Michael Schulder: [00:00:00] Tim Snyder, welcome to Wavemaker Conversations.
Timothy Snyder: Glad to be with you.
Michael Schulder: I'm very excited about this because, you know, first of all, like many people, your book On Tyranny has sort of been like a North star for me. I really- I carry it around, there are- chapters come up in my mind that impact the way I am in the world, very often. And what I'd like to do with you is, in terms of where to start, first of all, I just noticed that you have this new newsletter, and I love the tagline: “Greetings from the edge of something good.” Just tell me where- how did you arrive at “Greetings from the edge of something good.”
Timothy Snyder: Well, that comes from a couple of places. I mean, first of all, it comes from the trajectory of my own writing. So I've spent a good number of years trying to write about some of the most atrocious things in world history, in European history. And [00:01:00] then following that, I wrote The Road to Unfreedom and On Tyranny, which are about contemporary authoritarianism and what to do about it. But there's a tension in there which is that if you can diagnose problems or if you can even predict problems, you should also be able to resolve them. You know, if there's a diagnosis, there should be a prognosis as well. And you also just psychologically or morally, you can't get by just telling people how things go wrong or, or just how wrong things can go. You also need, you know, for yourself, but also for others - not so much to give hope, I don't like the word hope so much – but to give a perspective, right? To reveal that the bandwidth of history is broader than we think and that also includes good things that we don't see and not just, not just bad things that we don't see. The other level is that I'm excited about writing what I want to write about. I mean, I'm in a very luxurious position in general. I can write, you know, I can write in a lot of [00:02:00] fora. But I always feel trapped by the moment. I mean, when you're, when you become a historian, one of the things that you learn to do is to inhabit a different moment. And that different moment often then allows you to zone in on your own moment and take that- see things other people don't see and say things other people won't say. But even so, I feel like I'm trapped in my moment, like I'm trapped by the news peg, I'm trapped by, you know, what people want to talk about in the moment. And I want to just bust out from that. So-
Michael Schulder: So the irony is I'm coming to you from a life in network news. But I busted out of CNN in 2013 and here I am. And let me start, because again, we journalists are, we are captive to the moment, and maybe it doesn't have to be that way. So I want to do something with you. I'm going to pull up and share the screen from cnn.com. right now. There are a lot of stories on it and I almost feel like “My gosh, if we had had [00:03:00] Timothy Snyder in our editorial meetings for all those years, we might've made some different story selections and actually put our resources more intensively on fewer, but more important stories.” So let me bring up... Okay, can you see my screen right now?
Timothy Snyder: Yeah.
Michael Schulder: Okay. So, I mean, this is just moments ago, so we see “happening now,”- Well, it's actually… Now that was a good symbol. It is refreshing as we speak. What do you see on that home page that you really want to lock in on and say, “Okay, this, this is worth paying attention to.”
Timothy Snyder: Yeah, I mean, I can't resist the temptation to make the obvious point, which is that the most important story today probably wasn't covered at all. Like, if I- if it were fifty years from now, and I was going to do the history of today, I would have access to all kinds of sources and time to think about them [00:04:00] that a journalist can't have. And so I just want to make the very obvious point that if we really were fifty years from now, and we really did have time, we would- there would probably be something which we're just not covering at all. Okay. But that said, I'm happy to go along with the rules. I don't mean to dodge the question. I just want to make that- because for me, it's kind of- like, for me, it's very good, important to realize that, like, there's always stuff that's going on that you don't see. And it's not in a mysterious conspiratorial way, but rather in the sense that like, the moment always makes more sense than it seems to, right? Like this is- we get overwhelmed with the news and with the internet, and it's hard to see how it all makes sense. It does make sense. It just doesn't always make sense in our ability to real-time process it.
Michael Schulder: Well, let me give you even, you know, maybe a better construct. In terms of what we do see… So, you know, I grew up in the era- I was actually Peter Jennings’ writer at ABC World News Tonight for a number of years. And in those days, because it was the Cold War, and there was a hot [00:05:00] war going on, we would come in every day and sort of ask “Has anything happened today that has made the world more dangerous or safer?” Especially in the context of the cold war. You know, now, as I read On Tyranny and I know- and The Road To Unfreedom and dealing with those parameters, is any- has anything happened today that you think is worth noting because it's moved us more on the road to freedom or unfreedom?
