Alexander Hamilton published political pamphlets. Benjamin Franklin did, too. So did Thomas Paine, Samuel Adams, Mercy Otis Warren, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and numerous other prominent Americans.
In 2016, so did Timothy Snyder. The American historian and author, now the Temerty Chair in Modern European History at the University of Toronto, published a political pamphlet called “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century.” The pocket-size, 128-page book encouraged acts of resistance: “Do not obey in advance,” for instance. It
became a No. 1 New York Times bestseller.
“Then I spent the next years trying to help folks orient themselves about resistance,” Snyder said in a recent interview. “But I realized in talking to people that a very good question arose, which is, what are we resisting for?”
Snyder answers that question in his latest book, “On Freedom.” Part philosophical treatise, part reportage and part memoir, the 368-page book positions freedom as “not just an absence of evil but a presence of good.” The author will appear Oct. 28 in Portland at the event “Timothy Snyder in Conversation,” where he’ll discuss the book with Andrew Proctor, executive director of the Portland nonprofit Literary Arts.
Here are excerpts from a recent interview with Snyder.
Q: You structured the book around five pillars of freedom: sovereignty, unpredictability, mobility, factuality and solidarity. How did you settle on these five pillars?
Snyder: There is a space between freedom as an idea and freedom as politics. So my idea of freedom is that it’s positive. It’s about being able to see moral choices, to affirm different values, to achieve things in the world. And the politics of that, jumping to the end, is that we need institutions which allow us to be capable and empathetic and to see the various choices that we in fact have.
But in between the idea and the politics are these forms of freedom, and I settle on them because they allow me to capture everyday situations. For example, the form of unpredictability allows me to discuss social media and the way that it works on us. Factuality allows me to discuss climate change and its direct connections to freedom more broadly.
I also chose [these forms] because there’s a certain order to them. Sovereignty has to do with what we need when we’re very young. Unpredictability has to do with getting through maturation without being predictified by the environment or by machines. Mobility has to do with physical mobility, being able to move around, go somewhere new, as well as social mobility, being able to move from one part of society to another part of society.
And then the last two, solidarity and factuality, in a way those are looking back. You can’t do freedom without solidarity, because you can’t do freedom without recognizing that we all have the same sorts of rights. And you can’t do freedom without factuality, because without factuality you’re without facts, you’re defenseless, and without facts you’re not able to cooperate with one another.
Q: You also identified three key barriers to freedom: the collapse of local news, the rise of oligarchy and the reach of social media. Why those three?
Snyder: They’re all connected.
Oligarchy is a problem for freedom in a lot of ways, and this is something that we’ve known, that philosophers and smart observers have written about for more than 2,000 years. If there’s too much wealth in too few hands, that will end up making a joke of democracy and freedom, because regardless of what kind of government you have, if the power and wealth are too concentrated, then the rest of us end up orbiting around the few people who have the wealth.
Oligarchy connects to media because it’s a very bad thing if too much of your media is in the hands of a few people. Because they will tend to use the media they control for their own self-interest or in the pursuit of personal ideological agendas, which will tend to get in the way of the actual purpose of media, which is the reporting of facts.
Local media are especially important, because local media meet people where they are. Local media includes things like local sports teams. It includes the city council. It includes the elections for mayor. It includes whether your local water is polluted. You need local media because local media is the thing which teaches people that factuality about the world immediately around them can help them to be more free, can help them to be more powerful in the world.
If you lose local media, you also lose that insight, and then the character of media changes. Media shifts from being something which empowers people and which gives them a certain trust for its factuality. It shifts towards being something which is on one side or the other, which is about us and them, which makes me feel good or doesn’t make me feel good.
Q: You and I are talking as Portland anticipates a 60-day mobilization of National Guard troops. What’s your take on how this mobilization affects the freedom of Portlanders?
Snyder: Freedom depends upon sets of practices which allow us to respect each other. And one of the examples of this is, what are the armed forces for?
In some kinds of systems, the armed forces are at the personal command of a leader, and those are military dictatorships or those are fascist systems. In other kinds of systems, like the ones that ours are supposed to be, the armed forces are subject to law. The armed forces swear an oath not to a person but to the Constitution.
So ordering the armed forces to Portland or anywhere else, by breaking basic American law – which is that the armed forces are supposed to be used for national defense and not for law enforcement – it’s pushing us all towards a military dictatorship.
Another thing is that if we get used to the idea of the armed forces on the streets, if we accept that, that becomes normal to us, then we are also taking part in this transition.
Which brings me then to the third thing, which is the most personal and local thing: Armed forces on the streets in Portland, as in any other city, are an attempt to educate Portlanders that you don’t live in a free society. You don’t live in a democracy. You live in an arbitrary situation where only the leaders matter and not the law.
Q: You talk in your book about freedom not just as a principle but also as a practice. So, how can people practice freedom in this context?
Snyder: Yeah, number one, it’s very important to use clear terms discussing what’s going on. If we are invading ourselves, we have to talk about it in terms of invading ourselves. We have to be very careful to avoid euphemisms and to be clear about what’s happening, because only with clarity do we have any chance of taking action.
As far as taking action, it’s important, I think, to talk to people who are in the armed forces, talk to family members and friends who are in the armed forces. Not in the sense of saying, “You’re wrong, you’re terrible. How could you possibly do this?” But just keep lines of communication open. Listen to them because they’re facing moral dilemmas, and make sure there’s a connection between folks in the armed forces and everybody else.
The third thing is to publicly protest in the name of fundamental human and American values, in the name of the separation of military power from our constitutional order, in the name of the freedom to do the things in public that you should be able to do in the name of freedom itself.
There are few symbols that are more strongly representative of tyranny than the presence of the armed forces in the streets of a peaceful city.
Q: Next year, 2026, we’ll observe the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution. What conversations around freedom do you hope we have?
Snyder: So much could happen between now and then that this question and answer, you know, might seem ridiculous by the time we get there. But here is my great hope.
My great hope is that this anniversary will be celebrated by Americans in a thousand different ways or a million different ways. That civil society groups and book clubs and universities and schools will find thousands or millions of different ways to think about the past, because that’s what democracy is about, and that’s what democracy depends on.
History is really important for democracy, but it’s not important in the sense of a single legend about how some guys were good and some guys were bad. It’s not important as political memory, which is what the Trump administration tries to turn it into, and what they will try to do next year.
It’s democratic to say the past is complicated, the truth about the past matters, we’re going to keep at it. It’s undemocratic to say, hey, we’ve got a round-number anniversary so we’re going to enforce a single quote-unquote truth about the whole past and then we’re going to condemn people who won’t accept our myth.
Q: Did you have anything else that you wanted people to know about your book?
Snyder: It’s an essentially positive book. It’s a book about trying to regain a sense of what should be, not just pumping up the word freedom with meaning, but considering that meaning in the richest and most productive ways. It’s a book about how thinking about the right ideas can lead us to better political practices, not just in terms of resistance, but also in terms of constructing better things.
This is a book about the difficulties we’re in as a country and as the world, but it’s fundamentally a book about how an idea of freedom can meet those difficulties and help us get beyond them.
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