Hi everyone. This is an anxious moment in America. The midterms are approaching. The president has declined to rule out federal forces at polling places. He keeps testing the limits of courts and institutions. AI and the economy are reshaping people's lives, and the sheer volume of provocation can make it hard to distinguish outrageous noise from a real threat.
Which makes this a very good time to call Timothy Snyder. Snyder is one of the world's leading historians of authoritarianism and fascism and the author of On Tyranny and On Freedom. He has spent his career studying what happens when democracies come under pressure and, crucially, what people can do about it. When we spoke almost a year ago, we talked about the strain on American democracy, the growing power of tech oligarchs, and his insistence that democracy is not a spectator sport. So a year later, I'm looking forward to asking him — or maybe not — where are we now? Tim Snyder, welcome and thank you for your time today.
So, you know, I wanted to start with the very first most obvious question that comes to me. When we spoke a year ago, you were worried about the pressure on American democratic institutions. Would you just take broadly the temperature today? What has gotten weaker in a year, and what's actually proved more resilient than you expected?
Well, I think we have to start with people because democracy means rule by the people, and if people don't want to rule, then they'll lose their democracy. And so the things which are most encouraging are the actions which are led by normal people and which normal people take part in. So since we talked last time, there have been major, very large protests organized in the coalition known as No Kings. There has been a great deal of organization around protecting undocumented immigrants in Minnesota and elsewhere, which involves a lot of local organization. There's been a lot of action around protecting the vote and around supporting Democratic candidates in close races. All of that is incredibly encouraging.
What's also encouraging to me is that I think there has been a kind of breakthrough about how people think about the current president. I don't think it's gone quite far enough, but I think we have reached a point where most people recognize that there's something exceptionally bad about him, that he doesn't fall within the norms, that this is someone who actually would change the whole system. That maybe the system's corrupt, but that he's corrupt in a different way. I think people now think that. I think the polling shows it, and that wasn't really true a year ago.
That's interesting. I'm also hearing, and I need to confirm this, but that he's had to not cancel some attendance at fundraisers because even within Republican ranks, he's not raising the money he wants. I want to talk about one of those unusual norm-breaking things that he's done. In the last 10 days, the White House barred three news outlets from covering the president, basically because the president objected to their factual but critical coverage. As you know, a judge ordered their access restored, but the White House has continued to restrict CNN's access. In the beginning, the other networks stood with CNN, but the others have now resumed providing pool coverage. They've said that they simply can't stop covering the president. I'm curious, as a historian, to you, what distinguishes a president who is threatening institutions from a president who has been able to get them to comply, who has actually, in a sense, corrupted them?
That's a great question, and I just want to start with the example that you're giving. I think if you're — and I say this with love and respect — but I think if you're part of pool coverage of the White House, you shouldn't overestimate how important the job you're doing is. It's important, but there are more important things that journalists and reporters do, and there are more important things that are done in the world. And so if you're doing something because you're telling yourself how important your job is, you may want to take a step back. If we didn't have pool reporting to the White House for 7 hours or 7 days, or honestly 70 days, it wouldn't really matter very much. So I think a mistake is being made here, and the chance is being lost here.
And I appreciate the question, the way you formulate the question, because if you are covering the White House — and this has been a problem from the beginning — if you're covering Mr. Trump personally, you have to be very careful about the extent to which you are simply giving traction, or giving purchase, or giving effect to things he's saying which just aren't true. And I would have thought that this could be a chance for people to maybe take a break and take a breath and think about how we're going to cover the president from now through the midterms. Because as you say, between now and then, his words are chiefly going to be weapons, and if we repeat them without commenting on them, we can be helping him to do a job that we shouldn't be helping him to do.
I'm curious, how would you, if you were in charge of the press for — how would you say they should cover the president, or we?
I mean, I will tell you the advice I gave to the New York Times, which was of course ignored. I think that the president should have his own, like, bottom-right section on the entertainment section. And what he says literally should be covered, but it should be covered like a transcript, and it should be just like, 'Mr. Trump, or the president, said today,' and just have the words that he said, and then just leave them there. But I think we get into a big problem when we confuse what he says with two other things: what he says with what he can do, what he says with what he legally can do — I guess three things — and what he says with what's actually going on.
And I think this deep into a second term, we still have the problem that what he says gets confused with those three other things: what he could actually do, what he could legally do, and what is actually going on in the world. So I think it would be wise to try to hive off his words and put them in some place, because of course they deserve to be covered as his words, but then try to cover the news separately.
That's interesting. Let's talk about the midterms. The president has declined to rule out federal forces at polling places. His Homeland Security secretary says ICE could enter a polling place under certain circumstances. And for anybody panicked by that, I should say the military currently says it has no plans to deploy troops or seize ballots or voting equipment as of today. So, first, would you help us understand the significance of armed federal agents at polling places, given the following: non-citizen voting is vanishingly rare, the people showing up are overwhelmingly American citizens trying to cast a ballot. So what does the presence of armed federal agents change? And what worries you most about what could happen around this election?
Well, I'm going to say, if you don't mind, I'm going to take a couple steps back and just say: whatever the president says he's going to do, and whatever he actually does, you still go and vote, right? And that's the basic lesson, because we can parse this, and I'm going to do my best, but the main thing which is happening here is that he's trying to create an atmosphere of threat to discourage people from voting. And if you want to win, you have to vote anyway. I mean, this is a very clear historical lesson, and it's been shown over and over again, most recently in Hungary. You can win even when they threaten and even when they cheat. You can win big even when they threaten and even when they cheat. So I just wanted to get that out of the way, because that's the most important thing.
