The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America

by Timothy Snyder

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.