Historian and political analyst Timothy Snyder joins host Alex Lovit to discuss the power of the electorate and the inherent challenges of democratic participation on the verge of the 2026 midterm elections. This episode was recorded in partnership with community-owned public radio station WYSO 91.3 FM in front of a live audience at WYSO’s studios in Yellow Springs, Ohio, on October 30, 2026. Timothy Snyder is the chair in Modern European History, supported by the Temerty Endowment for Ukrainian Studies, at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. He has written several best-selling books, including On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. And he is a senior fellow with the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. https://snyder.substack.com/
Timothy Snyder:
You can actually take huge risks for things that you care about, which is a very important lesson because democracy is one of those things that doesn't exist unless you care about it. We all have to be a little bit courageous. And when people are a lot courageous, it makes a difference.
Alex Lovit:
American elections are hard to ignore. We've seen it all before. The political ads, the roadside signs, the skits on Saturday Night Live. But the familiar traditions of campaign season can pull focus from the ways that our elections are becoming less fair and less representative. Even if we're lucky enough to have an election without any major disruptions and your preferred candidates win, we can't tune out until next time. The threats to democracy will remain. And American elections don't only have impacts in our own country. Our democratic decisions resonate in Iran, in Ukraine, in Gaza, and all around the world. And the rest of the world affects us too. Authoritarians work together and learn from one another. Disinformation travels around the globe.
So today we're bringing you a conversation that cuts through the noise of election season to focus on what really matters. You are listening to The Context. It's a show from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation about how to get democracy to work for everyone and why that's so hard to do. I'm your host, Alex Lovit. My guest today is Timothy Snyder. Timothy has spent his career studying just how ugly authoritarianism can get and just how fragile the institutions that protect us from it can be. He's written several bestselling books, including On Tyranny and On Freedom. He's the chair in modern European history at the University of Toronto and he's a senior fellow here at the Kettering Foundation. This conversation was recorded in front of a live studio audience at WYSO, Southwest Ohio's community-owned public radio station and Kettering's local NPR affiliate. We thank them for their partnership. We recorded this just days before the midterm election. It's a good time to take stock of American democracy and there's no one I'd rather do that with than Timothy Snyder.
So you grew up near here in Centerville and I've read you describe your childhood as somewhat idyllic. I don't just say that because your parents are here, but you've described playing baseball, visiting your grandparents on the farm, and then you go on to become a scholar of some really heavy topics, a historian of some of the darkest moments in human history and a public intellectual trying to call our attention to the risks to freedom and democracy today. So I think of you as someone who can look hard at things that are hard to look at. Did you have that in you as a kid when you were practicing your fastball in Centerville?
Timothy Snyder:
I don't know. I'm all one person. I mean, right before I came here, and I have witnesses, I was at the batting cages at Young's Dairy and I went all the way up to fast fastball, which is 70 miles an hour and I was still making contact at 57. So I'm going to leave that as an answer to your question. It's hard to track a life over decades like that. But more seriously, I'm sure it's the case that, in fact, it has to be the case that I got things from my family and from the way that I was raised in this part of the world that helped me go out and look at things. I'm sure that's true, but I'm not sure I fully understand how that works. I mean, I think there's a conceit that we have, especially in this country, I think it's a mistake that you are the best guide to yourself.
I think one of the mistakes we make is that we're super individualists and we think we understand ourselves and what we want, but we don't. I mean, you can't understand yourself without the help of other people, which is one of the premises of my Freedom book. If you take it to the extreme, like with an Elon Musk view that empathy is toxic, you see where that leads. If you think it's all about me and I understand myself, it ends up becoming a downward spiral where in the end you're just kind of floundering. Whereas if you think, aha, I can only understand myself if I acknowledge other people and pay some attention to what they think about me, then you have some chance. So I think I have some chance of understanding myself, but I can't do it up here on my own. I think by definition, you can't really do it up here on your own. All I can say is that I'm sure you're right that I owe something to other people.
Alex Lovit:
Well, so I take some reassurance in you talking about the batting cages because you're someone who is working very hard to combat some of the evils in the world. Do you find it necessary to take breaks? How can you give us all advice about how we can work hard and also play ball?
Timothy Snyder:
Man, I am not the best person to ask about that, but it's a really good question. So I was with my team and we were in Minneapolis for a few days and then we've just arrived in Ohio and we spent most of the day today actually in Springfield and we spent it trying to find out just how Haitians are being deported from Springfield or how Haitians are being politically humiliated or as one of the folks said today nicely, nicely in the sense of precisely, juridically, ethnically cleansed from Springfield. And that's the kind of thing which is important to do, to look at things, as you said in your first question, directly, try to understand them, try to get the first person sources, try to get the evidence, try to make sense of the story. And there's a story there to be made sense of. There's a rough outline which goes like this, that in Minneapolis they invaded the city and that had repercussions for them and it didn't turn out exactly as they expected.
In Springfield, there's a similar situation. There's a community which can be defined by the color of its skin. There's a community that can be marginalized, treated differently, but they're not taking exactly the same approach. They are grabbing people on the street and deporting them, but they're also doing new things like manacles, ankle monitors, where if you're caught and you're brought into ICE and in the back of a warehouse or something, you can leave, but then you have an ankle monitor on you, which means that you can't go for more than 75 miles from wherever you were tagged. And it means that it's very hard to live a normal life and it means that you're stigmatized and all the other people who don't have ankle monitors think that you must have done something wrong and it means you can't be close to loved ones because you're being followed and it may not be comfortable for your loved ones to know that you're with you, has all of these consequences which are new. And you can only figure things like that out by stopping and listening to people.
