Transcript: Why freedom is on the ballot this November: Historian Timothy Snyder
Ian Bremmer:
Hello and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast. This is where you can find extended versions of my interviews on public television. I'm Ian Bremmer, and today, Election Day is fast approaching in the most unusual, may well be consequential presidential race in modern US history.
My guest today, historian Tim Snyder, he's out with a new book that argues for reframing how we as Americans, and everyone else frankly, think of freedom. The book, you'll be shocked to learn, is called On Freedom. We'll be having a lofty ivory-towered debate on philosophical principles.
No, no, actually we have an election coming up in just weeks, days. If you want to count that way, you are free to do so. So how is freedom on the ballot in November, and what kind of freedoms should Americans be looking for? There's plenty to get into, so let's do it. Here's my conversation with historian Tim Snyder. Tim Snyder, really great to have you on the show.
Tim Snyder:
Glad to be with you.
Ian Bremmer:
Congrats on the new book “On Freedom,” that's certainly what we want to spend most of our time talking about. I'm thinking back to when you and I were graduate students decades ago. At that point, there was a lot of talk about freedom “from.” Freedom from autocracy, freedom from communism, freedom from living behind the Iron Curtain. You suggest in this book that now we should be thinking differently about freedoms, at least those of us living in places that are ostensibly democratic and free like the United States. Explain to our audience what you mean.
Tim Snyder:
Well, when I think back those 30 years in, I think you probably had the right idea back then because you were somebody who was already thinking in terms of building stuff and combining things, and having various schemes, and starting things up. And that's more the spirit of freedom. After 1989 or '91, we had the idea that if you could just clear the bad stuff away, in that case Communism, then the good stuff would automatically appear in some sort of transition. But that's not how it works.
Freedom “from” only makes sense because of freedom “to.” It matters if there's some kind of a barrier, but only matters because a person is hindered by that barrier. And once you get rid of the barrier, you still have to ask, what kind of a person do I want to be? What are my purposes? How can I fulfill them?
Or more broadly as a society, what can we do to create the conditions in which as many of us as possible can be as free as possible? So that's I think the right way to think about freedom, the positive way about thinking about freedom. And I think one of the reasons we've got ourselves into the jam that we're in is that we've been thinking negatively about freedom for 30 years, which means that we're psychologically closed off, and we're politically closed off. And we can't use what is basically our central political concept to get ourselves moving again.
Ian Bremmer:
How free do you think the citizens of the United States are today?
Tim Snyder:
We're middle of the pack. Middle of the pack. We're okay on political liberties. I mean, if we just fell back on Freedom House, we'd see roughly 50, top third okay. We're not going to make the playoffs, for sure.
Ian Bremmer:
These are the democracy rankings of countries around the world you're talking about, yeah.
Tim Snyder:
The reason why I start with Freedom House is because it's pro-American in the sense that it uses American-type quantifiers of civil and political liberties. Whereas if you throw in things like healthcare and so on, then we would be doing much worse. So 50 is about our ceiling, honestly. And there are reasons why we're not free, and they're not just the political ones that not everybody can vote easily, and our political system is confused, and there's too much money in politics.
It's also that freedom is about how calm you feel, whether you feel you have lots of choices. You have to stay in a job because of health insurance, you're not free. If you don't have health insurance, you're even less free. If you're worried about your health, you're less free. If you're not sure where your kids are going to go to school and you fret about that, then you're less free than you would be. And so we have the habit of talking about ourselves is free, but I think we turned the corner a while ago to the place where we talk about freedom to compensate for the fact that we're not actually leading that free lives.
Ian Bremmer:
If you're working in a job you don't like, if you feel like you need to make more money, you need to have more status. If you're engaged algorithmically as opposed to by yourself, that doesn't sound very much like you're free in the way you think about that. And that seems more existential to me than even talking just about the United States or democracies.
Tim Snyder:
Yeah, I agree. I mean, in the book, I'm trying to start from the ground up. I'm trying to define freedom in terms of what we know both from traditions of philosophy, and findings of science about what kind of creatures we actually are. And so I do end with prescriptions for the US, but I'm trying to write about everybody, and I want to take your point.
