On Freedom, Tyranny, and Resilience: Historian Timothy Snyder on The State of Belief Podcast

REV. PAUL BRANDEIS RAUSHENBUSH, HOST:

Dr. Timothy Snyder is a renowned historian and professor of history at Yale University, specializing in modern European history, with a focus on authoritarianism, Ukraine and the Holocaust. His many influential books include Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, and On Tyranny: 20 Lessons from the 20th Century. These and other titles have helped shape the discourse on democracy and historical memory.

His new book is titled On Freedom, and explores what freedom truly means, how it has been misunderstood, and why it is critical for our collective survival. It debuted as an instant New York Times bestseller and has earned praise from leading figures such as Anne Applebaum and Ukrainian President Zelensky. I am very happy that that book brings Dr. Snyder to The State of Belief today.

Timothy, welcome.

TIMOTHY SNYDER, GUEST:

Glad to be with you.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

So, sir, we are in a moment, and it is a moment that somehow you have presaged in a lot of your work. And I have to say, it still is one of those things where I think of work like yours as talking about things “over there.” But it's actually not about over there; it's about right here, it's about everywhere.

And so I just really want to start with a moment of gratitude, because I think a lot of times, academics are kind of hither and yon, and it's just really important that you understand how important your work has been for those of us out in the field, and those of us trying to understand this moment. The word “public intellectual” gets thrown around a lot and I think it seems very grandiose, but in your case it actually really feels grounded and important.

So let me start with thank you, and welcome to this show, and maybe you can just start with a little bit about what you are feeling right now as an American, as a human being living in this country and seeing this moment that we're in.

TIMOTHY SNYDER:

Well, first of all, thank you for the kind words. As somebody who really likes spending time in both hither and yon, and who wishes he could have some more time in hither and yon, it's much appreciated - because I'm just trying to do the things that I can do, and that's the answer to your question.

As a historian, I can't separate being a historian from a human being. You know, I love being a historian. I'm a historian all the time, and as a historian, you're always thinking in terms of something like fields of probability: you know that not everything is possible, and you also know that many more things are possible than that people realize - which is a funny position to be in, because a lot of the things people think can happen really can't, they're just not going to happen. But there are a whole bunch of things that could happen that people aren't thinking of, and those two things are always true at the same time.

And so how I feel, the field of probability for the future of the US changed with the last presidential election. We're now in a different zone. We're still in a zone where what people do matters, but we have to think in terms of the dark things that are possible in order to head them off, and we have to have positive ideas of what we're aiming for, which is what I was trying to do in the book.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Let's get into the book On Freedom. I'll just say it felt like a privilege to read, because you shared so much about yourself in it. And I think sometimes you read books by historians where it feels like: this is the objective truth and I'm laying out the narrative and that's it. And in some ways, what you did with this book is you acknowledge that you are a player in the history, and the way you came across, just learning about a childhood, learning about ringing a bell. You know, it opens with these moments that are very evocative of ringing a bell in 1976. And this idea that you came from a place and that you're a part of this question of what freedom means. And so, interspersed with all of the other great thinkers, you bring your own reflection into it.

So I just I want to recommend this book, On Freedom, to our listeners because it's also a way of just understanding how you can make an argument which includes yourself, which I feel is very persuasive.

But this question of freedom. I use that phrase all the time. You know, because we talk, especially, about religious freedom and what is and is not religious freedom, and I want to get into that. But I think one of the great things that you offered me was the question of positive freedom and negative freedom, and I just wonder if you would unpack that a little bit for us. You do it throughout the book, so I know that's a huge question, but it's something for our listeners to begin to wrap their minds around: what is negative freedom and what is positive freedom? Not as values, but as, actually, ways of understanding what freedom means in the world.

TIMOTHY SNYDER:

That's great. Let me try to link your setup with your question, because it is a book which is somewhat about me; but it’s largely about me being wrong. And that reveals something about the way historians are supposed to work. So if you read a book that passes for history and it just makes a bunch of grand proclamations, and it confirms the things you already thought, then it's probably a very bad history book.

A very good history book is going to have lots of deep footnotes and lots of research. It's not necessarily going to hem and haw, but it's going to end up in a different place than the author intended. Every single history book I've written, I've had a hypothesis and then I went out and tested it and not only was I wrong, but I was asking the wrong question. And you just keep doing that with the sources until you land at a place where you can write with assurance.

And so I just want to say that what I was doing was in that sense historical and also philosophical, like the old-fashioned Socratic method of walking in and asking uncomfortable questions. What I was trying to do, partly, was ask uncomfortable questions to myself, to my younger self, to the mistakes that I've made before, and so that leads to your question.

