Is the U.S. Headed Towards Tyranny? Timothy Snyder Discusses | Amanpour and Company

Yale University's Timothy Snyder is a historian and author devoting much of his career to understanding the rise of tyranny in different parts of the world and he sat down with our contributor Anna Cabrera to discuss his concerns about the trend taking root in the United States you have devoted so much of your studying your teaching your writings to understanding the rise of fascism and tyranny in different parts of the world you're sounding the alarm about what you are seeing here in the US right now how concerned are you about America's democracy I think I'm the right amount of concerned when America's democracy was founded in the late 18th century by people we were Revere it wasn't founded on the idea that Americans are a special people it was founded on the idea that tyranny is easy and democracy and Republic's are hard the whole system was set up to prevent one man or one party from accumulating all the power that system has been tested for more than 200 years it's being seriously tested now but I think I'm the right amount of worried because everybody should be worried to be a citizen in a democracy is to understand that you have to take a certain amount of risk yourself the system doesn't sustain itself on its own can you talk about what it is that concerns you the most absolutely well in in the last few weeks as we've watched impeachment and the impeachment trial unfold we've seen challenges to the basic founding documents of our country the whole idea of the Declaration of Independence is that no man is above the law the reason why independence was declared by the colonies was that King George was breaking established rules established contracts but the underlying principle was that everyone should be governed by the law mr. Trump's defense in the appeasement trial was precisely that he is above the law that whatever he says is the law that we should wait and see what he says and then adapt the law to that that is precisely what Terran tyrants over the centuries and authoritarians in the last century have always said our second basic founding document the Constitution is basically a design how to prevent someone from becoming a tyrant it assumes that if we have three parts of the government they will balance each other but what we saw unfold and the impeachment trial was the opposite the the Congress gave way and then Justice Roberts also gave way so at the end of it we have a much much stronger executive claiming nearly absolute power which is something that the founders precisely were trying to prevent you said Justice Roberts gave way how did he give way well I mean I've been I've been doing an old-fashioned thing which is actually reading the text of the Constitution and according to the Constitution the Chief Justice presides that is to say he's in charge the Senators are meant to be jurors what Chief Justice Roberts allowed to happen was that the jurors decided that they could do things like say how they were going to vote in advance the jurors could decide to do things like not listen to evidence that the jurors could decide basically the shape of a trial if you're in a small claims court or if you're in a divorce court or if you're in any kind of court the United States those kinds of principles were the judge cysts that where the judge just gives up would be unthinkable so basically what we saw was a trial that wasn't a trial and so both in the form and in the outcome the Supreme Court ends up being marginalized and not just not just the Congress Trump has been impeached he's been acquitted and since all of that he's gone on to fired two of the witnesses who testified during the impeachment process one of them being Lieutenant Colonel Alexander VIN Minh Purple Heart recipient a military veteran and he will recall testified during the house impeachment process that he felt it was his duty to respond to a subpoena to speak the truth and his lawyer said in a statement the truth has now cost Lieutenant Colonel Alexander VIN Minh his job his career and his privacy he did what any member of our military is charged with doing every day he followed orders he obeyed his oath and he served his country even when doing so was fraught with danger and personal peril and for that the most powerful man in the world buoyed by the silent the pliable and the complicit has decided to exact revenge and timid the president didn't even try to suggest this was anything other than revenge and now Trump is saying the military should look into potentially disciplining Lieutenant Colonel Alexander of Inman what does this tell you well it tells me three things I mean personally about mr. Trump it tells me that his desire to protect himself his his ego his appearance a sense of being right is bottomless because if there's anything that you should hold back from doing it's from it's from punishing someone like like Lieutenant Colonel ven Minh the second thing it tells me or rather reminds me is how important the lines of authority actually are even within the executive branch we have never had a system where the president instructs the military what rules should be followed in terms of in terms of Military Justice so even within the executive branch there are some lines that are very important the third thing though that it calls up to me is a memory of what purges are like because that of course is what is happening people who refuse to toe the line a line of fiction a line which said that Ukraine plotted against the United States and not Russia a line that said a server was in Ukraine which has never been the case a line which said that Ukraine was corrupting us when we were trying to corrupt Ukraine in fact under the Trump administration a line which was false a set of statements which were clearly false in which Republicans senators also know to be false that you don't follow a line like that and then get purged that's what happens in authoritarian systems or rather in totalitarian systems and just add in what else is playing out this past week within the Justice Department and in the Roger stone case in which we now have four prosecutors who are part of that case who have withdrawn from that case two of them resigned from their office altogether after they were undercut after giving their sentencing recommendation they were undercut by senior members of the DOJ after the president publicly complained