Chapter Review: Prologue (2010)

This is a review of the prologue (13 pages) of Timothy Snyder’s 2018 book, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University and a Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. His specialty is the history of Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and the Holocaust. Snyder also wrote other books, including On Tyranny, about how democracies fall and tyrannies rise (my review is here). He is a highly regarded historian.

In essence, Snyder’s book is an urgent warning about the power of dark free speech[1] or propaganda and the terrible corrosive power that undermining trust and institutions, e.g., the rule of law and a free press-media, can have on democracies and the rule of law. In a broader context, what is described is an ongoing, deadly serious global war between democracy, truth and the rule of law vs. tyranny, dark free speech and corruption. Snyder makes it crystal clear where our president stands in this war.

Inevitability vs eternity political ideologies

A theme that runs through Snyder’s book is two different conceptions of how politics plays out over time. He calls them inevitability and eternity. The inevitability politics mindset holds that society is moving toward a fixed, stable end situation. For Marxists, the final state of social evolution is a classless, governmentless communist utopia. For capitalists it is the final triumph of a free market utopia. From a point of view grounded in history, philosophy and cognitive and social science, the Marxist and capitalist ideals are unattainable nonsense. Utopias are not possible, only aspirational ideals. They are rigid ideological mirages that wind up serving narrow interests, not the public or human interests.

On the other hand, the eternity politics mindset posits that history progresses in more or less static cycles of threat, conflict and rebirth of the nation followed by a temporary calm before the next spasm of violence and rebirth. The eternity mindset creates foreign enemies when domestic threats have been subdued. Technology advances, but society is stuck in the hate, violence, destruction and rebirth cycle inherent in the human condition. This vision of reality is more plausible than the inevitability ideology, but not necessarily true. Human societies have advanced over the millennia. They are not static, at least not yet. What isn’t knowable now is just how far human society as a whole can advance. Also unknowable is, if there is a social plateau and stasis, what that world would look like.

Inevitability politics promises a better future for everyone, while eternity politics promises endless cycles of conflict. Snyder argues that inevitability tends to collapse into eternity politics, which envisions an innocent, righteous nation at the center of endless cycles of victimhood.

Snyder takes a very dim view of both ideological mindsets based on history, including events as recent as 2018. Both narratives foment and lead to intolerance of enemies, real or fake. They also tend to rely on religious religious iconography to help draw the true believers in. These narratives create out-groups or enemies from people who questioning the narrative’s supposed truth. People who dissent from the narratives are generally not tolerated. Snyder comments on eternity:

“Eternity politicians spread the conviction that government cannot aid society as a whole, but can only guard against threats. Progress gives way to doom. In power, eternity politicians manufacture crisis and manipulate the resultant emotion. .... Using technology to transmit political fiction, both at home and abroad, eternity politicians deny truth and seek to reduce life to spectacle and feeling.”

In essence, eternity drowns the future in cycles of present emotional whiplash grounded in fear, intolerance and outrage, followed by elation. Inevitability doesn't fare any better:

“[Inevitability politics is based on] a sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing really to be done. In the American capitalist version of this story, nature brought the market, which brought democracy, which brought happiness. .... Before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, communism had its own politics of inevitability: nature permits technology; technology brings social change; social change causes revolution; revolution enacts utopia. .... American politics of inevitability, like all such stories, resisted facts.”[2]

Snyder makes a prediction and gives his basis in facts and logic for it:

“What has already happened in Russia is what might happen in America and Europe: the stabilization of massive inequality, the displacement of policy by propaganda, the shift of politics of inevitability to the politics of eternity. Russian leaders could invite Europeans and Americans to eternity because Russia got there first. They understood European and American weaknesses, which they had first seen and exploited at home. .... Concepts moved from East to West. An example is the word ‘fake’ as in ‘fake news’. This sounds like an American invention, and Donald Trump claimed itv as his own; but the term was used in Russia and Ukraine long before it began its career in the United States. It meant creating a fictional text that posed as a piece of journalism, both to spread confusion about a particular event and to discredit journalism as such. Eternity politicians first spread fake news themselves, then claim that all news is fake, and finally that only their spectacles are real. .... The techniques were everywhere the same, although they became more sophisticated over time. .... Russia in the 2010s was a kleptocratic regime that sought to export the politics of eternity: to demolish factuality, to preserve inequality, and to accelerate similar tendencies in Europe and the United States.” (emphasis added)

Footnotes:
1. Dark free speech: Constitutionally legal and protected (1) lies and deceit to distract, misinform, confuse, polarize and/or demoralize, (2) unwarranted opacity to hide inconvenient truths, facts and corruption (lies and deceit of omission), and (3) unwarranted emotional manipulation (i) to obscure the truth and blind the mind to lies and deceit, and (ii) to provoke irrational, reason-killing emotions and feelings, including fear, hate, anger, disgust, distrust, intolerance, cynicism, pessimism and all kinds of bigotry including racism. (my label, my definition)

2. If my recollection of American history from public education and my observations of American conservative and populist political rhetoric is any indicator, the facts that American capitalist politics resists or denies include those chronicled in the 10-hour documentary Plutocracy, which is discussed here.