In the years since the 2016 US presidential election there has been no more significant critic of the advance of Trump’s form of nihilism than Timothy Snyder. The Yale history professor effectively took a sabbatical from his day job in 2017 to write On Tyranny, a series of 20 lessons derived from his close study of totalitarian regimes in Europe in the last century and how they might apply to the US in this one.
He followed that book, in 2018, with The Road to Unfreedom, an illuminating and disturbing account of the ways in which Vladimir Putin’s war on truth was being seeded as a global virus, promoted by the tech oligarchs of Silicon Valley, and amplified by the self-serving populists in the White House and Downing Street and elsewhere. With the prospect of another round of Trump-led deconstruction of the rule of law, Snyder here unites all those strands of his attention and sets out an urgent case for exactly what is worth fighting for: “If I can describe the worst, can I not also describe the best?”
On Freedom is a companion volume to those earlier books, penetrating in its analysis of our current crises – of information and climate and civil society – and clear in its prescriptions for change. In it, Snyder reclaims several words that have been co-opted by the so-called libertarians of the right, not least his titular subject, which here becomes defined not as a negative – as in “freedom from” regulation, or from the demands of fact, or from social obligation – but as an active, physical demand (“if we want to be free, we have to affirm as well as deny”).
It has been Snyder’s developing contention as a writer that the body is where we site our opposition to the dehumanising advance of “screen culture”; he has encouraged a vigorous “corporeal politics”, voting with paper ballots that can be counted and recounted; eye-to-eye interaction, rather than social media; marching and debating, not online likes and anonymous snark. “Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on a screen,” he wrote in 2017. “Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people.”
Like other authors with whom he shares these concerns – Anne Applebaum, Peter Pomerantsev – Snyder gains his understanding of the threats to western democracies through his first-hand knowledge of the collapse of Soviet communism. The key reference points in this meditation therefore include Václav Havel and Simone Weil, those writers who lived their philosophies in a climate of repression.
Using their coordinates, he identifies five key determinants of a truly free society – and it seems highly appropriate that those tenets can be counted on the fingers of one definitely raised fist. Each one leads to the next. The foundation is sovereignty (not the resolve of narrow nationalists but the creation of political conditions in which individuals are safe and enabled to make meaningful choices about their lives, underwritten by empathy). That in turn leads to “unpredictability”, the freedom to behave in ways that authority (and algorithms) cannot control; and mobility (the possibility for young people, in particular, to “break free of the structures (and people) that allowed them to become [sovereign]”. That is only possible with the freedom of “factuality” (“the grip on the world that allows us to challenge it” – Snyder makes a particularly impassioned argument about the devastating effect of local news deserts on democracy); and finally, “solidarity”, the recognition that these freedoms are not just for the privileged 0.1%, but for everyone.
This is a rigorous and visionary argument, and one deeply rooted in Snyder’s own biography – he begins with his memories of ringing the family Liberty Bell on his Ohio farm, as a 10-year-old on Independence Day. He has subsequently done nearly all of his thinking about these ideas not on a screen but in interactions with those who feel the presence and absence of freedom most keenly: from Ukrainian pensioners caught up in never-ending conflict to the inmates of a high-security prison, where he teaches a course on liberation. The result is that to his prescriptions for freedom you might add three more: buy or borrow this book, read it, take it to heart.