Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Timothy Snyder:

One of the things that the Hungarians who won didn’t hesitate to say before and after the election is that there will be legal consequences for abuse of power, right. It’s one of the things that Maduro said in his victory speech, and I think that Democrats have to be ready to say that too.

Preet Bharara:

Welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara. My guest this week is Tim Snyder. He’s a historian of authoritarianism and modern Europe, and he’s the inaugural chair in Modern European History at the University of Toronto’s Munk School. That’s coming up. Stay tuned. What does it take to dismantle an authoritarian regime? Historian Timothy Snyder weighs in on the electoral defeat of Hungary’s Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán. Timothy Snyder, welcome to the show.

Timothy Snyder:

Really glad to be with you. Thanks.

Preet Bharara:

It’s been a long time that I’ve wanted to talk to you. You’ve had a lot of influence in a lot of places. We are recording this. I like to timestamp sometimes when we’re talking about modern current events. On Monday, April 13th, in the morning, by happenstance, I think we are speaking the day after Viktor Orbán suffered a defeat at the polls in Hungary. And who better to talk to than you? So first dumb question I have is, I’ve been told that Viktor Orbán was a dictator, an autocrat, an authoritarian. What’s an authoritarian worth his salt doing losing an election?

Timothy Snyder:

That’s a great question, and it does happen all the time. I think in the US, our expectations have been drastically shifted by the experience of Trump because I think most folks would’ve thought, “Well, it’s impossible for somebody to try to steal an election.” And then suddenly we’ve all lived through an American president trying to steal an election. And so then we think, “Well, everybody must steal elections all the time.”

Whereas the truth is a little more complicated. The truth is that if you are trying to build an authoritarian system, one of the things you do is you rig the elections, which is what Orbán had done. Maduro’s victory in Hungary is all the more impressive because it was uphill. He managed to get a constitutional majority even in a rigged setup. And when you win an electoral victory like that, it’s not just numbers, it’s mass mobilization, it’s consistent effort.

And the demonstration of that is what gets the authoritarian to concede. A narrow victory, a chancery victory, a victory where the outcome isn’t so clear, maybe he calls in the Russians, maybe he calls in the Americans, maybe his false flag terrorist fake thing from a week ago gets brought up again. But when you get crushed, you know you’ve been crushed. So no, this happens. The political scientists call this competitive authoritarianism. There are elections, they’re just uphill. And if you can win, then power may actually change hands.

Preet Bharara:

Should we be shocked and appalled that even the campaigning of one J.D. Vance didn’t turn it around for him?

Timothy Snyder:

I’m trying to unpack the levels of irony, that question. I mean-

Preet Bharara:

There are about four levels, four levels.

Timothy Snyder:

Yeah, I mean-

Preet Bharara:

Unpack one to three if you would like.

Timothy Snyder:

I’ll try to go upwards in terms of level of difficulty. I mean, for one thing, this was a domestic election, right. And so we Americans shouldn’t think that everything is all about us or that an American turning up is going to make much of a difference one way or another. Second, this domestic Hungarian election was largely about grift, and we are the grifters. J.D. Vance is a candidate of grift. He is backed by billionaires. The people immediately around him are grifters.

So he can come and talk about God as he did, but that the resonance that the Trump administration has for most folks outside the US is that it’s a collection of mad grifters. And mad grifters are what Maduro was campaigning against. And then the final thing one has to realize is that J.D. Vance doesn’t actually know anything about Democratic politics. I mean, he won the race in Ohio when he was backed by Peter Thiel.

He was carried along as vice president. But the idea that you’re going to send Vance off on a mission to get votes, whether it’s in Peoria or whether it’s in Budapest, is a little bit silly. But I mean, I’m just going to add this, though. I was also offended by what he did. I mean, I just don’t think we have any right to be going to other countries and telling them how to vote. And we certainly don’t have any right to go to other countries and tell them that we know how God thinks they should vote, which is what Vance did.

Preet Bharara:

Because it looks kind of bad now because God was wrong, per Vance. It’s kind of bad on… Although the other thing that I wasn’t going to mention, but it seems apropo of your remark, Trump is Jesus. Did you see this?

Timothy Snyder:

Yeah. No, it is very much apropo because they are self-deifying. They’re in the self-deifying phase of their politics.

Preet Bharara:

How many phases are there? How many phases are there? How many post-deifying, self-deifying phases do we have to live through?

Timothy Snyder:

Well, in the case the Roman Empire, the deifine habit expanded until the whole thing collapsed.

Preet Bharara:

Are we penultimate? I just wanted to say penultimate.

Timothy Snyder:

Yeah. No, who can blame you? Are we penultimate or are we anti-penultimate? I think whether we’re penultimate or anti-penultimate depends on… I mean, not to make the easy point. It depends on us, right. So the lesson of Hungary is to return to where you started is that you can beat these aspiring authoritarians in unfair elections, and you can beat them badly. You can beat them so soundly, they know they’ve been beaten. But you have to do it. You can’t just observe the stages of development, right. It is interesting that Trump is right now, he’s not in a beef with Leo.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, the Pope. Yeah.