Like a lot of Americans, or at least like White male Americans coming from a relatively prosperous background, I don't think I thought hard enough about the substance of freedom. I think I was like a lot of folks: I was tempted to look for easy formulae, which could be things like, well, America's free because constitution; or America's free because exceptional, or America's free because of capitalism. And the problem with all those formulas - they're grand and attractive and they're elegant and they get you to literary or biographical closure, but they're a hundred percent wrong. Nothing can actually bring you freedom. To be a free person, you have to struggle. And that that gets us to the beginning of what positive freedom is.

So positive freedom means that you care about things, that you have values, that you care about integrity or decency or beauty or grace or whatever it might be, and you believe these things are real. And this is a very important already juncture, because there are a lot of people out in the world who are arguing that nothing is real, nothing is true, nothing is of value. Our totalitarians or our authoritarians of this century are very often starting from the premise that hey, look, nothing's really true, it doesn't really matter, right? There's nothing there to care about. The only thing that really matters is power. And so this is already a big first step.

And then the second step in thinking about positive freedom is to realize, okay, there are these good things, but they don't always go together. So I can be precise in my answer to you, but I could also be brief in my answer to you, and I’ve got to balance those two things. The more brief I am, the less precise I'm going to be. And this is always true, we’re always making these balances. And so that's what makes us human is that we care about things, but then we have to combine them. Maybe in God's world, all good things go together, but in this world certainly they do not. And so, as humans, we're building up character by making these choices all the time.

And so then the third step is, okay, if freedom is positive, and freedom is a state where we can make these choices about what's good, and develop ourselves and become the people we want to be, what kind of politics does that involve? And that's pretty easy, because then you can just say, okay, you should have a government which creates the conditions which, given our weaknesses and possibilities as the kinds of biological and spiritual creatures we are, what kind of structures then allow us to become that free person? So it's not more government, less government - who cares; it's the right kind of government. So that's positive freedom.

Negative freedom is like a baby step towards positive freedom, but it doesn't get you all the way there. Negative freedom says: freedom is just about the barrier, it's just about the thing which is in the way. Which is okay, but the thing is, you have to remember the human pressing against the barrier. If there's a wall, it doesn't matter if there's no human behind the wall, right? The wall is bad because of the human who's pushing. And the human isn't pushing just because wall is bad. The human is pushing because the human wants to go out and do other things and become a richer, more interesting person. So the wall shouldn't be the focus of our attention, it has to be the human.

And the mistake a lot of Americans make, particularly, is we say, okay, well, freedom is only negative, it's only about the barrier, and the barrier is the government. And therefore, so long as I'm slagging the government, then I'm being a free person. And that's just such an easy shortcut - and it's just not true, right?

Sometimes government helps, sometimes it hurts, but if we want to be free people, there are lots of things which we need the government for. We can't create roads or kindergartens or healthcare or all kinds of other things which help us to be free without working together, and that's what government is for, in the end. And so freedom is positive in the sense of, philosophically, lots of things are good. But it's also positive politically, in the sense that we have to work together to create the right structures to help us all to be free, rather than just saying, oh, government's a problem, let's drown it in the bathtub, let's make it as small as we can, let's burn it all down.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

I love the idea of negative freedom is the baby step, but then there's so much more that has to happen. And one of the things that you talk about in the book is that it's not enough that our Constitution or our Declaration of Independence says some things. That means almost nothing. It's what we do with that.

But in some ways we say, we are free because we have a Constitution that tells us we're free. No, that's not it. It's what we do in response to the Constitution or in the response to the ways that we've been invited into being part of this country and its evolution. It's helpful to think in that way, because it offers us a process-oriented understanding of freedom that is always becoming, and that we will not arrive at it.

And members of my family have been pastors for a long time, and one of them was Walter Rauschenbusch. And he said that the kingdom of heaven is always becoming. We are not going to arrive on this earth. We have to try, we have to strive to continue. Your book is not religious – aside, I would say, that the part that I found most religious, and I do want to get into religious freedom, we're going to get there – but is the

Leiber versus Körper. This was an important distinction for you, which is: Leiber is about the body that matters, rather than the body that is just a physical. It's about a body that is alive. Can you just talk about it, because you spent quite a bit of time on that - not the whole book on that, but it was such an interesting dichotomy for me, and a helpful one. Can you say a little bit about what you meant by all that?

