The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America

by Timothy Snyder

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...