Timothy Snyder:

His problem with Leo is that Leo believes in God. That’s his problem with Leo. And for Trump, there’s no God but Trump, right. Trump’s whole Christianity is about worshiping himself. So it’s interesting to observe, but this kind of decline in fall, it may have a dynamic of its own. But where it goes, that depends on what people do. That depends on what we do.

Preet Bharara:

So the election in Hungary, as far as I understand, as you say, was a domestic election, and it turned on grift/corruption and also the economy. It did not turn on these broad issues of authoritarian rule and the supposed dismantling of the judiciary and the independent functioning of various institutions in Hungary. All these things that we rail about, some of the things that you’ve written about, were they at the center of the election defeat or not, or were they indirectly?

Timothy Snyder:

That’s a really great question because I think it speaks to something important about how you have to run on the issue of democracy, because I don’t… I mean, I care deeply about democracy. I really think the idea that the people should rule is the best idea we’ve had, but that word democracy doesn’t rally people.

And I think it’s understandable because people, at least Americans, they’ll associate democracy with this thing that they’ve got. And the thing that they’ve got is pretty flawed. It could be a lot better. The way that it works and the way that it did work in Hungary is to connect the issue of abuse of power with the things that people feel in their everyday lives.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, yeah.

Timothy Snyder:

So in Hungary, you have independent media, not the big media, but the independent media that remained revealing scandals, and those scandals, one of which, interestingly, was also a sex abuse of minor scandal, but those scandals then connect the issue of abuse of power with people being poorer than they ought to be. And I think those dots have to be connected.

If you just try to run on affordability as the Democrats… some of the Democrats want to do, you’re aiming for a conventional victory, and you’re also not preparing yourself for dramatic things you have to do after you win. You can’t just say affordability. You also can’t just say democracy. You have to say abuse of power, grift, oligarchy, making everybody poor. It’s only going to get worse.

Preet Bharara:

What’s the particular grift or corruption or abuse that is the winning formula as a matter of street politics for Democrats in this country?

Timothy Snyder:

I mean, I’m going to speak to that, but I just want to point out the converse. Since we’re talking about Hungary, and I think this is related to your question, one of the things that the Hungarians who won didn’t hesitate to say before and after the election is that there will be legal consequences for abuse of power, right. It’s one of the things that Maduro said in his victory speech. And I think that Democrats have to be ready to say that too.

Preet Bharara:

What does that mean?

Timothy Snyder:

It means that there are people committing crimes in the United States right now who are not being prosecuted and who are not afraid of being prosecuted. And if you want to deter further abuse, especially around the November election, you do have to make it clear that on the other side, there will be prosecutions.

Preet Bharara:

Well, are you talking about Donald Trump? Is Donald Trump one of those people?

Timothy Snyder:

Absolutely. Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. So I’m going to play devil’s advocate for a moment. So we’ve been down this road. There was a first term of Donald Trump. People said there will be accountability. There were two impeachments. There was a special counsel investigation, and there were prosecutions. There were four indictments. And some not insane people will say whether that was right and proper and just and backed by the evidence or not, it fueled the comeback of Donald Trump in spectacular fashion. Do you have a reaction to that?

Timothy Snyder:

I don’t think that was a big campaign issue either way in the summer and autumn of ’24. But I mean, I think regardless, you’re paying a long-term price if you don’t prosecute the big criminals. And in the case of the Second Trump administration, there are lots of them. And if they attempt to rig the elections in some of the ways they’ve been talking about, there will be many more of them.

So no, I think in normal Democratic countries like France, like Italy, heads of state or heads of government get prosecuted on a regular basis. And this American notion that we could just make an exception, and I mean, forgive me, you’re an expert on this, and I’m not, but the way we went about it with Trump was pretty half-hearted. And I think that is the mistake and not the actual prosecution of him. But I don’t want to personalize this because it’s not personal.

And this goes to your question about what the winning message is. One of the reasons why Americans are upset about the economy is because they understand that some people are doing extremely well and they’re not. And they’re coming to understand that some of those people are the people like the Witkoffs, like the Kushners, who are personally around the Trump administration, that the economy is being rigged in this very particular way.

That’s the way you make a reckoning. A reckoning is both an economic reckoning. It’s a policy reckoning, but also, there are going to be cases of people. I mean, I don’t want to overdo this point. I just think you can’t actually win an election without it. I think if you say, “We’re going to keep kicking that can down the line,” then people think that you’re cowardly. And what’s the point?

Preet Bharara:

And so does the election provide a glimpse of our future? Does it provide an opportunity or a lesson for our future? Is it a one-off? Are there trends? How do you see it in the broader scope of things before we move on?