There are engines of predictability out there in social media which take the worst bits of us and reinforce them, and make them stronger. And of course there are also tough parts about daily life which lead us to be less free, and which we've learned not to call freedom. But a kid should have a chance to become many things, and an adult shouldn't be stuck... Even, it's good to have a job, but we shouldn't be stuck in jobs we don't like if we've got other ideas. We give up, we talk about freedom and then we give up on it too quickly, and then we also miss, I think the new kinds of threats that you're talking about, the digital ones.
Ian Bremmer:
As you're writing this book, how did it change the way you think about yourself?
Tim Snyder:
I love that question because in the book, I'm trying to be Socratic in the sense of asking questions rather than just having answer after answer, after answer, syllogism after syllogism, after syllogism. Not only asking questions, there are no question marks. It's that I'm taking for granted I got a lot of things wrong.
And so I'm an American who's had, by normal measures, a pretty successful life. And I think I've also been able to live a pretty free life, I've been able to do a lot of the things that I want to do, think the things I want to think, combine the values I want to combine. That's been good. But to what extent is that typical, and to what extent is it exceptional, and in what ways are the exceptions of things that I need to learn more about? So I think I was stuck a little bit too much in the idea that I am an individual who can do everything by himself, and a health crisis and almost dying reminded me that you can push that way of thinking too far and put yourself in danger. But it doesn't just put yourself in danger.
If you think I am the kind of hearty individualist who doesn't need healthcare, you're going to vote against it, and you're going to vote against it for everybody, and then maybe your country doesn't have universal healthcare, which we don't as Americans, and then maybe we're all less free as a result of that. So I mean, it's banal, but the book is kind of written around 50 years of my own mistakes. The consistency of it is that even when I was a little kid and didn't understand things, I cared about freedom, and I still do, but the biographical arc of the book is trying to push on the little mistakes that I made along the way.
Ian Bremmer:
Yeah, I mean, most good nonfiction is going to have some autobiographical baseline to it, and I always find that interesting. But especially in something where it's so clear that the line you're discussing is one that matters to you intrinsically just as a person, as a human being. If I were to ask you what values you consider most important, I assume that you'd put freedom in the way you define it right at the top.
Tim Snyder:
Ian, you're absolutely right. That is what we like to call through line in my life. But I think as I've understood myself better, the way that I think about freedom has also become better. I think freedom has to involve other people.
So yeah, it's true that this is what I care about. But the reason why I think it's the most important is it's the value of values. So you and I care about different things and we should, but what is the condition in which we can juggle and combine and make those values real? That's freedom. And you can't create freedom in that sense alone, nor can I. We need institutions and cooperation, which even has to be generational, because we want little kids to grow up so that they can have free lives. We have to be thinking about what already has to be there when they're born.
So the reasons... I mean, the way that I think about freedom comes from my education. There are thinkers in here which have helped me with this, which helped me understand that if there are many good things, then the thing which allows you to manage those many good things has to be the best thing, and that's freedom. But also the thinkers, and some of them are familiar to you and come from things we both studied, but the thinkers have helped me to understand that in order to be free, you also have to not have illusions about yourself. And the best way not to have illusions about yourself is to take other people seriously, which is hard, but it's I think an essential part of freedom.
Ian Bremmer:
Let's move to the backdrop that everyone is thinking about right now, which is we're in the middle of an election where freedom is seen to be on the ballot, democracy is seen to be on the ballot. I mean, we talk about issues, we talk about personalities, but one of the top issues that is being debated in this election, unusually in the United States, is kind of the core, what does the United States stand for? And are the values that America ostensibly holds under threat, at stake? Most Americans say yes, but they say yes for very, very different reasons. Talk about your view on this.
Tim Snyder:
Well, this is one way that my book is very conservative in that I think there's a right and wrong answer to what freedom is. And so I think a lot of people are wrong, and I'm not just going to referee the debate and say like, well, this position has something to be said for it.
