Like the framers of the Constitution, I’m not an American exceptionalist. TIMOTHY SNYDER: So, I guess the place to start would be with the quotation. Can you talk about, well, just what we quoted you saying there? Do you think that the United States is - is headed towards tyranny? Welcome to Democracy Now!, Timothy Snyder. Professor Synder is also the author of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, as well as Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.” That’s from On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder, Levin Professor of History at Yale University, where he joins us now. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. It is titled On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.ĪMY GOODMAN: Professor Snyder writes, quote, “The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We spend the rest of the hour with award-winning author and Yale University history professor Timothy Snyder, whose new book draws on his decades of experience writing about war and genocide in European history in order to find lessons that can help the United States avoid descending into fascist authoritarianism. “What stood behind all of that was a lifetime of working on the worst chapters of European history, a sense of how things can go very wrong.”

“I was trying to get out front and give people very practical day-to-day things that they could do,” Snyder says. Is the United States sliding toward tyranny? That is the question posed by Yale University history professor Timothy Snyder in his new book that draws on his decades of experience writing about war and genocide in European history in order to find 20 key lessons that can help the United States avoid descending into authoritarianism.

The following interview comes from Democracy Now! (May 30, 2017).įor Dan's review of Snyder's book On Tyranny, see here:

Timothy snyder on tyranny 20 lessons