages a good part of the economy, but a lot of its voter base and some of it's leaders are interested in some kind of revolution or some kind of dramatic change. I think what Mr. Trump's big lie did was make this Fisher visible and more real. The people who are basically gamers, like Senator McConnell, they went with it for a while thinking that it would peter out. They were with Trump so long as they could get things out of Trump.

Then you have people like Mr. Cruz or Mr. Hawley, who, of course, just like Mr. Mcconnell and for that matter Mr. Trump, know that the whole thing is a lie. They know the whole thing is a scam and a grift, of course, but they see potential in the lie itself for the future. Of course, if you take a big lie like this into the future, what you're saying is we, not just Mr. Trump should be allowed to win when he loses, but I should be allowed to win when I lose. When I run for president in 2024, I want to see the same scenario. If I don't win the electoral college, I'm going to cry fraud and I'm going to expect that Congress is going to appoint me, assuming that there are enough Republicans in Congress to do that.

I wanted to explain it, but the short answer to your question is, yes. I think that anybody who voted against the confirmation of the electoral college vote should probably be considered someone who is not really in favor of American representative democracy. I think the people who led that charge, who opportunistically led that charge, knowing that they were telling a lie or repeating one, namely Sanders, Hawley, and Cruz, are most clearly suspect of being people who would be happy to take power amidst the ruins.

Brian: Davin in Bed-Stuy, you're on WNYC with historian of fascism, Timothy Snyder. Hi Davin.

Davin: Hi. Thanks so much for taking my call. A huge fan, Brian. My question for the guest, how do we hold these kinds of white supremacists tactics and these people accountable while we also not handing a ton of power over to the FBI and the CIA and these counter-terrorism forces who historically have-- They'll be created to go [unintelligible 00:12:14] things and then end up being used against Muslims, marginalized communities, the left. How do we end-- There's already-- I'm sorry, I'm a little nervous, Brian.

Brian: You're doing good, Davin. Don't worry about it.

Davin: There's already indication of Biden adding funding to these things. How do we ensure that those things don't get turned towards the less and towards marginalized communities?

Timothy: It's a great question because historically, and not just historically but in the last four years, that's what's happened. If you look at Homeland Security, Homeland Security's own reports indicate that the greatest terrorist threat into the United States is white supremacy. That's what they say, but if you look at their actions in 2020, you see all kinds of twisting and turning in order to make the case that one should really be worried about Black Lives Matter.

One part of the answer is that, I think with Biden, there will be a turn away from that emphasis from this reflexive Republican claim or this reflexive claim that whatever might be happening on the right, what's happening on the left is worse. The numbers just don't bear that out, which is my second point. It's important, I think, for people to be aware of and to repeat that the facts just show that in the US, and this has been true for years now, the threat from white supremacists, domestic terrorism is much greater than left-wing terrorism, or than Islamic terrorism. If you care about terrorism and violence, that's where the resources should actually be devoted.

Then, the third thing that I would point out because I share your concern about overreaching agencies and unclear mandates, is that, we have to have specific individual responsibility for what happened on the 6th of January. Every single person who breached the Capitol that day committed at least one crime and probably more. I realize there's a presumption of innocence, but for God's sake, at least trespassing, it's clear they all committed and many of them much, much more.

There's a problem of a culture of impunity here where these people thought they could just walk in and walk out. It has to be clear that that doesn't happen. This specifically applies to the president of the United States. He is the walking embodiment of a culture of impunity, if you like, lead impunity. He, as an individual, has to be treated like other individuals would be treated. He's not above the law. He has to bear responsibility for this.

Brian: Mikhail in Hawthorne, New Jersey. You're on WNYC with Timothy Snyder. Hi Mikhail.

Mikhail: Hello. Hi, Brian. Thank you very much for taking my call. Thank you very much to you and to your team. You don't even know, but you are one of my best friends. I work from home since the pandemic started and it's been a huge discovery. Let me start saying that-

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Brian: I just want to say I'm honored to be one of your best friends. Go ahead.