Timothy Snyder: All right, I'm going to take a stab at that. So what's a news conference? I mean, a news conference is the president of the United States, in this case, speaking to reporters. But for me, the real story here would not be the president. The real story would be the reporters. The real story for me in the United States would be the shortage of, the absence of reporters. The president gave a news conference in the 1980s, [00:06:00] you would have local reporters and local editors all over the country saying different things about that news conference. In our country today, there are only going to be three or four takes, I mean, maybe ten on this news conference because the news is so centralized, right? So that's, like- that's- for me, like, the way that a news conference has been narrowed because there are fewer people thinking about it will be the story. The second thing I see here is like “The Congress slams tech CEOs over handling of online extremism, misinformation.” This to me would be a step towards freedom, because I think it's very important for us to be processing, to be understanding social media, not in terms of the under- the information it brings, but fundamentally in terms of the psychological damage that it does. In the long term, social media has made us not just less [00:07:00] tolerant, but frankly just stupider in all kinds of ways, from shorter attention spans to, oh, the taboo subject of lower IQs. And so, it's very important for us to see the new medium as a medium, and to understand that every time there's a new medium, and this was true of the book and the radio as well, every time there's a new medium, you have to get hold of it. Because freedom isn't just about doing anything with a new medium, right? If it were, the religious wars of early modern Europe would be fine or Goebbels having, you know, wanting to use radio to get the same message to every German at the same time would be fine. It's not freedom to do anything you want with a new medium. Freedom means finding a way to make a new medium actually allow humans to reach other humans and it doesn't do it on its own. So, I mean, that's a story which probably is in the category of shifting us towards freedom.
Michael Schulder: So I want to lock into humans- what was your phrase? "Humans being with other humans?"
Timothy Snyder: "Humans [00:08:00] conveying something meaningful to other humans" is what I think I said.
Michael Schulder: Which is, which is interesting to me. So I'm going to take us off screenshare because, really one of the most powerful short chapters in your book On Tyranny, which I've been thinking about a lot, “Chapter 12: Make Eye Contact and Small Talk.” So we've just gone from the national and global headlines at CNN, and you've brought us to that- making us hyper aware of local news and the importance of diversity of opinion. And now we're drilling down even more to a more hyper-local level: make eye contact and small talk. This is not just polite, it is part of being a citizen, and a responsible member of society. This is one of the 20 lessons you drew out of the deepest dive into the darkest chapters of history - make small talk and eye contact. I'm sure I'm not the only one who was struck by that. It has impacted how I am in the world. I'm always somebody who does that normally, but [00:09:00] now I try to make an effort to do it even more. What in history led you to draw out that as one of the only 20 lessons from the 20th century?
Timothy Snyder: Yeah, thank you. I can- I could already tell you're someone who's good at this. And it’s- that's a lesson which, you're right, draws a lot of attention, because it doesn't seem to be obvious. It's not about a glamorous form of resistance. It's not about doing something which is obviously right. It's not something which is going to make the first cut, you know, in a Hollywood movie about what totalitarianism is. But it is about totalitarianism. And there's a bright side and there's a dark side. So the bright side is you can reassure people that things are not as bad as they think. So, if you, when you read about, for example, closely about the great terror in the Soviet Union and the- you know, [00:10:00] when certain categories of people, nations, for example, were categorized as enemy nations or when a family member of someone disappeared and that meant it's very likely that that person was just going to disappear too, people then cross the street, right? They cross the street. They don't make eye contact. They cross the street and maybe, you know, maybe you're not going to save them by not crossing the street. But you're, you at least are reassuring them that there's somebody who doesn't hate them, right? And you're- and in those moments of pressure, maybe something terrible really is going to happen, but you don't have to be part of that something terrible. And by crossing the street or by looking away, you're being part of that something terrible. You're diminishing that person's psychological resources. You're helping to break them down by not making eye contact, by not making small talk, by crossing the street. So that's the bright side. The dark side is- and, I mean, you know, we haven't- the U.S. hasn't gone this dark for [00:11:00] most people, although it has gone this dark for some people, the dark side is you have to be aware when people are not making eye contact with you, or are crossing the street, that you might be in trouble, right? That there are cues, like, you can draw cues about your own precarity from the way people are treating you. But, I mean, it's- there's an underlying lesson here in this lesson, which flows into some of the others as well, which is responsibility. That these- you know, the crack, the fissures in a democracy also run fine, you know, that- and they run, they run into each one of us and we each have a little tiny bit of responsibility. And so we, you know, it's very tempting to think of the success and failure of democracy in terms of larger factors. You know, Americans like to think of economic factors, for example. But democracy is the rule of the people. And ruling is something you have to do every day, you know? You can't delegate it to the free market. You [00:12:00] can't delegate it to larger forces. You can't even really delegate it to two year or four year elections. You have to do it, you know? And then, that sounds very hard, but if you break down doing it into tasks like “let's make eye contact, let's make sure that I at least listened to one sentence of that person who I know disagrees with me,” you know, then it can become something that we can do.