Then to pick up your point, obviously people who are voting are American citizens and they don't have anything to fear from ICE, but historically African Americans and others have had a reason to be afraid of the presence of policemen and people in uniforms. And this is part of American history, unfortunately, right? And so the putting what looks like law enforcement around polling places is designed to threaten people who the president thinks might be voting against him. And we, as a country who participate in this history, have to be aware of this and have to recognize that not only is this illegal and morally wrong, but it also has a historically, I would say, racist underpinning to it.
Mhm. And what have you seen work in other countries to get people who are anxious about showing up if there are troops to actually go and vote?
That's a great question. I mean, part of it is knowing that other people are going to do it. Part of it is the consciousness, which I think is beginning to emerge, that what we've got is just not tenable, right? So like in Hungary, there was this tipping point where people realized, you know what? This is just too corrupt. Like this just can't last. And I think we're getting to that tipping point as well. Another thing which is really important is talking it up. So like if you're going to go vote, just bring it up in small talk. Bring it up in chance conversations. 'Hey, I'm going to go vote.' Try to make it as normal as possible.
And then people being supportive of — insofar as, you know, the law permits it, and in most states it permits it quite a lot — being supportive of voting. Like putting up signs saying that you're going to vote. Like helping people who are waiting in line. Things like that. But all of the work to create an atmosphere that says this is normal, this is good, you're doing the patriotic thing that you ought to be doing.
Yeah, they say it's peer pressure — the fact your friends are doing it makes you more likely to. I'm curious, going back to your comments on the press, one of the things I have been told as somebody who does media is don't talk a lot about threats around the election because that disincentivizes voting, or that could disincentivize voting.
And it's a real conflict for me because I think I have an obligation to make people aware of what's possible or what they're threatening, so there's opportunity to push back. But I also don't want to be part of disincentivizing voting. So what would you advise?
I would advise starting coverage not from what the president says, but starting it from what NGOs do. So like look at what Protect Democracy is doing, or look at what Stacey Abrams is doing. Like start coverage from the reaction of the people who are legal and political and civic experts on all of this, and look at what language they're using. Because yeah, I mean, I think you're absolutely right. The danger is that if you just repeat his language, you're kind of doing his work, because a lot of the stuff that he says he can't actually do. It's not legal. He doesn't have the guts. He doesn't have the means to do it. And so if you look at how NGOs who are used to processing this stuff do it, I think that's a better way to start.
Okay, that's helpful. Flipping topics, today the president is having lunch with the tech oligarchs, or at least some of them. When you and I last spoke, you warned about them, and back then they weren't even oligarching the way they are now. The people who are building the most powerful AI systems right now are in a strange position. Some warn that what they're creating could threaten humanity and needs to be controlled, but they keep racing to build it themselves. Meanwhile, they've accumulated enough wealth and power that governments are really struggling to constrain them. Can you put on your historian hat and help us understand, in recent history, how did we get to a place where a handful of private individuals have this much power over a technology they themselves say could threaten us?
That's a great question. I mean, number one, I'm going to point out that we got here because of American tax dollars. So all of Silicon Valley is built on US government patents and things that arose from our tax dollars — here, mine, and everybody's. And I just say that because a lot of the Silicon Valley nonsense ideology is this libertarianism that the government can't control them and government can't tax them because they're amazing supermen who never benefited from anybody's help. And that's entirely fictional — like it's Orwellian the degree to which that is false. And so one thing we have to keep in mind in the history of all this is that Silicon Valley only exists because of our tax dollars and our government, and our tax dollars and our government have every right to regulate and constrain what Silicon Valley does, right? So the ideology that like they're fantastic and they're wonderful and they're beyond all of this is just total nonsense, and they know it completely. They're aware of the trick that they're playing.
The second thing I would say is that we have to talk seriously about how we use the word technology. I think it's only technology if it enables humans to do things — I mean, just literally a technique or, you know, a technē — like it's something that allows you to do things you couldn't otherwise do. If something makes you stupid or makes you sick or kills you, it's not actually technology. And I think if we would adjust the way we talked about some of this stuff and not call it high-tech or not call it tech, you know, but shift rather into realms like mental illness or addiction or disability or things that are disabling or anti-pedagogy or anti-education, it might help us get a grip on all of this, because most of the effect of this for humans has been quite negative — in terms of our mood, in terms of our intelligence, in terms of pretty much our sociability, in terms of our capability to be democratic, it's pretty much all been negative. And so I think it would help for us to consider how we talk about this. That's another thing.
And then the final point is that all of these guys and all of these companies had to be taxed, and we blew that, right? So I mean, if these companies had been taxed, or if we decided to tax them, or if we could tax these individuals, we could fund education, we could fund local journalism, we could fund things which could be a counterpoint to the damage that's being done.
Mhm. You know, we spend a lot of time around AI asking whether it'll become smarter than humans and threaten us through their autonomous actions. And I wonder if we're missing the more immediate threat that it increasingly shapes our information and makes human beings easier to manipulate and makes us less capable of acting independently already.
Yeah, I completely agree with that analysis. I mean, I think you're exactly right. Like we get drawn by the more attractive and coherent science fiction scenario, which is, you know, in the Terminator or in the Matrix. But the thing which is actually happening is that our own neurological circuitry is being broken up. So it's not so much that AI is getting more impressive, it's that we're getting stupider. Sorry. There's a big taboo about saying this, which I break every chance I get. We're getting stupider, and therefore we're ever more impressed by less impressive stuff, right? And that's the thing which worries me. Because if we make a collective decision to all become less capable, well, then other bad scenarios are very likely to happen. Whether it's an AI takeover, or whether it's electing the wrong person president, or whether it's global warming, whatever it might be — if we make a collective decision that AI is going to ruin our schools and ruin our minds, then we're inviting bad things to happen.
