- Freedom is about how calm you feel, whether you feel you have lots of choices.

We talk about freedom to compensate for the fact that we're not actually leading that free lives.

(calm inquisitive music) Hello and welcome to "GZERO World."

I'm Ian Bremmer, and on the show today: we are just weeks away, days if you count that way, from election day.

Can you believe it?

Do you want to believe it?

Do you have any choice but to believe it?

No, no, and no.

I'll spare you.

The horse race, the polls, the gaffe du jour.

You can find all that on cable news.

Today, I want to explore what this election is about and my guest today will say that a lot of it comes down to freedom.

And that works well for him because he happens to have a book out, it happens to be called, "On Freedom."

When Americans hit the polls on November the 5th, what kind of freedom will they be voting to protect?

The freedom from, big government, discrimination?

Or the freedom to, to vote, to love, to pray?

We'll get into that and much more.

And fear not, I also have your little unfree folks on strings, "Puppet Regime."

- The new Bob Woodward book claims that Donald Trump called Vladimir Putin at least seven times after leaving office.

- But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

- [Announcer] Funding for "GZERO World" is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

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Learn more at Prologis.com.

- [Announcer] And by: Cox Enterprises is proud to support "GZERO."

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Cox, a family of businesses.

Additional funding provided by Jerre and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and.

(bright music) (logo whooshes) (energetic music) - The late great Harvey Milk once said, "I've tasted freedom.

I will not give up that which I have tasted."

Americans certainly have acquired a taste for freedom.

We've also acquired a taste for depriving people of their freedom.

See slavery, Manifest Destiny.

But few have expressed their love for freedom more than that patron saint of modern conservatism: President Ronald Reagan.

- Freedom from the government's increasing demands on the family purse.

Greater freedom from state control.

Too much big government and not enough freedom from it.

A new era, one where freedom from violence prevailed.

- It's not Reagan's use of the word "freedom" that I want to talk about today.

It's the preposition that follows it.

Reagan was much more concerned with the freedom from than the freedom to.

Freedom from what, you ask?

I'll let the Gipper field that one.

- The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: "I'm from the government and I'm here to help."

- [Ian] Conservatism 101: Keep the government as small and as far away from you as possible.

But recently it's been the Democratic candidate for president who has been talking a little more about freedom from.

- Across our nation, we have been witnessing a full-on assault on hard-won hard-fought freedoms and fundamental rights.

The freedom to vote, the freedom to be safe from gun violence, (audience cheering) the freedom to love who you love openly and with pride, (audience cheering) and the freedom of a woman to make decisions about her own body, and not have her government tell her what to do!

- I'm old enough to remember when Democrats talked about how government could protect the freedom to love or the freedom to unionize.

Flash forward to 2024, Reagan would be proud.

What explains this rhetorical jujitsu?

Well, it makes for a handy political foil.

- And if Donald Trump wants to pick a fight over our most fundamental freedoms, we say bring it on.

(audience cheering) Bring it on.

- Cheeky, isn't it?

To equate Trump, the face of today's GOP, with intrusive big government.

But beyond the savvy and more centrist campaign strategy, Democrats are saying that they can wave the flag too.

Patriots aren't just the one with the red MAGA hats anymore, and preserving those freedoms means protecting against the likes of that meddlesome Trump.

There is, of course one little problem with this messaging: reality.

Because in reality, Harris fundamentally believes that policy can make people's lives better.

Sure, she received some criticism in her debate against Trump for being light on policy, and her campaign waited until well into September to publish an "Issues" page on her website.

But make no mistake, Kamala Harris wants to use the levers of big government to build more housing, to pass new child tax credits, to modernize education.

So the question for Kamala, as well as Donald, is if enough voters can live with those contradictions?

And we'll find out when millions of them exercise their most fundamental freedom at the ballot box on November 5th.

Here to talk about freedom is the man who just wrote the book on it, literally.

Joining me now, historian and author of "On Freedom," Tim Snyder.