Michael Schulder: Given what you said, I got an email yesterday from a very close doctor friend of mine who is seeing patients who are resistant to getting the COVID vaccine. And this idea of eye contact and trust, he wrote me this, and I want to read it to you because it's sort of the intersection of your work here. This is an exchange that he had with a patient and the patient's mom. Let me see, “A parent-” This is what my doctor friend wrote me: “A parent of a child with asthma. She was probably in her forties, moderately overweight. I asked her if she was going to get the vaccine and she was doubtful. [00:13:00] I asked her why she had her doubts and she went through the usual tropes, including that it was rushed and Bill Gates was involved. I then asked her if she was fearful of getting ill from COVID or dying. And she said yes, and that her sister died last year from the disease. She was diabetic. I looked at her perplexed, but kept cool. I asked her if she feared dying and she said yes. At that point, she said ‘I will probably get it eventually, but my husband will never get it.’ I think she might be 50-50 now at best.” What do you think?
Timothy Snyder: I mean, a couple of things is what I- I could think of a couple of things. I mean, one is the importance of- I mean, in this whole COVID business, the importance of local news, again. I wrote- I was very sick myself at the time when this disease came to the U.S and I was in the hospital for a lot of the beginning of it. [00:14:00] And I was struck by this, like, how COVID was instantly an abstraction, you know? Since we didn't have the people covering the local news, COVID was about China, you know, it was about Trump. It was about whatever, but it wasn't about people down the street. And a disease is always about people down the street, you know? And that, so it was like one more way that, because we don't have the first person local reporting, the conspiracy theories get a grip. And that's just a structural problem we have, you know, if you don't have the local news then the conspiracy theories are always going to get a grip. The second thing of course is what your friend did, which is exactly right, you know, which is to actually make contact with a person. And doctors are, you know, sad to say, in general, getting much worse at this. And this is a general trend that doctors are less able [00:15:00] to spend time by bedsides, because they have to spend more time- I wouldn't say filling out forms, it's not forms exactly, it's the medical record system that they all have to use, right? Which they find very frustrating, which is basically about billing. And so the trend, I mean, the trend is sadly- and it shows, just shows how important this point is, the trend is sadly for doctors to do less of what you just described and more looking away, more looking at screens, right? But how did this doctor, he probably, you know, he may have saved this woman's life. How did he save her life? By making contact with her, like, by having the patience to actually make contact with this person.
Michael Schulder: Well, and you mentioned your own battle, and I have read Our Malady, and by the way, after watching you on screen often and reading your book, you are so composed, you are so methodical. And then that first chapter of Our Malady and your battle for your life last year: rage. I've never heard [00:16:00] anybody write that way about rage, but not blind rage. It was, for you, you turned it into clarifying rage. You've got to share that with us.
