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Episode: Episode 213: The Shallow, Power-Flattering Appeal of High Status #Resistance Historians

Author: Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson
Duration: 01:19:41

Episode Shownotes

"The Bad Guys Are Winning," wrote Anne Applebaum for The Atlantic in 2021. "The War on History Is a War on Democracy," warned Timothy Snyder in The New York Times, also in 2021. "The GOP has found a Putin-lite to fawn over. That's bad news for democracy," argued Ruth Ben-Ghiat

on MSNBC the following year, 2022. Within the last 10 years or so, and especially since the 2016 election of Trump, these authors — Anne Applebaum, Timothy Snyder, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, in addition to several others — have become liberal-friendly experts on authoritarianism. On a regular basis, they make appearances on cable news and in the pages of legacy newspapers and magazines–in some cases, as staff members–in order to warn of how individual, one-off “strongmen” like Trump, Putin, Orban, and Xi, made up a vague “authoritarian” axis hellbent on destroying Democracy for its own sake. But what good does this framing do and who does it absolve? Instead of meaningfully contending with US's sprawling imperial power and internal systems of oppression — namely being the largest carceral state in the world — these MSNBC historians reheat decades-old Axis of Evil or Cold War good vs evil rhetoric, pinning the horrors of centuries of political violence on individual "mad men." Meanwhile, they selectively invoke the "authoritarian" label, fretting about the need to save some abstract notion of democracy from geopolitical Bad Guys while remaining silent as the US funds, arms and backs the most authoritarian process imaginable — the immiseration and destruction of an entire people — specifically in Gaza. On this episode, we look at the advent and influence of MSNBC-approved historians, dissecting their selective anti-authoritarian posture and discussing how their work does little more than polish their careers and provide cover for US and US-allied militarism. Our guest is historian and author Greg Grandin.

Full Transcript

00:00:03 Speaker_03
This is Citations Needed with Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson.

00:00:08 Speaker_04
Welcome to Citations Needed, a podcast on the media, power, PR, and the history of bullshit. I am Nima Shirazi. I'm Adam Johnson.

00:00:16 Speaker_04
You can follow the show on Twitter at Citations Pod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com slash Citations Needed podcast.

00:00:26 Speaker_04
All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated as we are 100% listener funded.

00:00:32 Speaker_02
Yes, as always, you can support the show by subscribing on patreon.com. We appreciate the support there. It helps keep the episodes themselves free and the show sustainable.

00:00:46 Speaker_04
The bad guys are winning. wrote Ann Applebaum for The Atlantic Magazine in 2021. The war on history is a war on democracy, warned Timothy Snyder for The New York Times, also in 2021. The GOP has found a Putin-lite to fawn over.

00:01:04 Speaker_04
That's bad news for democracy, argued Ruth Ben-Gyat for MSNBC the following year, 2022.

00:01:12 Speaker_02
In the past eight or nine years, and especially since the 2016 election of Trump, these authors, Ann Applebaum, Timothy Snyder, and Ruth Ben-Ghiat, in addition to several knockoffs, have become liberal-friendly experts on authoritarianism.

00:01:26 Speaker_02
On a regular basis, they make appearances on cable news, namely CNN and MSNBC, are featured in the pages of legacy newspapers and magazines, such as the New York Times and Atlantic,

00:01:36 Speaker_02
And in some cases, our staff members, in order to warn how individual one-off strongmen like Putin, Trump, Orban, Xi, Maduro, make up a vague authoritarian axis hellbent on destroying democracy for its own sake. But what good does this framing do?

00:01:51 Speaker_04
And who does it absolve?

00:01:54 Speaker_04
Instead of meaningfully contending with the United States' sprawling imperial power and internal systems of oppression, namely being the largest carceral state on Earth, these MSNBC-approved historians reheat decades-old axis-of-evil or cold-war good-versus-evil rhetoric, pinning the horrors of centuries of political violence on individual madmen.

00:02:17 Speaker_04
Meanwhile, they selectively invoke the authoritarian label, fretting about the need to save some abstract notion of Big D democracy from geopolitical bad guys, while remaining silent as the United States itself funds, arms, and backs some of the most authoritarian states in the world, including the ongoing immiseration and destruction of an entire people, namely, Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza.

00:02:44 Speaker_02
On today's episode, we'll look at the advent and influence of embassy-approved historians, dissect their selective anti-authoritarianism, and discuss how their work does little more than polish the careers and provide cover for U.S. and U.S.

00:02:57 Speaker_02
allied militarism.

00:02:58 Speaker_04
Later on the show, we'll be speaking with Greg Grandin.

00:03:02 Speaker_04
the C. Van Woodward Professor of History at Yale University, and the author of a number of books, including Empire's Workshop, Fordlandia, The Empire of Necessity, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The End of the Myth, From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America.

00:03:18 Speaker_04
His new book, America, America, a New History of the New World, will be published by Penguin in April 2025.

00:03:25 Speaker_03
The number of scholars and pundits who position themselves as intellectuals immediately jumped on this bandwagon of positioning Trump as some kind of authoritarian or a fascist or compromised by ties with Putin and Russia.

00:03:44 Speaker_03
I mean, there's so many iterations of this argument. And, you know, some of them may have some basis in fact, and certainly Trump is an authoritarian, there's no doubt about that.

00:03:55 Speaker_03
But what it does by talking about it in a certain way is that it obscures and denies the fact that everything that they say Trump is has deep roots in U.S. history and culture and politics.

00:04:09 Speaker_02
So this is a spiritual successor, a spiritual sequel to a few episodes, but mainly episode 25, the banality of CIA-curated definitions of democracy, where we discussed the literal CIA-curated definitions of democracy.

00:04:25 Speaker_02
in opposition to so-called authoritarianism and with the U.S. being the protagonist of that moral narrative that's simply flawed and loses its way but is fundamentally good.

00:04:35 Speaker_02
So if you haven't checked out that episode, this episode is specifically about a certain pop historian current, which is very popular among the Atlantic Magazine, New York Times, MSNBC, CNN set.

00:04:48 Speaker_02
that in and of itself can be fine, but is, as we'll discuss, fairly selective, and I think what we would argue is over the last year with the genocide in Gaza, has proven to have severe limitations in its framework, and is mostly a kind of audience-flattering claptrap that orients Trump specifically as part of some broader global conspiracy rather than an outgrowth of very specifically American currents.

00:05:14 Speaker_04
I would argue there is certainly a value in critiquing and contextualizing the rise and influence of certain political ideologies, of certain modes of oppression, certain modes of leadership around the world.

00:05:29 Speaker_04
Putting that, of course, again, into historical context, seeing how these things ebb and flow, rise and fall across history. What can we learn from the past to inform us about our present and lead us to a certain kind of future?

00:05:42 Speaker_04
What we are discussing here is how this kind of contextualization and the analogies used, right, the connections that are made across the current leadership of nation states around the world, how some are deemed to be authoritarian or fascist, while others don't get similar treatment.

00:06:01 Speaker_04
And so much of that selectivity has to do with the political orientation of these historians and these commentators themselves.