Tim Snyder, really great to have you on the show.

- Glad to be with you.

- Congrats on the new book "On Freedom."

That's certainly what we want to spend most of our time talking about.

I'm thinking back to when you and I were graduate students decades ago.

At that point, there was a lot of talk about freedom from.

Freedom from, you know, autocracy, freedom from communism, freedom from living behind the iron curtain.

You suggest in this book that now we should be thinking differently about freedoms, at least those of us living in places that are ostensibly democratic and free like the United States.

Explain to our audience what you mean.

- Well, when I think back those 30 years, Ian, you know, after 1989 or '91, we had the idea that if you could just clear the bad stuff away, in that case communism, then the good stuff would automatically appear in some sort of transition.

But that's not how it works.

Freedom from only makes sense because of freedom to.

It matters if there's some kind of a barrier, but it only matters because a person is hindered by that barrier.

And once you get rid of the barrier, you still have to ask, "What kind of a person do I want to be?

What are my purposes?

How can I fulfill them?"

Or more broadly as a society, what can we do to create the conditions in which as many of us as possible can be as free as possible?

So that's I think the right way to think about freedom, the positive way about thinking about freedom.

And I think one of the reasons we've got ourselves into the jam that we're in is that we've been thinking negatively about freedom for 30 years, which means that we're psychologically closed off, and we're politically closed off, and we can't use what is basically our central political concept to get ourselves moving again.

- How free do you think the citizens of the United States are today?

- We're middle of the pack, middle of the pack.

You know, we're okay on political liberties.

If you throw in things like healthcare and so on, then we would be doing much worse.

And there are reasons why we're not free, and they're not just the political ones that not everybody can vote easily, and our political system is confused, and there's too much money in politics.

It's also that freedom is about how calm you feel, whether you feel you have lots of choices.

You have to stay in a job because of health insurance, you're not free.

If you don't have health insurance, you're even less free.

If you're worried about your health, you're less free.

If you're not sure where your kids are going to go to school and you fret about that, then you're less free than you would be.

And so we have the habit of talking about ourselves as free, but I think we turned the corner a while ago to the place where we talk about freedom to compensate for the fact that we're not actually leading that free lives.

- Let's move to the backdrop that everyone is thinking about right now, which is we're in the middle of an election where freedom is seen to be on the ballot.

Democracy is seen to be on the ballot.

One of the top issues that is being debated in this election, unusually in the United States, is kind of the core, what does the United States stand for?

And are the values that America ostensibly holds under threat, at stake?

Most Americans say yes, but they say yes for very, very different reasons.

Talk about your view on this.

- Well, this is one way that my book is very conservative, in that I think there's a right and wrong answer to what freedom is, and so I think a lot of people are wrong.

And I'm not just going to referee the debate and say like, "Well, this position has something to be said for it."

And of course- - And to be fair, Tim, most Americans think a lot of people are wrong.

So in that regard, you're not all that different from the mainstream.

- Yeah, but I think one of the moves we make both on the left and the right is in different ways we say, "Okay, like, you have a strong emotion about this view, therefore I'm going to respect it."

And that's not the move I'm starting from.

The move I'm starting from is, there's a correct way to define freedom.

And one of the things which is necessary in this view, this sort of pluralist view that I'm giving, is that there is a world of facts.

Because if, like, of course we have different values, but if we also have different facts, we're not going to end up in a free world, because whoever has the most power over fantasy is going to end up deciding things.

So you can take the view, for example, that JD Vance is free from his position to make up stories about, you know, animal-eating immigrants.

But if we don't have a fabric in the background of factuality, including things like reporters believing in facts, but also institutions of facts, we're not going to end up being free.

So I think the view that power can lie to us and fool us as freedom is wrong.

And I think the view that all of us need a kind of backstop of background factuality in order to be free, is right.