Ian Bremmer:
Let's be fair, Tim. Most Americans think a lot of people are wrong. So in that regard, you're not all that different from the mainstream.
Tim Snyder:
I'm always reassured when I'm told I'm like most Americans, it doesn't happen all that often so, good. Yeah, but I think one of the moves we make both on the left and the right is in different ways we say, "Okay, you have a strong emotion about this view, therefore I'm going to respect it." And that's not the move I'm starting from. The move I'm starting from is, there's a correct way to define freedom.
And one of the things which is necessary in this view, this sort of pluralist view that I'm giving, is that there is a world of facts. Because of course we have different values, but if we also have different facts, we're not going to end up in a free world because whoever has the most power over fantasy is going to end up deciding things. So you can take the view, for example, that JD Vance is free from his position to make up stories about animal-eating immigrants.
But if we don't have a fabric in the background of factuality, including things like reporters believing in facts, but also institutions of facts, we're not going to end up being free. So I think the view that power can lie to us and fool us as freedom is wrong, and I think the view that all of us need a kind of backstop of background factuality in order to be free is right. So people think this is at stake for different reasons, and that's kind of why I'm glad that I am coming in now with a kind of conceptual discussion of what freedom actually is, because I think we need that. I think people are groping a little bit. I think we've worn the word out so that it means everything, and the moment it means everything, it's going to end up meaning nothing.
Ian Bremmer:
And so if you were to take freedom and apply it to this election, apply it to the stakes of this election, people being able to do the things that make them human, that make them citizens, that make them members of family, that make them members of community. How do those things apply to this election?
Tim Snyder:
In a number of different ways. I mean, the Trump version of government is dysfunctionality plus spectacle. So if they win, they're going to put in a bunch of people who replace the civil servants, and the government's not going to work, and we're going to have some version of cats and dogs being eaten every day. It's going to be dysfunctionality plus spectacle.
In that world, people aren't going to be free because they're not going to get their Social Security checks. Various things aren't going to work, including for business, by the way. Business is going to be much less functional because the things that business needs to get done aren't going to get done by that federal government. And the strongman principle is going to be reinforced because when the institutions don't work, the only way to get things done is by appealing to people you know, and becoming somebody's client.
So that's at stake. The other thing which is at stake is the sort of oligarchical libertarian view of freedom, which is very present, for example, in JD Vance. The idea that government can't really do anything. It's not really capable of doing anything, but we can make it small and let my friends who have lots of money actually determine what kind of values we're going to have, what kind of media we're going to be able to use, how we're going to be able to think because of the algorithms, and so forth. That's all at stake.
And then voting too. Because we think of voting's an individual right, but if you can vote easily, that just raises the question of who can't vote easily? And that's a good example of freedom as solidarity. There is one party which thinks people should vote, and there's another party which thinks people shouldn't vote, and that goes right to the heart of what freedom is going to mean.
And on the other side, I don't have anything to do with this personally, but I'm heartened that the Democrats, for political reasons, started to use the word freedom. And notice they used it as freedom “from”. They started with freedom as negative because that's American common sense. But once Kamala Harris starts using it, it can slip into freedom “to,” as it's doing. And I find that very heartening.
Ian Bremmer:
On the abortion issue, for example, which is the principal issue that she's been scoring points with the public, has been a freedom to have a choice as a woman over your body.
Tim Snyder:
She starts from the rhetoric of, we're the people who are going to keep the government away from your body, and then it moves to, we'll be the people who enable you to live the kind of life that you want to live. And once you have that rhetoric, you can start talking about health and social security and so on in terms of freedom, which I honestly believe is the right way to talk about those things.
Ian Bremmer:
It's interesting because in that regard, it's a smaller government argument on some of this side. I mean, we're keeping the government out of your body. We're not monitoring that. You get to make the decision, which is in principle, a more libertarian position from the government perspective.
Tim Snyder:
I mean, the way that one has to modify libertarianism is to take seriously what it means to become free, because libertarianism assumes that you already have all the stuff you need to be personally free. Whereas if we want everybody to be free we have to ask, what do we have to provide for everyone?