00:06:11 Speaker_02
Yeah. And the question becomes, can leftist or even really, I guess, liberals or progressive liberals make alliances with what is effectively a neoconservative project?

00:06:20 Speaker_02
And I think the answer to that, and I certainly think the answer after having survived four years of the first Trump administration, is not really.

00:06:28 Speaker_02
And do these limitations maybe call for something a little deeper, a little richer, a little more historically oriented, and a little less flattering to the Atlantic Magazine and New York Times set?

00:06:38 Speaker_02
And I think the answer to that is that this has kind of exhausted its utility and ultimately leads people down a primrose path that doesn't actually have a lot of workable solutions to how one deals with Trumpism and properly contextualizes Trumpism in the current Republican Party.

00:06:52 Speaker_02
A little bit of history. The rhetorical gambit of using foreign dictators as a reference point to call attention to streaks of authoritarianism is, of course, not new.

00:07:00 Speaker_02
In his 2021 anthology of the so-called Enlightenment, The Enlightenment, the Pursuit of Happiness, Oxford professor Richie Robertson notes how political thinkers and philosophers often use warnings from the Ottoman Empire or China as a way of commenting on contemporary authoritarian streaks within Europe itself.

00:07:16 Speaker_02
Robertson notes in the 18th century critics of the ASEAN regime, Francois Brunier and Montesquieu often warned against the possible excesses of French absolutism by noting how French society was going the way of the Ottoman Empire.

00:07:28 Speaker_02
Robertson writes, quote, Brunier was warning where Louis XIV's autocracy and extravagance might lead. Montesquieu was worried about the absolutism of his successors.

00:07:37 Speaker_02
There seems to be reason to conclude that Oriental despotism was not really about the Orient itself, but rather it was a rhetorical tool in the arsenal of the opponents of the French absolute monarchy.

00:07:47 Speaker_02
The concept of Oriental despotism, especially when based on Montesquieu's climatic determinism, implied a them-and-us contrast between an Asia condemned to systemic misrule and a Europe in which misgovernment was an occasional accident."

00:08:02 Speaker_02
So, again, the baddies, the authoritarians of the East are axiomatically despotic, whereas despotism in the enlightened West is merely an occasional accident. Where have we heard this general formulation before?

00:08:17 Speaker_04
Yeah, Adam, so let's start with a citations-needed all-star here, Anne Applebaum. Ann Applebaum has been a staff writer and resident authoritarianism expert at The Atlantic Magazine since 2019.

00:08:31 Speaker_04
Applebaum got her start in media in the late 1980s, covering the dissolution of the USSR, presumably with glee, if you read her writings, for The Economist, The Independent, as well as other outlets.

00:08:45 Speaker_04
By the early 2000s, though, Applebaum was warmongering on behalf of Israel and the United States.

00:08:51 Speaker_04
On January 21, 2002, Slate Magazine published Applebaum's infamous piece entitled, quote, Kill the Messenger, Why Palestine Radio and TV Studios are Fair Targets in the Palestine-Israeli War, end quote.

00:09:07 Speaker_04
in which she advocated for Israel's destruction of Palestinian media infrastructure, and by extension, Palestinian media workers, for the apparent crimes of broadcasting Israel's violence and criticizing the Bush administration's support.

00:09:23 Speaker_02
To be clear, if you read this article, She's not even using the pretense of like terror or associations with Hamas or whatever. She's speaking specifically about the West Bank, but has no mention – doesn't even say that.

00:09:34 Speaker_02
She says simply by virtue of making Israel and the U.S. look bad that it's fair game for Israel to kill Palestinian media workers, journalists, reporters. and television broadcasters, and does so in a very cold and calculated way.

00:09:47 Speaker_02
There's not any kind of even hand-wringing. She's like, oh yeah, they're fair game. Israel has a right to kill them. Again, by simply making Bush look bad, and one example she uses to justify this is a political cartoon.

00:09:58 Speaker_02
The political cartoon has Bush throwing darts at the Middle East to pick his targets, and that in and of itself becomes justification for Israel killing political cartoonists and other Palestinian meteor.

00:10:10 Speaker_04
And perhaps unsurprisingly, Adam, there's never been any kind of contrition or mea culpa kind of taking this back from Applebaum. She has never been asked about this ever since publishing this.

00:10:20 Speaker_02
And she was selected in 2021 and has henceforth been a member of the Pulitzer Selection Board at Columbia University that picks the Pulitzer Prize. This is someone who, again, has called for the killing of Palestinian journalists.

00:10:33 Speaker_02
And in a year, in 2023 and 2024, where Over 140 or 180, depending on your count, media workers, reporters, journalists in Gaza have been killed by Israel, again, carrying out a policy that she advocated for.

00:10:48 Speaker_02
It would seem like she should be held accountable for that, or at least explain it. Does she currently still believe it? And no one has done that. And I guess we're doing that again. We're appealing to her again, asking her, does –

00:10:58 Speaker_02
And Al-Babam still support the summary execution of journalists in Palestine. She's never answered for that. She's never explained herself. But yet she's held up as this expert in authoritarianism.

00:11:08 Speaker_02
So the question becomes, in your model of quote-unquote authoritarianism, is killing over a hundred and… 50 media workers in Gaza, a form of authoritarianism. And I think the answer to that would be to her, no, because Palestinians don't count.

00:11:24 Speaker_02
Palestinian journalists are just seen as not particularly human.

00:11:27 Speaker_04
In the years since writing that, Applebaum has become a columnist for The Washington Post.

00:11:32 Speaker_04
During the Obama years, she would spill much ink warning about the dangers of the United States' official enemies, primarily Russia and China, and denying currents of authoritarianism within the United States itself, along with its allies.

00:11:48 Speaker_04
In a column from June 14th, 2013, for example, Applebaum scoffed at former intelligence contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden, sarcastically referring to him as a quote-unquote martyr, insinuating that he had exaggerated the extent of NSA spying that he had revealed and accused him of being more interested in publicity than anything else.

00:12:10 Speaker_04
Applebaum also couldn't help but fearmonger about surveillance in China, not the United States, citing zero evidence because apparently there was no need to. It's just assumed.

00:12:21 Speaker_04
Applebaum wrote this, quote, Snowden stole a horde of documents and fled to Hong Kong.

00:12:26 Speaker_04
Thus, did he place his fate in the hands of a government that exerts total control over its nation's Internet and spares no expense in its attempts to penetrate ours, end quote.

00:12:38 Speaker_04
Some of Applebaum's other greatest hits from the Obama years were columns like, A Need to Contain Russia from March 2014, and later that year in August 2014, this one, Obama's Legacy Could Be a Revitalized NATO.

00:12:54 Speaker_02
Well, let's not forget her hits from 2009 and 2010, where she defended Roman Polanski from arrest. But that's another – I guess that's also a form of authoritarianism, arresting people who rape 13-year-olds.