Timothy Snyder:

Yeah, I mean, I don’t think… I think it’s really impossible to overstate how important Hungary is. I think folks in the US who are centrists, who are liberals, who are on the left may not understand that Orbán was the sun in the solar system of MAGA. I think we systematically underrate how cosmopolitan MAGA is. I mean, MAGA may not understand it either, but MAGA is-

Preet Bharara:

That’s super interesting. We underestimate… I don’t think I’ve heard that sentence before. We underestimate how cosmopolitan MAGA is.

Timothy Snyder:

Yeah. No, the far right is cosmopolitan. The far left is… Our far left tends to be provincial. Our far right is cosmopolitan.

Preet Bharara:

But not globalist.

Timothy Snyder:

Trump… Well, globalist is code word for antisemitic. I mean, when people who say globalists, what they mean is they hate the Jews a lot of the time, and especially on the MAGA side. But bracketing that, they are… I mean, in that sense, they are what they claim to oppose, right. They are actually a conspiracy. Trump, Putin, Vance, Orbán, together, along with others, comprise a large network, which has been broadly documented involving the trends of Russian oil money, the sharing of political memes, the support of think tanks, right.

The whole… The thing which passes for right-wing nationalism in the United States is largely a set of internationalists who are trading ideas, who are trading money, and are learning from one another. And so the obvious significance of Orbán losing in Hungary is that it’s demoralizing for Trump and Vance because he’s basically their daddy. They learn from him, not the other way around. When Orbán was in power the first time, Vance was still in high school. So it’s a blow to them.

And the reason why it’s a blow to them is not just the end of these networks and the end of their champion, but it’s also that they think… I mean, they’re the latest people to make this mistake. They think that history is over, especially Vance. But Vance, Trump, the whole movement, they think history is over, that they are right, that their version of the far right is what people really want, and there’s really no reason why they can’t stay in power forever. And the fact that at the center of their universe, which is Budapest, someone could get absolutely thumped like this in an election.

That shows them that maybe history isn’t on their side, maybe God isn’t on their side. But then on the positive side, if you’re trying to run against Trump, this shows that they can lose. It shows that protest politics are directly connected to Democratic victory. It shows that you can bring a chain together of independent media, scandals, protests, and an electoral outcome. That’s what the Hungarians managed to do. So it’s tremendously important, however you’re looking at US politics.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with Timothy Snyder after this. So you mentioned the possibility of shenanigans in a future American election. And so you said a thing, it’s fairly provocative, and I want you to explain it and defend it.

A couple of weeks ago, on your Substack, you wrote something called the Next Coup Attempt, and talking about the problem that Trump faces an uphill battle electorally at the moment, “Some variant of terrorism is Trump’s best bet, and so one should be (preemptively, now) skeptical of Trump’s account of any future terrorist attack.”

“We can be sure,” that’s pretty strong, “We can be sure that, whatever its true origins and character, Trump will provide a self-serving account meant to serve a coup and a dictatorship. It is utterly predictable that he will attempt to pass responsibility for any act of terror to his domestic political opponents and discredit or undo elections.” Really?

Timothy Snyder:

I think that the presumption in favor of something like that is much, much stronger than the presumption in favor of if there’s a terrorist attack in the United States, Donald Trump will suddenly revert to something he’s never been before, which is a person who cares about the interests of the United States and its population.

Preet Bharara:

That I certainly agree with.

Timothy Snyder:

Or that Trump will do something that he’s never done before, which is generate a foreign policy response, which comes from the interests of that country or those people. Look, I mean, I realize our default in the media is that we would like for the president to be the president, and we’d like to imagine that in a drastic circumstances, he would revert to some kind of type, but Trump has never been that type. There’s no reason to think that he would react the way we would like for him to react. And so we have to imagine how else he would react, and that’s my version.

Second point is that it is totally normal for US presidents actually to take advantage of terrorist attacks. That’s what the Bush administration did in the war in Iraq. That was taking advantage of a terrorist attack. He took advantage of a terrorist attack in the way that conformed to his character. Now let’s ask about Trump’s character. Trump, if you think through that analogy through, what Trump’s character is about is preserving personal power for Trump. That’s what he cares about. And I don’t think he’s making any illusions about that.

And the final thing I want to point out is that, and again, this isn’t meant to be a doomsane prophecy. This stuff can be beaten, and it can be counterproductive. But the final thing I want to point out is that this just happened in Hungary. It just happened a week ago. Orbán just generated a false flag terrorist attack. Okay. He just made that up. It’s not exactly the same because nothing actually, I think, happened. But Orbán said, “We have uncovered a terrorist attack on our pipeline, and it was our enemies who did it.” He claimed it was the Ukrainians, and he associated the Ukrainians with the Hungarian opposition.