So shifting back to the book, the way I'm trying to argue this is that the justification for the things government does has to be freedom. We don't want government doing things that aren't related to freedom. The libertarian mistake is to say there's an easy answer, have the government do nothing, that isn't going to work. If power abhors a vacuum, other things will come in, there will not be freedom. But if you say government exists in order to make us free, you actually have a good argument for good stuff. Like for example, the welfare state, because the welfare state makes our lives more predictable in such a way that we can be more unpredictable and more free.
Ian Bremmer:
Now I understand how it's easy and opportune to use freedom as a brick bat against MAGA Trumpism, right? I also am interested in freedom in the way it is not applied by an establishment in the United States, left and right, that controls so many of the formal and informal levers of power. In a way that the United States is, its ceiling the 50th most-free country in the world, even though it's vastly richer and more powerful than that. And that has been the result and the responsibility of leaders on the left and the right for a very long time in the United States. I'd like you to address that as well.
Tim Snyder:
I agree with you. I agree with you. I mean, we use freedom to express anger and we use freedom to express opposition. We use freedom to express rebellion, whereas in fact, freedom is a creative concept. Freedom is about how you and I can be more interesting and better, or our kids could be more interesting and better. Freedom is about a future which is better than the present. Freedom is about all the good things that we might know about, and all the good things we have yet to discover. It's not about anger, it's not about barriers. And that's a bit of a critique of the right, what I just said.
And on the left, there's the problem that everyone wants to frame things in terms of justice and equality, and justice and equality are good things, but they have their limits. Whereas freedom, it doesn't really. Freedom's much more communicable, and the things that you want for justice, or fraternity, or equality, can be better justified in terms of freedom.
Not only that people understand it better, but actually it makes a lot more sense. If you and I have health insurance, it's not going to make us equal, but it is going to make us more capable of freedom. If we have retirement benefits, we have longer vacations and so on, that doesn't make us equal, but it does make us more capable of being interesting people with habits, and friendships, and lifelong commitments, and so on.
So I mean, I think you can take the best of... Look, I'm writing a book of philosophy. I'm not starting from the way things are, I'm starting from how they should be, but I try to take something good from traditions. And so I think conservatives are right that virtues are real. And I think liberals are right to say, well, but there are many different virtues, and you have to combine them. And I think the social Democrats are right to say, hold on guys, there might be good things in the world, but we're not going to have people who get to embrace those good things unless we lay down some basic social fundaments for them like healthcare, and kindergarten, and so on and so forth. There's a way in which everybody's right in this discussion, and we're used to saying that everybody's wrong. But if we say, wait a minute, everybody's right, you could define freedom drawing from those three positions, then you might get somewhere.
Ian Bremmer:
Now, if I widen the lens a little bit and say, who's the most free by your definition in the world? I mean, it's very easy with a Western definition, looking at sort of these kind of liberal values to talk about the Nordics, for example, or say Canada's freer than the United States. But with this broader definition, it feels almost philosophical to me. My knee jerk, I'd be going to a place like Bhutan in terms of freedom too. They may not be so wealthy, but they also have an orientation towards themselves and their fellow citizens. That doesn't matter all that much. Am I on the right track there? Tell me I'm wrong.
Tim Snyder:
No, I want to do a separate half-hour podcast where I ask you questions about Bhutan at this point in the conversation. I think you're right. And I think we have a big problem with conformism, and we have a big problem with ideas which require us to take other people seriously.
And honestly, I think that does go back to the negative freedom problem, because negative freedom assumes that I'm right, and it's only the barrier outside, which is the problem, so I should try to knock down the barrier, with my head if necessary. And there are barriers, but very often you're not right, and not even about yourself, and you have to have some way of listening to other people, and getting their own unpredictable ideas into your way of thinking. Which is why I dwell so much with the dissidents, which is something I at least feel familiar with and can talk about, because the dissidents were concerned not with freedom... I mean, they resisted and they went to prison and all of that, but their idea of freedom was, I'm unpredictable, I have odd quirky ideas, and you might too, and maybe those things will overlap, and we need the space to work all that out. That's what freedom means. It's about.