So that's work that needs to be done. And then yeah, I actually thought maybe afterwards we should take a break. But it's also serendipity, man, because I was in a cafe in Toronto and there's a colleague that I know up there who also teaches in Ontario and she just wandered over to me in a nostalgic reverie, literally it was like autumn and the sun was shining through the glass onto her face. She's from [inaudible 00:07:23], I should say. And she walked up and said, "Tim, when you were a kid, did you ever go looking for pumpkins at Young's Dairy?" And she went on in that vein for a while. I thought, okay, I'm taking this as a sign that in this trip that I'm planning to Minneapolis and to Springfield where we're going to be working on ethnic cleansing, I should pause and go to Young's Dairy. But I guess what I'm saying about myself is that it sort of takes a sign from God for me to ever do anything like that.
Alex Lovit:
Whatever keeps you with us and keeps you doing your work. So what is happening in Springfield right now, which is the people in this room know, of course, because it's a local story and it's also a national story, Haitian immigrants who were admitted under the TPS program who never committed any immigration crimes have now had their immigration status canceled by the Trump administration. And that's kind of a story of international relationships, trends that are driving people to want to immigrate to this country and national politics, this being talked about by the president and Vice President of the United States, and then local politics. And for those of us in this room, this is a local story. And I think the closer that people are to this story, the less they have been willing to want to denigrate these Haitian immigrants. Is there anything we can do? Is there anything that people in this area can do and how should people across the country think about what they can do in their own communities?
Timothy Snyder:
Yeah, that's a terrific question. I mean, because I'm also more or less from the area and I've been to Springfield before and I still have reasons to go to Springfield, I have a colleague in Springfield who's writing a paper for a project I'm working on. It caught me both ways. It caught me as a national story and it caught me as a local story. Here it's the national which is driving everything because there was quite literally a moment where JD Vance just noticed that there was this thing and he jumped on it and he turned it into something with that mixture, which is particular to him of inventiveness and joy and the pain that he's causing for others. And it went from there. The tropes that he spread, which I don't really want to repeat, but the tropes that he spread were first spread quite literally by literal Nazis.
I don't mean Nazis in parentheses or in quote marks or anything, but actual self-regarding, self-describing Nazis. These tropes about Haitians were spread by them first and then the vice presidential candidate as he was then picked them up and spread them. And then the presidential candidate as he was then, Mr. Trump, picked them up and spread them during the debate as everybody knows. But in that way, it's a national story because Mr. Vance didn't go to Springfield. These extravagant claims that he made just had to do with his instinct that he had found an issue where he could anger people and he could hurt people and he could divide people. And the sadness of that, of course, is that he's doing it not just to people, but he's doing it to his Ohio. I mean, his memoir is largely a kind of fairytale, but Springfield is exactly the kind of place which he claims to himself embody the industrial town, which has seen better days and which has collapsed and where the working class suffers and so on.
And so what he did was he took a city which was rebounding and made everything so much worse for that city. And he did it only so that he could create a division, that's the only reason, and then try to ride that division to power. So it's a national story I think first, but it's a local story in terms of the people who are affected. And as much as I try to understand it by reading about it and on the basis of other cases like it, which I've worked on as a historian, there are these particularities that you only learn locally, which I'm sure many of you have figured out long before me, like the way that the ankle monitors work or the shackles.
Another one is the delegalization, because as you say, these are people who arrived legally and there isn't actually any kind of case against them. And even if TPS no longer applies to them, that's not a reason to put them in jail. And so what they're doing is they're delegalizing people by putting them in judicial positions that are impossible. So I put an ankle monitor on you and you can't go for more than 75 miles, but oops, your next asylum hearing, like all of your asylum hearings are in Cleveland, which is more than 75 miles away. And then where are you? You're going to violate one thing or the other, you're either not going to show what you're hearing or you're going to go more than 75 miles. Or I set a hearing for you and then I set another hearing for you that's a week later and then another one's a week later and it's very hard for you to go back and forth because you live in Springfield and you're supposed to keep showing up in Cleveland and maybe you don't have a car or maybe because you can't go to work anymore, it's not easy for you to get to Cleveland.
So they create these situations where it's like you're creating a situation where the individual can't actually manage and then as soon as you fail at something, boom, then you're illegal, quote unquote, then you can be deported, but that situation is being quite deliberately created. And then there's what's happened to asylum, which used to be a long process, and now it's become a short process where everybody in a matter of weeks, these asylum claims, which used to take years to process, and in the meantime you could stay, are suddenly now taking weeks and everybody fails and then they can be deported. So there's all of this judicial action which is going towards the process of depriving people, not only just depriving their legal status, but actively creating situations in which you can then say, "Aha, you are in fact illegal."
