The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America

by Timothy Snyder

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...