Timothy Snyder: The Politics of Impotence

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Speaker 8 Hello and welcome to the Bulwark podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller.
I'm delighted to be here with fellow Tim Timothy Snyder, professor of history at Yale, author of the new book On Freedom.

Speaker 8 He's also written a few other books, including Bloodlands, Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, and On Tyranny, 20 Lessons from the 20th Century.

Speaker 8 So you know this is going to be a really uplifting podcast. How are you doing, man? Thanks for doing this.

Speaker 2 Very glad to be with you.

Speaker 8 You had an article last week that was getting sent around the bulwark slack that I wanted to start with before we get to on freedom.

Speaker 8 And it was on your sub stack, which we're all loyal readers of, which is Trump's Hitlerian month.

Speaker 8 My colleague Bill Crystal is this morning in morning shots talking about how maybe we should be talking about how Trump is more akin to fascism than authoritarianism, and that we should be using the F-word.

Speaker 8 I have to admit, I've been

Speaker 8 a little bit hesitant to use the Hitler metaphor because as much as I despise Donald Trump, it's like it's hard for me to envision in my mind gas chambers, you know, and so I do wonder if

Speaker 8 I'm overstating the case or if I'm actually harming the efficacy of the the case by making the comparison, but you make the countercase, that it is a worthwhile comparison.

Speaker 8 So why don't we talk about that first?

Speaker 2 Yeah, so I'm a historian, so it's not a metaphor for me.

Speaker 2 It's not a literary device. Hitler is something that could happen, and he's an example of a larger pattern of politics, which can happen, which we could call fascism.

Speaker 2 Not every time there was a fascist or fascism did it end in the murder of 5.7 million Jews. There were other paths that fascism could take.

Speaker 2 It could take the Italian path, the Romanian path, Spanish, Portuguese, right? So the reflex to say it's not exactly like that or

Speaker 2 it's not exactly the same as Hitler would kind of rule out all comparisons and therefore we would be kind of stuck. in a permanent present where we have no reference points.

Speaker 2 So when you make a comparison, you're not saying this is exactly like that or history repeats itself. It doesn't repeat itself.

Speaker 2 What history does, the only thing that history does, is that it gives us some points of reference so that we have a sense of some things that might be coming. And

Speaker 2 that's why I think this is useful. I don't think it's like the point is not to say like everything's the same or everything's different.

Speaker 2 The point is to say many things are possible, and let's look for patterns that we recognize.

Speaker 8 And to that point, and I think that what you wrote, but also Bill this morning, are both interesting on this. The parallels to Italian fascism are actually pretty strong in a lot of ways.

Speaker 8 And if you read Umberto Echo, You Are Fascism, and he where it kind of lists out the traits of fascism. There are

Speaker 8 a lot of parallels, frankly, to Trumpism and just kind of about the style of it, the affect, in addition to some of the more particulars of the policies.

Speaker 8 So if you kind of look at that period, what jumps out to you as far as other parallels or things that you find the most

Speaker 8 relevant?

Speaker 2 Relating back to the first question,

Speaker 2 I appreciate broadening the context to fascism generally, and I appreciate the reference to Umberto Echo because fascism is something that we take part in.

Speaker 2 It's not something which just comes from outer space. It only works if it has the participation of large numbers of people.
And of course, the people who are doing it don't think it's bad.

Speaker 2 And so when you say like you're like Hitler or like Mussolini, people have been trained to think Hitler and Mussolini are bad, but they don't know why. necessarily.

Speaker 2 And so people who are being fascists or who are doing fascist things don't necessarily know that they're doing fascist things, which I think it, which is precisely why I think it's useful to bring the term in, because if we don't bring the term in, then it becomes impossible to help people make connections.

Speaker 2 They're going to resist these connections, right? It's not like everyone's going to immediately jump through the happy hoop and say, oh, yes, you're right. You mentioned Mussolini.
I'm like Mussolini.

Speaker 2 But without the history. We really don't have a chance to see what's coming.

Speaker 2 So with respect to the comparison between Mussolini and Trump, of course, Ruth Bingat has made, has written a book, which is largely about that, but the overdone masculinity, which like verges on a kind of like conspicuous impotence, you know, like I can't, I'm not actually going to do anything.

Speaker 2 I'm going to fail at everything, but I'm going to be large while I'm failing, which I think J.D.

Speaker 2 Vance has actually perfected this performance of political, like hyper-masculine political impotence where the message is the government isn't actually going to do anything.

Speaker 2 If we fought a war, we would lose it. Everything is bad, but look at me like I'm a guy.

Speaker 2 It's almost like they've taken Mussolini to the next stage because Mussolini at least tried to win wars before he lost them.

Speaker 2 Like he at least tried to make the Italian government do things before failing. Whereas these guys have kind of taken the next conceptual step to all you have to do is perform masculinity.

Speaker 2 But it's a particular kind of masculinity where you give in to Putin in advance, where you admit that you don't have any policy in advance, where like masculinity is entirely visual.

Speaker 2 It's entirely aesthetic.

Speaker 8 So strange that J.D. Vance and Donald Trump, with his makeup of all people, are the representation of performative aesthetic masculinity.

Speaker 8 It feels like it works for them, to a certain audience, less about their personal traits and more about how they tear down other people, right?

Speaker 8 That it's this kind of high school, schoolyard, bullyish form of masculinity.