So the two processes work together. There's the national attempt to find these enemies because the president and the vice president still talk about the Haitians that way. And then there's a local process, which tears a community apart is not enough. It does tear a community apart, but it does horrifying things to individuals. It deprives people of breadwinners. It separates people from their children. It makes children fearful of what it means to be in America. Children who are six years old are told that they're arrested and they think, "Well, wait, what does it mean that I've been arrested? This means that I'm a criminal. Am I a criminal forever? What does this mean?" All of this kind of mental and traumatic damage is being done to people as well as the fact that a community is being torn apart.
Alex Lovit:
So I think part of the tragedy of this is that national politics are overwhelming local desires. We aren't paying attention to the international aspect of it, the reason that people are fleeing Haiti. And we have an election coming up, people might have noticed that. And again, a lot of our attention is on the national picture. Do you think that we ignore the local, ignore the international?
Timothy Snyder:
I mean, I appreciate moments like this because it's so hard to talk about anything except the national in the United States. Everything has flattened to the national, and that is really bad, because whether you're in Brooklyn or whether you're in Birmingham, Alabama, or whether you're in Berkeley, California, the national shouldn't actually be the most important thing in your life. It should be the local, the municipal, the county, the state. That should be, and in fact, very often is, the most important thing in your life. But in your symbolic life and what's being fed to you day to day on the internet or on other media, it's only the national. And then the national is reduced to red team and blue team, or Trump and everybody else, or what did Trump just say yesterday as opposed to what's actually going on. So I appreciate your point. It's really hard to do the national right without the international.
The Haitians who are in Springfield, just to take our example, are there because they were fleeing a truly horrific situation, which remains absolutely horrific. And if you don't have international news, that's just an abstraction and you have to work really hard to get into the details of it. If you live on the one side of the country and you have to arrive in an airport on the other side of the country because you've been deported, you're probably not going to make it alive to where you came from. You're just not going to make it. Getting the details across or creating an intuition about what other countries are like is impossible with that international news.
And then on the other side of it, as you say exactly, the local, right? I mean, even Minneapolis, which I have in my mind because we just came from Minneapolis, there's some good writing about what happened in Minneapolis, for sure. There were some writers from The New Yorker, there were national writers who came and did good work on Minneapolis. But the most we can manage even for something like that is a burst of attention around January, February, March of this year. And then we kind of lose the threat again. Even for something like metro search, even for the federal invasion of American city, we lose the plot pretty quickly because we don't have local news which then corresponds to other local news. Not to be too nostalgic, but the way that we did used to have 30 or 40 or 50 years ago. And without the local, you also can't see the real.
So the people who are talking to me in Springfield today, most of them had no idea who I was, which is fine. Actually, I kind of prefer that. But they were talking to me, I think because they were quite aware that their story was not actually getting out and they needed people to try to help. Although they're working very hard and they're doing wonderful organizational labor and they're supporting one another and they're doing great things as are other members of the Springfield community, they're aware that there just isn't an organized media which can get their story across. I do read about it in the Dayton newspaper. I'm aware of work that local reporters are doing, but there isn't enough of that and there isn't a way for local news to get into other localities. So I agree with you completely, without local news, the national news doesn't make any sense. I feel like we've all kind of been pushed into this plane where it's all us versus them at a national level, and everything else doesn't really fit into that picture.
Alex Lovit:
Well, is there anything we can do as individuals to try to direct our attention? And is there anything we can do to try to push other people to direct their attention?
Timothy Snyder:
Yeah. I mean, in this particular case, because we are 15 minutes away, it's easy to think of some things. I mean, individuals can drive people in the Haitian community to their hearings. That's a need. Individuals can provide food for people in the Haitian community. That's a need. Individuals can drive Haitian kids to school because often parents aren't present or for one reason, for an obvious reason, can't get out of the house to drive them to school. So there are things that, I mean, I'm sure there are people in this room who are doing these things. But certainly, from Yellow Springs, there are things you can do in Springfield, and there are Haitian churches and good communities where one can coordinate. Yeah, so absolutely there are local things one can do.
Alex Lovit:
Well, I'm thinking about the attention part of it, that across the country, we are all attending to national news in red and blue. It's not like local journalism just died on its own. We stopped paying attention. Is there anything we can do to reverse that trend?
Timothy Snyder:
It's kind of like the earlier question about the origins of the ethnic cleansing in Springfield. Yeah, it's local, but you can't do without the national level of it. So we're not going to get local journalism back without some kind of national policy. I can urge you all to read local news and to subscribe to it, which I'm sure many of you do, and we all should. I mean, one of the bad things about the internet is that it's trained us to not pay for anything, and especially when it comes to information, that's very bad.
If your neighbor said, "Hey buddy, I'll fix your muffler for free." I don't know, maybe you would go along with it, but I didn't get the immediate reaction I expected. Maybe everybody in Yellow Springs is super handy with mufflers. But in general, if your neighbor said, "Hey, trust me, I can do a great job with your plumbing, and I'll do it for free," you'll probably hesitate. But with information, we've been trained to think, "Oh yeah, we can get it for free." Whereas in fact, no, you got to pay a few dollars a month basically. It's not that expensive, but you do have to pay a few dollars a month. So that's on us. We should be taking responsibility for that.
But in general, we're not going to get back to having a healthy media environment without an active regime at the federal level, which subsidizes and which makes the consumption of quality journalism part of the curricula in public schools and which taxes as an externality, which tries to internalize the externality of the brain pollution of the social media or the AI companies. You have to tax them because they're making ridiculous profits by destroying our brains and move some of that taxes back into the support of local journalism. We're not going to be able to do it just on the basis of the market. The market's not going to do it for us.