Timothy Snyder: Well, it's a hard thing to share, not because I mind sharing it – you know, if I minded sharing that I wouldn't have written the book. But it's a hard thing to share because it came from a particular place to which one doesn't have access, or one doesn’t want to have access all the time? I mean, I was raging. I was raging against dying. You know, a nurse friend and another, you know, another nurse friend suggested this is, you know, this is adrenaline doing its work maybe. But what I felt like was, I- this is not going to happen. I'm not going to allow this to happen. And it was pure because I couldn't actually do anything, you know? I couldn't do anything in the conventional sense. I could barely think I couldn't move my limbs really very much, but I [00:17:00] felt like- I felt this must not happen. This must not happen. And then there was another mood, which is very important, a completely different mood, which I also had in the end of December and early January of ‘19 and ‘20. And that mood was a complet- it was empathy like, and that felt very different. I mean, the rage felt like- it just felt like this pure white, like fire, you know? Just pure, it was pure. And then there was this empathy and the empathy was much more like, it was much, like, much less defined, like this kind of bouncy feeling, right? Like a raft in the water that you're just kind of, you're going through life, you bump into things, you bump into people. There's some people with you, you know, on this raft, it's important that they stay on the raft. It's important that you stay on the raft. And then the thought that I had, which you're kindly calling clarifying, is that you can't- you need both of those things, right? I mean, the rage was about, it was about my biological existence and [00:18:00] like, and that's, you know, we need that. Like, we need to think “I should exist as me. I'm the only me.” But then there's, you know, but then there's also the sense that life only matters if other people understand you or care about you or are somehow along with you for the ride. And neither of those things is enough, right? And I got- this got me thinking about freedom, you know, and how freedom isn't- freedom isn't just about being alone. If it were just about being alone, then, you know, if it were just about rage, that would be insufficient. But freedom is also about the people who make you who you are and how, if you disappear, their lives will be changed, right? You don't actually die alone. I mean, you die- you die alone in one sense, but you also die- when you die, you're taking with you everybody else's version of you. You know, in that sense, you’re dying together. And both of those things are true at the same time. So freedom is about solitude, it’s also about solidarity. And so this got me thinking [00:19:00] about if that's right, you know, if that view from the extreme is right, then how would you build up individual life, social life, political life, so that we could, you know, so that we can balance solitude and solidarity a little bit better?
Michael Schulder: Which gets into some of the things that you observed firsthand in the healthcare system. When you were in the middle of that and looking at both rage and empathy, your children were at the center of that. And that really resonated with me. You did not want to leave your children without you. And coming back to the news, when I worked at CNN, I was, for a while after 911, I was head of the weapons of mass destruction beat. So I was also diving deeply into every imaginable, unimaginable thing. And every day my kids would ask me – and my kids were about- then were about your kid's age now – and they would always ask me “Dad, what stories did you work on today?” And I would always have to struggle to figure out- and I just wonder, because [00:20:00] you know, we, you don't want to “Disnify” this, but are there particular stories that you share with your children to try to impart the values beyond your own life, that you want to impart to them?
Timothy Snyder: That's a tough question. You know, because when I was, when I was very sick and I was thinking about my kids, it wasn't because I thought I'm, like, such a great dad, you know? It’ because, it’s just because I'm their dad, right? Like it wasn't like, “Oh, I'm like so wonderful. I'm irreplaceable.” It's just that I’m theirs, you know, it’s like, I’m their father. I would be taking that theirness away from them, you know? When it comes to that stuff, I mean, I, I have views about what they should be exposed to at what time, you know? I wrote a book called Bloodlands, which I was racing to finish because I wanted that [00:21:00] part of my life to be over before I became a father. And I didn't succeed. I ended up, you know, I did finish it that on time, I mean, well, before I became a father, but I- I wanted to- I then wrote another book about the holocaust, called Black Earth, which came out when my first child was five and my second child was three. But I don't like to talk to them about those things. I mean, what I like to talk to them about is possibility. I mean, a historian, like, a historian thinks, sees, you know, and a journalist does too, that there are, that there's a much broader range of stuff than we expect, in all directions. If things had happened, things that could have happened, it’s just much bigger, right? And so in that possibility, there are things like the Holocaust. And, you know, my kids are only eight and ten, but they, they already, you know, they already know, [00:22:00] like, they can't not know what that was. But what I find- what I like is the existence of models. Like, that- I like that a lot. I mean, this is kind of old fashioned, but I really like biographies. And I really like for my kids to realize that like, oh, like Einstein for example, right? Like one of my kids is fascinated with Einstein right now, right? That's cool. You know, there's never going to be another Einstein, you know? There's not, you're not going to, you're not going to be Einstein. But it's cool to know that there was this guy who would like do his job in the patent office in a couple of hours. And then figure out the basic rules of the road of the universe, you know, during the afternoon, like, that's cool. Or, you know, Martin Luther King or Vaclav Havel... I like- I mean, rather than the horrible times, I like for them to know that there are these exemplars, like, that that's possible. That that's out there, right? That there's- that life isn't just physical life. It's not just like the suffering and the [00:23:00] difficulty, but it's also the moral life. And that there are people in whom this moral life seems to be concentrated, you know? And they're worth knowing about.