Speaker 2 I think that observation is absolutely spot on, and it gets to what kind of politics we're talking about because I think in any form

Speaker 2 of a republic in any form where you think about politics as being about the common good you have to have a story about how some things are going to be good for some group other things are good for other group maybe there are things that are going to be good for all of us maybe there'll be institutions we can all agree on and we can kind of compromise and respect one another and move forward.

Speaker 2 So like the politics of, for lack of a better word, progress or the politics of stability, or the politics of prosperity depend on some kind of respect and some kind of language where I can recognize you despite our differences.

Speaker 2 The politics of impotence, which is what they're pioneering, depends precisely on tearing everybody else down all the time.

Speaker 2 Because if you don't actually care about the American state, which they don't, if you don't care about American power, which they don't, if you don't care about any sort of virtue, which they don't, then you have the luxury that you can practice politics just by tearing other people down.

Speaker 2 And when you set that tone and that example, then what you're trying to do is get Americans to just tear each other down all the time over imaginary issues like pets in Springfield, for example.

Speaker 2 You know, you get Americans to tear each other down, and that becomes politics. And that, by the way, is a form of fascism, right?

Speaker 2 You're teaching everybody that all politics is about is choosing the enemy. The state isn't going to do anything for you.
You just choose your enemy. You get to it.
That's it. Aaron Trevor Brandon.

Speaker 8 So when you wrote about Trump's Hitlerian month in September, you were talking mostly about some of his comments related to kind of the bad Jews.

Speaker 8 And I want to get to that for a second, but I felt remiss, given what you had written, if we did not just play the audio from Trump here last week talking about genes and how that might tie into his Hitlerian month.

Speaker 8 Let's listen to Donald Trump the other day.

Speaker 9 How about allowing people to come through an open border?

Speaker 9 13,000 of which were murderers. Many of them murdered far more than one person.
And they're now happily living in the United States. You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it's in their genes.

Speaker 9 And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.

Speaker 8 We've got a lot of bad genes in our country right now. That's pretty ominous stuff.

Speaker 2 I don't know if you all caught Sidney Blumenthal's longer article about this in The Guardian.

Speaker 8 I think yesterday. I did.
He'll put it in the show notes as well.

Speaker 2 Yeah, in which Blumenthal points out that the people doing the genealogical research seem to be pretty confident that Donald Trump had relatives who were war criminals on the German side in the Second World War, which would put that whole notion of murder being in your genes in an entirely different light.

Speaker 2 But being even more serious,

Speaker 2 That's directly Nazi language, of course, you know, this notion of racial superiority and genetic superiority. And it's not the only time he's done it.

Speaker 2 I mean, he does these things where it sounds like he's half joking or whatever, but he actually talks about genes and his family's genes and his genes and why his genes are why he's smart.

Speaker 2 You know, when he's in northern states like Minnesota, he says like in Minnesota, you've got good genes. And what, you know, what he means is obvious what he means.

Speaker 2 And so like in my piece, I was mostly talking about, I was talking about the anti-Semitic stuff, but the genetic stuff is also kind of right down the middle.

Speaker 2 And I think folks who want to try to resist this comparison just need to take that data a little more seriously.

Speaker 8 Let's just talk about the anti-Semitic stuff really quick because I was emailing with a very thoughtful listener that I email with often.

Speaker 8 And I think that there are some legitimate concerns among Jews in America, particularly center-right Jews, particularly Jews that have a strong affinity for Israel, about the left anti-Semitism that you're seeing from the protests that spring up on campuses but elsewhere in the country that you just see online from left anti-Semites.

Speaker 8 And that there is like an acute concern concern about that among a certain group of Jews here in America.

Speaker 8 And yet, like, the Trump behavior on this and the way that Trump has almost more maybe deftly, this is a weird word to use for Trump, sidled up to right anti-Semitism, I feel like sometimes gets missed.

Speaker 8 And like, I don't, I can't quite put my finger on why, like, like he's getting a pass for it in a way that the left anti-Semitism is not getting a pass for good reason, by the way.

Speaker 8 Talk about what you identified there, and if you have any thoughts on why you think he gets more of a pass on this, I would love to hear them.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's interesting. I agree with what you're saying.
I mean, there can be a lot of bad things going on at once.

Speaker 2 And one bad thing, which is certainly going on, is a rise of global anti-Semitism, which one does pick up.

Speaker 2 The left is kind of a broad category, but certainly one does pick up very specific kinds of anti-Semitism from folks who claim to be supporting very progressive causes.

Speaker 2 And I see that too, and it would be silly to deny it.

Speaker 2 In the dynamic you're talking about, I think there's an understandable desire for people to see the anti-Semitism as being on the other side.

Speaker 2 You know, I mean, this is just sort of personal experience and anecdotal, and maybe wrong, but if you're right of center, I think you kind of prefer for the anti-Semites to be on the left.

Speaker 2 Yeah, right. And probably the other way around, too.
And that's human and understandable.

Speaker 8 And because maybe they're other, you can kind of imagine them as having more power. Like you're like, I know the right anti-Semites.
These are trolls. Nobody would ever listen to these freaks, right?

Speaker 8 Like these are trolls. And so it's harder to imagine them gaining power, maybe.

Speaker 2 That's like the extreme version.

Speaker 2 I was thinking more of like a kind of center version where you'd be thinking, yeah, you know, I mean, I know that there's a little anti-Semitism among people on the American, you know, American conservatives.

Speaker 2 I know that. But like, I know these guys, they're not so bad.

Speaker 8 Right.

Speaker 2 Whereas I don't know the other guys. So maybe they're much worse than I think.
That's another possible dynamic.

