283 - Timothy Snyder: Donald Trump and the End of America

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**Robinson Erhardt** (1:10)
So Tim, you've spent your career studying moments when democracies fall apart, when empires push too far, and when people resist. And when you look at the United States right now, is there a historical case you've studied where the comparison helps most or is most illustrative?

**Timothy Snyder** (1:31)
I guess I would start by saying that, as you know very well, the states that we have don't have to exist. And that's where one starts. I think the fact that the US exists and is celebrating 250 years doesn't mean that it will exist in five years or 10 years or 15 years. And that's where I start. States have a beginning and they have an end. And I don't necessarily see our present position as one where the United States is a container and all that happens is inside the container, for better or worse. I see our condition as being inherently international, that the people who govern us or rule us now are specific kinds of internationalists who take their models from abroad, their templates from abroad, a lot of their money from abroad.
And so I am not myself necessarily primarily in the resistance versus tyranny paradigm. I'm personally much more in the state survival, state rebuilding paradigm when it comes to the US. I don't mean to dodge your question. I just want to put my priors right out there in front because I think that the Trump people are much more likely to wreck the US as an entity than they are to succeed in generating some kind of homogenous tyranny from the Pacific to the Atlantic. The contemporary examples that are helpful to me personally, that doesn't mean they're objectively the best, would start with Russia, where many of the things that have happened in the United States happened first in Russia. And many of the clues of what postmodern tyranny or fascism will look like, you can get first from observing Russia. You can see from Russia that hydrocarbons are a bad thing. You can see from Russia that how the centralization of media and the destruction of local reporting is very harmful. You can get from Russia how social media can be consonant with a certain kind of authoritarian politics. So recent examples would include, would probably start with Russia.
As far as general historical moments, I think we're at an imperial turning point, like roughly let's say 130, 140 years ago, where people take a certain kind of imperial order for granted, and the question is, how do you react when it breaks up? So thinking again from inside the United States, but thinking internationally, how do we deal with it when we no longer exercise the same kind of power that we used to? Are we able to exercise power in new ways, or do we choose to fall upon one another? Or to put it in a more historical or sociological way, as we deal with our own heritage of the mass killing and displacement of Native peoples and the enslavement of Africans, as we deal with that, do we choose to focus on how we were always right at home, and thereby lose any possibility for building a post-imperial state, or do we instead continue a conversation inside the United States, which allows us to present ourselves as a credible power outside the United States?
I see us at a imperial transition moment, like at the end of the 19th century or the end of the Second World War. And I think part of our problem in the US is that we're a strangely provincial empire, and so we don't see our challenges as being subject to comparison or as involving other countries.