TIMOTHY SNYDER:

Well, let me just take a step back and just address the broader question, because I do go off on some Christian riffs by way of a couple of female philosophers, one of whom you've mentioned or you're referring to, Edith Stein, for whom this distinction between Leiber and Körper was important. Another is Simone Weil, and in different ways they were after something which I think we need for freedom. Freedom wasn't their big preoccupation, necessarily, but they, in different ways, argue that you need the other person to be free, and I think this is a very profound way to start, and it goes to this issue of positive and negative, too.

Because if you believe in negative freedom, if you think that the problem is the barrier, what're implicitly saying is: I'm cool, right? Everything's fine with me. It's just the government that's the problem; and then the other people are the... I'm cool, whatever I'm doing is great, I'm free. And, of course, if freedom is about becoming and if it's about the good things in life, that can never be right. Like, you're never cool. You can be better or worse, you can be striving, not striving. But if you just say, what I'm doing right now is great, you're probably not a free person - because you don't know who you are. And that's where you need the other person.

So Stein was a philosopher of empathy. That’s what her dissertation was about, and a very important work. And what she said, which is important to freedom, is that you can't really know yourself without knowing the other person. And so, for our purposes, you have problems, and you need someone to tell you what your problems are. You're living life inside a story and it's your story, but your story is wrong in some important respects. We're all walking around with metaphysical shaving cream on our faces, and somebody has to tell us that. And you're only going to listen to the other person if you believe the other person is real; if you believe that the person is in the world the same way that you are. And that takes effort, and that's what Stein calls empathy.

So empathy isn't just about being a nice person. It's not this touchy, feely thing. You need empathy to know yourself. And if you don't know yourself, you're not going to be a free person. You're going to get caught up in some false story - negative freedom being one of these false stories - because negative freedom says hey, you're cool, it's just the rest of the world. All you have to do is be a rebel and you're going to be fine. And, by the way, let me tell you how to be a rebel: make the government smaller. And, of course, the person who's telling you to make the government smaller turns out to have a billion times more money than you do, and it turns out that you're in fact living inside their story, which means you're not a free person at all.

And so of course that empathy business comes out of the parable of the Good Samaritan, explicitly or implicitly. Simone Weil, who talks about this, she says, ok, the thing about loving your neighbor as yourself - there's the obvious business that you should be showing mercy to someone who's different than you are. But Weil kind of takes another step with that, and she talks about a different passage of Leviticus and she says, well, if you're going to love the stranger, the trick there is to love the stranger in yourself - which I think is very important. If there's no bit of you which is a stranger to you, if you actually think you know yourself completely, man, you're definitely not a free person. There's a whole lot of you which you have to get to know, that you have to see as a stranger, before you can figure out what it is that you're going to be becoming

So in this way - it doesn't have to be Christianity - but in this way, freedom, I think, is certainly limited to metaphysical questions, like the other person being a person the same way that you are; and metaphysical questions like what is familiar and what is strange in the world, and how do you get across that barrier?

I wanted to talk about Leiber and Körper. Leiber and Körper is very important, important to me too. It had to do with some like some health issues that I had, helped me get across this. A Körper in German is any body, so it could be a heavenly body - any physical body. It's subject to laws of physics, and we are subject to laws of physics. But a Leib, you know, a Leib is also a Körper. It's subject to laws of physics. If you jump off of the roof right now – which, don’t, because we’re in the middle of doing something important – but if you jump off a roof, you’re going to fall, just like any other object. But when you hit the ground, you’re going to feel it, and that makes you a Leib – that makes you different.

And there’s going to be a reason why you did that thing you did, and that’s because you’re a Leib. And so as a Leib, we feel things – which objects don’t do – but also, we can emanate our values out into the world. We can do things – I mean, jumping off a roof is a stupid example – but we can do things like have a podcast or write a book or make a friend, because we care about stuff, and that makes us different. So Leib gets you that business of the world coming into you and you feeling it, but also you pushing back out into the world and changing it and making it something that wouldn’t otherwise be. And that’s a very cool distinction which we owe to Edith Stein.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Well, it's wonderful. And this book On Freedom, in some ways it felt like a retreat, in the best way. It allowed me to go deep into ideas that felt incredibly relevant to my living, but weren't coming to the fore in this moment of what feels like an emergency. And I think, just like retreats in any sort of spiritual practice, feel like they're giving you sustenance to do the hard work that you do when you go out into the world, I feel like this book offers that. In some ways, your book On Tyranny feels like, almost, when you sound the alarm and it's like, ok, this feels like, I have a blueprint for this moment, and I think you intended it to be that way. But talk to me a little bit about that book and the genesis of On Tyranny, and what it means to you today when you go back and revisit it.