Speaker 2 But I think you're right that Trump on this issue, as on a number of other issues, he's kind of,

Speaker 2 I think he is deft, actually. I think he's quite intelligent.

Speaker 2 And I think he's kind of step by step by step normalized things to the point where he's now literally telling American Jews that they're going to stab him in the back.

Speaker 2 And it doesn't really provoke the kind of reaction that one would have expected.

Speaker 2 And, you know, I don't want to speak for American Jews or American Jews on the right in general, but I do think that we have crossed a point where we shouldn't really be saying, like, is it right or is it left?

Speaker 2 We should be saying, wow, that's Hitlerian or, wow, that's conspiratorial anti-Semitism or, wow, that's very familiar kinds of anti-Semitism.

Speaker 2 And it doesn't really matter whether we think Trump is right or left. What matters is the anti-Semitism itself.

Speaker 8 Yeah, and

Speaker 8 you went through things that he's done, you know, recently saying that it will be Jews' fault if he loses, that they must be loyal to him.

Speaker 8 You talked about the unusual powers that

Speaker 8 they have, as Trump references that, maybe not quite as dramatically as Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has been once again saying this week that they control the weather. But

Speaker 8 when you put it all together, it is a pretty alarming run of comments by the former president.

Speaker 2 I'm going to bring in Ukraine because it actually links

Speaker 2 what we're calling left and what we're calling right.

Speaker 2 Because there are folks on the far left, let me put it this way, there are pro-Palestinian anti-Semites who don't like Ukraine because the president's Jewish, right?

Speaker 2 And who think that if you like Ukraine, it's because you're a Zionist. And, you know, that's, that's anti-Semitism.
I'm not even sure that's the left, honestly, but there is that thing in the world.

Speaker 2 And then simultaneously, you have Donald Trump who gets up and says that Volodymyr Zelensky is basically a huckster. You know, he's a shyster.
He's the greatest salesman on earth. Right.

Speaker 2 And that's obviously anti-Semitic. It's obviously anti-Semitic.
It's just that Trump has pushed the needle so far that folks don't even necessarily notice.

Speaker 2 But Zelensky is a very courageous human being. And what Trump is doing is he's applying this age-old Jewish stereotype, which is that, of course, a Jew can't be courageous.

Speaker 2 Of course, a Jew couldn't be at the front. Of course, a Jew couldn't be doing all the things Zelensky is doing.
Therefore, it must be a scam.

Speaker 2 And so, this whole argument that Zelensky is taking money, spending it on yachts, that he's a war profiteer, that that is 100% pure anti-Semitism. It has zero basis in reality.

Speaker 2 And we've kind of let it slip through. And that's because Trump has pushed the needle so far.

Speaker 8 Yeah, let's go to Ukraine for a little bit. So you were there a couple weeks ago.
You've written recently how the war in Ukraine ends. You offered one potential path for that.

Speaker 8 And I want to talk about that. But before we do that, I want to actually listen to the vice president, Kamal Harris, was asked about this.
How does the war in Ukraine end on 60 Minutes last night?

Speaker 8 And I want to listen to that with you.

Speaker 10 What does success success look like in ending the war in Ukraine?

Speaker 11 There will be no success in ending that war without Ukraine and the UN Charter participating in what that success looks like.

Speaker 10 Would you meet with President Vladimir Putin to negotiate a solution to the war in Ukraine?

Speaker 13 Not bilaterally without Ukraine.

Speaker 8 No.

Speaker 11 Ukraine must have a say in the future of Ukraine.

Speaker 10 As president, would you support the effort to expand NATO NATO to include Ukraine?

Speaker 11 Those are all issues that we will deal with if and when it arrives at that point. Right now, we are supporting Ukraine's ability to defend itself against Russia's unprovoked aggression.

Speaker 11 Donald Trump, if he were president, Putin would be sitting in Kyiv right now. He talks about, oh, he can end it on day one.
You know what that is?

Speaker 12 It's about surrender.

Speaker 8 I wonder what you made of her answer,

Speaker 8 and then we can talk a little bit about how you think the war might come to a conclusion.

Speaker 2 I mean, I think that's all basically

Speaker 2 very sound.

Speaker 2 You know, Trump thinks that Mike makes right, and he also thinks that Putin is strong, which isn't necessarily so, but I think it's all fundamentally sound.

Speaker 2 I think the war ends, and this is the part that pretty much all Americans have trouble understanding, so one wouldn't want to fault the vice president particularly for this.

Speaker 2 But I think the war ends when Putin realizes that he's losing.

Speaker 2 And the way that we help it it to end is to mobilize the economic and political and military strengths that we have to make sure that Putin realizes that it's coming to an end.

Speaker 2 Just to be specific, I mean better sanctions, NATO membership for Ukraine, plus better and faster weapons deliveries. Because the war ends when in Moscow they know that they're losing.
That's it.

Speaker 2 There's no magical third way where you just get to choose peace. The Russians started the war.
They'll change the subject when they know they're losing.

Speaker 2 And I don't think Americans have generally quite seen that basic reality. I think we still kind of want there to be some notion of peace which doesn't involve defeat, but defeat is part of the deal.

Speaker 8 There was another article, I think it was in Politica, that you were sharing recently about does the U.S. really want the war in Ukraine to end.

Speaker 8 The Biden-Harris administration has been pretty stalwart in allyship with Zelensky and Ukraine, but there does seem to be a little bit of a

Speaker 8 hesitation to want to provide what is necessary to

Speaker 8 actually decimate Russian forces. Do you feel that way?