Now, why didn’t we hear a whole lot about that, outrageous though it is? Because it didn’t work. And why did it not work? Because the Hungarian opposition ahead of time said, “It’s pretty likely there’s going to be some kind of electoral terrorist stunt, and we can’t let Orbán take advantage of it.” So what you and I are doing right now is that same kind of inoculation. There are two desperate moves that a leader like Trump can make. The first is fight a foreign war. Check. That’s happened. And the second is to generate or take advantage of, generate a terrorist attack, take advantage of a real terrorist attack, or take advantage of a fake terrorist attack, something that never actually happen, right.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, but those are very, very different things. So that’s what I was trying to get at.

Timothy Snyder:

Yeah, sure.

Preet Bharara:

The difference between one and two are vast. Taking advantage of politically, as you say, has been done many, many times before, including on 9/11, of a, quote, unquote, legitimate, actual, genuine terrorist attack versus concocting one or generating one are huge, hugely different. And you’re saying we have the possibility of both.

Timothy Snyder:

These things… Look, I just want to normalize all this because it happens all the time. How did Putin come to power? Who are the two people Trump… Who do we think Trump admires in the world? Putin and Orbán. How did Orbán try to stay in power? By inventing a plot, which probably didn’t happen, and blaming domestic enemies for it. How did Putin come to power? There were several elements to this, but one of the elements was that the Russian Secret Services quite literally bombed a series of Russian apartment buildings and then blamed it on Muslims.

This happens in the world, and it’s done by the people who Trump admires. And we, as Americans, we just can’t do this thing which we keep doing, which is saying, “Oh, there’s some things that happen in history, or they happen in foreign countries, but I would like to reserve the right to be very surprised when they happen in the United States.” No, we cannot reserve the right to be very surprised when these things happen in the United States, because if we’re surprised by them, our surprise becomes the political resource that other people use.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, I totally get that. The only thing that gives me the heebie-jeebies a little bit is when you speak from a position as you do, and I do, and many other people do in good faith about being wary of conspiracy theories and evidence-free hypotheses about things, whether it’s landing on the moon or who did 9/11 or what happened on October 7th or anything else, to suggest, and I know you don’t mean to do this, to put out there in advance without anything having happened, if something happens, you must immediately doubt it. To me, a little bit gives grist to the conspiracy theorists who we’ve been trying to fight intellectually and politically for a long time. Does that make any sense?

Timothy Snyder:

Oh no, I totally take that point. But what I said in the piece, and I stand by it, is that one should not take seriously what Trump says.

Preet Bharara:

Yes.

Timothy Snyder:

I’m not saying what you-

Preet Bharara:

That’s true.

Timothy Snyder:

… shouldn’t take seriously what local police on the scene say. I’m not saying you shouldn’t take seriously, what reporters say. I’m saying that one in that… precisely in that situation where something very frightening has happened or seems to have happened, precisely in that situation, one has to pull back the impulse to trust the leader, especially when you have a leader like Trump.

Because what we know of history is that these things get taken advantage of precisely on people like Trump. I take your point. There will be authorities on explosives. There will be authorities on the relevant political parties who might be involved. There will be local investigations. All of those things are serious, and all those things should be taken seriously. I’m afraid what’s not serious in that circumstance is what the President of the United States says.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, no, I think that’s an important distinction.

Timothy Snyder:

I’m going to stick to that.

Preet Bharara:

I just don’t want us to be doing what they do. If I had more time, I would go through each one of the Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century in your great slim volume, On Tyranny. And I had not looked at it in a while, and I had forgotten the order in which they appear.

And I literally went to go look for it over the weekend to see what number your lesson was entitled, Do Not Obey in Advance, because that’s the one that seems to be quoted the most. That’s the one most relevant in my professional sphere. Why’d you put that first, and how are we doing on that?

Timothy Snyder:

It goes first because it’s the first thing you have to do. If you fail to do that, then the lessons two through 20 don’t matter. Really, nothing matters. When something surprising happens, like somebody you didn’t expect will win an election will win an election or somebody who wins an election and they try to change the system, you have to not obey in advance. You have to have your own sense of what is normal and follow that because if you don’t do that, then you will normalize, which we’re all very good at.

But if you normalize, then you’re not going to follow the rest of the lessons. That’s the main reason why it’s first is that psychologically, morally inside of us, it’s first. There’s another reason why it’s first, which is that, as you probably noticed, if you’re flipping through it again, the lessons go from, in a way, least severe and least demanding to most severe and most demanding, right. They’re following a trajectory of how the regime changes.

Preet Bharara:

Number 20 is Be As Courageous As You Can. That’s the tall order.

Timothy Snyder:

Yeah, I mean, it is. But remember, the nice people were talking about in Hungary who just won this huge election, they were afraid that they… I mean, independent journalists in Hungary were being investigated by this state. The leaders of the opposition movement were legitimately afraid of prison if they failed. People were being courageous.

And I mean, Hungary is just one example. So, how courageous we can be depending upon whether we’re middle-aged white guys with tenure or whether we’re undocumented people, people can be differently courageous. But I think without that little element, without that little moral vector, I don’t think we’re going to go anywhere.