So, yeah, people think this is at stake for different reasons, and that's kind of why I'm glad that I am coming in now with a kind of conceptual discussion of what freedom actually is, because I think we need that.

I think people are groping a little bit.

I think we've worn the word out so that it means everything, and the moment it means everything, it's going to end up meaning nothing.

- And so if you were to take freedom and apply it to this election, apply it to the stakes of this election, people being able to do the things that make them human, that make them citizens, that make them members of family, that make them members of community.

How do those things apply to this election?

- The Trump version of government is dysfunctionality plus spectacle.

So if they win, they're going to put in a bunch of people who replace the civil servants, and the government's not going to work, and we're going to have, you know, some version of cats and dogs being eaten every day.

It's going to be dysfunctionality plus spectacle.

In that world, people aren't going to be free because they're not going to get their social security checks.

Various things aren't going to work, including for business, by the way.

Business is going to be much less functional because the things that business needs to get done aren't going to get done by that federal government.

And the strongman principle's gonna be reinforced because when the institutions don't work, the only way to get things done is by appealing to people you know and becoming somebody's client.

So that's at stake.

The other thing which is at stake is the sort of oligarchical libertarian view of freedom, which is very present for example, in JD Vance.

The idea that government can't really do anything, right?

It's not really capable of doing anything, but we can make it small and let my friends who have lots of money actually determine what kind of values we're going to have, what kind of media we're going to be able to use, how we're going to be able to think, because of the algorithms and so forth.

That's all at stake.

And then voting too, right?

Because we think of voting as an individual right.

But if you can vote easily, that just raises the question of who can't vote easily?

And that's a good example of freedom as solidarity.

I'm heartened that the Democrats for political reasons started to use the word freedom because once they, and notice they used it as freedom from.

Like, they started with freedom as negative because that's American common sense.

But once Kamala Harris starts using it, it can slip into freedom to, as it's doing.

And I find that very heartening- - On the abortion issue, for example, which is the principle issue that she's been scoring points with the public has been a freedom to have a choice as a woman over your body.

- She starts from the rhetoric of, we're the people who are going to keep the government away from your body, and then it moves to, we'll be the people who enable you to live the kind of life that you want to live.

And once you have that rhetoric, you can start talking about health and social security and so on in terms of freedom, which I honestly believe is the right way to talk about those things.

- That's interesting because in that regard, it's a smaller government argument on some of this side.

I mean, "We're keeping the government out of your body.

We're not monitoring that.

You get to make the decision."

Which is, you know, in principle a more libertarian position from the government perspective.

- The way that one has to modify libertarianism is to take seriously what it means to become free.

Because libertarianism, it assumes that you already have all the stuff you need to be personally free.

Whereas if we want everybody to be free, we have to ask, what do we have to provide for everyone?

The justification for the things government does has to be freedom.

We don't want government doing things that aren't related to freedom.

The libertarian mistake is to say there's an easy answer: have the government do nothing.

That isn't going to work.

Power abhors a vacuum, other things will come in, there will not be freedom.

But if you say government exists in order to make us free, you actually have a good argument for good stuff, like for example the welfare state, because the welfare state makes our lives more predictable in such a way that we can be more unpredictable and more free.

- Now I understand how it's easy and opportune to use freedom as a brickbat against MAGA Trumpism, right?

I also am interested in freedom in the way it is not applied by an establishment in the United States, left and right, that controls so many of the formal and informal levers of power, right?

In a way that the United States is, it's ceiling, the 50th most free country in the world, even though it's vastly richer and more powerful than that.

And that has been the result and the responsibility of leaders on the left and the right for a very long time in the United States.

I'd like you to address that as well.

- I agree with you.

I agree with you.

I mean, we use freedom to express anger, and we use freedom to express opposition, we use freedom to express rebellion, whereas in fact freedom is a creative concept.

Freedom is about how you and I can be more interesting and better, or our kids could be more interesting and better.

Freedom is about a future which is better than the present.

Freedom is about all the good things that we might know about and all the good things we have yet to discover.