TIMOTHY SNYDER:

Well, we can work with the bell. I mean, you kindly recalled that On Freedom begins with a story of my ringing a bell when I was a kid, a six-year-old, in 1976. And the thought then, when I was a child, was, ok, I’m ringng this bell and I associate it with the Liberty Bell, and I associate it with the things that I was already imbibing at that point in my life about the United States always having been a free country, and how we're celebrating, now, this round number, 200 years of freedom.

But you know, the Liberty Bell… So you ring a bell. One of the things you ring a bell for is an alarm, and in On Tyranny I was sounding the alarm, you know, I was ringing a bell. But the bell itself might have a crack, as the Liberty Bell does. I think the last crack was when it was rung on George Washington's birthday. And you know George Washington was a very important, impressive person. But he was also somebody who expended resources trying to track down his wife's escaped enslaved person. There's a crack in the Liberty Bell, and that crack can stand for things like slavery or it can stand for the disenfranchisement of women; it can stand for other kinds of oppression.

And, of course, as I realized when I was thinking about this anecdote, I thought about this anecdote as a former child, and then I thought about it as a historian. I realized well, wait a minute. You know, the Liberty wasn't even rung in 1776. That's a myth. But it wasn't called the Liberty Bell then, either. It was actually called the Liberty Bell by the abolitionists a few decades later, who were trying to help more people to become free. And then, a few decades after that, it was called the Liberty Bell by the women's suffrage movement, who were also trying to add more people into the community of the free.

So On Tyranny was about playing defense, and it's important to defend things. Sometimes, you have to defend. Sometimes things are literally urgent. There's an emergency, as you say, and you have to just hold the line. But even as you're holding the line, especially if you have to hold the line for a long time, you have to be thinking about well, wait, I draw the line, but wait a minute. Drawing the line just to defense, or maybe I need to draw the line in the creative sense, too. Maybe I need to take this line and make a beautiful picture of it. Maybe I need to know what it is that I'm actually defending. Maybe I have to think not just in terms of the present but the future. Maybe I have to define values, not just in terms of holding off the bad ones, but generating the good ones.

And so that was the challenge from On Tyranny to On Freedom, you know, to think about America critically, but also to think about America constructively - and to think about freedom not just as something of which you can be deprived and which you have to defend, but think about freedom as something which has a substance, in which you have to create, in which you have to extend. So that's the relationship between the books.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

I love that. And that feels so important right now. It is important that we draw the line, and there is a moment where it feels very much on defense right now. Just to divert for a second, you know my organization, Interfaith Alliance, we're actually launching something called Promise 2025, which obviously is a play on Project 2025. But we're like, it's not enough just to refute Project 2025. We have to cast a vision that people can see. A vision for how our democracy can work for everybody in the future and work towards that, even as we play defense against some of the most egregious things that are coming.

You know, they're called principles of on tyranny. How do you delineate the various areas? What do you call them?

TIMOTHY SNYDER:

In On Tyranny, it's lessons.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Lessons. Okay, one of them that I'm seeing everywhere, and now I'm just repeating it to everyone is, not submitting in advance. It's a little crazy to be like, hey, what do you think about all these things that you wrote? But that's what we're doing here. But I do think that that's a really helpful reminder, because the temptation is to give ground even when it hasn't been asked of you yet. So can you talk a little bit about what that means to you, and maybe how you're seeing it play out in our politics, even as we speak?

TIMOTHY SNYDER:

“Don't obey in advance,” which is the first lesson of On Tyranny, is a kind of natural connection back from our discussion of On Freedom, because in order not to obey in advance, you have to have a notion of what you, yourself, stand for. That's the beginning: your notion of what's normal. And the normal thing I get out of, incidentally, I get the normal thing out of the anti-communist dissidents, but also out of working on Holocaust rescue, because so often what happened in both of those cases, which I researched a fair bit with primary sources, people would have these two different ideas of normal.

Somebody who took risks to rescue a Jew during the Holocaust would often be very inexpressive about it, to the point of being mute. But when rescuers said things, they were often saying things like well, I was just behaving normally. Which of course seems crazy, because you look at it and you say, well, that's not how everybody else behaved. But what they meant by “normal” wasn't what everybody else was doing. What they meant by normal was “normal to me.” Normal to me, and I'm not going to change when everybody else around me is changing. But that bragging part is the part that I'm adding, but that's what was meant.