Preet Bharara:

It seems to me a lot of the debate between people who are worried and people who are complacent, wherever they’re on the political spectrum, is a battle between two metaphors, kind of. On the one hand are the people who say, “You, Timothy Snyder, and others, you’re Chicken Little, you’re always crying that the sky’s falling and the sky has not fallen.”

And at the end of Trump won, he didn’t do all these terrible things, but he talked about your Chicken Little. The response to that is often no, and moreover, you’re the slow-boiling frog, and you’re not realizing what’s happening to you. Is that a fair assessment of how the debates are unfolding? And wouldn’t you rather be, if you had to pick one or the other, wouldn’t you rather be Chicken Little than the slow-boiling frog?

Timothy Snyder:

I sort of have to reject the comparison. For one thing, it’s unfair to frogs. Frogs do it… Frogs do in fact-

Preet Bharara:

They do jump out-

Timothy Snyder:

… jump out of…

Preet Bharara:

… of the boiling water.

Timothy Snyder:

Yes. Yeah. No, in general, these comparisons are unfair to other animals. I think there’s a certain amount of speciesism involved. Look, I think the answer is something like this. Whatever you think the problems are, and even complacent people tend to think there are problems, how I judge you is whether you’re doing something or not. So I don’t claim to be right about everything. I’m certainly not. And I don’t think people who are complacent are right about everything. And if they’re human, they’ll admit that they’re not.

But we all can agree that there’s some stuff which is going wrong. And for me, the real question is, are you doing something about that stuff that is going wrong? Because if you are, then that’s going to help push us in the right direction. What I do fear is I think what was at the heart of your question and the word that you used, which is normalization. I mean, because one thing that history does teach us is that we can normalize pretty much anything.

It’s an incredible human capacity. And so if we have to talk about arguments, I mean, I would prefer personally to talk about organization and activism than about arguments, but if we have to talk about arguments, the style of argument that I really fear is the one where the chicken little person in your conversation is constantly being forced to prove that yet another bad thing is happening. Whereas the boiling frog person in your conversation is saying, “Yeah, actually the temperature went up 10 degrees, and I’m still fine.” And then it’s as though the burden is on the chicken little person to say, “Here it’s going to be another 10 degrees.”

Whereas in fact, the argument shouldn’t be about that. The argument should be about, “Hey, let’s go do some stuff. Let’s try to make things better.” Going back to Hungary, a lot of commentary about Hungary was like, “Look what happens if people get out and vote.” Okay. Yes, we should all get out and vote, but the reason why they had such extraordinary participation in the Hungarian elections was that there was two years of hard work ahead of that. Democracy is not this automatic thing which corrects itself, nor is law.

Preet Bharara:

Not at all.

Timothy Snyder:

Nor is Constitution, nor is history. There’s no automatic self-regulating mechanism. And yet that does make me furious. The way people talk about the No Kings protests as well. They say, “Oh, well, somebody just pushed a button, and eight million people turned up.” No, that’s because there were thousands of organizers, all over the country, who made that happen.

And if you want the elections to go the right way or if you want the American Republic to thrive, you’ve got to be on the side of those local organizers who are actually doing stuff rather than just waiting for history or the Constitution or whatever to deliver this equilibrium because it doesn’t. There’s always somebody doing work. And when you make those kinds of comments, what you’re doing is you’re pushing them out of the picture.

Preet Bharara:

I’ve been preoccupied lately with this idea of thoughtfulness, the lack thereof, the presence of its opposite, thoughtlessness in politics, in our leaders, in our voters as well. And you have written about some of this in the past number of years. You wrote a great piece called What Turing Told Us About The Digital Threat to a Human Future, revisiting a little bit unkindly some of my old favorite short stories by Isaac Asimov and others.

I was a kid, so I wasn’t as critical as you. And the Three Laws of Robots, I always thought that was almost of framer level sophistication, but apparently I was wrong about that when I was 12 years old. But you write about human thoughtlessness as follows. “As a bruised apple attracts flies, human thoughtlessness draws algorithms.” What do you mean by that?

Timothy Snyder:

I wrote about Philip K. Dick, and I wrote about Isaac Asimov, and those are stories that I loved too. And insofar as I’m finding weaknesses in them, I’m finding the weaknesses that help me to see our predicament with the digital world now.

And so it’s not an essay about how science fiction isn’t useful. It’s, if anything, an essay about how it can be, but maybe we have to revisit a little bit. So I’m preoccupied like Hannah Arendt was, like many people wiser than me were with the relationship that I think you’re just suggesting, which is between thoughtfulness in a liberal order or thoughtfulness and democracy.

Preet Bharara:

Precisely it.