Michael Schulder: Let me ask you a final all-encompassing question from every aspect of your work and you can take it whatever way you want, but as I'm listening to you talk about models and I just read your second newsletter edition of Hank Aaron and what you learned from him. And I was so surprised to hear that you were a kid who couldn't really focus or concentrate that well, but what you learned from him about always keeping your eye on the pitcher and that brought to mind what I've learned from a guy named David Epstein who wrote a book called The Sports Gene, where he looked at a study of pit- of hitters, of batters who had the best batting averages. They don't see the ball, they see the anticipatory cues. They can see the movement of the pitcher’s shoulder, all those things better than other people. And I'm thinking, well, what better person to see the anticipatory cues of certain trends in history than you? And then, you know, and then I thought about your “gamers [00:24:00] versus breakers” piece. So my final question is if you could just briefly explain the gamers versus the breakers and then add a third category for us, the fixers.
Timothy Snyder: Okay, so I can't help but start with your point, which I really like, about seeing the pattern, because sports is like that. I mean, sports helps you to do that. You can see sports as just numbers and that's attractive too, but when you're actually playing it, there's no, there’s no moment that you can take apart from the other moments, you know? I mean, the moment where the ball hits the rim is the same moment as your anticipation of where it's going to go off the rim, you know? And like in baseball, you're searching for where the pitcher's hand is on the ball, you know, is- to try to anticipate whether it's a breaking ball or not, like, you know, looking at the wrist, the bone of the wrist to see if there's a telltale shift. Like [00:25:00] that's the same thing as you're pulling the bat back a little bit, because you think it's going to be a breaking ball and you want to slow, it's all the same thing, right? And so sports is good about that. And I just wanted to mention that when I was sick, like, a funny thing happened when I was sick, which was I st- that human ability to kind of anticipate what's happening got very sharp. Like I was- when I was recovering, I would see people on the street and I would start to like, that particular ability started to go haywire. And I would like start to see the things that they might do. And then I would kind of, like, almost like I saw them happen, and then they didn't necessarily happen, like, my mind was filing through all these things. And it's so interesting how, like, that's a capacity that in normal life, it just folds into what we think we're doing. But it's actually a very special thing that we're able to do. And as far as like history in the future, historians like to say like, “Oh, we can't talk about the future. We talk about the past.” But I think like that's a bit of a [00:26:00] cop out because people are talking about the future all of the time and usually doing a very bad job of it, you know? So why don't, I mean, we might as well do a bad job of it too, you know? And I think we might do a slightly less bad job of it than other people sometimes. And the reason has to do broadly with what you're talking about or we're talking about, which is this business of patterns. Isaiah Berlin, quoting the great political thinker Isaiah Berlin quoting the historian Lewis Namier said that a historian is not somebody who knows what happened, a historian is somebody who knows what didn't happen. And that's that, right? Like, that ability to think “Okay. You know, I'm not sure that that's going to be- I'm not sure it's going to be a curve ball, but it's not going to be a fast ball.” You know, like, “I'm not sure, I'm not sure that this is going to be a fly ball, but it's like it's- but it looks like it's not going to be a grounder,” you know, like, that you can kind of narrow things and put them into like part of the bandwidth of probability. You have this sense [00:27:00] of like that some things just aren't going to hold together and that- very often, you have a feel for the flavor of the lie, you know? Like politicians are lying, they lie all the time, but there are different flavors of lying. And you can have a feeling like, “Oh, that's not just a normal lie, that's a big lie. Like, that's an inverting lie. That's a lie which is turning the whole universe around. That's a lie which is ripping things up.” That, historians can sometimes do. And so, you know, with the breakers and the gamers, it’s nice of you because I'm not really, I'm not- I mean, I’m an American and I'm a historian, but I'm not really an American historian. And I've like, I've had to get interested in it, and now I find it interesting. But this- you know, the way, the ways democracy breaks down, where you game the system, you game the system and after a while you've realized like, “Well, I don't take it seriously. Why should I really take it seriously? Why should I pretend anymore?” And then you get the people who are the breakers, who say, “Yeah, we're not pretending anymore. We're just not.” You know, “We're gonna, we're gonna use violence. We're going to overturn the outcome,” you know? “Yeah, [00:28:00] that's what we're going to do. Why not?” And then the fixers, I think that's nice. I mean, I think the fixers- you know, you're introducing