And then, interesting, similarly, in the Soviet dissident literature, you get a very similar formulation, where people say, well, I didn't want to go to the gulag, I wasn't trying to be a fighter for freedom, I don't even consider myself a dissident, whatever that means. I just wanted to have a normal life - where normal meant stuff like I could speak my own language, I could sing my own songs, I could have my own friends, I could be honest about the things I cared about. That was normal. Normal is not what everybody else is doing, all the conforming and the submitting. Normal is I wanted to be me, and so it's both a small definition of normal, but also a very big definition of normal.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

You know, people talk about a moral compass and it all feels very technical or vague, but there is something inside of us that says, okay, this is what is right for me, this is what I truly believe. I will act in accordance to who I am. And I think making some of the internal, external, or doing some of the reflective pieces right now of like, what do I truly believe, and what will that help me to do as “normal” for me - you can call it a psychological thing, but it can also be a spiritual exercise of who am I? What is normal to me? And I think that's really important in moments like this.

TIMOTHY SNYDER:

Yeah, absolutely. I think pausing on this before we even get to the first lesson properly, there are exercises, as you say. Back in 2016, Sarah Kendzior wrote an essay where she basically said - okay, maybe it was early 2017 - she said, write a letter to yourself. Write down what you think is important to yourself, do this now, and then check it at various instances and try to hold true to it. And it seems very simple, but I actually, I think that's a really good idea, because the things that you think are normal, you may not actually articulate them; and if you articulate them to yourself or, even better, to a small group of other people, there's a better chance you'll be able to hew to them as time goes on and as other people start to obey in advance.

Because the tide, the motion, is always going to be towards obeying in advance. That's what most people are going to do, and you're going to feel… I mean, even if you are a saint, even if you're a perfect person, you're still going to feel that tug, that gravitational tug, to go along with the tide and to obey in advance. And so the normative part has to come first, and making the normative part a social part by talking about it with other people or just having a small group discussion where each of you says, hey, these are the things that I think are normal, that I'm going to try to stand by. And then meeting again a couple of months later and seeing how that is going - because people will adapt, and then they will rephrase, and then they will adjust, and then they will find excuses. And this isn't just a moral thing. We've been talking about on the moral plane now; but it's, honestly, in On Tyranny, it's mainly a political thing.

The only way that somebody like Trump can actually transform the whole political system is if people think he can; and not just they're willing to obey orders, but they just, as a default, imagine the world as he imagines it. And then you think, ok, if the world's going to be like that, then what do I have to do to make sure I don't get hurt? And then you half-thinkingly give the power. You give the power, and that's the most anti-freedom thing that you can do. And the problem is, once you've done it, you then use the rest of your mind to justify having done it, and then you're really stuck.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

These exercises feel like one of the reasons that, perhaps, congregations exist - is to really reflect on what our principles are, what we really stand for, or what we will show up for, and to do that as individuals but also as a collective. And so, whatever tradition you might be in, making that intentional and making that explicit among your close congregational partners could be a really important exercise right now.

So, I'm just curious, what are you seeing? We're kind of, whatever, a month in or so after the election and kind of careening towards an inauguration. What are you seeing as far as the country, and are people beginning to obey in advance? What are you seeing?

TIMOTHY SNYDER:

Well, for our conversation, I think one thing which is worth dwelling on is a kind of moral aggression, where the appointments that Trump has put out there - and not all of them are going to survive and some of them have already fallen - but the appointments he put out there have been, I would say, a kind of form of moral aggression. Because if you're dealing with a Pete Hegseth, who is... I mean, I'm sorry, there's just like nothing good to say about him. Okay, other people, I'm sure, are more forgiving than me; but he's a drunk and he abuses women and has no qualifications for the job and his notion of what the US military should be doing is that it should be purged so that there can be a holy war inside the country. I'm quoting him, this is what his books say.

And so you face a choice. Either you say, well, wait a minute, that is nuts, that's crazy, that's really out of bounds. Or if you don't do that, then you start thinking, well, you know, look, the guy performed military service and he can tie a tie on his own, apparently. And you know, whatever you put on the other side. Or you start saying, well, people are criticizing him, poor man… Whatever you do, whatever move you make - anything, I think, except repugnance, you're then buying in. The moral aggression has made you immoral.

And I think the same goes for a whole bunch of these other appointments. Like Matt Gaetz, who's fallen already, but that's just extreme moral aggression, because if you do anything but say, well, wait a minute, he's not only not qualified, but he's somebody who has been dodging and avoiding the rule of law his whole life - how can he be the attorney general? Like, if you do anything besides repugnance, you're then a victim of this moral aggression.