Timothy Snyder:

Where in order to be in a democracy, we have to be thoughtful. And again, echoing Arendt and other smart people, to be thoughtful recognizes that we are encountering other people who are thoughtful. And so we always think together. I can’t think without you, or I can’t think without other people. And the nature of thoughtfulness involves at least that kind of baseline empathy. And so what I’m concerned with, roughly, and this is a couple of chapters in On Freedom, is the way that the digital world can strip that thoughtfulness away from us and return us more to a world of impulse.

And in a world of impulse, pain, pleasure, fear, in that world, people can make lots of money. But also in that world, we’re trained to become, and again, given what I said, I don’t want to be unfair to animals, but we’re trained to become less thoughtful, right. We’re trained to become more bestial, like us and them, fight or flight. And the great irony of all this, if you look back to the science fiction of the ’70s and ’80s, the premise of science fiction, or a lot of it, before it took the very reasonable dystopian turn it’s taken in the last 20 years, but the theme of a lot of it was that the machines were going to make us smarter.

And what we’re facing day-to-day is, I mean, putting aside things like IQ and knowledge, where I think you can also make a similar argument, what we find is that they tend to be making us less thoughtful in the sense of reflecting on ourselves by way of what we learned from other people. And that is reflecting on self on the basis of what you learn from other people is a core element of democracy. And so our inability to do that, I think, is more fundamental maybe than anything else we’ve been talking about when it comes to the rise of authoritarianism.

Preet Bharara:

I thought the theory was supposed to be, or one theory could be, calculators freed up mathematicians to do the more serious thinking in terms of a mathematical problem. The same with these other machines. It should free us up to think about the essence of poetry, or what the social contract should be and how it can be improved, but it doesn’t do that. Why doesn’t it? Because when people have free time, they watch MMA fighting. Is that why?

Timothy Snyder:

I mean, I don’t… The point is about how we’re perfect. The point is about how we’re improvable. And the algorithms are set to draw our attention, which is just drastically inconsistent with self… with improving ourselves, which can only be done, and this is the tragedy, but also the beauty, it can only be done in contact with other people.

It can’t really be… You can’t become thoughtful all on your own. That is, in fact, our nature. We become thoughtful with other people. And we’re driven by the algorithms to become our worst, most lonely selves, and we become addicted to behaviors which are our worst, most lonely selves.

Preet Bharara:

But isn’t there something… Tell me if this is wrong, and I’ve been thinking about this. Culturally and aesthetically, in America in particular, is there and has there often been a sort of aesthetic preference for the man or woman who is in the arena, so to speak, who acts with gut and instinct, who doesn’t get paralyzed by overthinking. Do I have that right, or is that unfair?

Timothy Snyder:

I tend to think that nobody becomes a courageous individual without the solidarity and the consideration and the labor of other people at some point. You don’t become the person who’s able to take individual risks without a lot of social solidarity. And I think that’s… that apparent contradiction is at the heart of what freedom actually is.

If you want to create a nation of people who are actually courageous, you have to have healthcare. If you want to have a nation of people who can think on their own, you’ve got to have great schools. And I think when we veer too far in the… If we think that the self-sufficient individuals produce themselves, then we end up with the perversion of Donald Trump. We end up with the kind of… the worship of the oligarch.

Preet Bharara:

Are you surprised at how few people have courage and have spoken up or engaged in behavior that might lose them their jobs or their standing in powerful positions, because I have been? Or are you going to say that you have a somewhat jaded view because you have observed history and how other regimes have handled these things, because I find it quite dispiriting?

Timothy Snyder:

At one level, yeah. Like I said before, I’m aware that we can normalize almost anything. And the fact that we can normalize everything that we are so plastic means that we have to build into our historical and moral and legal awareness the kinds of constructs that we’ve been talking about, like empathy, social contract. That we have to have these constructs inside us when we meet a situation which asks us to normalize something new.

And so we learn from history that, yeah, you can do a lot with us, but we also learn from history that you can take from tradition these living, moral, legal models that can help you to resist. The second thing I want to say is that a lot of the most embarrassing concessions were from the people who had the most power.

So it’s our American oligarchs to a great extent who have set the worst example, and by doing so, have made it much harder on everyone else. I mean, I feel like, every day, Americans have to do more work than they should have to do because the folks who could have, so to speak, easily resisted or just remained neutral chose not to do so, chose to obey in advance. I think that has made actually the situation much, much worse.

Preet Bharara:

I know you’re not a psychologist either, but why? Is it really as base as they want to not have any disruption in their comfort level? They do a lot of… Is it that they fool themselves into thinking, “Well, my duties and responsibilities to my immediate family or to my immediate direct reports is more important than anything larger and it’s not my responsibility to save the country.

It’s not my responsibility to fight and thwart authoritarian impulses. My responsibility is to take care of this little company I have and the fine men and women who rely upon the wages we give them such as they are to live their lives. And so why are you bothering me, Professor Snyder?”