this category, but the fixers, I think, are the people who have, who introduce values back into this discussion. So if democracy is not a game, what is it? And I think the answer is that it's a mission. You know, that it's a value and that value describes a mission, like, that value describes a trajectory into the future. It'd be great if America were democracy. That'd be great, right? I mean, humans should be free. We should be able to express ourselves. We should all be able to vote. It should be easy to vote. We should be proud that it’s easy to vote in our country, right? So I think a fixer, I mean, there are problems that have to be fixed. Like, local news is for me is the big problem which the Biden administration has not yet launched this moonshot about and I wish they would. You know, and there's global warming, that's number two on my list. But there are problems that can be fixed, but in terms of our society, [00:29:00] we'd be better at solving those problems, be more likely to solve those problems, if we saw democracy as a kind of mission, like if we saw democracy as a place to go, you know? That for me is a fundamental fix that the country needs. Not that people always make the right decisions, but boy, we would make- as a society, we're much wiser than our outcomes, you know? I mean, we are. We're not, we're not that wise. I'm not trying to praise us or being an American nationalist, but like, we, we actually have much more common sense than our institutions do at the end of the day. And so for me, like, the fix would be let's make it easy for people to vote instead of hard, you know? Let's make people feel like they're included in the country. And I think then some of the other problems will- they won't solve themselves, but they'll start to seem a lot more, they'll seem a lot more tractable.
Michael Schulder: And you say that even despite the fact that right now, obviously there is this huge battle over making it either harder or easier to vote.
Timothy Snyder: Yeah. I mean, that's like, that's our American [00:30:00] syndrome, you know? I mean, I- it should obviously be easier to vote. It should obviously be easier to vote. I mean, the whole fraud thing is- there just empirically isn't that much fraud. It's a cover story, you know? I mean, for me, it's an addiction. The Republicans are addicted to voter suppression. And when you're addicted to something, you always have a story you always have, you know, it's like, “This is not- it's my medicine,” you know? That when they say fraud, it's like the addict saying “It's my medicine, it’s like my medicine, I need it.” And you get addicted to things and then you can't imagine it being any other way. You can’t imagine, like- you can't imagine getting out on the other side. And the funny thing about all this is that, I mean, so when you're addicted to voter suppression, you're a racist. You're a racist because you're taking part in a racist tradition and you're a racist because you're creating racist outcomes. And you're probably also a racist in your intentions, even if you don't admit them. And the thing is like, if you're a Republican, you say “Well, our problem is demography.” You know, “There’s [00:31:00] not enough white people, you know, that's our problem.” But that's not the problem. The problem is the voter suppression. If you didn’t suppress the voters, people wouldn't think you were racist because you wouldn't be, right? Like, that's the problem is your own actions, but you're deeply addicted to this and you can't see your own problem, right? I mean, that, and that’s like- and it's not about Republicans, it’s about the structure of U.S. society – the Democrats used to be the voter suppression party for the same reason, because they used to be the racist party, right? And so in that sense, like the word “fix” kind of isn't, you know, doesn't take us deep enough because it's not just an institutional fix, it's also a moral, like it's a moral repair, right? I mean, Trump's big lie was “I won the election.” But his big lie only works on the surface of the American big lie, and the American big lie is “black people aren't people and therefore shouldn't be allowed to vote,” right? That's the American big lie. It rides on the surface of that. And we have to, like, we- for everybody, you know, it's in everybody's interests, [00:32:00] not just morally, but politically in terms of just the survival of our country and even our species that we get ourselves out of that, you know, that we get ourselves out of that. And that's, you know, and now I'm talking for a long time, but like, this is one of the, this is one of the things which is so important about history and where I learned from my us historian colleagues, because it's something I know about in other societies, but I've only recently started figuring out in the U.S. You can never make this transition to being a democracy, I don't think, without getting the history right. Like history is not just, democracy is not just mechanics. The idea of one person, one vote isn't mathematics. One person, one vote is a moral commitment, which requires a self-awareness of how you haven't treated other people as people. And it's not about feeling guilty, you know? It's not about long sob stories, but it's about recognizing history. Like, I think without history, you can't do it, right? And so some of the fixers – and sorry this is such a long answer to your question – but-
Michael Schulder: No no, please.