It's not about anger, it's not about barriers.

And that's a bit of a critique of the right, what I just said.

And on the left, there's the problem that everyone wants to frame things in terms of justice and equality.

And justice and equality are good things, but they have their limits, whereas freedom, it doesn't really.

Freedom's much more communicable, and the things that you want for justice, or fraternity, or equality can be better justified in terms of freedom.

Not only that people understand it better, but actually it makes a lot more sense.

If you and I have health insurance, it's not going to make us equal, but it is going to make us more capable of freedom.

If we have retirement benefits, we have longer vacations and so on, that doesn't make us equal.

But it does make us more capable of being interesting people with habits, and friendships, and lifelong commitments, and so on.

And I think part of our problem is that the US, so to speak, is bigger than it was in the sense of more vacuous, like in the sense of more empty, containing fewer things.

So for example, the media.

We have less media now, and it's worse than we did 40 years ago.

And so that makes us bigger in a sense because everybody, and I write about this in the book, like people who used to have newspapers have to go up to the national conversation where they're helpless, where they're objects, right?

Like people in Springfield, Ohio, which is pretty close to where I'm from.

Right now, they're helpless objects in a national conversation, as opposed to having, you know, their own local reporters who would've just, you know, knocked this thing away a long time ago.

And that's true people in general, right?

And then another example of that is wealth.

So the wealth is much more concentrated in a few hands now than it was 40 years ago, and that means in effect that the country's bigger, in the sense of more distant, right?

There are few people who are, if you're an average American, there are few people who are far away from you physically, and even further away from you mentally, who have all kinds of weird capabilities, which are very different from your own capabilities.

And in that sense, the country is bigger, like more vacuous.

There's more distance in it than there used to be.

- The biggest problem with US society in that regard is atomization, right?

It's not fragmentation, it's atomization.

It's people feeling alone.

People feeling unconnected to others.

- It's cool to be different, but, like, difference sometimes allows you to intersect with other people.

It's not good to be lonely, it's not good to be isolated.

And a lot of the isolation is engineered now because of all the time we spend on screens.

And, you know, if we're quirky then we can kind of intersect and stick, right?

But if we've been smoothed off by the algorithms, then it's just a kind of us and them.

Like, "We're all like this, and they're all that."

And then ironically, it's not just that you're against the ones who are different, you also don't really have any way to interact with the ones who are the same, 'cause you've all been smoothed off.

The quirks have all been smoothed away.

- And this is why there's so much space for Trumpism in the United States right now because so many people feel alone, feel alienated, feel like they've been left behind by a political system that is far from them, that doesn't care about them.

I mean, right?

That's what we're seeing in 2024, isn't it?

- That's a big part of it.

And then the other part of it is the aggressive exploitation of those sentiments.

- Yes.

- Both by people who own the platforms, and by people like Trump who are able to use the platforms.

You know, when you're alone, when you're isolated, then you counteract that by joining a mob.

Whereas what we want is not mobs.

We don't want loneliness and mobs, we want people in little unpredictable groups doing things that they like to do, that they have time to do, because they have elementary things like vacations and parental leave and so on, and which, you know, government has to do, but which make us more free, less alienated, less lonely, less vulnerable to this sort of stuff.

- So before we close, I want to talk about a personal passion of yours and mine from our histories, that's Ukraine.

You just came back from a trip to Kyiv.

And there, of course, fundamental freedoms are being subverted in horrible ways every day.

Talk a little to me about your trip in the context of what it means for Ukrainians to be free.

- It took me a long time to write this book, and I tried to check myself.

You know, going back to your point about listening to other people, being with other people, I took the manuscript with me three times to Ukraine, because the Ukrainians were the ones who were talking about freedom.

And the way they were talking about it, you know, it's not just they talk about it a lot, they're making a lot of sense.

And one of the things which is really tangible is de-occupation.

