The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America

by Timothy Snyder

That politics begins from “friend or foe” is the basic fascist idea, formulated by the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt and endorsed and propagated by Ilyin.

The essence of Russia’s foreign policy is strategic relativism: Russia cannot become stronger, so it must make others weaker. The simplest way to make others weaker is to make them more like Russia. Rather than addressing its problems, Russia exports them; and one of its basic problems is the absence of a succession principle. Russia opposes European and American democracy to ensure that Russians do not see that democracy might work as a succession principle in their own country. Russians are meant to distrust other systems as much as they distrust their own. If Russia’s succession crisis can in fact be exported—if the United States could become authoritarian—then Russia’s own problems, although unresolved, would at least seem normal. Pressure on Putin would be relieved. Were America the shining beacon of democracy that its citizens sometimes imagine, its institutions would have been far less vulnerable to Russia’s cyberwar. From Moscow’s perspective, America’s constitutional structure created tempting vulnerabilities. Because of the evident flaws in American democracy and the American rule of law, it was all the easier to intervene in an American election. The rule of law requires that the government control violence, and that the population expects that government can do so. The presence of guns in American society, which can feel like strength to some Americans, appeared in Moscow as a national weakness. In 2016, Russia appealed directly to Americans to buy and use guns...

Race was on the Russian mind in 2016. Russian leaders had occasion that year to observe as race opened a tremendous gap between the executive and legislative branches of the American government. In February, one of the nine supreme court justices died. The Republican majority leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell, made clear that the Senate would not consider any nominee of Barack Obama. This broke one of the most important conventions of the federal government of the United States, and was commented upon in Moscow. The Russian press quite rightly noted the “paradoxical situation” of a president unable to exercise his normal rights. It did not escape the attention of the Kremlin that the Republican leaders of Congress declared, almost a year early, that Barack Obama no longer enjoyed the usual prerogatives of the president of the United States. At that moment, Russia began its email hack of Democratic politicians and activists.

It is easy to see the appeal of eternity to wealthy and corrupt men in control of a lawless state. They cannot offer social advance to their population, and so must find some other form of motion in politics. Rather than discuss reforms, eternity politicians designate threats. Rather than presenting a future with possibilities and hopes, they offer an eternal present with defined enemies and artificial crises. For this to work, citizens have to meet eternity politicians halfway. Demoralized by their inability to change their station in life, they must accept that the meaning of politics lies not in institutional reform but in daily emotion. They must stop thinking about a better future for themselves, their friends, and their families, and prefer the constant invocation of a proud past. At the top and throughout society, material inequality creates the experiences and the sentiments that can be transformed into a politics of eternity. When Ilyin was portrayed as the heroic opponent of the Russian Revolution on Russian television in 2017, it was with the message that the promise of social advancement for the Russian people was a “Satanic deception.”

In the 1980s, the federal government weakened the position of trade unions. The percentage of Americans in unionized jobs fell from about a quarter to under 10%. Private sector union membership fell still more sharply, from about 34% to 8% for men and from about 16% to 6% for women. The productivity of the American workforce grew throughout the period, at about 2% a year, but the wages of traditional workers increased more slowly, if at all. Over the same period, the pay of executives increased, sometimes drastically. At the same time, the United States was very weak on the basic policies that stabilized middle classes elsewhere: retirement pensions, public education, public transport, health care, paid vacation, and parental leave. The United States had the resources to give its workers and its citizens these basics. Yet a regressive trend in taxation policy made this more difficult. Whereas workers paid an increasing tax burden through payroll taxes, corporations and wealthy families saw theirs drop by half or more. Even as the percentage of income and wealth at the top of the American distribution increased, the percentage of tax expected from the most fortunate decreased. Since the 1980s, the tax rates paid by the top 0.1% of American earners fell from about 65% to about 35%, and for the top 0.01% from about 75% to below 25%.

For many Americans, oligarchy meant the warping of time, the loss of a sense of the future, the experience of every day as repetitive stress. When economic inequality suppresses social advance, it is hard to imagine a better future, or indeed any future. As an American worker put it during the Great Depression of the 1930s, fear “does distort your outlook and your feeling. Lost time and lost faith.” An American born in 1940 was almost certain to make more money than his parents. An American born in 1984 had about a fifty-fifty chance of doing the same. Billy Joel’s 1982 song “Allentown,” which was really about the neighboring steel town of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, caught the moment. It spoke of men of a second postwar generation without the social advancement attained by their fathers, of workers betrayed by narrow nationalism. The fate of the steel industry, like that of the American labor market generally, had much to do with changes in the world economy. The number of manufacturing jobs decreased by about one-third between 1980 and 2016. The problem was that American leaders took globalization as the solution to its own problems, rather than as an invitation to reform the American state. The globalization of the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s coincided instead with the politics of inevitability and the generation of economic inequality.

Inequality means not only poverty but the experience of difference. Visible inequality leads Americans to reject the American dream as unlikely or impossible. Meanwhile, more and more Americans are unable to change residences, which also makes better futures hard to imagine. In the 2010s, more Americans between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four lived with their parents than in any other configuration. A young person who became a teacher and took a job in a public school in San Francisco could not afford to buy a home anywhere in the city. In other words, an American who completes an education and takes a job of the highest public value is not sufficiently rewarded to start what was once considered a normal life. A sense of doom pressed down especially on youth. More than a fifth of American families reported owing debt for college in the 2010s. Exposure to inequality persuaded American teens to drop out of high school, which then in turn made it very hard for them to earn. Children down to the age of four suffered in testing if they were raised in poorer families. As Warren Buffett put it, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” Americans die in this war every day, in large numbers, in incomparably greater numbers than in wars abroad or as a result of terrorism at home. Because the United States lacks a functional public health system, inequality has brought a health crisis, which in turn has accelerat...