00:13:05 Speaker_02
Again, this is all rather incoherent, mostly just is it good for US militarism, is it good for NATO? If the answer is yes, then it's not authoritarian. If the answer is no, then it is authoritarian. Again, it's all rather kind of cheesy Cold War.

00:13:18 Speaker_02
Framing. By 2015, Applebaum had cemented this kind of selective authoritarianism.

00:13:24 Speaker_02
In an April 2015 column headline, How to Make the World's Madmen Think Twice, Applebaum advocated for arming Ukraine with nukes to defend against, quote, a kleptocratic authoritarian state, e.g. Russia, and criticized lawmakers for being too dovish.

00:13:40 Speaker_02
The madmen, of course, are entirely Russia and Iran.

00:13:43 Speaker_02
Applebaum added, quote, In the 1980s, the Soviet leadership was terrified that a cowboy in the White House, someone who was so nutty he made jokes about signing legislation that would outlaw Russia forever, might just flip a switch and send a missile.

00:13:57 Speaker_02
Nowadays, it's we who fear the madman in foreign capitals. While our large nuclear arsenal goes unmentioned and unacknowledged by Western political class, it is frankly embarrassed that it exists, unquote.

00:14:09 Speaker_02
And suddenly, as Trump began his first presidential campaign in 2015, it was time to look inwards.

00:14:14 Speaker_02
Applebaum decided to join a chorus of pundits denouncing Trump as a unique evil within the U.S., an almost foreign import, alien to any native political currents. Say, I don't know, Ronald Reagan, Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot.

00:14:28 Speaker_02
He was something that was somehow exotic or from the Orient.

00:14:32 Speaker_02
One example was a piece headlined, quote, Is this the end of the West as we know it, unquote, in which she devoted a token reference to concerns about Trump's views on torture and mass deportation, probably because she mostly agrees with him and had historically.

00:14:47 Speaker_02
Her chief fear was that Trump instead, like fellow reactionaries Viktor Orban of Hungary and Marie Le Pen in France, would undermine NATO and thus the US and EU's global strategic alliance.

00:15:00 Speaker_04
Notably for all her fretting about authoritarianism, surveillance and kleptocracy, nowhere in Applebaum's body of work for The Washington Post has she ever focused on Israeli apartheid, occupation and violence toward Palestinians.

00:15:14 Speaker_04
This remains absent from her work. At best, she has singled out Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as an aberrant, budding threat to Israeli democracy, which is apparently just this thing that we are told exists.

00:15:28 Speaker_04
In her writings for The Atlantic magazine since October 7th, 2023, She has only devoted one piece to Israel, headlined, quote, Netanyahu's attack on democracy left Israel unprepared, end quote.

00:15:42 Speaker_04
In this piece, Applebaum paid no heed to the violence being wrought upon Palestinians, of course, opting instead to focus on how political polarization within Israel itself, precipitated by its far-right leadership, is undermining national security and thus rendering Israel more vulnerable to the, quote unquote, terrorism

00:16:02 Speaker_04
of Hamas. Applebaum made similar arguments in her latest book, Autocracy, Inc., The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, which was released earlier this year, 2024.

00:16:10 Speaker_04
The book's manuscript was finished before October 7th, 2023, but Applebaum made adjustments to it afterwards before publication.

00:16:21 Speaker_04
In a July 2024 interview with The Guardian, she said the following of the attacks on Gaza, quote, The fact that the commentary about Gaza became so toxic online so fast When I saw that happening, I thought, OK, I'm staying out of this.

00:16:37 Speaker_04
I'm not an expert in the region. I'm not there. I'm certainly not going to talk about it on Twitter. I mean, do people have completely settled views about what's happening in Sudan? Say that's another huge crisis. End quote.

00:16:49 Speaker_02
Right.

00:16:49 Speaker_02
So here we have a very typical cop out because Gaza for all three of the historians will be discussing and others and the kind of broader so-called anti-authoritarian expert nexus that did emerge with Trump and fell neatly within a kind of Biden White House framework.

00:17:04 Speaker_02
And then, of course, Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was their ideological Super Bowl. because it, you know, affirmed their priors to some extent justifiably. And then Gaza comes along and there's this huge ideological inconvenience to that.

00:17:20 Speaker_02
Then suddenly they really sort of don't know what to say because it doesn't fit into this cheesy good versus evil narrative rather than simply being consistent, right?

00:17:27 Speaker_02
As very few people have been rather than being consistent and saying, well, both of these things are bad. It's obviously they support Israel. They support Biden's support of Israel, Applebaum specifically.

00:17:39 Speaker_02
Snyder's a little more nuanced, but it's mostly just avoided the topic altogether. So it doesn't really fit into this cheesy good versus evil narrative. So the choice is to just not talk about it.

00:17:52 Speaker_02
And Applebaum would not only kind of deny Israel's crime, she would go on to attempt to cop out of it by saying she wasn't an expert.

00:17:59 Speaker_02
She told The Guardian, quote, clearly Hamas, which is connected to Iran as part of that autocratic world, again, whatever that means, Should we go on to say, clearly Netanyahu has designs on Israeli democracy.

00:18:10 Speaker_02
I wouldn't say he's a dictator, but he clearly is willing to preside over decline in Israeli democracy. Again, 4.5 million Palestinians are under Netanyahu's authoritarian rule in the West Bank and in Gaza.

00:18:26 Speaker_02
No control over imports, exports, no control over it's an open-air prison, no control over fishing rights, no control over freedom of movement. They can't go anywhere. They're confined under the unilateral control of Israeli authority.

00:18:38 Speaker_02
This, to her, is not authoritarian. There's this precious Israeli democracy where there's basically a Jim Crow situation, apartheid situation, two sets of rules for two different people based on their ethnicity, based on their religion.

00:18:50 Speaker_02
This, to her, is not Authoritarian. This is important. Again, much like the largest carceral state in the world, the United States is not authoritarian.

00:18:59 Speaker_02
Israel's apartheid and genocide of Gaza over the past year has killed hundreds of thousands of people, maimed endless amounts of children.

00:19:08 Speaker_02
Tens of thousands of children no longer have arms and legs, untold PTSD, untold trauma, untold injuries that'll take generations if they ever do recover at all. This is not authoritarian. A homeless person starving on the street, not authoritarian.

00:19:25 Speaker_02
undergrad student at Middlebury College interrupting Charles Murray authoritarian. This is the kind of facile narrative that Applebaum specifically works under. So she's kind of has no real choice but to sort of just avoid the topic.

00:19:38 Speaker_02
She would say, quote, as journalists, our role is to try to collect information as accurately as possible and analyze it. If the interpretation leads to describing Israeli war crimes,

00:19:47 Speaker_02
in Gaza or whether it leads in the direction of describing Hamas atrocities in Israel, that's what it should do. But I think, for example, that it's a great mistake for universities to announce what their policy is on the war."

00:20:00 Speaker_02
Now, of course, she didn't say that when every single major university lent support. for Ukraine after Russia's invasion. Right, exactly.

00:20:08 Speaker_04
If universities came out opposing Iran or China or Russia, I don't think Applebaum would have a problem with it. She would probably say that's a very strong anti-authoritarian stance.

