Threats to democratic values
In the years since the 2016 US presidential election there has been no more significant critic of the advance of Trump’s form of nihilism than Timothy Snyder. The Yale history professor effectively took a sabbatical from his day job in 2017 to write On Tyranny, a series of 20 lessons derived from his close study of totalitarian regimes in Europe in the last century and how they might apply to the US in this one.
He followed that book, in 2018, with The Road to Unfreedom, an illuminating and disturbing account of the ways in which Vladimir Putin’s war on truth was being seeded as a global virus, promoted by the tech oligarchs of Silicon Valley, and amplified by the self-serving populists in the White House and Downing Street and elsewhere. With the prospect of another round of Trump-led deconstruction of the rule of law, Snyder here unites all those strands of his attention and sets out an urgent case for exactly what is worth fighting for: “If I can describe the worst, can I not also describe the best?”
Reclaiming true sovereignty
In his latest book On Freedom Timothy Snyder identifies five key determinants of a truly free society – and it seems highly appropriate that those tenets can be counted on the fingers of one definitely raised fist. Each one leads to the next. The foundation is sovereignty (not the resolve of narrow nationalists but the creation of political conditions in which individuals are safe and enabled to make meaningful choices about their lives, underwritten by empathy). That in turn leads to “unpredictability”, the freedom to behave in ways that authority (and algorithms) cannot control; and mobility (the possibility for young people, in particular, to “break free of the structures (and people) that allowed them to become [sovereign]”. That is only possible with the freedom of “factuality” (“the grip on the world that allows us to challenge it” – Snyder makes a particularly impassioned argument about the devastating effect of local news deserts on democracy); and finally, “solidarity”, the recognition that these freedoms are not just for the privileged 0.1%, but for everyone.
Snyder's On Freedom is a companion volume to On Tyranny and The Road to Unfreedom, penetrating in its analysis of our current crises – of information and climate and civil society – and clear in its prescriptions for change. In it, Snyder reclaims several words that have been co-opted by the so-called libertarians of the right, not least his titular subject, freedom, which here becomes defined not as a negative – as in “freedom from” regulation, or from the demands of fact, or from social obligation – but as an active, physical demand. Too many of us look at freedom as the absence of state power: we think we’re free if we can do and say as we please. But true freedom is “freedom to” – the freedom to thrive, to take risks for futures we choose by working together. Freedom is the value that makes all other values possible.
Source: The Guardian, 23 September 2024.