So there has to be a recognition that factuality is a public good, which Americans have trouble with, not here in Yellow Springs, you all have the correct views on everything. But Americans in general have a hard time with public goods. I was about to say just like air and water are public goods, but I think, okay, in a lot of America, air and water are not really public goods. But that's the idea, that we should think of factuality as a public good, something that's worth allocating resources towards.
Alex Lovit:
And public media can be a public good, and is in much of the world. I think the United States has always had a somewhat smaller version of public media. Here we are at a NPR affiliate. Talk a little bit about what Trump has done to public media, and why.
Timothy Snyder:
Yeah, let me start with the premise because it is a really important premise, and it's an example of how democracy doesn't work on its own. There's a notion in America, which is already not true, that capitalism works on its own. Capitalism does not work on its own. If you don't have a government which says that there are property rights, then you're not going to have capitalism, you're just going to have piracy and butchery. So even capitalism needs government. Once you recognize that, then the next question is, what kind of government? If you're going to have markets, what's the best way to deal with markets?
Anyway, we go from that false premise to democracy also works on its own. It just kind of springs out of the ground. And that's just completely not true. We don't get democracy because you're American or because of the founding fathers or because of the economy. There's no automatic democracy. In order to be democratic people, we have to be thoughtful about the institutions that we create for ourselves and for those who come after us. And that involves the conscious production insofar as this is possible of objectivity and factuality. Again, these are things that don't arrive on their own. Factuality takes a lot. It takes a lot of work. It is a lot of work to be a good laboratory scientist. It is a lot of work and risky work to be an investigative journalist. It takes a lot of labor to produce these things. And objectivity is something which takes mental training and strenuous effort and self-discipline. All of these things, it's work.
If you accept that democracy requires certain things, high on the list is public media, by which I don't mean state media. I mean, this is an important distinction because there are, in recent examples, where there are problems with democracy, like in Poland, public media became state propaganda, and that's not what I mean. I mean public media, which is perhaps financed by taxes, but which is independent of both the government and of private sector sponsors. We have this notion in the United States that, "Well, if it's not the federal government, it's got to be owned by somebody. There can't be a middle zone." And it's that middle zone, which is actually crucial, where it's neither private nor state, but it's public.
So yeah, in most functioning democracies, you have a lot more public media than in the US, and that includes something I was talking about before, which is effective subsidies of regional and local media so that they exist, because if people don't have local media, they don't see themselves in the media. When they don't see themselves in the media, that's a first step towards alienation and anger in the sense that you don't really count for anybody, and therefore, why should you care? I mean, the reason why Mr. Trump is against public media in the United States is that he is in favor of oligarchical private media. He has a model in mind, which just incidentally, I'm sure it's a complete coincidence, is the Russian model where there are a few private media concerns. They're owned by people who know each other, and they're basically all following the same political line, which is how things have worked in Russia for the entire 21st century.
But if you look at the overall media landscape in the United States, it is startling how concentrated it has become and how it will become more concentrated, which isn't just bad in a textbook way. Any economist can explain to you in a textbook way how monopolies are bad, whether you're producing facts or whether you're producing, I don't know, fruit. It's bad when there's no competition, but it's also bad in a personal way because the people who own these concerns are people. As you become a person with incredible wealth and power over what other people think, you do not necessarily become a more virtuous person. It's possible that you become a less virtuous person. It's possible that you become a more sensitive person who is only concerned about how you feel at that particular moment, or when you have a good day, you're concerned with how your oligarchical friends feel and you do them a favor. And we are getting startlingly close to that.
I mean, in the middle of October, three things were happening simultaneously. Platforms were suppressing the advertisement of a documentary about Elon Musk. Meanwhile, Elon Musk was suppressing Starlink in Ukraine so that more Russian jet power drones were getting through and killing people. And meanwhile, at the exact same time, Meta was suppressing the Instagram page of the No Kings Coalition on the day, October 17th, that No Kings was organizing the big pro-democracy, pro-voting rallies. All of those things were happening. They didn't happen. They happened at the same time, at the same moment. All three of those things were happening.
And that's a signal of the kind of world you get to when too few people are controlling too much, not just wealth, but media power, because you see that there are personal connections between the people involved. There are personal connections between the people who are involved with the Musk documentary and Musk himself. And that's also something to watch out for. We're 330 million or however many we are, but at the end of the day, what we end up seeing or feeling, or if you just take it ratchet up a couple steps further in Ukraine, whether missiles come down and kill you or not, those things end up getting decided by two or three people who kind of nudge each other and know each other favors.
Alex Lovit:
So you're drawing connections there between problems of local democracy, local media, and making some comparisons to international oligarchies. Let's talk a little bit about the international world, which is something you know a lot about. You at one point planned to be a diplomat. You've thought a lot about the US's role in the world. It is not as if a decade ago the US was universally beloved and seen as a completely benevolent force in the world. How was the US seen before the Trump era, and how has that changed now?