00:20:18 Speaker_02
And almost every university came out with a statement of support after October 7th.

00:20:22 Speaker_02
But then suddenly, when the death count in Gaza starts to surpass October 7th, as it did within the first few days... Then, hey, she's no expert and people should stay out of it. Yeah. Just report accurately as journalists.

00:20:33 Speaker_02
and then it's 20x, 30x, then suddenly it's all very nuanced and complicated and she'd rather stay out of it.

00:20:38 Speaker_02
And so this, again, this facile definition of authoritarianism, not anything to do with negative rights, being homeless, not having housing, not having an education, living in poverty, living check to check, skipping meals, not being able to afford diapers, genocide in Gaza,

00:20:55 Speaker_02
U.S. overthrowing of the Bolivian government in 2019, overthrowing of the Venezuelan government attempted in 2018 and 2019, the successful overthrow of the Venezuelan government in 2002. We can keep going on. None of that's authoritarian.

00:21:08 Speaker_02
That's just either something we don't talk about or something we think is actually good. Ann Applebaum is someone who openly supported the Iraq war. She was indexed as a neoconservative until I think she mostly migrated to more liberal spaces.

00:21:23 Speaker_02
would have been considered a textbook neoconservative, but suddenly is this liberal hero because she opposes Trump.

00:21:28 Speaker_02
Again, oftentimes for good reason, but it's a very superficial opposition that wants to preserve the sitting on a hill mythology of U.S. imperialism, that it's kind of its primary goal. And then there is

00:21:41 Speaker_02
To move on to our next historian, I think someone who's done a ton of media events, panels with Ann Applebaum, but is not as overtly neoconservative and is maybe more comfortable operating within liberal spaces, which is Timothy Snyder, who's a Yale historian who specializes like Ann Applebaum in Eastern European history.

00:21:59 Speaker_02
So he is a Russian expert, so he sort of was in the right place at the right time. to comment on the rise of Trump in the context of Russiagate and speak about it in a legitimately authoritative way.

00:22:09 Speaker_02
This is someone who's done original scholarship, who speaks several languages, who knows the region, but we would argue unfortunately began to fall into this kind of cheesy neoconservative dichotomy that removed a lot of the nuances and historical antecedents to Trump in a way that did become palpable

00:22:28 Speaker_02
to a, for want of a better term, kind of low information liberal who wanted to eat the sort of simplistic slop. You know, again, understandably so.

00:22:36 Speaker_02
But I think in many ways removed Trump from history and removed his rise from American history specifically.

00:22:42 Speaker_04
Snyder has written a number of bestselling books, including Black Earth from 2015, On Tyranny from 2017, and On Freedom, published this year, 2024.

00:22:52 Speaker_04
One of his most famous books, Bloodlands, which was published in 2010, correlates Nazism and the Soviet Union as, quote, twinned totalitarianisms, end quote.

00:23:03 Speaker_04
This form of historical collapsing is profoundly problematic, as we will discuss, and has drawn substantial criticism from other historians.

00:23:12 Speaker_04
Historian Adam J. Sachs, for example, has called Snyder, quote, the most outspoken propagator of historical confusion, end quote, adding this, quote, from the World Economic Forum to virtually every major media outlet.

00:23:27 Speaker_04
Snyder has morphed into a policy pundit panic peddler, projecting fascism and genocide onto contemporary Russia, while infamously trying to frame Hitler's consistent and uncompromising genocidal assault against the Jews as a result of quote, ecological panic, end quote.

00:23:46 Speaker_04
as if the Jewish minority threatened the precious little fertile land Europe had at its disposal."

00:23:53 Speaker_04
Sachs and other historians have also noted that contrary to Snyder's claims, there is no evidence that, quote, Nazis linked the Holocaust or the genocide of the Roma and disabled to anything perpetrated by the Soviet regime.

00:24:09 Speaker_04
Now, Snyder's pat observations in media appearances and speculative arguments have proven very popular in powerful liberal circles in recent years.

00:24:18 Speaker_04
Since 2016, Snyder, equipped with Ivy League credibility, of course, has emerged as a default media source on fascism, and especially on the supposedly unique perils of Donald Trump. whom he tends to compare to Putin and to Hitler.

00:24:32 Speaker_04
He's influential enough that, in the spring of 2024, he appeared before the U.S. House Oversight Committee to be told by California Rep. Ro Khanna, quote, a lot of my Democratic colleagues listen to you religiously, end quote.

00:24:46 Speaker_02
For The Guardian, in October 2018, Snyder wrote a piece entitled, quote, Donald Trump borrows from the old tricks of fascism, where he argued that Trump, like Hitler, claimed innocence and took no responsibility for his actions, which is fair enough.

00:24:59 Speaker_02
It's consistent of both Hitler and Trump. But the issue is on the emphasis.

00:25:03 Speaker_02
The piece focused primarily on individual psychoanalysis and only secondarily on the actual fascistic dangers of Trump's policies and political stances, which, to be clear, are very real, but they're not

00:25:13 Speaker_02
outgrowth of some foreign government or his psycho analysis. They are largely preceded by a fascistic current domestic to the US, which is very popular and has been popular in the Republican Party for many decades.

00:25:26 Speaker_04
Right. You don't have to outsource it to some kind of historical analog. It's coming from inside the house.

00:25:32 Speaker_02
It is indeed. Similarly, in May 2022, The New York Times published an op-ed by Snyder entitled, We Should Say It, Russia is Fascist. The thesis basically was that Putin equals Stalin and equals Hitler.

00:25:43 Speaker_02
Critiquing Russia is perfectly fine, but it's always done in this very chauvinist Cold War framing, where everybody in the Orient is uniquely and axiomatically evil, and the US is flawed, but is fundamentally good. And Trump is merely an aberration.

00:25:59 Speaker_02
On the issue of the genocide in Gaza, Snyder never makes any such sweeping statements or comparisons.

00:26:04 Speaker_02
Rather, he characterizes Netanyahu, like Trump, as an aberration, as a one-off from an otherwise liberal democracy that is fundamentally good, and Netanyahu deviates from an otherwise noble

00:26:17 Speaker_02
He wrote, quote, in November of 2023, Netanyahu avoids prosecution if he wrecks the Israeli judicial system or convinces people the war demands a permanent exception or Israel is destroyed.

00:26:30 Speaker_02
That's his incentive structure arising from his dreadful record. He's an existential threat to Israel. He would also add in March of 2024, again, he rarely comments on Gaza, but this is the comments he has made.

00:26:41 Speaker_02
If anyone really is thinking of voting for Trump or abstaining because of Gaza, you should know that this is just what Netanyahu wants to do, unquote, which is a very popular talking point over the past year that, yes, Biden is supporting genocide in Gaza, but Trump will do Gaza extra genocide, which is just tedious voter scolding.

00:26:58 Speaker_02
But on the first point, this idea that Netanyahu is somehow pushing the war to stay at a jail became this popular liberal line.