Timothy Snyder:

I’m sympathetic with that position because that’s a CEO position. I mean, I think at the end of the day, that’s an argument to be had, and the answer is something like small and medium-sized companies under authoritarianism are going to fail. Hungary is poorer than the US, Russia’s poorer than the US because you can’t actually work as a normal CEO in those conditions. The legal environment is too hard on you. You get tried for corruption. There are bogus tax things against you because you’re not one of the handful of companies which is close to the government.

But for me, that conversation with CEOs is a different conversation than what I was trying to suggest, which is the one about Thiel, the one about Musk, because they’re in a different position. They have different ideas about the world, and they want to use Trump to enforce their ideas about the world on the rest of us. And that’s… so they’re not so much complying as they’re taking advantage of the situation to try because Trump is essentially a weak figure in many respects, and he has a big fat opening to the US government because he doesn’t care about the government, he doesn’t care about law, practice, right. So I just want to close on this point.

Day to day, I’m involved with people in the US and Ukraine and elsewhere who are involved in organized opposition and resistance. And that means that although I am discouraged when I see people conform, and when I have to have these normalization arguments that you talked about earlier. But day-to-day, the reason I generally feel good is that I’m around people who are better organized and more courageous than I am, and doing stuff. And there are a lot of such people, and there are a lot of people doing good work in the US, and if we don’t think they’re enough, we can support them, we can join them.

So there were a lot of people doing good work in Hungary to repeat the point for a couple of years before we got to that election. And there are a lot of people doing good work in Ukraine, which is one of the main reasons why their armed forces have been able to resist the Russian invasion. So I know a lot of courageous people, and I try to gravitate towards them, and that’s what keeps me from being too dispirited.

Preet Bharara:

And sir, you are one of those people. Timothy Snyder, most recent book On Freedom, the less recent book On Tyranny, both essential reading. Thank you for your work and your insights, sir. We appreciate it.

Timothy Snyder:

It’s been a pleasure. Thanks for what you’re doing. I’m glad we could meet.

Preet Bharara:

This episode continues for members of the insider community. In the exclusive bonus segment, I answer a listener’s question about conditions in state prisons and share my experience working to reform one of New York City’s most notorious prisons, Rikers Island. To try out the membership, head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider. After the break, I’ll answer your questions about whether the president has to comply with the law requiring him to preserve official records and whether it’s now legal to distill liquor at home.

Now let’s get to your questions. This question came as an email from Douglas, who wrote, “I just read that Steve Bannon’s contempt conviction is on the verge of being erased at the request of the DOJ. What’s up with that? Can DOJ just delve into the past and erase people’s crimes at will? And does this mean that congressional subpoenas are now optional?” Well, Douglas, thanks for the question. The Steve Bannon situation is unusual, but becoming less unusual in the Trump administration, term two. What makes it unusual is that the Department of Justice reversed its position after being the agency that secured his conviction.

Let me remind folks of the background. In 2022, Steve Bannon was convicted on two counts of criminal contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with the subpoena from the House Select Committee investigating the January 6th attack on the US Capitol. He went to trial, and a jury found him guilty of failing to testify and produce documents, and so Bannon was sentenced to four months in prison and a fine. The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit upheld the conviction. Bannon ultimately actually served his four-month sentence. Even so, he petitioned the Supreme Court to review the case. So up to that point, the case had followed a fairly typical appellate path.

That is, until earlier this year when the Department of Justice reversed course, as it has with respect to other Trump allies. DOJ filed a motion asking the courts to dismiss the indictment, effectively withdrawing its support for the prosecution it had previously pursued, and they didn’t give a lot of reasons. It’s highly unusual for the department to prosecute a case, secure a conviction, have the defendant serve the sentence, have that conviction be affirmed on appeal, and then later seek dismissal of the charges. But of course, the Bannon prosecution began during the Biden administration, and this Justice Department, under Trump, has taken a decidedly different approach to cases arising out of the January 6th insurrection.

Pardons galore and motions to dismiss as well. In any event, in light of the government’s motion to dismiss the Bannon case, Supreme Court recently granted Bannon’s petition, vacated the judgment, and remanded the case to the lower court for further consideration. Since the Justice Department is no longer defending the conviction, the charges will likely be dismissed. Of course, practically speaking, Bannon has already served his sentence, so this reversal has limited impact. Dismissing the charges obviously does not give him those four months back. However, the Solicitor General has also raised the question of whether Bannon could seek further relief based on arguments that the January 6th committee was improperly constituted. We’ll have to see.

As for your last question, does this mean that congressional subpoenas are now optional? Well, not quite because you defy congressional subpoenas at your peril. It will be interesting to see if the House goes to the Democrats and or the Senate goes to the Democrats and they hold hearings as you expect that they will, and that will likely draw some folks from the Trump administration or from the Trump orbit into the position of Steve Bannon wanting to defy those subpoenas. What kind of an impasse will we have? An attempt to enforce subpoenas by a Congress with respect to a DOJ that is not amenable to such a thing for Trump allies. Stay tuned.