Timothy Snyder:
That's a good question. I mean, by the way, I just want to emphasize your segue because the local really is the international. You ask why Mr. Trump doesn't like local media, but the folks who run our social media outfits also don't like local media and they also despise public media. And it's for the same reasons that they would like to be able to control our brain flows and suppress any possible discomfort to themselves. And it's not really much more complicated than that. It's kind of tragic how far we've gone in bending ourselves towards caring about what two or three or four or five extremely wealthy people feel. Why do we care? Why do we follow that? Why does that matter to us? They're just five people. Their feelings don't count for anybody else's feeling more than anybody else's. On the contrary, there's a very powerful way in which they should count for less, and that has to do with free speech. The solid reason you have free speech is that it's physically dangerous to criticize the wealthy and powerful. That's why. It's not some airy abstraction. It's not like eating dessert. You don't have it because it makes you feel good. Americans often say, "Well, free speech, free speech," after they say something they know is obnoxious and untrue. Free speech allows you to be obnoxious, but that's not the point. The point of free speech is to protect the powerless from the powerful, because for at least 2,500 years, and this is in Euripides, and I'm sure there are other ancient traditions which also understood this, for at least 2,500 years, people have understood that if you want to have any kind of decent politics, the most wealthy and the most powerful have to be subject to critique.
Because if they're not subject to critique, then you very quickly spiral into some form of tyranny. And so the next step is for them to be subject to critique, you have to protect the bodies, physically the bodies, the lives of those who might criticize them. And that is why you have freedom of speech. And so freedom of speech means beginning from the least powerful and the poorest. You start from them and you ask yourselves, I'm just taking our examples from today, you ask yourselves, does the Haitian migrant have free... Have we heard much from them? What about the impoverished? Have we heard much from them lately? What about the people who are homeless? How about their voices? If you really cared about free speech, you start from there. And quite literally, literally the last person you care about in the world is Elon Musk or maybe Vladimir Putin, I'm not sure.
But you're laughing and it's kind of funny, but we've got the whole thing turned around where when we talk about free speech, what we're kind of doing is we tend to talk about the people who already control the conversation and the people who control the conversation are just by definition the last people. Not that they don't have freedom of speech, they do. But if you care about freedom of speech, the question you ask has to begin with the most vulnerable, the ones who should be able to criticize them. And if they can't criticize them, then we all have a problem. I ventured away a little bit from your question, but I just thought that that was a way that you can connect the local and the international. We're talking about people who internationally have this kind of voice.
And one thing which is different, going back to your question between now and 10 years ago, is that 10 years ago, the United States of America, whatever its flaws, and they are many, and whatever its injustices that it perpetrated abroad, above all, I mean a very strong tradition in Latin America, no one really doubted the United States of America was a sovereign state. Now that is subject to serious doubt. So we have our flags and we have our traditions and we will go off and vote and everybody should.
But if you're looking at the United States of America from the outside, you do not see a country that is pursuing anything like a national interest. You just don't see it because it ain't there. What you see is a series of oligarchical clans around the president who are pursuing their own interests, whether it's going to Moscow and looking for the highest possible bribe when you're supposed to be negotiating for peace in Ukraine, whether it's selling American mineral rights in Alaska to Russians and trying not to talk about it, whether it's Trump gaining billions of dollars by being president or people around him gaining even more, you don't see an America there.
People ask me, how do you explain the war in Iran in terms of American national interests? People set this trap. How do you explain how Trump is backing Russia when Russia is Iran's ally and Trump is fighting Iran? Yeah, that's a contradiction. Sure, it's a contradiction. But if you recognize that Trump is not acting on the basis of American national interest and he couldn't care less, then the contradiction sadly dissipates, it goes away. So that is one difference that I think it used to be reasonable to consider American action in terms of something like national interest. I think it is now unreasonable. I hope it becomes reasonable in the future.
And so we've created this situation which is, it's beyond saying our traditional allies who 10 years ago more or less counted on us. They now no longer count on us, which is a difference, but it's something beyond that. It's that we have become unreckonable. No one knows what we're going to do next or can really guess because what passes for our foreign policy is really just the whimsical activity of a select group of grifters.
Alex Lovit:
Talk a little bit about Ukraine. When did this war begin?
Timothy Snyder:
First invasion, 2014, full scale invasion, 2022.
Alex Lovit:
So how has the US played a role in Ukraine and what role are we playing now?
Timothy Snyder:
Well, first of all, let me just say how important Ukrainian resistance is. And I say that with recognition that there are many other terrible things happening in the world and many other wars, but the resistance of Ukrainian state is particularly consequential I think for us because as a state, it's defending the principle of national sovereignty, which may sound dry and technical, but it's the way the world is organized legally that states can't invade other states and take their territory. It's a pretty basic rule. It's the foundation of international law as we've constituted after the Second World War. And if you let that go, then there's really not much else to hold onto. The other thing that they're doing is that they're showing how offensive wars are difficult, which has a similar effect. If Ukraine loses or if we let Ukraine lose, other offensive wars are more likely, for example, those led by China.