00:27:05 Speaker_02
Despite the fact that it is empirically untrue, a Pew poll in April of 2024 showed that only 19% of Israelis think Netanyahu's Gaza policy, quote, went too far.

00:27:17 Speaker_02
39% thought it was just right and 34% thought it had not gone far enough, that he, in fact, was not doing genocide hard enough.

00:27:23 Speaker_02
The reality is, is that to the extent to which Netanyahu has been criticized in Israel, with the exception of 10, 15% of the so-called Israeli left, It's that he's not pursued the policy of genocide in Gaza aggressively enough.

00:27:36 Speaker_02
And this poll was before he killed the head of Hamas, Sinwar, Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, and his popularity has in fact skyrocketed. The point being is that instead of providing existential critiques to Israel,

00:27:48 Speaker_02
as a fundamentally apartheid state or an ethno-supremacist state that needs to do these bad things by its very definition to maintain its so-called demographic superiority, just like he won't existentially criticize the U.S.

00:28:00 Speaker_02
as the country with fascistic or violent tendencies baked into the cake, right, like he does for other countries, China, Russia. They are existentially evil.

00:28:09 Speaker_02
We have these kind of one-off leaders who deviate us from our normal default position of being fundamentally good and decent in liberal democracies. This is a very power-flattering prescription for what's wrong with these respective countries.

00:28:23 Speaker_02
Snyder has never equated Zionism, especially hard-right Zionism, with fascism in the Levant, but mostly he's just avoided the topic altogether.

00:28:31 Speaker_02
He's hand-wrung about it here and there, but mostly it's just not something he talks about or something he views as part of this authoritarian axis, which to him is China, Russia, Iran. And again, Gaza doesn't fit neatly within that framework.

00:28:44 Speaker_02
And so he just, like Applebaum, doesn't really ever talk about it.

00:28:47 Speaker_04
So unsurprisingly, Snyder is a favorite among MSNBC bookers and viewers in large part for his careful avoidance of politically meaningful discussion about this issue.

00:28:59 Speaker_04
So let's listen to a clip of one of Snyder's recent appearances on The Rachel Maddow Show.

00:29:03 Speaker_04
This is from September 2024, nearly a year into the genocide in Gaza, during which he promotes his latest book on freedom without ever really making a single point. Let's listen.

00:29:16 Speaker_01
The book, in a way, is about how it's beautiful to be human. It's about the thing we can be that nothing else in the universe can be. We can be free because each of us has a different idea of what's good. We all have different values.

00:29:29 Speaker_01
The one thing we have in common is that when we're free, we can realize those values.

00:29:33 Speaker_01
And so on the one hand, we have to work together to create the conditions of freedom so that we can live lives from infancy onward where we can realize those values.

00:29:43 Speaker_01
And then on the other hand, we can take joy in the fact that we are so different, that we have different ideas of what's beautiful and what's right and what's true, but that together we've created the world where we can realize those things.

00:29:54 Speaker_01
I want a happy idea of freedom. I think freedom is an idea that should make people happy. It shouldn't make people angry. It shouldn't be just about opposing things.

00:30:01 Speaker_01
Sure, we have to keep a bad government away, but freedom is that place where we are when we can become who we should be.

00:30:08 Speaker_02
Well, that's kind of fatuous. This is the sort of caliber.

00:30:12 Speaker_02
Again, while there's an ongoing genocide, how does one interrogate these lofty ideals of freedom when there's a people being supported by, again, the favorite candidate of the network you're on, who's eliminating people from the planet in whole or in part?

00:30:24 Speaker_02
And I don't think it's tangential. I don't think it's one of these things that needs to be part of every discussion, but it certainly needs to be a discussion about how we conceive of freedom.

00:30:31 Speaker_02
And when you're doing a book tour and you're talking about these lofty ideals, And you're doing really the ultimate other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how is the play?

00:30:38 Speaker_02
It's like, how are you not talking about that particular issue when it is so relevant to the subject at hand? And I think that omission is conspicuous.

00:30:46 Speaker_02
And Snyder did have one passing reference to Gaza when he was promoting this concept of freedom in this book. He wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times.

00:30:55 Speaker_02
On September 21st, 2024, entitled, Freedom Is Not What We Think It Is, where he includes one passing reference to Gaza, and then moves on to more pablum and abstract nouns. This is an excerpt from his opinion piece.

00:31:09 Speaker_02
Quote, I was reminded of a nurse who arrived at a Nazi concentration camp in 1945 after liberation. She wrote in her diary that this was not the correct word.

00:31:18 Speaker_02
Inmates could not be regarded as free, she thought, until they had been restored to health and their trauma was addressed. To be sure, it matters when Russian power is removed from Ukraine. And it, of course, mattered when SS fled the camps.

00:31:29 Speaker_02
No one is free behind barbed wire or under bombing, whether we are talking about the past or the present, about Xinjiang or Gaza or anywhere else. But freedom is not just an absence of evil. Freedom is the presence of good," unquote.

00:31:41 Speaker_02
So that's the only real sort of mention we get is that there's this It's a very passive thing. There's no real agency, and it's not part of any broader regime of injustice. It's kind of just this thing that's bad that needs to be corrected.

00:31:52 Speaker_02
Presumably, I guess Israel, if they win the war, could be one interpretation. And after Trump won his second term, God forbid. Snyder appeared on MSNBC in the pages of the New Yorker to evaluate Trump's electoral victory.

00:32:06 Speaker_02
He went on the show Velshi, hosted by Ali Velshi on November 9th, 2024, and advised his viewers to cope with Trump's win as individuals and, quote, keep moving forward with dignity, unquote.

00:32:17 Speaker_02
And of course, he compares Trump to the Soviet Union, which is his favorite topic.

00:32:22 Speaker_01
Let's listen to that clip here. This is 35 years ago, communism came to an end, and it didn't come to an end because the Berlin Wall fell, which is what people are talking about today. The Berlin Wall never fell.

00:32:34 Speaker_01
There was never some barrier which fell on its own. The reason communism came to an end was because there was a messy authoritarian regime. governed by a group of people, the Politburo, who couldn't get along.

00:32:45 Speaker_01
And people managed to find ways to cooperate, especially by way of an important labor union in Poland called Solidarity.

00:32:52 Speaker_01
It was the cooperation, it was the courage, it was the not obeying in advance, which created the conditions for things to get better. And this is going to be true of all authoritarian regimes, they're all aspiring ones. They have their own problems.

00:33:04 Speaker_01
And when we work together, we make those problems worse and we give ourselves a chance.

00:33:10 Speaker_02
Right. So this is a kind of hokey idea that Trump is going to be an authoritarian or would be authoritarian. And we need to, I guess, work together to stop him, which is, again, like not untrue. It's just how is that very meaningful?

00:33:22 Speaker_04
Yeah, there's nothing inherently wrong in contextualizing history and thinking about the antecedents to solidarity, to organizing, to struggling against oppressive governments. This is important. This is also something that

00:33:39 Speaker_04
I think we do on our show a lot.