about the sentencing that they were recommending in fact you know he's a friend of Roger stone and he clearly showed how he felt the outcome was unfair that was according to him what implications could this have well they're there they're two major ones I mean one that we won that we're already beginning to forget is just how deep and long-lasting the consequences are when a foreign power plays around with American elections so people like Roger stone or for that matter mr. Trump who is both involved and as it beneficiary are naturally going to be affected by the fact that a foreign power was involved that the fact that Russia mattered in 2016 that mr. stone helped Russia to matter in 2016 that mr. Trump did as well affects what they do in 2020 and for the rest of their lives so this is one more argument for trying to make our democracy sovereign rather than something which is open to international money and international influence but the second and even more important implication is that this is a direct attack on the rule of law the basic idea of our whole legal tradition is that law comes before the individual person and the more power you have the more you have to respect that principle if you're in mr. Trump's position what he's done is the very last thing that he ought to be doing and this is the basic principle of our system without the rule of law nothing else is possible including freedom and cleaning all the other values which people Republican Democrat independent or whatever they might be say are important what role does the media play because we obviously help determine what is news and then we amplify that to make sure the information gets out to the public are we partially to blame and what do we do about that I think that the basic problem we have with the media is that we don't have enough media that actually search for hunt down create and record facts what we don't have are enough reporters we don't have people covering local news we don't have enough independent editorial boards on local newspapers who would be giving their own independent opinion about impeachment that might be different from opinions coming out of New York or Washington or out of the to into the two political parties we don't have enough creation of enough new material anymore so we all get locked down in these emotional polarizing debates where everything seems obvious immediately so I mean the the big media has made some mistakes of course treating everything as about personality makes things easier on authoritarians but our big problem with the media is that we just don't have enough facts well and at this point it also feels like the facts and the truth doesn't seem to matter it doesn't break through you look at you know the Washington Post fact checker which shows the president has said more than 16,000 false or misleading statements since he's been in office and yet you know the president continues to present what it is he wants people to believe and he repeats it over and over and over again and and his supporters specifically buy it why is that since people first thought up democracy we knew it would be hard because human beings naturally want to hear what they want to hear and mr. Trump is very good at telling people what they want to hear and the Internet is basically a device for finding out what you want to hear and giving it to you so this is the same challenge that we've always had in a new form and what it means is that you can't be cynical you can't give up on the truth you can't give up on facts you have to say I'm on the side effects because facts give us a chance to have deliberative democracy give us a chance to have law gives us a chance to have decency and for that matter prosperity because one of the things that I think the people who don't care about facts aren't thinking about is that ultimately not just democracy but functioning markets depend upon factuality and if we if we get if we get rid of it completely we're gonna have not only authoritarianism but our prosperity will very soon be at risk as well the president communicates with a lot of slogans and mantras and things that are easy to remember he gives his support or something to rally around right like make America great like America first you say this is a form of politics of eternity which started in Russia explain okay well with with the slogans it goes it goes way back I mean the idea of a slogan like locker up or drain the swamp is to get people rallied so that they think we're in they're out we're the real nation the other people are not the real nation their corrupt whatever it might be that's that's that's that's older than Russia goes that goes back to fascism and other kinds of authoritarianism by politics of a eternity I mean the kind of politics which we see very much in the 21st century where not much policy actually gets made if you look at Trump's for years there's basically zero policy in the sense of big laws that could affect people's lives the one big law is a tax cut for corporations and the rich and that's not really policy that's just gravity that's what happens when you do nothing but politics of eternity is teaching people that politics is not about changing the world politics is just about characterizing the world we're good they're bad we're in they're out and we know this because we say it to ourselves with these with these persuasive and appealing slogans over and over and over again what do you think America's adversaries people like Putin are thinking as they're witnessing what's happening right now in America we I mean we are helping Putin system last because the whole justification for mr. Putin system in Russia is that sure things in Russia are corrupt sure we're an oligarchy sure the media lie to you all the time but look at it look at other countries it's just the same basically what's happened in the US and last 43 years confirms this our institutions unfortunately have become more and more like the caricature which the that the Russian media portrays them as being the impeachment trial is a very good example you have the solemn picture of of Justice Roberts talking about this being the supreme deliberative body in the world which is obviously in the circumstances a joke right and making our institutions a joke is exactly what helps authoritarians like mr. Putin survive if there's no example of things going better it makes their life much much easier I mean a bit a