So as for our policy, I mean under democratic administrations, under Obama in 2014 and under Biden in 2022, we missed obvious opportunities to do the right thing. I'll put it that way. When Russia invaded Ukraine the first time in 2014, the Obama administration missed an opportunity to call the thing what it was, which was a war, and it missed an opportunity to impose severe sanctions on Russian hydrocarbons. If we had done things like that, the second war probably wouldn't have come around. And then the Biden administration after the full... And by the way, I'm not saying it's only America's fault, that's the way the question was posed. The war is obviously Russia's fault. Russia had no reason to invade Ukraine. The reasons that Russia gives to invade Ukraine, the serious reasons are things that go back to our discussion of tyranny. That only a tyrant, only someone like Vladimir Putin who has hundreds of billions of dollars and controls the hydrocarbon industry and also controls a state, only someone like that can try to realize a proposition like Ukraine doesn't really exist.
But in 2022... So that's just to say that I'm not blaming the Americans, I'm just saying that we were inadequate. The Biden people wanted to be on the right side, which is a laudable, and by the way, very large D, people say small D democratic. I mean large D. It's a very large D democratic impulse to be on the right side. And yeah, you want to be on the right side, but also you want to win.
Okay, I'm just checking the pulse of the room here. And especially in a war. I mean, there are things you want to win and elections are... And a war is another thing that you want to win. You don't just want to be on the right side of it because someone's going to win and someone's going to lose. And so being on the right side of it isn't enough. Someone's going to win and someone's going to lose. And so you have to decide, do you want to help somebody win? I mean, I'm simplifying a bit, but the approach we took under Biden was we want to be on the right side, which is better than being on the wrong side, but it's not as good as saying, "Well, we had an opening in 2022 in the fall. The Ukrainians could have pushed through probably and won and we didn't help them enough." Now, what's changed is that Trump ended the Biden policies of supporting Ukraine, which interestingly, a lot of Americans don't know.
We no longer give financial aid or military aid to Ukraine, and we haven't for some time. The Europeans do, and the Europeans buy our weapons for cash and then give them to Ukraine. All we do is talk about stuff. We don't actually do anything. And insofar as we do anything, and sorry, I'm not getting the answer to your question, it's now help the Russians that we... Trump's diesel announcement that we're going to buy Russian diesel, it doesn't have any practical effects for you or me. It doesn't change the international markets at all. It's not going to lower diesel prices. All it does is break the sanctions regime. All it does is send a powerful signal that the most important country, the Americans, are not going to enforce a sanctions regime anymore.
All it does is flip us more to the side of the Russians, which has been emphasized by Trump multiple times saying the war is Zelenskyy's fault, by Trump saying that Putin has been perfectly fine towards Ukraine, a quote that he uttered unfortunately or sadly or I'm not sure tragically on a day when there were particularly murderous Russian attacks on Ukraine, including a strike on a park in Kharkiv, which killed a baby in a stroller. Trump also multiple times suggesting that the way to end the war is to make things hard on Ukraine and easier on Russia, which is just nonsensical. The Ukrainians have no choice but to fight. And then you've probably all heard from the news that our basic approach to Ukraine, going back to an earlier conversation, is like our approach to everything. It's about people making money.
Alex Lovit:
So I've been forcing us to talk about local and international because I think it's important to pay attention to those and there are politics there that those should be part of how we make political decisions. But we have a national election coming up. We're on the verge of that. What are you worried about and what are you hopeful about?
Timothy Snyder:
I'm worried about and hopeful about exactly the same thing. I think the headline, the front page news, the real story of the election that we're about to have or are already having because folks are already voting of course, is that the opposition party, the Democrats have a historical opportunity to take control of both houses of Congress and take the first steps towards systemic transformational change. That's the story. There are things that are on the periphery of that, like Trump is clearly desperate to hold onto power and there will be and already are electoral shenanigans, but the main story is that. And so that's my hope and it's also my fear.
My fear is that the opposition party, and I put it that way by the way, because I don't mean this in a partisan way. It's not that I love the Democrats. I love individual ones of course, but it's not about that. It's about the opposition party. You need the opposition party to break through and to make the system less corrupt if you want to have a democracy. And so my great fear about these elections is that the opposition party does break through electorally, but doesn't break through in policy. I mean, as I see it, the Democrats have a once in a lifetime opportunity, which they're never going to have again. And I say this with love, but there's nobody more likely to blow a once in a lifetime opportunity than a Democratic party.
There's nobody in the room who's like, "Yep, no, that's not true, Snyder." Everybody's like, "Yeah, I've known these people for a long time." Anyway, so it's a once in a lifetime opportunity because everybody thinks the system is broken, but right now in the fall of 2026, Americans think that Trump is more broken than the system, and so they're giving Democrats, the opposition party, a chance to fix the system so there won't be any more people like Trump. I'm not sure that they see that, and I'm not sure that they're going to take that chance, but it is the chance that they have to take. It's a window which will close. If they don't come out firing in November after they win and say what they're going to do.
And if they don't actually try to do it in January and February, I think by spring we just bounce back to where we were again with Americans saying, "Yeah, everybody's corrupt. What the hell? We gave the Democrats a chance, but it just turned out..." And then you get Trump 3.0, right? Then you get, if not Trump himself, some other version, because Trump's whole secret to success is he says, "Yeah, the whole system is corrupt, but look at me. I'm more charming being corrupt than the other people are. I'm making corruption fun. You can come along on my corruption sitcom." That's his whole shtick, right? He doesn't say he's not corrupt. He says everybody's corrupt and I'm corrupt too, and I'm just better at it than other people, and look at my red, white, and blue outfit and believe that this is America. It's a shtick and he's got a better shtick. And so if you don't get on the right side of the corruption issue, and I mean very specific things here, you got to vote to get money out of elections, even if they veto it, you got to pass a law.