00:33:40 Speaker_04
The issue here is the selectivity of the examples that are used, of what is seen as being so correlated to what Trump-esque fascism represents here in the United States, and that the examples that are given on CNN, on MSNBC.

00:33:59 Speaker_04
are ones that are most palatable to those audiences. So they are foreign. They are Hitler. They are Nazism. They are Stalin. They are Putin. They are the Soviet Union. They are Russia. They are Iran.

00:34:12 Speaker_04
Rather than the consistent white nationalism and white supremacy

00:34:18 Speaker_04
ideologies here in the United States, those are lesser antecedents than these kind of bigger order global world historic bad guy enemies that these kinds of historians, Applebaum, Snyder, and our next one, Ruth Ben-Gyat, traffic in a lot because it is safer to say that Trump is a strain of this kind of grand bad guy in world history

00:34:46 Speaker_04
that is outside the U.S. natural order rather than seeing him as part of the U.S. natural order. So let's get to our third example, Ruth Ben-Gyat, a professor of history and Italian studies at NYU.

00:35:01 Speaker_04
Ben-Gyat first started making media appearances as a quote-unquote anti-authoritarian historian in August 2016, shortly before Donald Trump's first electoral win.

00:35:13 Speaker_04
That month, Ben-Ghiat took to the pages of The Atlantic magazine to compare Trump to Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.

00:35:21 Speaker_04
In the piece, Ben-Ghiat had virtually nothing to say about the content of Trump's policies or general right-wing US policies and the dangers they pose to the public.

00:35:30 Speaker_04
Rather, she was more concerned with idiosyncratic similarities between Trump and Mussolini, such as the following, which she pointed out in her piece.

00:35:40 Speaker_04
lacking interest in political protocols, bonding with voters, humiliating and threatening other politicians, and being frank about their own agendas. Ben Gyat has since become a fixture on MSNBC.

00:35:55 Speaker_04
In 2021, she began publishing columns for MSNBC almost exclusively about either Trump or Putin.

00:36:02 Speaker_04
Many of Ben-Ghiat's columns have two common themes, an outsized focus on individual leaders' demeanors and behaviors, and more attention given to the destruction of an abstract, quote-unquote, liberal democracy than to actual reactionary policies that directly harm people and entire communities.

00:36:22 Speaker_02
Since October 7th, 2023, though Israel's authoritarianism of course has long been on display, but we'll start it there because it's relevant to the topic of the show. She has not written a word about the assault and genocide in Gaza, of course.

00:36:35 Speaker_02
That doesn't fit within the neat and tidy anti-authoritarian framework. Her commentary on global authoritarianism has instead focused on the following.

00:36:43 Speaker_02
In February of 2024, quote, Trump's humiliation of Tim Scott and Lindsey Graham is straight out of the authoritarian playbook. March of 2024, context only makes Trump's bloodbath comments worse.

00:36:54 Speaker_02
May of 2024, denial about Donald Trump is deeper than ever.

00:36:58 Speaker_02
August twenty twenty four quote trump can't take a joke democrats need to use that in which you are you that fascism can be defeated by making jokes at them unfortunately none of these efforts worked in trump was reelected now in god has reference israel wants in a column in december twenty twenty one,

00:37:14 Speaker_02
She rightfully pointed out Trump's anti-Semitism, including, of course, the Mussolini reference, which is required by law. But the crux of the piece was that Trump was insufficiently loyal to Israel.

00:37:24 Speaker_02
So this is an attack on Trump from the right as being insufficiently pro-Israel.

00:37:28 Speaker_02
Bing got concluded with an observation that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, quote, enjoyed a good relationship with Trump until he congratulated President Joe Biden on his election victory, unquote.

00:37:38 Speaker_02
Bingod added a quote from Trump in an interview with Axios resident pro-Israel laundromat, Barack Ravid, in which Trump revealed that he hasn't spoken to Netanyahu since Netanyahu congratulated Biden. But of course, who cares?

00:37:51 Speaker_02
Why does some interpersonal beef between Netanyahu and Trump matter? She was trying to make the argument that he didn't support the, I guess, supposedly liberal, democratic, anti-authoritarian Israeli regime.

00:38:02 Speaker_02
Because again, it all has to fit neatly within this neoconservative and democratic party geopolitical playbook. Modes of authoritarianism which are inconvenient to the U.S. are mostly just not talked about or rationalized away.

00:38:14 Speaker_02
And Biden tried this, right?

00:38:16 Speaker_02
Biden, who supposedly watches MSNBC religiously, as does everyone in his cabinet, he gave a famous speech last year where he tried to tie together – he was going to Congress basically to try to get billions more dollars for Israel and Ukraine.

00:38:29 Speaker_02
And he tried to tie Ukraine and Israel together as part of some nexus against authoritarianism. And he tried to sort of put Hamas in this league with Iran and Russia and China. And even some pro-Biden liberals were like, I don't know.

00:38:42 Speaker_02
That doesn't really pass the sniff test. And it really just shows how this Applebaum, Snyder, Ben-Ghiat model, again, it doesn't really go very far.

00:38:50 Speaker_02
It begins to kind of break down when one goes beyond the superficial and says, well, OK, if there is this kind of axis of evil, this kind of authoritarian axis, Where does the U.S.

00:38:59 Speaker_02
support of dictatorships in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the UAE, despotism in India, right? The world's largest, so-called largest democracy, the U.S. supports a sort of quasi-fascist government there. Where does the U.S.

00:39:13 Speaker_02
support of other dictatorships in Central Asia fall into this paradigm? And it sort of doesn't really, because the U.S. supports some liberal democracies, it supports monarchies, it supports fascists. And it, of course, supports a genocide in Gaza.

00:39:26 Speaker_02
So how is this valuable? And of course, it's all about chauvinist flattery. It's all about making the U.S. its enemies are existentially evil.

00:39:35 Speaker_02
And the U.S., when it does bad things, is simply deviating or it's, you know, the sort of foreign import of Trumpism. But it's ultimately, fundamentally, at the end of the day, has to have good, righteous institutions.

00:39:47 Speaker_02
And that is why this shit's so popular. It flatters the ego of both the audience and the corporate owners of these media outlets.

00:39:54 Speaker_02
And it doesn't ask us to look in the mirror and ask difficult questions, which is always going to get you booked on TV shows.

00:40:01 Speaker_02
And I think the value of interrogating this framework in the context of Gaza is I do think Gaza and the genocide in Gaza has exposed these contradictions and liberalism as fundamentally, at best, useless, and at worst, I think, deeply cynical.

00:40:15 Speaker_04
To discuss this more, we're now going to be joined by Greg Grandin, the C. Van Woodward Professor of History at Yale University and the author of a number of books, including Empire's Workshop, Fordlandia, The Empire of Necessity, and the Pulitzer Prize winning The End of the Myth, From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America.

00:40:35 Speaker_04
His new book, America, America, A New History of the New World, will be published by Penguin in April of 2025. Professor Grandin will join us in just a moment. Stay with us. We are joined now by Greg Grandin.