Speaker 8 That the U.S. has kind of

Speaker 8 been giving enough support to help Ukraine defend itself, as the vice president said in that answer, but at times maybe not enough to help Ukraine win.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, I'm not a person

Speaker 2 who likes war. And

Speaker 2 this is a horrifying war. I mean, alongside other horrifying wars that are going on in Gaza and in Sudan and other places, it's a horrifying war.
I wish it had never happened.

Speaker 2 I wish it weren't going on. But once there's a war, you have to think in the categories of war.
You can't think in the categories of being on the right side.

Speaker 2 So I think like there are three basic American conceptual mistakes here. The first was at the beginning, we correctly and very importantly predicted the war.

Speaker 2 and the Biden administration gathered allies, but we also incorrectly predicted that Ukraine would lose in three days.

Speaker 2 And I don't think America has ever quite recovered from that incorrect prediction, partly because Americans are really not the world leaders in recognizing our own mistakes.

Speaker 2 And so it takes us a long time, you know, to catch up to something like that. We should, like two years ago, we should already have been talking about Ukrainian victory.

Speaker 2 And we're just now kind of slowly getting to that point. The second conceptual mistake is thinking about the war in psychological terms.
So like, how is Putin feeling?

Speaker 2 And once you do that, then Putin has you by the throat because he just tells you, oh, I'm feeling very threatened. And so I might nuke you.
And you take that seriously, and then that slows you down.

Speaker 2 Whereas, of course, the nuclear, like the nuclear blackmail was always nuclear blackmail, that was always the weapon itself. That's the whole point.

Speaker 2 And the third mistake was not to take seriously like basic things about time and space. That like you have to act quickly, you have to surprise the other side.

Speaker 2 You can't wait for what the other side is doing and then said, Okay, they did this thing. Now I'm going to think for six weeks about my reaction.

Speaker 2 Oh, look, I reacted, box checked, you know, backpadded. That's not how wars are won.

Speaker 2 And we've let that fourth dimension, we've let that fourth dimension of time just kind of slip away from us instead of thinking about how we could mobilize the strengths that we have cleverly and sometimes unpredictably to give the Ukrainians a shot.

Speaker 8 Having just been there, is there any kind of insight for

Speaker 8 us Americans about

Speaker 8 what the mood is there,

Speaker 8 what the needs are?

Speaker 8 What was the sense you got having been in Ukraine recently?

Speaker 2 I mean, I've been to Ukraine now like four times. I've spent maybe six weeks total there during the war.
I was on the front most recently, about a month ago.

Speaker 2 There are lots of Americans who've spent more time there than me, but you know what? Not enough. That's a big problem.
We just don't have enough people there.

Speaker 2 And to be clear, I don't mean boots on the ground. And when I was talking to like guys and like soldiers in Khakiv region, like they said, tell the Americans we don't need your soldiers.

Speaker 2 And they don't, you know, they need our weapons.

Speaker 2 They need our sanctions.

Speaker 2 They need economic support. They don't need our troops.
And that's very clear.

Speaker 2 But I stress that other people are there too, because I think there's a certain thing which everybody understands who spent any time there, which is that this is a kind of misery which Americans just aren't in a position to understand.

Speaker 2 And I include the American Armed Forces. We have just never fought a war like this.
Nobody alive in America has fought a war like this, planned a war like this.

Speaker 2 It's a daily misery, not just for the troops, but for a good part of the civilian population, daily sources of stress.

Speaker 2 And that stress and that suffering and that misery is a price paid almost exclusively by Ukrainians so that you and I can have this normal conversation, so that like people in the West can have these normal lives.

Speaker 2 If the Ukrainians break, then everything changes, and European integration is threatened, the international order is threatened, China is emboldened, and like all this more or less relative normality we've had for the last two and a half years goes away.

Speaker 2 The thing that you get from the Ukrainians is that they're very humble about all of this. You know, they're very realistic about what we can do, but they just want us to do the things that we can do.

Speaker 2 You know, like they're kind of past the point where they're like making appeals, like emotional appeals.

Speaker 2 They just want us to do the basic things that we can do so they can do the much harder things that we're doing.

Speaker 2 And I think the American problem that we have as a people, honestly, and also as an elite, is like shifting into the respect position where we say, okay, we respect what you're doing.

Speaker 2 Let us do the things that we can do to help. We kind of have to be at the center.

Speaker 2 And being at the center is one of the things that causes all the delays because once we think that the stuff is about ourselves, then of course, if it's about us, it's reasonable to leak to the press.

Speaker 2 It's reasonable to talk for six weeks, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 2 But when we realize other people are actually at the center and we're doing our part for a very important cause, then maybe we can move a little more quickly.

Speaker 8 Is there a tangible example of that misery or like an anecdote that was something that struck you?

Speaker 2 Let me put it this way. Like everybody has lost someone.
Everybody has lost someone closer or further. Like every, there's nobody hasn't lost anybody.

Speaker 2 There's a degree of grief and grieving, which you would associate like with a particular disaster in America, maybe, you know, but it's on the scale of a whole country and it's ongoing.

Speaker 2 And despite the grief and the grieving,

Speaker 2 people go on and the first responders show up and the soldiers fight and the civilians in the white vans drive their supplies to the front, and the teachers go to work underground.

Speaker 2 People just keep on doing it. The keeping on doing it is the part which is very hard to convey, I think, because like we kind of think, okay, there's a tragedy, and then like you take a break.