Ian Bremmer:
To me, Solzhenitsyn learned that he was free in the Gulag.
Tim Snyder:
Yeah, that's true. And this book is based on a lot of writing from East Europeans in prison. I also redrafted it teaching in prison. And it is true that you can come to interesting conclusions and make interesting moral combinations in prison. You don't want to push that logic too far.
Ian Bremmer:
No, I wasn't going to suggest it, because we might end up in a different US system.
Tim Snyder:
But I'm going to agree with you about Bhutan, because I really like that way of thinking because, I can't look that far. You travel more than me, you've got knowledge I don't have. But when I look at Costa Rica, there's a country which is definitely-
Ian Bremmer:
No, I put Costa Rica on that list too. Absolutely. And not just because of the monkeys, though I like them.
Tim Snyder:
And the sloths, and the-
Ian Bremmer:
Sloths are great, yeah.
Tim Snyder:
Yeah, so I think sloths have a lot figured out. And not just because of the solar energy either, but because of the reciprocity, and the relaxation, and kind of the sense that life is more open and we're less stressed, and we wake up in the morning and many things are possible, and some are going to be good. I've been going to Costa Rica-
Ian Bremmer:
They don't have a national military. It feels like a community. It's a large community, but it's a community. So how much is freedom just cut off by size once you get to the point that you're really very far between the lower levels of power, and the higher, the geographic center of power and the tertiary. I mean, how much has it just become so, so much harder for human beings to get this right? Because both of these places, Costa Rica and Bhutan are reasonably homogeneous, kind of isolated, tiny places.
Tim Snyder:
So let me take that question apart a little bit and just say that it's not... Like physical scale can be broken down into smaller units. And I think part of our problem is that the US so to speak, is bigger than it was in the sense of more vacuous, in the sense of more empty, containing fewer things.
So for example, the media, we have less media now, and it's worse than we did 40 years ago. And so that makes us bigger in a sense because everybody, and I write about this in the book, people who used to have newspapers have to go up to the national conversation where they're helpless, where they're objects. Like people in Springfield, Ohio, which is pretty close to where I'm from, right now they're helpless objects in a national conversation, as opposed to having their own local reporters who would've just knocked this thing away a long time ago. And that's for people in general, right?
And then another example of that is wealth. So the wealth is much more concentrated in a few hands now than it was 40 years ago. And that means in effect that the country's bigger in the sense of more distant. If you're an average American, there are a few people who are far away from you physically, and even further away from you mentally who have all kinds of weird capabilities which are very different from your own capabilities. And in that sense, the country is bigger, like more vacuous, there's more distance in it than there used to be.
Ian Bremmer:
So people need to be closer to each other in a tangible sense, to be more free.
Tim Snyder:
Absolutely right. And I was using non-American thinkers to help us with those intuitions. I think that is absolutely correct. You're not free-
Ian Bremmer:
In that regard, the biggest problem with US society in that regard is atomization, right? It's not fragmentation, it's atomization. It's people feeling alone, people feeling unconnected to others.
Tim Snyder:
It's cool to be different, but difference sometimes allows you to intersect with other people. It's not good to be lonely, it's not good to be isolated. And a lot of the isolation is engineered now because of all the time we spend on screens. And if we're quirky, then we can kind of intersect and stick. But if we've been smoothed off by the algorithms, then it's just a kind of us and them. We're all like this, and they're all like that. And then ironically, it's not just that you're against the ones who are different, you also don't really have any way to interact with the ones who are the same, because you've all been smoothed off. The quirks have all been smoothed away.
Ian Bremmer:
This is why there's so much space for Trumpism in the United States right now because so many people feel alone, feel alienated, feel like they've been left behind by a political system that is far from them, that doesn't care about them. Right, I mean, that's what we're seeing in 2024, isn't it?
Tim Snyder:
That's a big part of it. But then the other part of it is the aggressive exploitation of those sentiments.
Ian Bremmer:
Yes.
