Mike Austin reviews The Road to Unfreedom

Apr 04, 2018 Michael Austin rated it it was amazing
Shelves: read-in-2018
The Road to Unfreedom was not the book I was expecting it to be, which is not necessarily a problem, since the thing it was is at least as good as the thing I thought it would be. What I was expecting was a sort of parallel history study of Russia, the European Union, and the United States, showing how various global trends have influenced each of these entities in similar ways. What I got was a very learned history of Modern Russia under Vladimir Putin and an clear explanation of how he has influenced both Europe and the United States for his own political ends.

The book is part theory and part journalism, and the theory is important to understanding the journalism. The basic theoretical narrative that Snyder offers goes something like this: the two major dysfunctions in a society are “the politics of inevitability” and “the politics of eternity.” The politics of inevitable are fueled by wrongful optimism—the belief that history is guaranteed to take a certain direction, so there is no need to worry about anything. Classical Marxism is a manifestation of the politics of inevitability because it sees history as inevitably ending up with a socialist revolution and the overthrow of capitalism. A similar politics of inevitability saturated America after the end of the Cold War, as neoconservatives touted “the end of history,” or the belief that free-market capitalism and liberal democracy remained the only viable ideology in the world.

The politics of inevitability is pretty straightforward. The politics of eternity is harder to understand, partly, I think, because Snyder’s terminology doesn’t really work here. What he means is something more like “politics unmoored from history.” Where the politics of inevitability are driven by hope, the politics of eternity are driven by despair. In this phase, leaders portray their nation as a uniquely moral entity that has been historically misunderstood and besieged by enemies. It looks to the past for challenges and then presents those past challenges as present realities. And it presents the problems to be solved as so great that no government could ever solve them. All that a leader can do is protect the country from its eternal threats and preserve its eternal righteousness. Fascism is perhaps the clearest example of a form of government based on the politics of eternity.

The politics of eternity requires not only the suspension of historical understanding, but a suspension of truth. It cannot exist in a world of verifiable facts that motivate actions, so it must go to great lengths to separate the people from the facts. This means authoritarian suppression of speech, of course, but it also means massive propaganda. But the propaganda is not so much aimed at convincing people to believe that a lie is true as it is aimed at convincing people that NOTHING is true, so they might as well believe whatever is most convenient. The propagandists of this kind of state, as their most basic mode of communication, work to undermine people’s belief in facts. When this is gone, then the state assumes the right to declare what is true, and the leader lies with impunity simply to force other people to become complicit in the charade.

In different ways, the politics of inevitability and the politics of eternity both bolster the authoritarian state because they both relieve people of any responsibility for the future:

Whereas inevitability promises a better future for everyone, eternity places one nation at the center of a cyclical story of victimhood. Time is no longer a line into the future, but a circle that endlessly returns the same threats from the past. Within inevitability, no one is responsible because we all know that the details will sort themselves out for the better; within eternity, no one is responsible because we all know that the enemy is coming no matter what we do. Eternity politicians spread the conviction that government cannot aid society as a whole, but can only guard against threats. (8)

With this theoretical model in place, Snyder spends several chapters showing how Russia under Putin has moved from inevitability to eternity. A lot of this is fairly dense intellectual history, as the professor shows how the clearly fascist World War II-era ideas of Ivan Ilyin were rehabilitated by Putin and other Russian elite. He goes through a series of pro-fascist Russian intellectuals that produced the intellectual environment for Putin’s state.

What comes through very clearly here is that Putin is a fascist. Full stop. That he has not been quiet about that in his speeches and writings in Russia. He has openly quoted acknowledged fascist writers and promoted them to highly visible positions. He has labeled America and Western Europe decadent enemies to Russia, driven by a mad compulsion to homosexualize the world by forcing everybody to allow gay marriage. This is apparently the most important issue in Putin’s internal politics. Putin has manipulated elections (his own and others) and suppressed any kind of democratic freedom. Any gestures of friendship that he makes to America or Europe must be understood in this context: he has pledged to his home audience that he will destroy us.

Here Snyder brings in another theoretical concept, but a very easy one to understand. He calls it “strategic relativism,” which means, in his words, “Russia cannot become stronger, so it must make others weaker. The simplest way to make others weaker is to make them more like Russia.”

This principle, Snyder argues, has driven Russia’s policy towards the West since around 2008. The two primary targets have been the European Union and the United States. A part of this strategy was the invasion of Ukraine in 2014. This was done because Russia’s own geopolitical ambitions call for the creation of a Eurasian state that balances the EU. But it was also done because Ukraine was getting too close to Europe, and Putin wanted to deprive the EU and Ukraine from each other. The invasion of Ukraine was only a modest success—if even that—as a military exercise. But it was a triumph of propaganda, as Russia figured out how to manipulate world opinion through bald-faced lies, Twitter, and Facebook.

And this is the new front of the assault on both the EU and the US. The Russians have figured out how to exploit democracy’s design flaws by flooding social media channels with misinformation and by cultivating Westerners through huge capital transfers and overt blackmail. Brexit was one example of this. Donald Trump is another. Both, Snyder argues, could not have been possible without Russia.

All of this leads up to a final chapter that is as devastating an indictment of Donald Trump as we are likely to get until the Mueller investigation comes to light. Trump, he shows, has been groomed by the Russians for years, starting in the 1990s when he was deep in debt and unable to pay his bills. The Russians transferred huge amounts of money to him through unsecured loans and purchases of real estate at wildly inflated prices. Trump’s first campaign manager—Paul Manafort—made millions advising Russians and pro-Russian Ukranians on political strategies, and nearly every member of Trump’s inner circle during the campaign had extensive contact with Russian agents.

So this is not just a few post on social media. Russia created a fictional character that Snyder calls “Donald Trump, successful businessman.” It capitalized a basically bankrupt real-estate developer and then started selling him to the world as a politician. This does not necessarily mean that Trump himself collaborated with the Russians. Snyder is careful to note that. It is just as likely that he is a useful tool whose ambition and ignorance made him a perfect fit for Russian intdeligierests. But there is no doubt whatsoever that pretty much everything Trump has done since becoming president is exactly what Putin and Russia wanted to happen.

And Trump has governed according to Putin’s playbook, which is what Snyder calls “the politics of eternity.” Elements of this kind of politics include

--Constant reference to a past era of greatness
--Hyperfocus on enemies who are enemies because of who they are and not what they do
--A profound belief in a zero-sum (or a negative-sum) world
--Willingness to hurt oneself if, in doing so, you can hurt someone else more
--The manufacture of crises and conflicts where none exist in order to control the news cycle
--Constant labeling of information sources as “fake” in an effort to delegitimize any source of truth
--Repetition of blatant, easily verifiable lies with no evidence to back them up other than the fact of the assertion

The end game here—and there is an end game—is that Americans become so distrustful of the rule of law and the political system that they no longer believe that anything they do will matter. It does not matter to Putin if Trump is shown to be a corrupt, bumbling liar. What he wants us to believe is that everybody is a corrupt, bumbling liar, so one is just as good as another. And if we get there, we will be as miserable as the people in Russia are, and Putin will have won by making us just like him. Without increasing Russia’s actual power, he will have increased Russia’s relative power by decreasing ours.

Or we could, you know, do something else.