Timothy Snyder: I mean, some of the fixers, at least on the side, are the historians, like, the people who- like the people who [00:33:00] say “Look, this isn't just the 6th of January,” you know, “This is, there is a long history of people storming buildings in the U.S. for these kinds of reasons.” And again, the point is not that you feel guilty about, you know, some state house in the third quarter of the 19th century, the point is that you're able to take it in and recognize it and say, “Aha, we're in this history,” right? “We own this history.” And if we want to, and part of having a democracy is telling the truth about, about the history.
Michael Schulder: Before I let you go, you've got to just do me one more favor because as you're talking- first of all, I am going to try to work with you on the moonshot for local news. You've sold me on that. And it's so interesting because they always said, Tip O'Neill, “All politics is local,” but all politics has now become national. And all news has become national and you really sort of opened my eyes to the “We need an adjustment there.” But in terms of fixers, given the deep dives, I'm thinking right now, if I were to ask Tim Snyder, give me one [00:34:00] example of a fixer from your exploration of history… I'm thinking Solidarity, right now, Solidarity in Poland, but maybe it's something else. Can you just give me a thumbnail of one fixer from another country who we might be able to take strength from?
Timothy Snyder: Yeah, sure. I mean, there are plenty of cool fixers. I mean, you know, in our, in our own society right now, too. I mean, the people, the people who work within our difficult system to get people out, to vote in 2020, you know, those are, those are, those are fixers in our, in our, in our sense. But in terms of, you know, history, I always, I always go to Eastern Europe because that's where, that's where I come from, so to speak. And I'll say something about Solidarity, then I'll say something about something else. But I mean, Solidarity was a labor union, which got itself to be recognized under communism. So it was at the same- it was, on the one hand, a challenge [00:35:00] to a regime. On the other hand, it was a way of being together and that, you know, there were 10 million members of solidarity at its height. And that's a reminder, a useful reminder, you know, whether you're on the right or the left or you think you're on one or the other, that in order to, in order to get things done, you not only have to have a claim to justice, but you also have to have this feeling that you're in it with some other people. And that that- then there's organization around that. And that's like- I mean, there's a small point too maybe here about labor unions, right? Labor unions are actually good for democracy and it's bad for our democracy that only 6% of people in the private sector are in a labor union right now. If we're going to go to a person, I mean, the person who's probably meant the most to me, um, in the last few years is Vaclav Havel, who was the former president of Czechoslovakia but more importantly, was a dissident in the 1970s who was concerned with [00:36:00] precisely, you know, an issue, which unites the two of us, which is local truth. And in the conclusion he came to in the 1970s in Czechoslovakia, which was an age of not just communism, but also consumerism and television, the conclusion that he came to was that all- resistance starts with finding a language which allows you to describe the truths immediately around you. And then from that, you can build outward to other people who are doing the same thing. And then from that, you can build outward eventually, you know, when the conjuncture is right, when you get a little bit lucky, from that you can build out to something, to something better. So, I mean, that’s a place where I take my inspiration because I'm a writer and I'm a historian and like, you know, I'm interested in truth and facts. So there you go.
Michael Schulder: We will end on local truths because you've given me a new mission. All my life I've been in network news, always thinking nationally and globally. And you've, you [00:37:00] really have opened up eyes more to this importance of local truths.
Timothy Snyder: Thank you.
Michael Schulder: Thank you so much, Tim Snyder. Thank you for joining me on Wavemaker conversations.
Timothy Snyder: Very glad we can do it.