Speaker 2 And like, they're just keeping on doing it despite everything.

Speaker 2 So, I mean, there are particular examples in my life of people, like, but I, this is maybe not the format for that. We'd have to kind of start that a different way.

Speaker 2 I would just say that, like, everybody's lost somebody and the losses always come in you know they it's always in some unpredictable way and it's always it's always at the worst time and no one ever completely recovers from anything but they keep going they keep going

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Speaker 8 This takes us to the book. You talk a bit at the beginning, towards the beginning of the book on freedom about how it ties to Ukraine and the time you'd spent there.

Speaker 8 And there's an anecdote, I forget if it's in the introduction or towards the beginning, about how you're in a classroom and there were military experts who were talking about how Zelensky was going to flee.

Speaker 8 And you said that you don't think so. You think that they're going to fight.
Just talk about that kind of anecdote and then let's use that to kind of get into the themes of the book on freedom.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I mean, it's an anecdote about us, us, not about them.

Speaker 2 That was February. That was the week before the full-scale invasion.
It was a few days before the full-scale invasion.

Speaker 2 And it was a class taught in the Yale School of Management by my colleague, Jeff Sonnenfeldt.

Speaker 2 And there was a panel of folks who were very respectable and admired national security experts. And there's not anything special about them.

Speaker 2 They were representing a complete American consensus at that time, which was that Zelensky would flee. And I said that he wouldn't and that they would fight.
And everyone disagreed with me.

Speaker 2 But that microcosm of that clasp just represented the entire American moment. That was the consensus inside the Beltway.

Speaker 2 And the disturbing thing is that the consensus inside the Beltway was the same as the consensus inside the Kremlin. And so that reveals a couple of problems.

Speaker 2 One is that one we kind of already talked about, which is that people didn't realize that Ukraine was a real place.

Speaker 2 We had deeply internalized Russian imperialism to the point where we thought Russia's real Ukraine's not like at a kind of gut level, like a pre-intellectual level, a pre-cognitive level.

Speaker 2 But the second problem, the problem about us has to do with freedom. I think we too often tend to think that freedom is just doing what you feel like doing

Speaker 2 and that freedom is somehow guaranteed by somebody else, like by the founding fathers or by the market economy or whatever, or by the fact that you're America and America is great.

Speaker 2 And if that's how you think about freedom, then the moment something goes wrong, of course you're going to run because that's going to be your impulse.

Speaker 2 And if you think freedom is brought to you by these outside forces, well, if the outside forces turn against you, like if there's an overwhelming invading army, too bad.

Speaker 2 Again, you're just going to run.

Speaker 2 And what worries me about us is that in our reaction to Ukraine, it just didn't seem to occur to anybody that there might actually be people who would fight for freedom.

Speaker 2 And that's disturbing because so much of our national identity is supposed to be built around precisely that idea that you would, not that everybody has to fight all the time, right?

Speaker 2 But that you would take risks for this idea.

Speaker 2 And in that moment, that historical moment, which was kind of almost a perfect case of people choosing to fight for freedom, that it wouldn't even occur to us that they would. That's troubling for us.

Speaker 2 And so that's one of the starting points of the book: is how we got to this place where we talk about freedom so much. But when push comes to shove, we maybe don't take it seriously.

Speaker 8 What parallels do you see there? You're on the Never Trumper podcast, so

Speaker 8 I've got to center our experience.

Speaker 8 Like the total acquiescence to him, you know, and to the potential threats to freedom here in America within the right.

Speaker 8 It does feel as if there is, again, it's a reflection of, as you were writing about this kind of perverted form of freedom, where it's like these guys are like, well, as long as I'm still going to be free to have power and as long as we can convince Donald Trump that he's only going to take away people he hates freedom, like then this is not something that I need to fight about on a, on a principled level, but maybe because I have a misunderstanding of the principle.

Speaker 8 I don't know. What do you think?

Speaker 2 Let me say something that will be more uncomfortable for center-right people.

Speaker 8 Okay, let's get real uncomfortable with it.

Speaker 2 I mean, I can probably get more comfortable than this, but I think it has something to do with libertarianism. Oh, you're coming right at me now.

Speaker 8 Okay. I'm ready.

Speaker 2 I'm ready.

Speaker 2 I can take it. Well, first of all, I should say, like, if libertarianism means that liberty is the most important value, then obviously I'm a libertarian.

Speaker 2 I just wrote a book about how freedom is the value of values. And I deeply believe that.
And I spent, you know, seven years trying to figure out how to make that case.

Speaker 2 But the problem with the way libertarians often talk about the economy and politics is that if you talk about a free market as bringing about freedom, then you're putting the burden of freedom not on yourself, but on something else, on this social institution, basically, which is what the market is.

Speaker 2 And then if you talk about the problem with freedom as not being you and your limitations and so on, but the problem with freedom is the government, and you got to make the government smaller.

Speaker 2 Then I think from there, it is a pretty natural shift to a politics of us and them, where if freedom is all about the barriers, which is the negative way of talking about freedom, then it's pretty easy to shift from there to the barrier is another person.

Speaker 2 And of course, that's wrong and it's unethical and so on, but I think that's the psychological path that a lot of folks have in fact followed, where you go from like government is the problem to migrants are the problem.

Speaker 2 And so suddenly you have all these people who, you know, day before yesterday called themselves libertarians talking about how government should build huge walls, right?

Speaker 2 So I think that's something which has gone on on the right side of American politics. Everything you said, I agree with.