Mikhail: Yes, that's right, Brian. Let me start saying that when I see our President Trump, when I see his eyes, I do see a psychologically ill person. In my mind, the problem is not him [unintelligible 00:15:47] The problem is the people that follows him. Why the people listen to him. With this, I like to say that I don't think Trump is the reason [unintelligible 00:15:58] the consequence. Trump, in my mind, is a consequence of two huge problems, not the biggest but two huge problems that the United States of America has.

One is a very old problem, huge. Which is the racism. The other problem is a very new problem which is the fact that the USA is no longer the top country in the world except for the army. That said, it's like Biden is not going to fix the situation. Nobody's going to fix the situation in the short term. Definitely, we need a long term to fix this. The good news is that there's a solution which is that we need to put all the children, from all the [unintelligible 00:16:51], rich, poor, Brown, Black, yellow, white, all the children in the same high-quality school.

The bad news is that this is going to be very difficult to accomplish. We all know why, because the white power don't want that. I just like to point that, unless we don't get to this problem and we don't get all the children on the same school, this is not going to be a resolved in a big [unintelligible 00:17:27] Thank you very--

Brian: Mikhail, thank you. Thank you so much. Well, he put a few big ideas on the table there, Timothy. What would you like to key on?

Timothy: Well, I agree with Mikhail's wise words. One way to characterize the point he's making is that the US as a whole, and I agree with him, there are deeper trends at play here. The US as a whole has reached the end of the expansionist part of its history. It's reached the end of its-- It's not just that we're not number one anymore, it's that we're now stuck in the territory that we have. We're not going to be gaining any more territory. We have the people that we have. We can no longer tell a story about expansion and elbow room and the frontier. There has to be a different vision of the future.

There were many things wrong with that vision of the future, of course, but here I think the issue is, when you're done with that expansion, with that imperial stage in your history, what comes next? What Mr. Trump has to offer is a vision of how things were good in the past. Let's make America great again. Let's cycle back into the past. Let's find some myth of innocence. I think it's very important, Mikhail's point here about the future is very important. If America is going to make it as a democracy, we have to have a different story of the future. I agree that the idea of children is very important here.

If we want to be a free country, for example, and I wrote a little book called Our Malady in which I talk about this some. If we want to be a free country in the future, then we have to create the conditions where children can become free adults. As Mikhail says, it means giving them the best possible education, taking advantage of these early years in their life when many of the important capacities they'll need later on will actually develop.

I think it's society that truly cared about freedom and that's a word that people use a lot these days. If we really cared about freedom, then we would be doing just that. We'd be concentrating on children and doing what we can to make sure they can have free lives.

Brian: Mikhail pointed to those underlying conditions, white supremacy, and American decline on the world stage as reasons that Trump was attractive to so many people. I want to route that back in your expertise, which is the history of fascism. I think as we see the forthcoming trial of Donald Trump in the Senate for inciting insurrection, this is not just like messing with some politicians in Ukraine like the first impeachment. This is inciting insurrection in the United States.

I think it's important to remember some of the things that happened in his first campaign, not just the big lie that he was telling after he lost this election. I want to play two clips. These are both from 2016. This one, well, it's self explanatory as he talks about Hillary Clinton and the prospect that she might win.

Trump: Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish the Second Amendment, by the way, and if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don't know.

Brian: Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, and we all talked about that at the time, as Trump playing footsie with assassination of Hillary Clinton if she were to be elected president. All right? The other one is, when he was being subjected to a heckler at one of his rallies in 2016. Another famous clip he said this.

Trump: You see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of him, would you? Seriously. Okay. Just knock the hell-- I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees, I promise.

Brian: Like he promised he would go to the Capitol with the marchers the other day. By the way, I heard a report that he's now saying he's going to withhold his legal fees from Rudy Giuliani, but that's another show. Timothy, what I'm getting at is, these intimations that he would lead people to actual violence if things didn't go his way were there from the beginning. Do you think that the Senate trial can reverse the possibility that somebody like that could be attractive to 74 million people to vote for even after they know what he is? Where does this fall in the potential drift to fascism in this country?

