Historian Timothy Snyder on VP Harris’ “Freedom” Campaign

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: And, next, in his new book, “On Freedom,” historian Timothy Snyder explores what it is, how it’s been misunderstood, and why it’s our only chance for survival. He now joins Walter Isaacson.

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WALTER ISAACSON, CO-HOST, AMANPOUR AND CO.: Thank you, Christiane. And, Timothy Snyder, welcome back to the show.

TIMOTHY SNYDER, AUTHOR, “ON FREEDOM”: I’m very glad I can talk to you.

ISAACSON: Your new book, “On Freedom,” is sort of a follow to your 2017 bestseller “On Tyranny.” And back in the book, “On Tyranny,” you talked about America’s turn to authoritarianism and the need we have to defend our institutions. Tell me how has that evolved since you first wrote that?

SNYDER: Well, on the national level, obviously, there’s been an attempted coup d’etat, an attempted changing regime in the United States, which is something that I predicted in “On Tyranny.” The point about institutions, of course, is that we can admire them, but if we admire them from afar, they’re going to fail us. They’re only as good as we are. From my point of view, in those years, since I wrote “On Tyranny,” I’ve had to answer the question of, if we’re defending something, which is what “On Tyranny” is about, what exactly is that? What would a good United States look like? And what does freedom mean? And so, that’s what moved me personally onto the next book.

ISAACSON: And when you talk about “On Freedom,” you go back yourself to, I think, 1976 Bicentennial. I loved reading about you ringing of the bells. But since then, you start thinking about what does that word freedom mean? And based on your career, your understandings, and your misunderstandings, how have you come to a sense of what we should really mean when we say freedom?

SNYDER: Thanks for that question and thanks for the word misunderstanding, because I worry both, like in the genre of memoir and in the study of freedom, we start from the position that, hey, the author is right about everything. I’m right about everything. Whereas, I think freedom involves recognizing that you’re wrong. I think a person who can’t recognize that he is wrong can’t be a free person because he’s inside somebody else’s story. So, what I’m trying to show with that image is how I believe that the time, when I was a kid, that the bell I was ringing on that farm, which is part of where I grew up, was connected to other bells, the Liberty Bell, that bicentennial thought made me think of 1776. But what I didn’t know at the time was how to ask what it meant to be free, and I didn’t know other people in the U.S. who’d had other kinds of experiences. So, the book is a kind of attempt to consider the U.S. story, not because it’s all wrong, but because if we take history seriously, we learn where we can do things better. My sense of freedom is that it has to be positive. It can’t be about worshiping the past. It can’t be about believing somebody else to take care of freedom for you. It has to be about combining the things that you believe are good. And what happens is that, as individuals, we realize to do that, we need help from others. And so, freedom is an individual thing. I believe it’s the value of values, but we can only get there if we together create the condition so that we can grow up to be free people, like I was lucky enough to do.

ISAACSON: You talk about freedom has to be positive. And in your book, you make this distinction between positive and negative freedom. Explain that to us.

SNYDER: So, negative freedom, I think, is something which is pretty close to American common sense. Negative freedom is the idea that we’re free if we just push everything away. If the government is pushed away, if oppression is pushed away, if government is small, if we eliminate government. And I think that is at best half the story or just the beginning of the answer. And this was brought home to me actually in parts of Ukraine that were de- occupied, where it was clear that, sure, removing the torture facilities was really important, stopping the deportation of children was really important, but it was only the beginning of something else. People who arrived at concentration camps after the second war had a similar experience. People said liberated, but then once they contemplated the concentration camps, they realized, wait a minute, these people aren’t free just because the Germans are gone. They need health care. They need medical attention. And those extreme cases bring us back to a basic reality. We need other things besides the absence of government to be free. We need cooperation so that our kids can have education, so that we’re not afraid when we need medical attention, so that we can look forward to old age and retirement pensions. These basic things that create security around us actually make us more free because they make us less anxious, less fearful, and more capable of thinking about what we individually think is good and more capable of realizing in the world. And that’s the positive vision, that freedom is about believing things are good, combining those good things in our own way and leading a life of moral character.

ISAACSON: I think one of the positive versions of freedom you mentioned in the book that’s core to what America is about is social mobility and the ability to get into the middle class.

SNYDER: Yes.

ISAACSON: Tell me how that has eroded a bit and endangered this concept of freedom.

SNYDER: The guts of the book are the five forms of freedom, the five chapters. It’s an introduction where I define freedom, conclusion where I make proposals for government. What links them are these five ideas, which I call forms of freedom, and mobility is right in the middle. Because of course, if we’re going to be free, we have to have — we have to be able to rebel. But the ironic thing is, we need institutions in order to rebel against institutions. If you want to leave Ohio, like I did, somebody has to build the road. If you want to get an education, somebody has to fund the university. In order for us to rebel, in order for us to do new things, to go places, both literally and metaphorically, other people have to do the work for us. So, the American Dream was possible in a certain way in the 20th century, thanks to a combination of the market and the welfare state since 1945, social mobility has slowed down, and this has meant that both in reality and in people’s minds access middle class has become much, much harder. So, part of being free or part of creating a land of the free is creating the conditions, whatever that might mean from the ground up, so that young people can move, so that they can be free, so that they can rebel, so they can realize their own ideas that are different than ours or against ours.

