Since the 2016 US presidential election, no one has been more vocal in criticizing Trump’s growing nihilism than Timothy Snyder. A professor of history at Yale University, he took effective leave of absence from his day job in 2017 to write On Tyranny, a collection of 20 lessons learned from a meticulous study of the totalitarian regimes of Europe in the last century and how they apply to the United States in the present.
In 2018, Snyder followed that book with The Road to Unfreedom, an illuminating and unsettling account of how Vladimir Putin’s war on truth was sown as a global virus, driven by Silicon Valley tech oligarchs, and amplified by self-serving populists in the White House and elsewhere. With the prospect of another Trump-led dismantling of the rule of law in sight, Snyder here unites all the strands he cares about, and makes an urgent plea for what, exactly, is worth fighting for: “If we can portray the worst case scenario, can’t we also portray the best case scenario?”
On Freedom is a companion to these earlier books, providing an incisive analysis of the current crises of information, climate, and civil society, and a clear prescription for change. In this book, Snyder recycles some of the language that has been used by so-called libertarians on the right, but in particular the title’s subject, “freedom,” is defined here not as a negative one, such as “freedom” from restrictions, factual demands, or social obligations, but as an active, physical demand (“If you want to be free, you must affirm, not just deny”):
Snyder understands the threat to democracy through his knowledge of the collapse of Soviet communism.
As a writer, Snyder has argued that the body is the site for taking a stance against the progression of a dehumanizing “screen culture.” He has encouraged an active “body politics” – voting with recountable paper ballots, meeting in person instead of on social media, marching and debating instead of online likes and anonymous sarcasm. “The powers that be want your body to go soft in your chair and your emotions to disappear on the screen,” he wrote in 2017. “Get outside. Spend your body in strange places, with strange people.”
Like other writers who share the same concerns, such as Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev, Snyder understands the threat to Western democracy through first-hand experience of the collapse of Soviet Communism, and important reference points for this reflection therefore include writers who lived out their philosophies in a climate of repression: Vaclav Havel and Simone Weil.
Using those coordinates, he identifies five key determinants of a truly free society. And it seems quite appropriate that those tenets could be counted on the fingers of a clearly raised fist. Each leads to the next. Its foundation is sovereignty (the creation of political conditions in which individuals can make meaningful choices about their lives that are safe and grounded in empathy, rather than narrow-minded nationalist resolve). That in turn leads to “unpredictability”, the freedom to act in ways that authorities (and algorithms) cannot control. And mobility (the possibility, especially for young people, to “break out of the structures (and people) that allowed us to become (sovereign)”. That is only possible with the freedom of “factuality” (a “grip on the world that allows us to challenge it” – Snyder develops a particularly impassioned discussion of the devastating effects of local news deserts on democracy). And finally, to “solidarity”, the recognition that these freedoms are for everyone, not just the privileged 0.1%.
It’s a rigorous and prescient argument, deeply rooted in Snyder’s own biography. He begins with a memory of ringing his family’s Liberty Bell on Independence Day as a 10-year-old on his Ohio farm. He has since considered these ideas almost entirely not on screen, but in his interactions with those who feel the presence and absence of freedom most keenly, from Ukrainian pensioners caught in a never-ending conflict to the inmates in the maximum-security prison where he teaches courses on liberation. As a result, three things might be added to his prescription for freedom: buy or borrow this book, read it, and take it to heart.
On Freedom by Timothy Snyder is published by Bodley Head (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