Speaker 8 That's the Ron Paul to MAGA pipeline. Yeah.
That's what you see very clearly. Yeah.
Anyway, continue.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean,

Speaker 2 I agree with what you said.

Speaker 2 There's also the fundamental problem that it's easier to talk about freedom than it is to be free. And the temptation to let somebody else talk about freedom for you is very strong.

Speaker 2 It's very tempting, this goes back to to fascism, to say, we're free because this person speaks for us, right? It's tempting. It's just not freedom.

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Speaker 8 Talk about then the more positive elements of freedom. On the one hand, you have the Harris campaign has been trying to co-opt this notion of freedom.
And in a lot of ways,

Speaker 8 it's kind of in the same negative view just on more liberal issues, right? Like abortion or, you know, issues such as that.

Speaker 8 But then I think that there's kind of a deeper conceptual element that you write about that they touch on occasionally as much as you can in a campaign about sort of more of these more positive elements of freedom so so talk about what those are and and how you wrote about it how you thought about it for the book yeah so i'm going to start i'm going to start with the book and i'll work my way back to the campaign because it's i'm i'm happy they're speaking about freedom and i'm happy to analyze the way they're doing it but I didn't have anything to do with that, at least as far as I know.

Speaker 8 It wasn't you and George Lakoff sitting in a room with Kamala Harris plotting the Biden overthrow and the pivot to freedom?

Speaker 8 That's what I heard.

Speaker 2 I can't believe you're breaking the story, man. I mean, that's bold.
So here's how I think about it. And this is like an all-now philosophical naivete, like just starting from the beginning.

Speaker 2 There are good things in the world. Honesty is good.
Loyalty is good. Beauty is good.
Fidelity is good. Mercy is good.
Compassion is good. But consistency is also good.

Speaker 2 And so, you know, mercy and consistency don't necessarily go together. In fact, they conflict.
And loyalty and honesty sometimes conflict too. So the good things in the world really are good.

Speaker 2 And they're as real as the rocks and the trees. Morality is real.
Values are real.

Speaker 2 But they conflict. And so the condition in which we can handle those conflicts and kind of think our way out of them, work our way out of them, and build character by dealing with them is freedom.

Speaker 2 So that's what positive freedom is. Freedom is positive because of the kinds of creatures we are in the world.
It's not just about barriers, right? Like negative freedom says a barrier is the problem.

Speaker 2 A wall is a problem. Barbed wire is a problem.
And that's true. But the reason why those things are problems is because of the human being on the other side.

Speaker 2 If there's no human being, then there's no problem. And so, of course, you have to raise the walls and bring down the barbed wire.

Speaker 2 But then you're left with the question of how do you create the conditions positively so that people can become free?

Speaker 2 And this is where positive freedom becomes a political project and not just a philosophical one.

Speaker 2 If you agree with me that good things are good and that freedom is the condition in which we're able to make choices among the good things and to realize those choices in a meaningful way, then you have to also agree, I think, that we should be creating the conditions in which children, babies, infants can grow up in this country to become the kinds of people who can make those choices and have real choices to make.

Speaker 2 And so then freedom becomes positive in the sense of if we care about freedom, we would agree that parents should have time to raise children or children should be educated and so on and so forth.

Speaker 2 And those kinds of things require collective work and generational work. And so in that way, freedom becomes a justification for government.

Speaker 2 The things that are justified for government to do are the things which create the conditions to help us to become free. So my account is positive.

Speaker 2 And then so turning to the campaign, I think you're 100% right. The Trump people have moved so far that like the way they talk about freedom is just this kind of empty like leader cult stuff.

Speaker 2 So they've basically dropped the ball and the Democrats have very wisely picked it up, wisely and I think correctly.

Speaker 2 And then you're also, I agree with you again, like they started with saying, hey, the Republicans now no longer give you negative freedom.

Speaker 2 They're the ones who are going to put government on your back, right? But then because they're the Democrats, they don't have to only say that.

Speaker 2 They can shift to positive freedom, which you see them kind of gropingly doing, right? They're talking about freedom to, as well as freedom from.

Speaker 8 To go to school without getting shut up, freedom to, you know, live without worry about climate emergency constantly, like all that kind of stuff. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Yeah.
And I think that's that's the right way to talk about freedom. I mean, freedom from is very important, but it's important because of the freedom, too.

Speaker 2 And that when you just talk about freedom from, you end up getting caught in various kinds of traps, I think.

Speaker 8 All right. We could do a whole 35 minutes on this next and final question, but I've got it.

Speaker 8 So maybe we'll do that in 2025 if Donald Trump's been defeated and we've got more time in the world to worry about these bigger problems. But

Speaker 8 I have to at least rep the small C conservative or libertarian pushback to this

Speaker 8 and just hear what you say about it, which is,

Speaker 8 yeah, good things are good. And yes, we should try to foster an environment where people have the freedom to have these good things, whether it be health, safety, family.

Speaker 8 But we also need to have some humility. And like, we're not that great.
We're not as good as we think we are at like picking policies that will lead to good outcomes.

Speaker 8 And sometimes we pick policies well-intentioned to lead to good outcomes and it leads to bad bad outcomes. And like, this is where the conservative impulse comes in, right? Which is, which says, okay,

Speaker 8 yeah, you think that this policy is going to give you the freedom to do it, but actually it's going to yield all of these unintended consequences.

Speaker 8 What's your pushback to that kind of critique of the positive freedom?

Speaker 2 Okay. There's going to be kind of a superficial response and then there's going to be a deep response.
And the superficial part is going to be disagreement.