You have to have investigations of individuals who are palpably corrupt, who have gained large amounts of money by self-dealing in the Trump administration. You have to get them on the back foot, and you also have to establish yourself as being the party that is against self-dealing, that is against money in politics. They have a chance to do that. And so my big worry, my real worry is that they won't take it.
Alex Lovit:
Well, I take some reassurance from the fact that I ask you what you're nervous about and you tell me what happens after the election is what you're nervous about.
Timothy Snyder:
I'm honestly more worried about that, right? The Trump people are already trying to fix the election. Obviously that's 100% certainty. They're already doing it, but you can win. We're in a system which is correctly called competitive authoritarianism. There are authoritarian aspects to this. We have a masked paramilitary. We have a president who says he's not sure he'll follow the election. We have extra judicial campaigns against political enemies of the president.
We have all kinds of things that authoritarian regimes have, and we've gotten used to a lot of them, unfortunately, but we also have elections. And the elections, although they're not fair, they are competitive. You can still win them. You can win stuff that isn't fair. That's, by the way, a very white person lesson. I mean, the other people already know that. The entire history of the United States in democracy is people winning stuff that wasn't fair to start out with. The civil rights movement, for example. Was that fair? Were the conditions in the 1960s fair? Did African Americans look around and say, "Yeah, things are fair and that's why we're going to have a civil rights movement." No, it was not fair and they won anyway. In the women's suffrage movement, people look around and say, "Yeah, stuff is fair for us women, and that's why we're going to get the vote because things are already fair." No, they got the vote when it was unfair.
And so yeah, it's like, okay, let's recognize that stuff is sometimes unfair and you have to win anyway. So yeah, these elections are not going to be fair, but they are imminently winnable. So I am concerned about ICE at the polling places. I am concerned about their whisking away ballot boxes. I am concerned about some kind of manufactured fake terrorism thing because that's what Orban did. I'm just going to mention this because I think you have to air it out. At the end in Hungary, Orban said, "Oh no, there was a terrorist incident and the Ukrainians blew up our natural gas pipelines." And everyone said, "Ha ha, that's a lie and that's stupid and you're a loser and you're about to lose."
And I just mention that because it is not impossible that our president will stand up and say, "Oh no, the Ukrainians blew out... Or whatever." And then the only response is to say, "No, they didn't and you're desperate and you're a loser." Because we usually do. We're like, "Okay, on the one hand, Mr. Trump has lied about everything his entire life, but on the other hand, this one might be true and let's give it some airtime." Then you give them time and then suddenly like, oh, terrorism becomes an issue or whatever. So I am worried about those three scenarios. I'm worried about that.
But you asked me what I was most worried about, and what I'm most worried about is the Democrats winning, as I believe they will, and controlling both houses I think is very likely and then blowing it. That's what I am most worried about.
Alex Lovit:
So you talked there about what you would like to happen, what needs to happen in divided government, which is the only possibility. There's two outcomes of this election. One is continued Republican control of federal government, the other is divided government. So you talked about what should happen in divided government. If a pro-democracy coalition wins control of the federal government altogether, including the White House, what needs to happen then?
Timothy Snyder:
Yeah, it's similar. I mean, I think in 27 and 28, what you have to do is get on the right side of issues where the president will likely veto the laws. I mean, for me, the issue of issues is money and politics. You have to get on the right side of that. Yeah, the president will likely veto it, but then it's on the record that you're in favor of it. And that's important for everybody because it means when you do have the presidency, you've kind of made a promise that you then have to keep. That's part of it. You get on the right side of the issue politically, but you also are making a promise that when you do hold the presidency, you will pass this law again and the president will not veto it and then you will change the country and the world and things will be much better for Americans.
So in a way, it's kind of act one and act two as I see it, that you pass the laws that you expect will be vetoed. For me, universal healthcare is another one. Sure, it'll be vetoed, but then you've made a promise of something that getting rid of college debt, things like this, you can do them with legislation, they'll veto them most likely.
But then you've laid down what you will do and that will make it much easier to win in '28 because then the president's party will have bound himself to positions like, yes, we love other stuff like AI and data centers. So then you get the president's party to bind himself to the position that all we want is a country which is full of unregulated data centers and we would like the social media tycoons to tell us what to think and also no healthcare. And by the way, maximum money in politics, you just tie them to all the things that everybody hates and then you have a chance in '28, but then also you've laid down what your agenda would be and you've kind of bound yourself to it and you made it harder to go away from it. That's how I see it.
But I mean structurally for me, the two master issues after money and politics are wealth inequality, which is the same thing as social mobility and social media and AI. Those are the two big issues. I mean, there's a historical legacy of racism which is connected to everything, but in terms of the 21st century issues, the things that we've got to get right are wealth inequality and the presence of algorithms in our children's lives and in our lives. Those are for me the two big things I would be thinking about if I was in control of government.
Alex Lovit:
So you're talking there about what political actors should do, what politicians should do, what should happen in election years. For those of us in this room and those listening, what role can we play? What can we do in between these elections?