00:40:56 Speaker_04
Greg, thank you so much for joining us today on Citations Needed. Oh, thanks so much for having me. I love the work that you do.

00:41:03 Speaker_02
Well, thank you so much. We always appreciate that. So I want to start off by talking about the somewhat cheesy dichotomy, this kind of axis of evil or axis of authoritarianism versus the so-called liberal West who are in contention. It's a kind of

00:41:20 Speaker_02
watered-down version of the Cold War, and even a kind of iteration on George Bush's axis of evil, this idea that there are kind of two camps in this world and one must choose, and that the so-called liberal democratic West, while having its flaws, is fundamentally good and the other guys are kind of ontologically evil.

00:41:37 Speaker_02
And Trump is a kind of foreign import from the Orient that perverts this dichotomy and will lead us to a place where we join the League of Baddie Nations by I guess repeatedly electing him. This is the framework of popular historians.

00:41:51 Speaker_02
We discussed Anna Applebaum, Timothy Snyder, among others.

00:41:55 Speaker_02
What we argue in this episode is that that was always kind of facile and shallow, but that the genocide in Gaza specifically has kind of exposed, to put it gently, the limits of that worldview. To say nothing again of U.S.

00:42:09 Speaker_02
supportive dictatorships, other places, authoritarianism in India, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Jordan. Central Asia, there's all these exceptions, there's all these asterisks, there's like 15, 17 asterisks to this kind of dichotomy.

00:42:23 Speaker_02
I want to begin by talking about this worldview, how it became kind of popular in the liberal imagination, specifically starting in 2016, and what you think its flaws are and how you think it kind of begins to break down when one looks at Gaza in an intellectually honest way.

00:42:41 Speaker_03
Yeah, well, Gaza just explodes the whole liberal resistance myth in many ways, and it has baleful effects in forcing basically decent people to wind up supporting actions like the expansion of the military-industrial complex and uncritical support for proxy wars.

00:43:03 Speaker_03
I mean, basically, as you said, it started in 2016 as a reaction to Trump. You know, some of it's understandable. You know, people had a reaction to Trump. Trump does seem to be outside of expected decorum and protocols.

00:43:18 Speaker_03
And so there was this natural tendency to cast him as outside the mainstream. But the number of scholars and pundits who position themselves as intellectuals

00:43:30 Speaker_03
immediately jumped on this bandwagon of positioning Trump as some kind of authoritarian or a fascist or compromised by ties with Putin and Russia. I mean, there's so many iterations of this argument.

00:43:47 Speaker_03
And, you know, some of them may have some basis in fact, and certainly Trump is an authoritarian, there's no doubt about that.

00:43:54 Speaker_03
But what it does by talking about in a certain way is that it obscures and denies the fact that everything that they say Trump is has deep roots in US history and culture and politics, and you don't have to look at Putin.

00:44:09 Speaker_03
to understand the rise of Trump.

00:44:11 Speaker_03
You have to look at Bill Clinton, and US historians who had access to MSNBC and were very prominent in pushing a narrative, you know, are totally incapable of doing, they're totally incapable of understanding how, say,

00:44:27 Speaker_03
Clinton's militarization of the border or the crime bill or his terrorism bill or his end of welfare bill or NAFTA, you know, led to Trump and Trumpism and basically what sociologists calls the de-pacification of society with the depolarization that's happening in the United States.

00:44:48 Speaker_03
You don't have to look outside. And then, of course, this is then expanded and extrapolated where domestic domestic pathologies within the United States then become civilizational, becomes about the West, right?

00:45:03 Speaker_03
That, you know, the struggle over territory in the Ukraine and the expansion of NATO becomes existential as writers like Applebaum and Snyder would have it. And it's really a way to deny the culpability of domestic actors, political elites.

00:45:26 Speaker_03
As I said, you don't have to look to Russia for foreign influence. If you want to look at foreign influence, and this is where Gaza just explodes the whole liberal resistance narrative.

00:45:37 Speaker_03
uh... you could look at the israel in a pack they've had a much more direct bearing on the shaping of of domestic politics and political culture than russia has

00:45:49 Speaker_02
I want to hook into this because I think some people, they listen to this and they think, OK, like y'all are just being a bunch of hipper than now leftists.

00:45:57 Speaker_02
But there's actually a prescriptive element to this, which I want to get into, which is the goal is to prevent future Trumps. Then you have to understand the antecedents.

00:46:05 Speaker_02
This is not just an academic exercise that this has real world consequences about how a 2025 hashtag resistance may be different than the hashtag resistance of 2017. And that the 2017 one leaned heavily into this.

00:46:18 Speaker_02
And again, because big donors loved it, Reid Hoffman, you know, all these kind of democracy think tanks, the high minded stuff, all the sort of rebranding of Bush era neocons. It had a hook of this kind of Russiagate lawfare thing.

00:46:33 Speaker_02
And again, I don't think there's anything wrong with investigating Russiagate initially because it's, you know, there's some weird shit that happened, but ultimately it kind of was a big nothing burger and wasted a lot of time and resources.

00:46:43 Speaker_02
And it pumped money and influence into some of the worst people on earth. That there is a prescriptive element to this, which is, okay, how do we prevent the 900 Trump clones coming down the right wing conveyor belt?

00:46:55 Speaker_02
You have to really understand the initial causes. to really have a long-term actual quote-unquote resistance. Why is understanding this history and Trump's antecedents necessary in terms of orienting opposition to his frighteningly appealing message?

00:47:13 Speaker_03
Yeah, I mean, there's no doubt that the way that it's framed by, you know, Rachel Maddow on MSNBC or of resistance historians shut down and preclude coming up with a more comprehensive, robust strategy for defeating Trump.

00:47:32 Speaker_03
It's a fact that you don't beat fascism by calling fascists fascists. That's not how I work, mostly in Latin America, and it has its share of fascists. They don't have a fascist debate. Who isn't a fascist?

00:47:46 Speaker_03
They call the right, they call the conservative right fascist.

00:47:50 Speaker_03
And the left defeats it usually, when it can, in those moments when they win electorally, by offering a robust social democratic program that speaks to the material conditions of people's lives. And just the way

00:48:05 Speaker_03
So much of the political discourse, look, already the autopsy of the 2024 election is taking shape.

00:48:12 Speaker_03
You know, it's basically, you know, blaming this micro voting group or that micro voting group, or whether, you know, whether woe is a strategy or not, but nobody talks about like, you know, what actually wins elections, or at least what could shape the political

00:48:29 Speaker_03
terrain in a way, and might entail losing elections until the terrain is reshaped, is pushing forward a robust program of social rights and universal welfare programs.

00:48:42 Speaker_03
I mean, when they picked Tim Walz to be the vice president, I thought that that was where they were going.

00:48:48 Speaker_03
I thought that was what the Harris campaign was going to do, because that's basically what Minnesota did coming out of that former labor tradition.

00:48:56 Speaker_03
They passed a whole series of, you know, not means tested, not tax credits, but universal programs like, you know, everybody in school eats breakfast and lunch for free, no matter what your family's salary is.