Like there's this Ukrainian word "de-occupation," which they tend to say instead of liberation.

And that really gets you thinking about freedom as positive because sure, you can de-occupy, and it's important that the torture stops, and the deportations stop, and the kidnapping of children stops.

But the word de-occupation reminds you that that is still just the beginning.

You have to clear the rubble, and rebuild the playgrounds, and the buses and the trains have to start running again.

You know, for the Ukrainians, the trains reaching a town is a mark of freedom, you know.

So we have this glamorous sense, like you get the army out and you're free.

And, you know, when they get the army out, the Russian army out, they still have to do other things.

That's very helpful.

And then the final thing, which I got from Zelensky in the beginning of the war, but comes from other people too, is a sense that if freedom is positive in the sense that it's about good things and about commitments, then sometimes you can't run.

Like, if freedom is just about barriers and impulses and, like, bad things, then you can always run.

But if freedom is about caring about certain things, then over time as you make decisions and become a certain kind of person with character, then being a free person sometimes means you can't run.

And that's been very helpful for me as an American, partly as I remember back to February, 2022, when so many of our fellow Americans assumed that the Ukrainians would run.

And I think that didn't say much about them, but it maybe said something about us.

And that's one of the reasons that I ended up writing the book the way that I did.

- The fact is that in the United States, stasis for many feels like an option.

Where in Ukraine, it really isn't, right?

- The choices are stark.

And the reason they have to keep fighting is that they can see the difference between, you know, fighting and occupation, in a way which is not clear to us.

That's it.

But it's also true that it's not just that occupation is so terrible, it's that they tend to have an imagination about how things could be much better than they are.

And that's, you know, something that I'd like to have more of here.

Because yes, stasis can seem like an option, but if you try stasis for too long, it becomes something else, right?

It becomes fermentation, it becomes rot, it becomes a lack of imagination, and things start to spiral downwards.

- Well, Tim Snyder, thanks so much for joining me today.

- Thank you, Ian, thanks for taking the time.

Really good to talk to you.

(light curious music) - And now for something a little softer, a little feltier, I've got your "Puppet Regime."

- The new Bob Woodward book claims that Donald Trump called Vladimir Putin at least seven times after leaving office.

We've obtained exclusive tape of those calls.

(phone buzzing) (patriotic Russian music) - Hello?

- Hi.

- Donald, what's up?

- Just calling to say hi.

- Uh, okay, hi.

- Hm, okay, bye.

- Hello?

- Hello, Vladimir.

- Uh, hi.

How's it going?

- Just chilling, man.

Same old, same old.

It's so nice to hear your voice.

- What was that?

- Sorry, nothing.

Got to go.

Bye.

- Hello.

- Oh, whoops.

Pocket dial.

(laughs) - This freaking guy again.

Hello?

- Hi.

- Donald.

- Did you get the COVID test that I sent?

- Yes.

Thank you.

And also cucumber face masks, and flowers, and classified- - Okay, bye.

(phone buzzing) - Donald.

- Hi.

Was just thinking about you.

What are you wearing?

I mean, doing today?

- Same as yesterday.

Dictating, chilling, invading.

- Sounds so amazing.

Okay, got to go, bye.

- What?

Hello.

Hello, Donald.

Hello.

You know, we really need this guy to get elected president again so he has something to do all day.

♪ Puppet Regime ♪ - That's our show this week.

Come back next week and if you like what you see, or even if you don't because that's your freedom too, check us out at gzeromedia.com.

(bright inquisitive music) (bright inquisitive music continues) (bright inquisitive music continues) (gentle music) - [Announcer] Funding for "GZERO World" is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

- [Presenter] Every day all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains with a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at Prologis.com.

- [Announcer] And by: Cox Enterprises is proud to support "GZERO."

Cox is working to create an impact in areas like sustainable agriculture, clean tech, healthcare, and more.

Cox, a family of businesses.

(bright music) Additional funding provided by Jerre and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and.

(spirited music)