Timothy Snyder:
I love that question because, and this has already come up as a theme in our discussion, but we are a bit prone to certain kinds of determinism in this country. And one form of determinism is that there has to be democracy because there has to be. It's been predetermined by the founding fathers or the constitution or whatever by our American exceptionalism, and that just is not true.
And then there's the minor key version of that is that whatever problem there is, the next election will sort it out. But no, the next election, I mean, it might bring some relief or slow things down, but elections on their own are never enough. They're never enough. And when you start to think elections are enough, it's a weird thing to think because we simultaneously think elections are enough, but also politicians are terrible people, and you can't simultaneously hold both of those views because all an election does, and politicians aren't all terrible people by the way, many of them are quite wonderful people.
There's some incredibly dedicated people in national level politics. And being in the House of Representatives is actually kind of a terrible job. I just say this from experience with friends. It's an incredibly difficult job and it's kind of a terrible job, and we should respect the people who are doing it who are not corrupt. But I mean, what I'm trying to say though is that we hold these two views. We say, "Well, we don't really like politicians, but also an election's going to solve it." And no, you can't hold both of those views. It's reasonable to think an election is part of the solution, but you have to push them further. And going back to our previous question, the Democrats, let's say, the opposition party, let's say wins control of both houses. I don't think that's going to be enough. I mean, I think people then have to remind them why they won.
I think there have to be victory celebrations which have slogans, and those slogans have to be things like money out of politics or an into corruption or whatever. I think you have to take the victory and power requires a language around it. It requires art around it. It requires an aesthetic around it, which can only be provided by the people who aren't the politicians who give their reason why there was a victory. I'm now trying to speak neutrally as a student of authoritarianism.
The way things change is when an election is a result of the formation of a broader coalition, of which the political party is an element. But there are other parts of that coalition, like in our country, no kings protestors, local organizers, labor unions and so on. Those are all parts of a coalition and those parts of a coalition also have a voice afterwards. We're not allowed to say, okay, now that X has won the majority or X is the president, that's going to be enough. We should have learned that it isn't. Because even when there was undivided government on the other side, it didn't turn out to be enough, I'm afraid.
So one way to phrase the answer is civil society. I mean, it goes back to our conversation about Springfield, the really heartening thing about Springfield, but also about Minneapolis where I was with my team before that, is that you see that people can act beyond government and that it's correct to think that electoral politics is very important, but it's wrong to think that electoral politics is everything and that the atmosphere that you create by way of self-organization is the thing that affects what happens after an election, and you can't do it all in one burst. It can't just be November.
It has to be, okay, we're continually acting, we're creating friendships, we're creating relationships of trust. We've helped to set up environments, bodies, institutions that can react if something goes terribly wrong, but also which can force people forward when things go terribly right. I'm afraid. I worry about what happens when things go terribly right, which isn't just a personality flaw. It's actually a decent historian's point. There are these contingent moments, as you know, when things do come together, but even when they come together, somebody has to grasp the brass ring. Somebody has to take that opportunity and move forward. And if we're used to working together in civil society, it's much easier for us to say, "Yeah, this is the moment. We're ready. We're ready to push forward."
So I think we have to be a much more activist country. I think we have to celebrate the people who organize. We have to celebrate the people who protest. We have to recognize that protest is something you do also when things are going well. Ukrainians protest right now, and they are absolutely correct to do so. They protest when they think their president is behaving in a way which is contrary to law, and they're a hundred percent correct to do so. They're absolutely right to do so. There are no circumstances in which you do not protest. You protest when things are going right because you need things to go better all the time. You have to keep working those muscles the entire time.
And I mean, as a nation, I think we all, and related to that, we have to spend less time getting ourselves anxious behind the screens and more time with our fellow people. I mean, this is consistent with what I'm saying about civil society. You use the screens in order to organize the action in real life and we need to get people... We've gotten much better at that. A lot of people have learned this lesson, including a lot of young people, but we still tend to spend too much time like this and not enough time out there doing things where at the end of it, you feel like giving people a hug.
I mean, that's kind of one of my tests of good politics. At the end of it, does anybody hug? If not, then maybe it wasn't such a great political action. I'm dead serious about this, by the way. I'm dead serious about the joy. I'm completely serious about the joy. If there is not joy, then you are not doing politics the right way.
Alex Lovit:
Well, Professor Snyder, you've given all of us an assignment and it involves hugs, and I love that. So I think that's a great note to end on. Thank you, Dr. Tim Snyder, for joining me on The Context. Thank you to WYSO for hosting this event, and thank all of you for being here.
The Context is a production of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. Our producers are George Drake Jr. and Emily Vaughn. Melinda Gilmore is our director of communications. The rest of our team includes Jamaal Bell, Tayo Clyburn, Jasmine Olari, and Darla Minnich. We'll be back in two weeks with another conversation about democracy. In the meantime, visit our website, kettering.org, to learn more about the foundation or to sign up for our newsletter. If you have comments for the show, you can reach us at thecontext@kettering.org. If you like the show, leave us a rating or a review wherever you get your podcasts, or just tell a friend about us. I'm Alex Lovit. I'm a senior program officer and historian here at Kettering. Thanks for listening.
The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the host and guests. They're not the views and opinions of the Kettering Foundation. The foundation's support of this podcast is not an endorsement of its content.
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