Speaker 2 And the deep part is going to be agreement or at least dialectical agreement. Okay, great.
So the unintended consequences thing, I think that argument as a historical argument is generally wrong.

Speaker 2 So there's this notion that the argument that libertarians make, which, you know, which by the way, libertarian founding fathers like Hayek did not believe, but there's an argument that like as soon as you have the welfare state, then you have a bigger government, and then eventually you get totalitarianism, right?

Speaker 2 Like you get Hitler or you get Stalin. And historically speaking, there's just nothing to say about that, except that it's just not true.
Like, that is not how Nazi Germany arose.

Speaker 2 That is not how Stalinism arose. They did not arise because of free kindergarten.
That simply never happened.

Speaker 8 Maybe a more modest version of that argument is these sorts of things lead to less growth and

Speaker 8 less well-being, right? Like if you look at Europe, you've had less growth. But I hear you.

Speaker 2 I needed to get that out of the way because that's

Speaker 2 kind of concurrent. Okay, good.

Speaker 2 So then on the conservative point, I want to say that I agree with that and that the proposal I'm making for government is meant to solve this kind of quandary that we find ourselves in, where people on the left say we should have the welfare state because of equality or justice.

Speaker 2 And people on the right say we can't have the welfare state because of unintended consequences. I think the reason you want the welfare state is fundamentally freedom.
That's the reason.

Speaker 2 And if that's the reason, it's also the check, right?

Speaker 2 Because if you legitimate, for example, public school by freedom, because you say, as I do in the book, that mobility is an essential part of freedom, then if the rationale has to do with freedom, then you have the ideological conceptual apparatus to check whether things are getting out of control and whether this policy is leading to things which are counterproductive, all the unintended consequences, which I agree are going to be built into any policy.

Speaker 2 But if you legitimate government by freedom, then you have a way to test government, which you didn't have before.

Speaker 2 I think the conservative libertarian view that the safest thing is just never to make policy, sorry, I'm parodying now, but if you say that the safest thing is not to do policy, I think that's over-elegant and it saves you having to think about which policies create freedom and which ones don't.

Speaker 2 But I think the messy truth is that some policies are consistent with freedom and some aren't.

Speaker 2 And it can't be the case that a huge state is always best, nor is it the case that zero state is always best. The messy human historical answer is some things are good.

Speaker 2 I'm going to go out on a limb and say that that people who have eight weeks of vacation a year are more free than people who don't. And the only way you're ever going to get there is by state policy.

Speaker 2 I'm going to limb and say that parents who have two years of parental leave are freer than parents who have two days. And the only way you're going to get there is by government policy.

Speaker 2 So I don't think of this as a book which is meant to like be against anyone. I mean, obviously, it's against some people, but it's

Speaker 2 I named some other Daves too.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 I honestly believe that conservatives have important things right, like that you can't do politics

Speaker 2 without a sense that it's ultimately about the good things and that free, like the virtues, which is the word I use, and that freedom is the virtue of virtues because it's the condition in which we can realize them.

Speaker 2 But I think liberals are right. So liberals are right to say, but yeah, there are many of them.
Right, not just one. And so therefore, you have to juggle.

Speaker 2 And I think the social democrats are right to say you need to have the state doing stuff. But I think they're wrong not to invoke freedom.

Speaker 2 I think freedom is the reason why you need to get the government doing stuff.

Speaker 2 So I do honestly believe, and this is a case I try to make towards the end of the book, that the conservative position only really works together with the other positions and likewise.

Speaker 8 Well, I think that we should have an on-freedom symposium in 2025, God willing, that we're still, you know, we still have the freedom to have such discussions. Tim Snyder, thanks so much.

Speaker 8 Everybody else, stick around. I want to do a little poll talk.
We've got a New York Times poll out this morning. So I'm going to analyze that for you all.
Thanks to Tim Snyder, his book is on freedom.

Speaker 8 His sub stack is snyder.substack.com. And there are a couple of great pieces I didn't even get to.
So go check it out and subscribe. And thanks to Tim Snyder.
We'll see you soon, I hope.

Speaker 2 Thank you, Tim.

Speaker 8 All right, guys, we are back. Tim Snyder, I told you it'd be waity, you know, just nothing like a little Tuesday to talk about a Hitlerian turn to

Speaker 8 the American democracy. But I want to talk about how likely it is that that is being prevented.
And we got a new New York Times poll out this morning.

Speaker 8 And I want to talk about why I like to focus on this New York Times Sienna poll so much. Because it's not because the old gray lady has any special brand affinity for me.

Speaker 8 It's because because Nate Cohn is doing such a good job of explaining his rationale for the presumptions that go into the poll.

Speaker 8 And when I've complained in the podcast with Jim Messina and with others, that I suspect that there's some poll herding going on, there's a lot of evidence in the plot today, particularly the one in Florida, that that is correct, that there are some of these pollsters who aren't as good, are weighting their responses to various things.

Speaker 8 Nate points to the 2020 election results in ways that are yielding numbers that kind of revert to the mean.

Speaker 8 And so it's hard to learn things when, like, if there's potentially an outlier, there's potentially a change in the electorate.

Speaker 8 It's hard to learn that if the pollster is just too afraid to be wrong because they don't want to get an F rating in the silver bulletin, that instead they're sort of, you know, jimmying their presumptions to get every number close to, you know, what the poll average is.

Speaker 8 Cohen isn't doing that. And it's yielded some interesting results.
And today's poll is just a prime example of that. He's got nationally some really good news for Kamala Harris, 49, 46.