ISAACSON: In both “On Tyranny “and now, in “On Freedom” you talk about the populist backlash, the authoritarian sort of sentiments, the ability to tolerate authoritarian type leaders. Is part of that because we failed in the sense of giving people these positive freedoms like social mobility into the middle class. Is this an understandable backlash?

SNYDER: I think part of it is that part of the failure is that we pushed freedom away from ourselves. Freedom always has to be about an individual pushing against the world on the basis of things that individual really believes in. And for the last 30, 35 years, there’s been too much talk, at least in the U.S., about how freedom is brought inevitably by capitalism, which it isn’t, or inevitably by the founding fathers, which it isn’t. One has to take hold of the economy or take hold of history. One has to take hold of things to be free. And when we preach that, we’re better or the capitalism will save us. We’re actually making ourselves unfree because we’re habituating ourselves to the idea that somebody or something from outside is going to save us. So, I think that’s part of it. But then the other part of it is, I completely agree. If we talk about freedom, but make it impossible, we’re creating this condition which is psychologically very demanding. If we say this is the land of the free, there’s an American dream, and then, we don’t make that American dream accessible, then people are going to look for easy answers. They’re going to look for people to blame. So, the connection you’re making, I think, is absolutely valid.

ISAACSON: You set up the book by talking about a trip you take — you took to Ukraine. And what you learned about the word freedom just by being in Ukraine?

SNYDER: So, I wrote this book and then I tested it. I took it into prison and taught it there as a test, and I took it to Ukraine three times and talked about it with colleagues and revised it as I moved around Ukraine. And that was really, really helpful, partly because, as you know very well, Ukrainians are the people right now who talk about freedom the most. And so, I wanted to listen. And in what they were saying, there were a couple of important lessons. One was that freedom is about the future, which is really, really important. Very often the authoritarians, who you mentioned earlier, or the people you call a populist, are trying to bring us into some kind of nostalgic past. But you can’t go back to the past. You can go to various kinds of futures, but they’re only there if you can imagine them and if you can realize them. And the way the Ukrainians talk about freedom is not negative. It’s not, we just have to get the Russians out, it’s something like, the Russians got in the way of these futures, which we really believed we had. And the second thing, as I mentioned before, was the positive negative distinction that when you’re in the rubble, you realize, well, it’s good that the Russians are gone, but someone’s going to have to clear this rubble, someone’s going to have to restore this sidewalk, someone’s got to rebuild this road, someone’s got to restore the bus line. And then, the third thing is character, right? So, if freedom is just negative, it’s just the absence of barriers. That means it means doing whatever I feel like at a given moment. But is that really freedom? I mean, what I think is that freedom is about having positive values and asserting them and realizing them and trying to live consistently with them. And as you do that over time, you become a personality or you build something like character. And when that happens, there are moments that you can only do one thing precisely because you are free. And it was Zelenskyy staying in Kyiv and millions of other Ukrainians staying at a time when we thought that they would flee, or maybe we would have fled, that got me thinking about that, that an unfree person can always try to run, but sometimes a free person has to be the right thing precisely because he or she is a free person.

ISAACSON: One of the less free places I can think of is a maximum-security prison. And you taught your seminar on freedom in a prison like that. Tell me what you learned from them about the concept of freedom.

SNYDER: Well, I’m going to just say about something really simple first, which is that we have a — there are a lot of talented people in our prisons and these were some pretty smart students and they really did the work. And I took the book manuscript to prison to test my own American experience. Because in many — my American experience has been — I mean, there’s been some bumps along the way, but it’s been a good one and it’s one that you could generally make line up with the story of an American dream. But that’s not the only story. There are other people’s stories. There are African American stories. And most of the men I was teaching were African Americans. And those stories must do and must involve the history of slavery, the history of Jim Crow, the history of voter suppression, and now, the history of mass incarceration. And so, since I was basing my book around my own life, my own experiences, I needed to get a sense of their experiences and how they were different. I needed to know — I needed to have more of an intuitive personal sense of other American stories because you can’t base a story about freedom on your own life if you can’t listen to other people, if you don’t have a sense of their experiences, their bodily experiences, their human experiences. The other thing about these guys was that they were very deep readers of philosophy. And this is basically a philosophy book. And we were — what we were doing was we were reading philosophers together, and they helped me see how I could use the philosophers that I liked and apply them to America and to questions of race. I did that much better thanks to them.

