Talking with Tim Snyder about resistance

Why comparisons to 1930s Germany are "nonsensical" but still instructive

I’m out this week in Science with a column about an interview that I did with Tim Snyder. Snyder is a professor who recently moved from Yale to the University of Toronto and is the author of On Tyranny, which provides 20 lessons for resisting authoritarian actions. In the last 18 months, many commentators have invoked his lessons, especially this first one: “do not obey in advance.” But there are 19 more lessons, and many of them create tension and tradeoffs with each other. I wanted to ask him about that so that our readers who are hearing about his work can judge what he means for themselves. Snyder is all over everywhere the last two years on podcasts: when he met with me it was one of six he was doing that day.

We are using this interview to launch our new Science Podcast channel on YouTube, where we will continue to post this kind of content. Here is the full interview and the full transcript is on the Science website with the column.

Snyder paints a forceful yet nuanced picture of how resistant should work. While he was appropriately critical of anyone in the establishment who silences what he called “troublemakers” (in the good trouble spirit of John Lewis), he also said that not everyone needs to be a troublemaker and that people would all respond differently in any given political moment. Rather, he says, the right thing is to ensure that someone is pushing back and that they are appreciated and not squelched by the others who are riding their coattails. As for individuals in the scientific community, he makes the point that everyone should be doing something, which could range from going to a public protest or something much more local like volunteering with your political party at a polling place.

The whole interview is worth a watch, and the high points are in the column.

Comparisons to 1930s Germany

One of the sayings that I wanted to ask him about in this moment is “whatever you’d be doing in 1930s Germany, you should be doing it now.” It’s common to hear this. When I’ve seen Snyder — who is an expert on authoritarian moments — asked about this, I’ve noticed he is extremely careful to be very rigorous about the comparisons (he said to Scott Galloway, “When you’re about to talk about Nazis, you try to be as fair as you can be.”) When I asked him about the parallels to Germany, he explained that history doesn’t repeat itself (as you hear often), but it instructs. (This part of the interview is not in the YouTube version, but I put the full transcript below if you want to read all of his remarks.)

“I think it’s nonsensical to say that we are Germany in 1933, but it’s also nonsensical to say that we are any country at any time,” he told me. Rather, he explained, we should look to what happened then for patterns that help us understand our current moment - as we should with many other times in history.

Synder’s first lesson was that in 1930s Germany, the left and far left failed to form a coalition, while the right and far right did, which allowed them to come to power with fewer votes. This was aided by the fact that Stalin had told the far left to attack the Social Democrats. Snyder sees the US as failing to learn that lesson. “It could happen that people who are centrist and liberals, and focus on things like the rule of law, could get in a big fight with people who are more concerned with social and racial injustice. I see sparks of that every day,” he explained. “It could happen that the reason that you lose an election is because the people who are center left and the people who are far left can’t get together for whatever reason.”

This is why it’s crucial for the scientific community to work together around our internal differences. That will require discomfort for everyone, but failing to form a coalition that fights for science together is a sure way to make the attacks on science from the outside more effective.

The other lesson Snyder pointed out was the failure to imagine that the worst things could happen. Many in the scientific establishment failed to recognize that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. could actually become the health secretary despite his views on vaccines or that the office of management and budget would actually try not to disburse funds that had been appropriated by Congress.

Find your something

“If you’re an American and you’re thinking about resistance,” he said, “you have to look to history for that because we have a history of resistance. And the more you know about it, the more you see its strengths and its weaknesses. If you just drop the history and say, okay, everything’s fresh and everything’s new, then you’re going to underestimate certain things. You’re going to overestimate certain things, you’re going to miss possible alliances. And also you’ll be caught by surprise when tactics that should have been familiar to you are used against you.”

I left my conversation with Snyder with greater clarity about the current moment. I have been a broken record about how we need to be painfully meticulous whenever we publish anything, but especially research, news, or commentary that will enter the political sphere. I asked Snyder if it was unfair that we were held to that standard when the folks attacking us were not. He agreed it was unfair, but that didn’t change anything. “It’s just the way it is,” he said. A free press covering science and science policy combined with journals that publish and maintain papers based on the highest scientific principles are an important part of the means of withstanding the attacks.

But the rest of it involves each of us finding our own way to contribute, as Snyder explained far better than I can. Tim Snyder is an outstanding voice to help bring the scientific community together in a common cause.

As the number of awards made by the agencies and overall disbursements continue to be even slower than last year, it’s time to find our somethings.

The full transcript of Snyder’s remarks on Germany

Because the section about Germany was cut from the YouTube version, I’m pasting the whole transcript here for those who are interested in hearing more from him about this.