I don’t know what you can say in favor of him, honestly, except that, like, look, he’s a White guy and he can apparently tie a tie by himself. I don’t know what, beyond that, you can say. But people were saying it. There are people who are in favor of him being confirmed. And this goes on and on and on.

I mean, you know Tulsi Gabbard who went to Syria and questioned little girls who'd been burned by bombs from Russian planes or Syrian planes, and questioned whether that was what actually happened to the girls themselves! To the girls themselves who were burnt. Somebody who defends Assad's murder of hundreds of thousands of his own people - to take that as a starting point for a director of national intelligence of the United States - what do you say about that, except that it's hideous and repugnant? But again, she's well-spoken and she's attractive and so then people will say, well, somehow this is thinkable.

And I think of all this as moral aggression. It's like these missiles that are launched at you, and if you don't dodge them completely, you end up kind of riding them, and you're like, oh well, this is okay. Somehow, this is okay. And there's a lot of that.

And broadly speaking, Paul, I guess where I'm bringing this back to, is that's a kind of obeying in advance. When you think these things - which Trump is intending to be unthinkable, his whole point is that they're unthinkable - if you start to think of them as being okay, then you're going along. You're going along for this ride, and you've morally disarmed yourself because, my God, if you accept this at the beginning, when he's not even president, then what on earth are you going to ever resist later on? Which is the point of all these appointments. So that’s one of the things which has been on my mind this first month, is these appointments as a kind of moral test, and a political test.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

The other thing that I think is probably worth thinking about is how the media is going to react to this moment. Personally, I think, the media totally failed us in this last election with just the normalization of Trump as a candidate, given what he had done and what he had tried to do after his last term. And I think you already see it happening, and I don't even know what to say about it, although it's very interesting how there's going to be, I think, some sort of media upheaval right now, because people are not sure what storytellers are good storytellers, and so I'm just curious what you think about the media.

TIMOTHY SNYDER:

I have this view, and as you know, it's basically Chapter Four of On Freedom. I have this view that factuality is something which has to start really small and, like a lot of things that have to do with freedom, it requires collective effort. And the moment you give up on the value of factuality and you don't want to make the effort anymore, then you're losing something.

And we have this notion that there's a free market of ideas and that the best ideas rise to the top - and that's unfortunately just not true. You know, it's just not the case. Very often the worst ideas rise to the top, especially when there's nobody out there doing the work of collecting the million small truths. It's the million small truths that save people from the big lie, and in the last 15 years, we've basically let American reporting go. And so that's my big thought about the media, and I'm trying to make it a positive thought that we've lost something which, in some form, I think we have to regain.

I mean, it's probably never going to be back in the same sense of having print newspapers like we used to have, but some form of organized fact finding is necessary - because you can't just say, oh, that's a conspiracy theory, that's a big lie. You have to have a population that is used to there being facts in the world, because when there's a vacuum, or to switch my metaphors, if it's just a smooth surface, then everybody just slides along and they're pulled this way and that by kind of what they want to believe or what sounds good to them, or whatever it might be, or what makes them feel better than other people.

So that's what I think about the media. I think it's the absence of a certain kind of media, specifically the local reporting and investigative reporting, which has got us to where we are, and so therefore you can think about that as something that can be repaired.

As for the media we have right now, it's easy to criticize them, and I will - but I just want to say that I think the problem is really structural. So as far as the things that they do which they shouldn't do now, they really, really, really shouldn't talk about guardrails. This whole metaphor is making me crazy. There aren't any guardrails. We're not on some kind of metaphorical highway. I mean, we may all be trapped inside Elon Musk's Tesla, but we're not really on a highway and there aren't really guardrails. And the metaphors you use, as you say, the metaphors you use are the foundation of the story that you're telling. And if the story is one in which there are guardrails, then okay, a guardrail is just there, right - but there isn't any guardrail just there!

This car, like Elon Musk's Tesla, it can drive you right off the cliff, and you could just go straight down and blow up. That could happen because there aren't, in fact, guardrails. Insofar as there are barriers, they do arise from social norms and laws, but those things all have to be made lively by people and their actions and their thoughts and their words every day. So I wish we could put the kibosh on the guardrails, and not talk about the guardrails.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Okay, so Professor Snyder is saying that we are all in Elon Musk's car. That's our new metaphor. I think that's the headline. No, guardrails is really interesting, and I think that part of the reason people use it is because it felt like in the last Trump administration there were people who were acting in ways that would temper his authoritarianism or whatever. And certainly, those people are not there anymore. But I think it's probably helpful to think as if there's a set road that we're definitely traveling on, and that there's guardrails on either side, but the road is already there. We don't know what the road is going to be. There's no road… There's no guardrails, but there's also no road. and so it's really... That is a very provocative. I'm sorry I cut you off.