Tim Snyder:
Both by people who own the platforms, and by people like Trump who are able to use the platforms. I mean, this is all Hannah Arendt. When you're alone, when you're isolated, then you counteract that by joining a mob. Whereas what we want is not mob. We don't want loneliness and mobs, we want people in little unpredictable groups doing things that they like to do, that they have time to do because they have elementary things like vacations and parental leave and so on, and which government has to do, but which make us more free, less alienated, less lonely, less vulnerable to this sort of stuff.
Ian Bremmer:
So before we close, I want to talk about a personal passion of yours and mine from our history, that's Ukraine. You just came back from a trip to Kyiv, and there of course, fundamental freedoms are being subverted in horrible ways every day. Talk a little to me about your trip in the context of what it means for Ukrainians to be free.
Tim Snyder:
It took me a long time to write this book, and I tried to check myself. Going back to your point about listening to other people, being with other people, I took the manuscript with me three times to Ukraine because the Ukrainians were the ones who were talking about freedom. And the way they were talking about it, it's not that they talk about it a lot, they're making a lot of sense. And one of the things which is really tangible is de-occupation.
Like there's this Ukrainian word “de-occupation,” which they tend to say instead of liberation. And that really gets you thinking about freedom as positive because sure, you can de-occupy, and it's important that the torture stops, and the deportation stop, and the kidnapping of children stops. But the word de-occupation reminds you that that is still just the beginning. You have to clear the rubble and rebuild the playgrounds, and the buses and the trains have to start running again. For the Ukrainians, the trains reaching a town is a mark of freedom. So we have this glamorous sense, you get the army out and you're free. And when they get the army out, the Russian army out, they still have to do other things. That's very helpful.
And another thing that they've been very helpful with for me is thinking about the future. Because we get caught up in the time when we were innocent, when we were great, when the founders were riding dinosaurs, and everything was terrific. And if there's freedom, it's in the future. You have to know history, and know tradition, and draw lines from the past in the future. But if we're going to be free, it's going to be in the future by imagining lots of better futures than what we've got now. And when the Ukrainians talk about the Russians, it's often in terms of, the Russians got in the way of this future. I think that's also very helpful.
And then in the final thing, which I got from Zelensky in the beginning of the war, but comes from other people too is the sense that, if freedom is positive in the sense that it's about good things and about commitments, then sometimes you can't run. If freedom is just about barriers and impulses and bad things, then you can always run. But if freedom is about caring about certain things, then over time as you make decisions and become a certain kind of person with character, then being a free person sometimes means you can't run. And that's been very helpful for me as an American, partly as I remember back to February, 2022, when so many of our fellow Americans assumed that the Ukrainians would run. And I think that didn't say much about them, but it maybe said something about us. And that's one of the reasons that I ended up writing the book the way that I did.
Ian Bremmer:
Life is a wonderful, and painful, and tragic, and extraordinary, but the fact is that for in the United States, stasis for many feels like an option. Where in Ukraine, it really isn't, right?
Tim Snyder:
The choices are stark, and the reason they have to keep fighting is that they can see the difference between fighting and occupation in a way which is not clear to us. That's it. But it's also true that it's not just that occupation is so terrible, it's that they tend to have an imagination about how things could be much better than they are. And that's something that I'd like to have more of here because yes, stasis can seem like an option, but if you try stasis for too long, it becomes something else. It becomes fermentation, it becomes rot, it becomes a lack of imagination, and things start to spiral downwards.
Ian Bremmer:
It's very important that people have a chance to think about, debate these issues. You know, psychologists and philosophers have worked on them for a long time, but bringing it to history, political science, and our government today, that's something I really appreciate is what you're doing, and I hope they will. Tim Snyder, thanks so much for joining me today.
Tim Snyder:
Thank you, Ian, thanks for taking the time. Really good to talk to you.
Ian Bremmer:
That's it for today's edition of the GZERO World Podcast. Do you like what you heard? Of course you do. Why not make it official? Why don't you rate and review GZERO World 5 stars, only 5 stars, otherwise don't do it, on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Tell your friends.
