On Freedom

by Timothy Snyder

sadopopulism offers only the spectacle of others being still more deprived. Sadopopulism salves the pain of immobility by directing attention to others who suffer more. One group is reassured that, thanks to its resilience, it will do less poorly than another from government paralysis.

It activates racism as the substitute for a better future. It creates barriers that block the many, then defines freedom as their absence for the few.

politics of catastrophe emerging now.

In American oligarchy, “free speech” all too often means the privilege of the very wealthy to transmit anonymous propaganda and to fund electoral campaigns. In such a situation, we the people will have little to say.

Eternity politics comes down to the idea that some single person should rule forever, usually to preserve personal wealth and avoid responsibility for crimes.

We know the way back toward freedom: a reclamation of the future. We must restore social mobility and prevent the coming catastrophe. Both can be done, but only through the conscious activity of sovereign, unpredictable people. Fear is not enough. It will not get us where we need to go. From the most basic facts we can build a scaffolding of hope. We need to ground ourselves in history and science to take a turn toward a better future. It is all within our reach.

that we can become free simply by removing an obstacle.

“In the struggle between you and the world,” says Kafka, “take the side of the world.” Freedom is not negative, not a matter of our breaking what is around us. Freedom is not us against the world but us within the world, knowing it and changing it. Freedom involves turning restraints into possibilities, a habit that can save our species.

Solar fusion has been going on for about 4.5 billion years, photosynthesis for about 3.5 billion.

They finance propaganda instructing us that hydrocarbons are safe and that renewables are risky.

In the United States, the political party that denies (or ignores) global warming also suppresses votes. Breaking democracy also breaks the ecosphere.

Factuality is the fourth. To get purchase on the world, we have to test ourselves and our convictions.

The science of global warming is an example of a general truth. We may not want to hear about it; but if we ignore it, we are less free.

If facts do not count, what James Madison called “clamor and combinations” will always win, which means that tyrants and oligarchs will always win.

Stalinism revealed the human ability to have faith in an entity whose utterances had no fixed content, followed no rules of evidence, and were often mutually contradictory.

People were capable of altering their views completely, and of acting as though they had never changed, and of preparing to change them again in the near future. Orwell invented a name for it: doublethink.

Americans live in a country where a sitting president gave advance warning that he would declare victory even if he lost an election.

He repeated claims of fraud that he knew to be false, and he urged his followers to support him in overthrowing representative government. Thousands obliged by invading the Capitol on January 6, 2021. A major television network,

In the aftermath of the failure of Trump’s coup attempt, some Americans held three contradictory propositions to be true: (1) the Capitol was not really stormed; (2) the Capitol was stormed by right-wing allies of Trump to keep him in power, and this was good; (3) the Capitol was stormed by left-wing agitators who wanted to harm Trump’s reputation, and this was bad.

Trump’s big lie recalled both the fascist and the communist inheritance.

It was like a communist party line in that people were meant to follow it de...

Trump has committed to making the federal government one giant safe space for his fiction, firing civil servants and replacing them with lie loyalists.

We can live a lie. We can be fooled. We can pose as people who doubt everything, and yet believe the most outrageous lies.

Freedom of speech is positive, in the sense that it depends on protecting those who take risks, encouraging others to listen, and indeed maintaining all the other forms of freedom.

When we no longer have any reporters, we say that we distrust “the media,” but all the while we cling to the mechanized bits of it that are attuned to how we already feel.

In the aftermath of the 2020 election, many Americans preferred their feelings about the election to its actual outcome.

If our concept of freedom is negative, then the truth seems frustrating, just one more barrier to our impulses.

The pursuit of truth is the first bulwark in a defense of the self. Believing a lie means serving a master, living or digital. That is a plausible end station for us: deluded and unfree, living and dying in a tedious alternative reality.

Euripides lived at the height of classical Greek culture. More than two thousand years ago, he realized that democracy depends on truthful, risky speech.

Freedom is positive, and so is freedom of speech: it makes no sense without the affirmation of truth as a virtue, and the creation of institutions to protect people seeking it.

Negative freedom in our American sense—the demolition of government services—generates fear and anxiety, making extreme politics more likely.

Most fundamental to libertarianism is its opposition to solidarity. It counsels us to act selfishly at all times, consoling us with the thought that this behavior will lead to the good of everyone. Competition can be a very good thing, as a practice within rules girded by norms. Yet even Adam Smith, the most famous of all thinkers about the market, understood that competition functions on the basis of virtues that it does not itself generate.

Freedom never just means government leaving us alone; nor does it mean our leaving government alone. The forms of freedom must be daily practice. The forms of freedom legitimate government and guide individuals.

To regard freedom as central is liberal. The conviction that freedom is about virtues is conservative. The belief that structures gird values is socialist. These three approaches to politics are perfectly justified and complementary. They do not succeed in isolation. If they work at all, they work together.

“We the people” will be sovereign in government only when individual persons are sovereign in their lives.

The philosopher John Rawls invented a reality check called the “veil of ignorance.” It asks you to bracket what you know about your place in society behind this “veil,” so as to look at the world more objectively and make better policy.

Americans sometimes say that their country is a republic, meaning that it need not be a democracy. This makes no sense. Both words commit us to the same principle: we should rule ourselves.

Those who care about a republic would never hinder democratic practice.

The point of freedom of speech is to challenge accumulated power, which means accumulated wealth. Associating freedom of speech with spending private money on elections is therefore perverse in the extreme.

those censored by cowards as “divisive concepts.”

A nation built on fear of conversation will be too fragile and porous for solidarity.

Sovereign people know the risks. If we identify with mobs and overlook the people in our lives, our republic is in trouble. If we worship oligarchs who identify with oligarchs abroad, we are in trouble. Republics die from wealth inequality.

We can have positive freedom for everyone, in a democratic republic that allows good government. The future could be so much better than the present.

Three new rights would complement Jefferson’s traditional ones: the right to vote, the right to one’s mind, and the right to health care.

Americans lose about $1 trillion every year to tax fraud and evasion by the very wealthy.

A charter for fair transparency would be based on three principles: (1) things should be transparent to us; (2) we should not be transparent to things; and (3) we should not be oppressed by data we cannot see.

(3) Social media must issue corrections to users who have viewed false material that was presented to them as news.