Timothy: All right, Brain, that's a lot of questions at once. First of all, I want to agree with you very much that this has been clear for a long time. When I wrote a little political pamphlet called On Tyranny in 2016. One of the bases of that was paying attention to the rallies, and watching the rallies, and reading the transcripts of the rallies. You could see in those rallies that he was calling for violence, he was celebrating violence. He was reaching for that part of people who liked violence, he was giving people permission, essentially, to be violent.

He was doing that thing which I'm afraid fascism is the right word for it, where someone in the position of authority allows you to be your worst, invites you to be your worst. There were other things in those rallies like the call and response, or the quick three word slogans like lock her up or drain the swamp, which really were redolent of fascism.

Brian: Hang Mike Pence.

Timothy: [chuckles] Hang Mike Pence, it's always three syllables notice. Which brings us nicely to what happened on January 6th. I think it doesn't work simply, but I think it does work. What you can't allow a figure to become too big to judge, right? Which is what Trump is basically saying. He's saying, I'm too big to judge. If you judge me, if you impeach me they'll be more violence, it will make things worse. That's a form of blackmail. The moment you're like, "Don't make arguments like that." You're basically doing away with the rule of law, because you don't have the rule of law at the top, you don't have the rule of law anywhere. He's setting the example for other people.

Those people who stormed the Capitol, of course, they thought they weren't going to get punished, either. They thought they were going to be immune to punishment. I think trying him and convicting him, whether it's by the Senate, or whether it's in a court of law, for other crimes or both, is very important just to demonstrate that someone isn't above the law just because he has the guts, or the Bluff, to say that he's above the law. It's also really important because it's not that it's going to persuade millions of people right away.

You do need some a shock. You need to see, this guy is not actually a demigod. He doesn't actually stand above everyone else. He's just a person and he can be found guilty, just like any other person can be found guilty.

Brian: What we hear from a lot of democrats right now is the reason to have Trump stand trial is so that, yes, they make sure to articulate all of these things because what he did was so bad, but also that he himself, if he's convicted in the Senate, would be barred from running for office again. I wonder, and this is relevant to your work, I think, if the stakes are much bigger. That if he's acquitted again, in the Senate, and we had Senator Gillibrand on earlier, predicting that that's more likely than not his acquittal. If he's acquitted again, it enables a Josh Hawley or a Ted Cruz or anyone else to take those next steps toward fascism.

Whereas if he's convicted, it actually might have a practical effect in terms of reversing that tide in republican America. What do you think?

Timothy: Well, I agree with you that the stakes are probably even higher than we're capable of imagining right now. This is one of these turning points where how you tell the story of what's happening is just as important as the event itself. They're already all kinds of versions out there from Mr. Trump and from others to the effect that, it was just free speech, or it was actually the left that stormed the Capitol or whatever it might be. Impeachment and trial is one way of trying to keep the story straight.

As a historian, one thing I can say is that, that's actually not that straightforward. You need to have processes, including investigations which create the facts and create the documents that help a nation to understand five or 15 or 50 years down the road, what happened, and what's important.

As for my take on the politics, my take on the politics is that very soon, it will not be the Democrats but the Republicans who will be keen on getting Mr. Trump out of politics. That might already be true. It's just not something that they can say aloud very well. If my analysis is right, that the Republicans who are basically, the gamers, the ones who manage the system, like Mr. McConnell, they want him out because he's a loser in 2024.

Then even if you are Hawley or Cruz and you want to inherit this story, that doesn't necessarily mean that you want Mr. Trump in politics, right? Actually, you need to have him out of politics. You don't want to have him with a story when it's the same story you're trying to use. I could be wrong about all this, but my sense is that Republicans-- It's going to shift very quickly after January 20th, I think. I think after January 20th, it's going to be the Republicans who are-- They're not going to say it aloud, but, I think, they're going to be the ones who are going to be sitting on their hands hoping that there are 67 votes.

Brian: Well, there are about six other big angles in your New York Times essay that we could pursue if we had time, like how Plato and Aristotle predicted Trump and a few other things, but I know you got to go. I want to thank you very much for your essay and for sharing it with us today. Historian of fascism, Timothy Snyder. The pamphlet, as he referred to it that he published in 2016 is On Tyranny and the New York Times essay that many of you may have seen this week is called The American Abyss. Thank you so much.

Timothy: It's my pleasure.

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