big sad thing which is happening is that there is no longer an American example the American example has always been imperfect in many ways but there is now no longer an American example that dissidents in China or oppositionists in Hong Kong or journalists in Russia or Poland or hungry whoever could point thanks to mr. Trump we know that President Putin and Russia launched a disinformation campaign to interfere in the 2016 election here in the United States and the FBI director Christopher Rea just recently said they're already seeing signs of Russia trying to interfere in the upcoming election but this time it's not just Russia and according to a recent investigative report in the Atlantic journalist McKay Coppins writes that the Trump campaign and some of his domestic allies partisan media outside political groups have begun to quote adopt the same tactics of information warfare that have kept the world's demagogues and strongmen in power what do you think we should be bracing for well this I mean this is what I was worried about way back in 2016 when I wrote on tyranny and and road to unfreedom what because what Russia does is not particular to Russia but Russia does is how an oligarchy with a good understand of the media stays in power what you do is you figure out what people want to hear not just by a good leaders instinct but by way of technical tools which cannot thanks to Facebook and Google you can actually learn and then you target your messages to them and you don't care that your messages are lies in fact it's better if your messages are lies because you want people to think that there's not really any truth and to just accept the story which sounds better so what we can what we can expect is I think a battle between what I think are the underlying political values is I don't think it's about classes I don't I don't think it's about I think the underlying political values now are truth and falsehood truth as the basis for policy falsehood as the basis for enmity I think that's some variant of that is the real clash that's going on which doesn't mean that you know that somebody is always good and somebody's always bad I just think that's fundamentally the issue the fundamental question is can you in a campaign proposing policy based on facts against someone whose basic idea is just to stir the pot with the most advanced technical tools possible and to rile people up that's not an American dilemma now that's now that's now a world alone that's that's everywhere we're unfortunately normal and know better than anybody else and if we face that fact and see what the challenges I still think we have a chance what do you see as the role of social media companies then to prevent some of that disinformation from getting through yeah the social media companies have a big problem with the idea of responsibility I mean what they think freedom is is you know the freedom of a few individuals to do very well but there isn't there's a big what the economists call externality there's a big cost which is that people's average levels of knowledge are declining then people's ability to engage with the world around them in various ways is also in decline I think there has to be a rethink of social media just as there was a rethink of the print printing press and a rethink of radio and of every major new communications technology where responsibilities in some form has to be injected back into the system I think it's I think it's ludicrous for Facebook to present itself as just passing on what other people do what Facebook does as it particularly is the authoritarian habit of looking for the emotion of fear that's what it does that's its design model it looks for what makes you anxious and fearful and makes you feel tribal and childish right it looks for that it's a tool that does that that's it that's by design so it has an inbuilt authoritarian bent if it wants to be neutral it has to pull away from being authoritarian and make some changes to itself which support factuality which could certainly be done we know some of the ways to do that but I mean for me the key word is responsibility whether you're talking about foreign actors like Russia or domestic actors the platform's with their guys have just been neutral or what make it all possible without the platforms this couldn't happen as you know there are a lot of Americans who don't just accept the status quo they're they're very engaged in democracy and this election that's upcoming I see a lot of hashtag resist online and people calling themselves the resistance in this in this way is it a productive use of of you know their advocacy for American democracy or do you feel like it's misguided I think you know I think the word resist is good because it calls attention to the fact that what's happening isn't just a change of policy but a change of regime we are living through a slow regime change in the US towards some kind of more Ithorian authoritarian oligarchy and so regardless of our positions on inhibited individual policies or statements of the president we can say I'm I would like to resist that general tendency I don't want authoritarianism I want I want Oleg our key that's a start but of course in the end it's more important to know what you're for and to be able to say what you're for I'm for you know this kind of education in the classroom I'm for freedom of speech for humans but not for digital beings who don't have souls I'm for economic inequality which gives people a chance to imagine a better future I'm for a system where everybody actually does have one vote and there's no voter suppression and so on and so forth so I think the idea of resistance is fine because it calls attention to the drama of the moment it is a dramatic moment but at the end of the day you also have to have a notion of what Liberty and what law and what these values actually look like so that you're not just letting the people who are changing the regime in the wrong way call the shots and and define the concepts professor Timothy Snyder I really really appreciate this conversation thank you so much it's been my pleasure thank you [Music] you

Channel: Amanpour and Company

Views: 824,575

Rating: 4.7521391 out of 5

Keywords: Ana Cabrera, Timothy Snyder, Yale University, Yale, On Tyranny, democracy, history, historian, The Road to Unfreedom

Id: hpwnKvsI3SQ

Length: 19min 47sec (1187 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 18 2020