TIMOTHY SNYDER:

No, no, it's good. You're making this better all the time. Like we’re on this open heath, but we're trapped inside Elon Musk's car and the stereo is on and we can't turn it off. But that's another feature.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Well, and actually, it's pre-programmed to Elon's favorite tunes that are, you know, very bro-y tech, bro-y tunes. Maybe we've gone as far as we need to with that.

TIMOTHY SNYDER:

I think we have taken this car off the cliff. We probably do deserve a fiery death at this point. Another thing, since you asked, another thing I really - people on the far right say this, but also people on the far left say it sometimes, too, and it annoys me more when they do it - the third thing I really wish people would stop saying in the media is, “shake things up.” A government is not something that can be shaken up, right. A cocktail, yes; but aside from cocktails, there's almost nothing in the world that actually needs to be shaken up. Maybe a paint can or something, but in general, shaking things is bad. And I think when people talk about Trump appointing some anti-vaxxer to some important health position, now that's going to shake things up. No, it's not going to shake anything up. It's just going to kill lots of people. Let's cut to the chase, let's avoid the kind of half-hopeful metaphors, because it's not going to shake anything up. It's just going to wreck things, and I think the shaking things up idea allows us... It's like oh, there's a silver lining to every cloud. No, sometimes there's just hail coming out of that cloud.

 PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Right, the idea that you can break something. That's like very Humpty Dumpty. You know, just just on the facts thing. I want to make sure that we get that, because one of the most chilling moments very early in 2017, was when Kellyanne Conway said: ”We have alternative facts.” And then you were like, oh, I get it. There's no establishing reality here, or we are going to establish the reality that helps us get to what we want, rather than look at actual facts. I think that that's really important.

Right now we are doing a lot of reflecting, as an organization that works on religion and democracy, around what is the role of religion in democracy and, especially right now, the way freedom of religion has been weaponized - in some cases to specifically marginalize our responsibility to one another. If you're free not to serve someone, free to not serve a LGBTQ person, I'm just curious how you understand the freedom of religion in relation to, certainly, the First Amendment, but also in your deep understanding of what freedom means.

TIMOTHY SNYDER:

All right, I'll start with that and then you can cut in, because we're coming at this from two very different positions. I think that there's a very positive relationship, or there can be, between religion and freedom. The freedom of religion is basically, it's a negative thought, right, like there should be a separation between Church and State, and there should. But I want to start somewhere else.

You can't really have freedom without a notion of what is good, and one thing that religion serves people as is as a kind of metaphysical source. Religion can offer notions of what is good - not the only ones, and certainly not ones that can't be challenged by other religions or by people who are not religious. But religion can be a source of metaphysical commitment. It can lead you to caring about things like consistency or grace or mercy, and those things are necessary for freedom.

So I'm not saying religion is necessary for freedom, but I'm saying that there's a fundamental way in which a religious commitment can actually help with freedom - so long as that you recognize and this is now important and this is in the book, it's also in my other book, Road to Unfreedom - so long as you recognize that on this earth those things clash.

So the moment you think like this earth could be God's earth and they could all be brought together into one thing, then you're a totalitarian. I mean, then you're a Christo-fascist or something, and you're not going to be supporting freedom. Because in fact, at least in our world, there is a clash between patience and precision. There's a clash between mercy and consistency. There's often a clash between loyalty and honesty. You know all kinds of clashes, and so long as you recognize that, though, then I can see religion as a wellspring of freedom. I just wanted to start with that, because I don't want to see the whole thing as problematic from the very beginning.

The second thing in terms of Christianity, which I noticed as an observer of Europe and also in the US, is this kind of distinction between Christianity as an us-them distinction, or Christianity as a sort of doctrine of neighborliness, like in the Good Samaritan sense. Because you know, there was a conversation between two people who may not be that familiar, but Viktor Orban and Donald Tusk about a decade ago, in which, Orban was describing Christianity as us and them - like we're the Christians and everybody else is the Muslim, Jewish, whatever hordes. And Tusk was saying, no, Christianity is a doctrine of brotherly love. It's a doctrine of toleration. To be a Christian means to accept the humanity of those other people. And those are two very different notions of Christianity and they're at loggerheads right now, and unfortunately at least judging by the American election where Trump got a clear minority of Jews and Muslims but a clear majority of Christians, it's one of those ideas which seems to be prevailing.