Many Americans did not see the difference between someone who constantly lied and never apologized and someone who almost never did and corrected his or her mistakes. They were accepting the description of the world offered by Surkov and RT: no one really ever tells the truth, perhaps there is no truth, so let us simply repeat the things we like to hear, and obey those who say them. That way lies authoritarianism. Trump adopted the Russian double standard: he was permitted to lie all the time, but any minor error by a journalist discredited the entire profession of journalism. Trump made the move, copied from Putin, of claiming that it was not he but the reporters who lied. He referred to them as an “enemy of the American people” and claimed that what they produced was “fake news.” Trump was proud of both of these formulations, although both were Russian. In the Russian model, investigative reporting must be marginalized so that news can become a daily spectacle. The point of spectacle is to summon the emotions of both supporters and detractors and to confirm and strengthen polarization; every news cycle creates euphoria or depression, and reinforces a conviction that politics is about friends and enemies at home, rather than about policy that might improve the lives of citizens. Trump governed just as he had run for office: as a producer of outrage rather than as a formulator of policy.

Like his Russian patrons, Trump portrayed the presidency of Barack Obama as an aberration. Along with RT, Trump promoted the fiction that Obama was not an American, an idea meant to strengthen the notion that “the people” are whites. Like Putin with his monkey imitation, like Ilyin and his obsession with jazz as white emasculation, like Prokhanov with his nightmares of black milk and black sperm, Trump dwelled in fantasies of black power. When Trump won the presidency, Kiselev exulted that Obama was “now like a eunuch who cannot do anything.” Trump was the only presidential candidate in American history to brag publicly about his penis. His white supremacist supporters called Republicans who would not support Trump’s racism “cuckservatives.” The reference was to the pornographic meme of a white husband, cuckold to a white wife, who watches her perform fellatio on a black man. To sexualize the enemy was to make politics into biological conflict, and to trade the hard work of reform and freedom for endless anxious preening. In an American eternity, the enemy is black, and politics begins by saying so. Thus the next point of innocence in Trump’s politics of eternity, after the 1930s-era racist isolationism of America First, was an alternative 1860s in which the Civil War was never fought. In actual American history, African Americans were enfranchised a few years after the American Civil War of 1861–1865. If blacks are to be excluded from “the people,” an American politics of...

Trump was called a “populist.” A populist, however, is someone who proposes policies to increase opportunities for the masses, as opposed to the financial elites. Trump was something else: a sadopopulist, whose policies were designed to hurt the most vulnerable part of his own electorate. Encouraged by presidential racism, such people could understand their own pain as a sign of still greater pain inflicted upon others. The only major policy of 2017 was to increase pain: a tax regression law that created a budgetary argument against funding domestic programs, and which included among its provisions the deprivation of health care from many of those who needed it most. In Trump’s words, “I’ve ended the individual mandate” for health insurance. This means that the Affordable Care Act, which had extended health insurance among uninsured Americans, was in his words “basically dead over time.” According to the Congressional Budget Office, the health care provisions of the 2017 tax bill will result in the loss of health insurance for thirteen million Americans. As an envoy from the United Nations warned, these policies could make the United States “the most unequal country in the world.” From an outside perspective, it was easy to conclude that pain was the purpose of such policies. On one level, a poor person, unemployed worker, or opioid addict who votes away health care is just giving money to the rich that they do not need and perhaps will not even notice. On another level, s...

To break the spell of inevitability, we must see ourselves as we are, not on some exceptional path, but in history alongside others. To avoid the temptation of eternity, we must address our own particular problems, beginning with inequality, with timely public policy. To make of American politics an eternity of racial conflict is to allow economic inequality to worsen. To address widening disparities of opportunity, to restore a possibility of social advance and thus a sense of the future, requires seeing Americans as a citizenry rather than as groups in conflict. America will have both forms of equality, racial and economic, or it will have neither. If it has neither, eternity politics will prevail, racial oligarchy will emerge, and American democracy will come to a close.

EPILOGUE (20—) To experience its destruction is to see a world for the first time. Inheritors of an order we did not build, we are now witnesses to a decline we did not foresee. To see our moment is to step away from the stories supplied for our stupefaction, myths of inevitability and eternity, progress and doom. Life is elsewhere. Inevitability and eternity are not history but ideas within history, ways of experiencing our time that accelerate its trends while slowing our thoughts. To see, we must set aside the dark glass, and see as we are seen, ideas for what they are, history as what we make. Virtues arise from the institutions that make them desirable and possible. As institutions are destroyed, virtues reveal themselves. A history of loss is thus a proposal for restoration. The virtues of equality, individuality, succession, integration, novelty, and truth depend each upon all the others, and all of them upon human decisions and actions. An assault upon one is an assault upon all; strengthening one means affirming the rest. Thrown into a world we do not choose, we need equality so that we learn through failure but without resentment. Only collective public policy can create citizens with the confidence of individuals. As individuals we seek to understand what we can and should do together and apart. We might join in a democracy with others who have voted before, and will vote after, and in so doing create a principle of succession and a sense of time. With this assu...