This question came in an email from Daisy. “I saw in the news recently that the Office of Legal Counsel put out an opinion that the president does not have to comply with the Presidential Records Act. Why does this matter? After all, it’s just an opinion. Can an OLC opinion thwart an established law?” Daisy, that’s a great question, and a variant of that comes up from time to time, especially in the last number of years. The Office of Legal Counsel has at times concluded that certain laws are unconstitutional, but you’re absolutely right. An OLC opinion does not invalidate a statute. Its practical impact depends on whether courts ultimately agree.

The OLC opinions give some guidance to departmental actors, but courts ultimately decide whether a statute is or is not constitutional. So here’s a bit of background on the Presidential Records Act, or the PRA. It was enacted in 1978 in the aftermath of Watergate. It followed a pitched legal battle between Congress and former President Richard Nixon over his attempt to retain control of millions of documents and White House tapes tied to his scandals. In response, Congress made clear that presidential records are public property, public property, not the private property, of a former president.

And so the PRA requires presidents to preserve official records created during their time in office and then to transfer them to the national archives at the end of their term. Even before the PRA was enacted, the Supreme Court upheld a closely related statute. In Nixon v. Administrator of General Services, the court ruled 7-2 that Congress could require the federal government to take custody of Nixon’s presidential materials. The justices rejected arguments that the law violated the separation of powers. But despite this Supreme Court decision, holding that the law is constitutional, earlier this month, the OLC issued a contradictory opinion, concluding that the PRA is, in fact, unconstitutional.

The opinion argues that the act exceeds Congress’s powers and intrudes on the independence of the executive branch. It characterizes the PRA as a “Burdensome regime of congressional regulation” of the presidency and concludes the president need not comply with it. Our query why this president and this administration is so keen and not complying with the Presidential Records Act. In any event, as we’ve said, the OLC opinion is not the final word. OLC provides legal advice, but it cannot repeal or nullify a statute. Only Congress can do that. And if a president were to rely on this opinion to disregard the PRA, it will certainly prompt a lawsuit. And it appears, by the way, we may not have to wait long for a legal test. The nation’s historians are already stepping in.

The world’s largest organization of historians, the American Historical Association, along with American Oversight, have filed suit against the Trump administration. They describe the case as an effort to preserve the historical record that belongs to the American people before it’s forever lost. So once again, stay tuned. This question came from an email from Larissa. “Hey, Preet. Now that the Fifth Circuit has ruled that the 158-year-old federal ban on home distilling is unconstitutional, are you thinking about making your own booze?” Well, thanks for the idea, Larissa. So it’s a fascinating appellate court decision, one that probably didn’t get as much attention as it might given all the other news that’s going on.

But in 2023, several members of the Hobby Distillers Association challenged a Reconstruction Era federal law that banned home distilling. So after the Civil War, the federal government relied heavily on excise taxes on goods like liquor and tobacco for revenue. The 1868 law imposed a tax on distilled spirits and, to prevent tax evasion, required distilling to occur only at authorized facilities. So it was a bit more about money than about morals. It also prohibited using a still in your home, punishable by a fine of up to $1,000 and imprisonment of up to two years. After the Hobby Distillers Association members prevailed in Federal District Court in Texas, the government appealed.

The case then went to the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, where it was decided under the case name McNutt v. Department of Justice. In McNutt, the federal government defended the modern version of the ban as a necessary and proper exercise of Congress’s constitutional power to “Lay and collect taxes,” but the Conservative Fifth Circuit disagreed. The court wrote that, “Congress’s taxing power reaches only existing subjects, not activity that may generate subjects of taxation.” It concluded that the law taxes nothing and instead prevents the taxable product, distilled spirits, from coming into existence. Interesting.

So, in other words, the judges ruled that outlawing the very activity that creates the taxable product is not a necessary and proper use of the federal government’s taxing power. So now, legal at-home distilling is one step closer to becoming a reality, folks. A similar case is also pending before the Sixth Circuit, which could determine whether other federal courts follow the Fifth Circuit’s lead. But even if home distilling does become fully legal and a reality in these United States, I’ll still be procuring my spirits from the store because I like the good stuff.

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks to my guest, Timothy Snyder. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. You can reach me on Twitter or Bluesky @PreetBharara with the hashtag #AskPreet. You can also call and leave me a message at 833-997-7338. That’s 833-99-PREET, or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com. Stay Tuned is now on Substack. Head to staytuned.substack.com to watch live streams, get updates about new podcast episodes, and more. That’s staytuned.substack.com.

Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The supervising producer is Jake Kaplan. The lead editorial producer is Jennifer Indig. The associate producer is Claudia Hernández. The audio and video producer is Nat Weiner. The senior audio producer is Matthew Billy, and the marketing manager is Liana Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost. Special thanks to Torrey Paquette and Adam Harris. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. As always, stay tuned.