Holden Thorp: All right, so one other thing that I want to know about is how do you compare the US to other moments like this that you’ve studied? And I’ve noticed you are very careful talking about that. But one thing that tends to run around is, oh, you should be doing whatever you would be doing in 1930s Germany. Do you worry about the generalization of that?

Tim Snyder: Colleague to colleague, I will tell you how I find that hard and how I try to deal with the difficulties. I find it hard because of course there is an endless amount to know about Germany in 1932. And I’ve done a little bit of work on Germany in that period. There are of course colleagues who are much greater authorities than me on Germany in that period. And when you know something about something, then you’re of course always hesitant, right? Because no matter what anybody says in public about Germany in 1932, pretty much there’s gonna be something wrong with it, right? And so on the one hand, it’s hard because you think ‘We don’t have enough history. I need everybody to know more history. There’s just so many more levels to what you’re talking about.’ Okay. all true. At the same time, I think that history is there not because we have to know everything about it, because the every single thing is gonna repeat pixel for pixel, datum for datum, fact for fact, day for day. Because from history you can get certain patterns and the, and the patterns can help you with the recognition. And so that’s where I aim for. So I think it’s nonsensical to say that we are Germany in 1933, but it’s also nonsensical to say that we are any country at any time. We’re not, that’s not how it works.

What you can do though, is you can learn from Germany in 32 or 33 to recognize certain things. So you can say, okay, in Germany in 32 and 33, the left failed to form a coalition. And the right, the far right, even though it had fewer votes, came to power. That’s happened, right? And something like that has happened in other places and something like that could happen in the US. It could happen that people who are centrist and liberals and focus on things the rule of law, it could happen that they get in a big fight with people who are more concerned with social and racial injustice, right? That could happen. I see there’s sparks of that every day, right? It could happen. And it could happen that the reason that you lose an election is because the people who are center left and the people who are far left can’t get together for whatever reason. In Germany, they had the excuse that Stalin told the communists to attack the social Democrats. Okay? So that’s why that happened. It was Stalin’s fault, but there’s a pattern there. There’s something, there’s something that you can, that you can notice, right?

Or to stay in Germany, another pattern is the old right not recognizing the new right. Which is the history of fascism in the twenties and thirties that you have. And I’m not saying the old right was great either then or now. But you have, you have an old right, which is concerned with continuity, with law, with certain kinds of economic exploitation, and then you have a new right, which is different. It’s a fascist right. They believe in unreality and motion over reason, but there’s enough overlap that the old right thinks, ‘oh, these new right guys, they’re just kinda like me, but they’re younger and stronger and more spirited, and maybe I should help them come to power.’ Something like that happened in Oma, Romania. Something like that happened in Germany. Something like that happened in Italy. That was an element to these fascist transformations. Is it exactly like what happened in the US? No, but I think it is fair to say that as in the early part of the 21st century, some people in our old right, like looked at new things coming down the pike and they said, well, that looks, that’s just kind of me, but more interesting.

But it wasn’t interesting. It was actually something else, like something that you enabled maybe, but it was something else. So maybe that’s a boring example, but there are, there are plenty of other ways that you can look at a period.

The classic example from Germany, 32, 33 is the lack of imagination, a normalization that even though things happen pretty fast, people still adapted to them and they thought, oh, the next thing isn’t gonna happen. And if you know that’s true of Germans or even German Jews, which it was true of German Jews, many of them, then you can ask yourself, okay, is that something that’s happening to me or people around me?

So that’s what I think history is for. It’s not ‘cause you get people get locked in, they either say it has to be exactly like that or it’s not relevant. And that it can’t be exactly like that history doesn’t repeat. Or they say I found a perfect historical analogy. No, there’s no perfect historical analogy.

What there are are patterns. There is another point which I think has to be made. I say in the book, I think I say it On Tyranny that history doesn’t repeat, but it does instruct and it should instruct us.

But another thing to keep in mind is that even if we drop history, people who wanna destroy science and people who wanna destroy liberty, they’re thinking about history.

Like I read, I read their stuff. They are perfectly aware of a lot of the history of the 20th century. They know a lot more about Spanish or Portuguese far right politics. They know sometimes a lot about post-war French fascist revival. They often know quite a lot about intellectual history that we might be tempted to discard.

And so when we think about history, we often have to remember there may be playbooks out there, which the other side is using, and if we decide we’re not gonna pay attention to history, we might miss that as well. And then I should say also like if you’re an American and you’re thinking about resistance, you have to look to history for that because, um, we have a history of resistance.

And the more you know about it, the more you see its strengths and its weaknesses and the more capable you might be. But if you just drop the history and say, okay, everything’s fresh and everything’s new, then you’re gonna underestimate certain things. You’re gonna overestimate certain things, you’re gonna miss possible alliances. And also you’ll be caught by surprise when tactics that should have been familiar to you or used against you.