And I guess another thing which worries me among American Christians and Trump is this sort of sneaky nihilism, where Christianity is all about preemptive forgiveness - and you're going to have to help me with this - but one thing that I noticed among a figure like Mike Johnson is like, no matter how bad your guy is, it's okay because, you've already forgiven him preemptively. It's like always forgiven advance.

No matter what Trump does, Mike Johnson's going to be there to say it's okay. Now, what kind of Christianity is that, exactly? The always forgive in advance? I mean, I understand that we want to be forgiving, but the notion that all evil is okay, because I've already adopted a stance in which whatever someone does, I have the personal power to forgive it. That strikes me as being very dangerous, and as a kind of empirical challenge which is out there.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Just on Mike Johnson and other Christian nationalists who are supporting Trump, they're not even looking at him, actually, as a Christian. They're looking at him, as they've described him, as a Cyrus figure, as someone who's anointed by God to help Christians regain their status. So, so he doesn't have to live up. They've already exempted him. So that was a very neat trick to kind of get around all of his moral failings, because he was anointed by God to do something else - and that's like really, really rough, terrible theology, but one that is definitely operating in a lot of people's minds.

I've just enjoyed this conversation so much, but I would be remiss if I didn't invite you to think more globally about what's happened here, and how it's going to impact the rest of the world. And, specifically, you've been such an important voice on Ukraine and recognizing that there's a whole other world out there that isn't about America, but America certainly impacts the rest of the world. And so I would be would like for you to help us learn how to think about the impact that this will have in Europe, and specifically in the clash between Russia and Ukraine.

TIMOTHY SNYDER:

Well, again, I'd like to start positively on that. I think we have to be. In order to make sense of that, one has to start with what the Ukrainians are already doing. And what the Ukrainians are doing is, I think, very important to one of the essential parts of this conversation, which is the metaphysical element of freedom. If we think freedom is just negative, then we can think of it as like a question in physics. You know, I'm just a billiard ball and maybe I'm bouncing up against the bunker, or I'm not. But if freedom is positive, if it's about values, if it's about things that we hold dear, then the world isn't just a physics problem. The world is about humans who care about things and sometimes have to take risks, and Ukraine's really important for that.

You know, when people talk about Ukraine as a democracy and a fighting democracy, all that's true; but within that there's also this element that people have a hard time getting their fingers on, which is the metaphysical part. They're taking risks because they actually think something is good. They think their way of doing things with their local democracy and their regional democracy and their civil society is better than a way of doing things which involves abducting children and terror and nihilism. And that may seem like an easy choice, but it's actually not, because you have to take the risk in order to do whatever, to stay in the country to fight.

And not that it's easy or simple, because it's really  incredibly complicated and messy. But if we let the Ukrainians lose, or if we throw American power on Russia's side - which is one of the things that the Trump administration could conceivably do, and make the Ukrainians lose - we're putting out that spark. It's not just that it's a domino, right, that's just in the physical world; but it's also like a spark being snuffed out, like it's an example of people who are willing to take risks for something they regard as good, which didn't work, and therefore it's going to be much less likely to be followed, because people are not going to see this sense of it right.

It's going to be a terrible victory for the people in the world like Putin and like Trump, who don't think there's anything good. And if you don't think there's anything good, you never end up with democracy, because democracy only makes sense if you think that there's a community of people who have different ideas of the good and therefore we're going to have elections, we're going to sort it all out with representation. But if nothing's good, you're never going to end up with democracy. If nothing's good, you're just going to end up with, well, I've got $100 billion and I'm going to try to control the army; or I control the army, therefore, I'm going to try to get $100 billion. Like those are the two variants that are left when you say that nothing's true and nothing's good.

So I just want to start with that, with what the Ukrainians have been doing for us. And then there's strategic things. You know that they're deterring China, probably, because they're showing how offensive operations are difficult. Or they're holding off nuclear proliferation because they're showing that you can keep a war at a conventional level even if the opponent is a nuclear power. They're holding up the international order in the sense that they're defending the basic principle that you shouldn't be violating borders with force and annexing territories. They're doing a whole lot of things that make our world more sensible and more coherent. And if we lose that, sure, it will be horrible for tens of millions of Ukrainians if we try to sacrifice them; but it will also be horrible for us, because they're doing things for us the whole time which we take for granted.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Timothy Snyder is the author of books that have shaped discourse around history, authoritarianism and democracy. The newest is titled On Freedom. Dr Snyder is Levin Professor of History at Yale University.

Professor Snyder, thank you so much for being with us today on The State of Belief. I've really enjoyed this conversation.TIMOTHY SNYDER:

Really glad we were able to have it. Thank you very much.