Speaker 8 And kind of, if you, if you actually go to the 10th mark and you kind of round, it's really almost a four-point lead for Harris in the national polls.

Speaker 8 And at the same time, he does an oversample of, or actually a full poll of Florida and Texas. And then he also looks at an oversample of Florida, Texas from all of their national polls.

Speaker 8 And the Florida poll had Trump winning by 13,

Speaker 8 which is just like 3x what he beat Biden by in 2020. And then in Texas, it has him about where he was at in 2020, just maybe a nudge higher, winning by 650 to 44.

Speaker 8 And so why is this interesting? Well, there's this huge conversation happening about like Biden needed to have a four or five point national poll win to eke out a narrow Electoral College win.

Speaker 8 So shouldn't you be concerned that Harris is only up about two or three in the poll average? The answer is yes.

Speaker 8 But Nate is like giving us evidence for why that is happening in real time.

Speaker 8 And what his polls are showing is that in certain states, particularly Florida on the red state side, and then in blue states with big urban areas, New York is one he points out.

Speaker 8 I'd also point to California potentially as somewhere where this is happening. Republicans are doing better.
And so that

Speaker 8 has an impact on the national polls. Nate writes this morning that if it is true that Trump has gained

Speaker 8 eight to 10 points in Florida and in New York, the states are so big that that's enough to give him a one-point bump in the national with no electoral college advantage, right?

Speaker 8 Because he's still going to lose New York and he's still going to win Florida. You don't get extra bonus points in Florida by winning by 13 instead of four.

Speaker 8 And so that explains then why Harris could have a similar number to Biden in the key swing states, particularly in these upper Midwest swing states with a lot of of older white voters, while not reaching his gap in the national number.

Speaker 8 And that's that's good news for Harris. It's good news for everybody that doesn't want to have another Electoral College popular vote split.
So, and just a couple other interesting items in the poll.

Speaker 8 Kamala Harris continues to do well with older white voters, as I mentioned, but also with some Republican voters, 9% of Republicans in the New York Times poll going for Harris.

Speaker 8 So good on you, Republican voters, against Trump.

Speaker 8 And I I think that also, you know, kind of explains why she's maybe overperforming places like Milwaukee suburbs, Philly suburbs will be next week for our live event.

Speaker 8 Well, actually, we'll be in downtown Philly, but in the Philly burbs, and, you know, hopefully also Maricopa County, Atlanta suburbs as well. So anyway, interesting results.

Speaker 8 I think that despite the fact that it's bad news if you live in Florida about which way the state is going, it might be supercharged towards the right.

Speaker 8 It might turn out that 2022 was not really an outlier in Florida, and that Florida is no longer a swing state. So that's not great news for Democrats in Florida.

Speaker 8 But for Harris to have her best national poll with the New York Times and then to pair it with kind of this real tangible evidence that there's good reason to think that the popular vote electoral college gap might not be as big as it was in 2022.

Speaker 8 Those are both good data points for her and something that we're going to be talking about with some political experts the rest of the week. We got some big wigs coming through the next two days.

Speaker 8 So come on back. Thanks to Tim Snyder.
And I guess, yeah, before I lose you, Philly, October 17th. Pittsburgh, the 18th.
Detroit, the 19th. Philly's already on sale.
Go to theborick.com slash events.

Speaker 8 Pittsburgh should be on sale any minute. Maybe by the time this podcast is up, it'll be on sale.
So check out thebork.com slash events. Hope to see you all there.

Speaker 8 We can kind of rally these 9% of Never Trumpers, as well as bringing in some of our Democratic friends, all get together, have a nice evening, and then go out and knock some doors and support the pro-democracy candidates.

Speaker 8 Very much look forward to seeing you all there, getting out to the swing states as we're under a month to Election Day.

Speaker 8 And one last thing, you know, while we're talking about Florida, our thoughts are just going out to everybody, particularly on that west coast of the Florida Gulf.

Speaker 8 What has happened with Hurricane Milton? It's very alarming. God willing, you and yours, if you have friends or family there, are evacuating.

Speaker 8 And it's something that we will certainly be keeping an eye on. And please reach out to us if you've got needs.
You're down in that area. We can, the Bulwark community has sprung into action for

Speaker 8 our friends in the past. And

Speaker 8 hopefully, that's not something that's needed this time. But obviously, it's very ominous forecast for this hurricane headed towards Florida.

Speaker 8 So, sending all of our thoughts to the folks in the Tampa area and the surrounding areas. So, I appreciate you all.
And we'll be back tomorrow with another edition of the Bullard Podcast.

Speaker 8 I'll be monitoring what's happening in Florida, be monitoring what's happening in the presidential race. We'll see you all then.
Peace.

Speaker 8 I made up my mind

Speaker 8 And I won't turn around

Speaker 8 I made up my mind

Speaker 8 And I won't turn around

Speaker 8 There is just one thing

Speaker 8 that I can't understand my friends

Speaker 2 Why some folks think freedom

Speaker 2 is not designed for all men

Speaker 2 There are so many people

Speaker 2 living their lives perplexed marching, wondering in their minds

Speaker 2 what's gonna happen next.

Speaker 2 Marching

Speaker 2 on the freedom highway

Speaker 2 Marching

Speaker 2 each and every day

Speaker 2 Marching

Speaker 2 on the freedom highway

Speaker 2 Marching

Speaker 2 each and every day

Speaker 2 I made

Speaker 8 The Bulwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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