ISAACSON: Kamala Harris has really grabbed onto this banner of freedom, just as you were coming out with the book. And in her first advertisement, I’ll read something she says, we choose freedom. The freedom not just to get by, but to get ahead. The freedom to be safe from gun violence. Freedom to make decisions about your own body, a future when no child lives in poverty, and we can all afford health care, and no one’s above the law. How does that definition of freedom and the grabbing of the banner of freedom by Kamala Harris, how do you assess that?

SNYDER: Philosophically, I think the vice president is correct in that freedom, I think, comes before democracy. If you believe in democracy, you have to believe in a people that can rule. And a people that can rule has to be a free people, which raises the question of how do you create a free people? It takes work. It takes institutions. It takes cooperation. It takes — as she says, you have to choose freedom, but on the other hand, you actually have to — you also have to build the institutions, which allowed children to grow up free. So, I mean, I’m watching this from afar, right? Like, it’s — from my point of view, it’s a coincidence. But it is interesting to watch her move from a language trying — first, she’s trying to take the language of negative freedom from the Republicans. She’s talking about — she’s saying, we’re the party that’s going to keep government off your back. But then there’s a kind of glide towards positive freedom, as she and others in the campaign starts talking about freedom not just from government oppression, but the freedom to do things, which I think is the right move, philosophically anyway, and hopefully, politically as well. Because as we were saying, like, freedom from is important, but only because it’s necessary for freedom too. We want to have a country where we can all grow up to be diverse, beautiful, different, flourishing individuals, that’s what positive freedom is about. But to do that, we can’t — we have to decide to create institutions together that make it possible.

ISAACSON: One of the things I enjoyed about the book were the tales of your childhood in Ohio. I didn’t quite realize you grew up in such a sort of idyllic in ways childhood there. What are you thinking when you see what’s happening to the Haitian immigrants in Springfield and the type of rhetoric now being used?

SNYDER: Man, that just — it makes me — it just makes me so upset, right? Springfield has about 20 miles from where I grew up. And, you know, the idea that like people who are just trying to live their normal lives. People who are just trying to live their normal lives have to be pulled into this spectacle of hatred. I think it’s infuriating, right? Like this whole rhetoric of us and them, it makes freedom impossible. Like freedom has to be about we’re all individuals, we’re going to kind of create some conditions together, whether we agree with each other’s ideas or not, we’re going to create some conditions together, call them rights, call it a welfare state, a reasonable way that we can all live decent, dignified lives. As soon as it goes to us and them, we don’t like the Haitians, we’re going to make up stories about them. As soon as it does that, and people’s minds change, we flip over to fear and anxiety, and who we are suddenly depends upon who somebody else is not. And that’s just completely inconsistent with freedom. So, it upsets me, right? Because Springfield is a normal place where like the Haitian immigrants are making a significant contribution to normal life, like they do in other medium sized cities and towns in Ohio, by the way, it’s completely normal. And they’re not being allowed to live this normal life because of this us and them stuff. This us and them stuff which leads to threats of violence and disruption, it brings this unreality into their lives. It really upsets me.

ISAACSON: I found “On Tyranny” to be a very cautionary book. And now, this book, “On Freedom,” is actually seems a pretty hopeful book. It’s forward-looking. Tell me what is it about this book that you feel is optimistic and hopeful about what we should be rather than what we should just guard against?

SNYDER: I’m glad you think so because that was certainly the intention. And it goes back to your first — very first question. I mean if there’s something to defend, what is it, right? It’s not just enough to be against tyranny. What is freedom? It’s not just enough to be against bad government. What is good government? And how can we link freedom to good government? And the reason I’m optimistic is that I think we can. I think that we do have the right word at the center of our national conversation, that word is freedom. I think it’s possible, and this is the intellectual work I try to do in the book, I think it’s possible to get freedom right. I think if we think it through, we come to an idea, which is positive in the sense that we’re talking about. And then, we think about positive freedom, not negative freedom, not just pushing things away, but positive freedom. It gives us prescriptions for good policy, which we don’t have to think about in terms of being, you know, it’s controversial in any way because they — it’s government helping freedom, right? The thing that justifies government, in my view, is freedom itself. Freedom itself is the thing that justifies government. So, I think if we can come to that conclusion, you can bring together conservative folks and left-wing folks and people with various kinds of ideas, people who think that the world is about values and are more conservative. Yes, you’re right, people who think that the world is more about institutions, about creating conditions for people. Yes, you’re right. And the reason that everyone is right is because of freedom itself. So, I’m hopeful because I think the right ideas can lead to the right kind of politics. And I’m also hopeful because, although, the history of these — of our kind of institution is beset with tragedy and failure, there are also moments where things unexpectedly go better than we think. And also, because, you know, when I’m insisting on thinking about the future here, we have a problem in our politics, which is we’re having trouble thinking about futures, I think that in the range of futures that we have as a country, there are more good ones than we realize. We’re caught up in the bad ones and it’s completely understandable, but there are also many, many good things down the road which we don’t yet see and which we could get to.

ISAACSON: Timothy Snyder, thank you for joining us.

SNYDER: I really appreciate the conversation. Thank you.