Democracy or Fascism? A conversation with Timothy D. Snyder | Episode Two of Unchained Democracy

[Music] we the people of the united states in order to form a more perfect union this nation has placed its destiny in the hands and heads and parts of its millions of free men and women establish justice ensure domestic tranquility yet we know what we must do and that is to achieve true justice among all of our fellow citizens provide for the common defense promote the general welfare victories against poverty are greatest and peace most secure where people live by laws that ensure free press free speech and freedom to worship vote and create wealth and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity do ordain and establish this constitution for the united states of america but it's 2020 and there are still many chains to be broken in order to rebuild our democracy for all of america this is democracy unchained the particular kind of instability we face creates an opportunity for those who would take power from the people as historian tim snyder reminds us humanity has seen that before and if we look closely at the past we can learn my name is timothy snyder i'm a historian and are tasked together for the next few minutes is to think about fascism now when we hear the word fascism we might think of places that are far away or times that are long ago but i think it's quite important for all of us and perhaps above all americans to be thinking about fascism as something that can arrive anytime and any place fascism is an attitude it's an attitude that we can try to recognize it's an attitude that has three parts the first part is that you take globalization personally you don't think that globalization is about economics or about technology or about new capacities to do things you think globalization is about some group or some individual which is acting against your country or you personally the second part of the fascist attitude is that you prefer the will over the facts it doesn't matter what's actually out there in the world what matters is how i feel about it and more importantly it matters how my leader can make me feel about it that's the third part of the attitude fascism puts the person above the law this is what's called the leader principle it doesn't matter what the law says my leader can do what my leader wants to do because it's my leader who explains to me how globalization works against me it's my leader who explains to me how i should be feeling fascism also has tactics tactics that we can recognize become familiar with if we want to resist them one tactic is to define an enemy which is both inside and outside somehow within the country there's a group and that group is not really part of the nation but that group is also connected to some hostile force outside of the nation second tactic is the ritualistic use of language language is not about describing the world it's about defining the world it's about telling you who those enemies are it's about finding those short slogans those three-part slogans bang bang bang that tell us who we are and who's outside and who's the enemy in politics the basic tactic especially at the beginning is a regime of exception the claim that something unexpected is happening we just have to suspend the rules for a moment and finally everything will be all right but what fascism is in practice is a sustained regime of exception if you let them suspend the rules for a moment then the rules stay suspended so let's take a step back and think about nazi germany think about nazi germany in broad strokes where it came from what it had to do with globalization and what it teaches us about our own globalization the first globalization is what the nazis were reacting to the first globalization a globalization of empire where all the space in the world seemed to have been taken up the germans didn't seem to have their own place in it hitler's basic argument in mein kampf was to say aha there's no space left for us we're like a species that doesn't have a habitat we have to struggle in other words hitler defined an ecological disaster he defined politics in ecological terms and he wasn't entirely wrong it was a much riskier world back then hunger was much more present back then even for relatively prosperous societies he continued principles universal laws ethics are just a way to lose if you believe in any kind of rule any kind of morality that just means that your mind has been taken over by the jews that was the form that andy said semitism took his answer to this challenge is what he called lebensval living space we have to treat ourselves like a species we have to behave heartlessly ruthlessly there are no rules there are no laws there is no ethics we have to survive and therefore everything is justified we have to take land from others we are now in a second globalization and of course i don't want to say that history will repeat itself no historian would say that what i would like to say is that if we look at the history of nazi germany a bit more deeply in this way as a certain reaction to a sense of ecological threat we'll be better informed and better able to rescue our own sense of law and our own democracy and our own freedoms as the threats to us grow greater in the decades that are coming so we are now in a second globalization hitler's globalization the imperial globalization is passed we're in a second globalization and we face the same sense that things are closing in that there isn't space or perhaps more specifically or more accurately that there isn't time we feel like we don't have time because of global warming and the current politics of the united states horribly are designed to consume time by making global warming worse we make the disaster come closer and we make ourselves angrier more worried and more anxious we are doing something very strange by avoiding the science by not addressing the problem directly we're actually making the conflict come closer and here i want to point out a surprising but unavoidable resemblance between what we do and what hitler and the nazis did hitler had very specific attitudes towards science hitler thought that what science told us is that we have to compete this is what uh you know academics or others would call social darwinism what he thought was that the science brought us a law and the law was a law of competition whatever happened was right the strong have to survive and that's really all that you need to know he was not interested in science in the sense of something that could provide a universal solution the ecological problem of his day the problem of hunger could actually be addressed with technology but he was not interested in that more than that he said anyone who believes in universal science in science that can rescue humanity is basically a brain slave of the jews any universal idea including science is for for hitler jewish now what does that have to do with us well we too or at least some of us are denying that there are universal scientific solutions we too when we think about global warming are paying too little attention to fusion to alternative energies to the things which could actually transform things for everyone and for the better and we too although still in a minor key obviously and not so intensely we too when we think scientifically quote unquote we tend to accept social darwinist ideas so the question to bring this to a close is how do we make the second globalization different and better than the first if we understand that we are facing threats and we are having reactions which are comparable to the threats of a century ago and the reactions might be similar to the reactions a century ago what do we what do we do with this knowledge of course we have to recognize as i said at the beginning the tactics of fascists we have to work against as i said at the beginning the attitudes of fascists but there's also something else there's the recognition of practical universals moral universals that is to say move away from the idea that everything has to be a competition but also practical universals the idea that there is there are scientific solutions which can which can change the way we feel about politics and which can open up the future nazi ideas started from the notion that the future is closed and therefore dramatic desperate and murderous action is necessary we have to make sure that our attitudes about morals and our attitudes about technology create a sense that the future is open that's the best way to avoid that kind of tragic and horrible politics or to put in a slightly different way to narrow it down a little bit the new deal in the united states in the 1930s among many other things was about making sure that the united states did not embrace a form of radical politics the next time around as we come out of pandemic as we face decreasing lifespans as we contemplate the disasters that could be coming we have to have something like a green new deal at the very minimum a green new deal not just to avoid an objective catastrophe out in the world but also a green new deal because it changes the way we think about the future a green no deal would also be about addressing fascism the next time around what we can learn from nazi germany and we have to learn from nazi germany is that a future a sense of the future is necessary to to preserve to maintain but to improve the kinds of politics that we think of as having to do with freedom and with democracy the effort to make the world the effort to preserve the ecology of the world turns out to be the same effort that we need to preserve the freedom in our own human life that's the big lesson that we can draw and i think at its core it's an optimistic lesson thank you

Channel: State of American Democracy

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Length: 11min 18sec (678 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 24 2020