00:49:11 Speaker_03
And, you know, it took a long time to get to that point, but they got it through. But this is what circles back to Gaza. Gaza put a lot of limiting pressure on what kind of campaign Harris could run.

00:49:23 Speaker_03
She couldn't run a center-left campaign, the kind Biden ran in 2020, and beating Trump by a slim margin.

00:49:33 Speaker_03
running on a campaign of Trump is an authoritarian and Trump is a fascist and the choice that stands before us is fascism versus democracy is such an abstraction. It didn't mean anything for most voters.

00:49:47 Speaker_03
And it pushed the Harris campaign into basically rehabilitating, turning the 2024 election into a celebration of the Cheney family. You know, which is just, you know, amazing.

00:49:58 Speaker_03
So you see the way that this liberal resistance narrative that sees all evil as coming from outside the United States, that doesn't see it as an attack on the institutions and society that we have, rather than emerging from the institutions and societies that govern our lives.

00:50:19 Speaker_04
You know, and this kind of gets back to the classic Chomsky critique. When the U.S. does something objectively authoritarian or violent or evil, it's painted as a deviation from the natural state.

00:50:31 Speaker_04
Whereas when these bad guy countries do it, it's existential to their nature. It is their true essence. And it gets to what you've been saying, Greg, about Trump being seen as an individual who has been pathologized with

00:50:45 Speaker_04
you know, fascism and authoritarian tendencies, if not deeper than just tendencies, but that it is an individual pathology and not one that reflects the pathology of a nation-state, unlike, say, Russia, China, Iran, which are pathologized as entire entities.

00:51:05 Speaker_04
And so it kind of gets us back to this idea of

00:51:08 Speaker_04
trust in institutions and how the assumption is that these institutions that we have here are noble and just and just need to get back to what they once were if this individual infection is removed from our nobility.

00:51:25 Speaker_04
Can you talk about the need of these pundits and this perspective to pathologize an individual rather than zooming out and looking at the historical context of our entire society and how we got here.

00:51:40 Speaker_03
There's a political theorist named Corey Robin, who, I mean, he's been making this argument for almost a decade now, you know, since 2016, that what that misses, you know, focusing on the institutions and holding up the institutions and positing a kind of, you know, Trump as a violator of proceduralism and institutionalism

00:52:01 Speaker_03
What that misses is that the way repression in the United States and exclusion and anti-democratic political culture emerges out of the institutions, that we have profoundly anti-majoritarian institutions, anti-democratic institutions, the Senate, the filibuster, the electoral college, the judicial system, the Supreme Court, none of these

00:52:25 Speaker_03
are particularly expansive tribunes of expanding democratic rights. The way that the United States has maintained power and the way power functions is through the institutions.

00:52:37 Speaker_03
So right there, there's a kind of original mistake among these liberal resistance historians in imposing Trump to the institutions.

00:52:46 Speaker_03
Trump is, you know, those institutions are primed to work and deliver on the Trump agenda without violating their function. I mean, look at the Supreme Court. So, there's that. And then, yes, there's a way in which

00:53:01 Speaker_03
Trump is seen and nation states are seen as outside of the virtuous circle that the United States and only a few other nations comprise, and in some ways is a kind of—there's scales of degradation, scales of decline.

00:53:20 Speaker_03
At the beginning of the Cold War, when the United States searched around for trying to figure out how it could justify support for authoritarian regimes while fighting the Soviet Union, justifying the Cold War, It came up with a dichotomy.

00:53:36 Speaker_03
You know, it's associated with Hannah Arendt, but other philosophers and political theorists also kind of contributed to this idea that there was a distinction between totalitarianism and authoritarianism, that authoritarianism allowed civil society to function.

00:53:53 Speaker_03
So it allowed the possibility of change and democratic movements to challenge the autocrat, whereas totalitarianism eliminates civil society. and leaves no buffer between the total state and the masses of people.

00:54:09 Speaker_03
And there was no space for democracy to take root, and therefore it had to be contained and counted.

00:54:15 Speaker_03
That was basically the ideological framework that justified supporting Somoza in Nicaragua or the military regime in Argentina or Pinochet in Chile, but opposing Fidel Castro in Cuba, or not to mention the Soviet Union.

00:54:34 Speaker_03
And of course, this is a framework that is highly ideological, that had no real bearing on the facts on the ground. But it was at least—it was something of a justification.

00:54:44 Speaker_03
Then Jean Kirkpatrick rehabilitated it during Ronald Reagan's ambassador to the United Nations, which was elevated to a cabinet-level post. And, you know, she rehabilitated that argument to justify the Contra War and Reagan's Central American policy.

00:55:01 Speaker_03
But there's long been a way in which the United States found ways to justify complete support for Saudi Arabia, say, and complete opposition to Iran. You know, and that's where we are today. I mean, you know, we're locked in this kind of

00:55:20 Speaker_03
foreign policy that makes gestures towards civilizational struggle, towards defending the West or defending universal values, but the hypocrisy of it is so glaring

00:55:36 Speaker_03
You know, during the Cold War, you know, you could point out the contradictions and the irony and the hypocrisies like somebody like Noam Chomsky did, you know, decade after decade after decade.

00:55:49 Speaker_03
But the Cold War, you know, the ideology corresponded somewhat to the reality. in terms of what the United States stood for. And I'm not carrying any water for Cold War United States.

00:56:03 Speaker_03
But compared to now, right, where the United States has completely gutted itself. You know, basically, the United States came out of the Cold War and treated itself as if it was an occupied nation and its citizens were belligerent.

00:56:18 Speaker_03
That's what the Clinton administration was.

00:56:20 Speaker_03
In the past, soldiers came back from wars to a country that was building itself, building its social capacity, building its roads, its bridges, its social compact, expanding, however, imperfectly, the promise of liberalism to more and more people.

00:56:40 Speaker_03
But starting with the first Gulf War, soldiers came back to a country that was literally taking itself apart. You know, physically moving factories from Detroit to Mexico, but also taking a part in social contract.

00:56:53 Speaker_03
And that's the context that explains Trump and where Trump is. And meanwhile, as all of this was going on, the political class continued with the same rhetoric, the same rhetoric of exceptionalism, the same soaring rhetoric of freedom and liberty.

00:57:10 Speaker_03
And the hypocrisy became more apparent, I think. And I think that that's the space that Trump fills.

00:57:17 Speaker_03
In a way, he's turned us all into a nation of, or at least half of the nation, from citizens into basically the Joker, you know, where they see that the only response to the bullshit is to tear it all down.

00:57:30 Speaker_02
Yeah, it's raw nihilism. Yeah. I want to try to give liberalism its due, which is to say, because again, I think the old adage, you know, a cynic is just a disappointed idealist. I think on some level, a leftist is just a disappointed liberal.

00:57:41 Speaker_02
So I want to sort of show like talk about the kind of failures of liberalism, but given their due, which is to say, Like Trump does deviate from quote unquote norms in certain ways.

00:57:51 Speaker_02
Now, of course, these norms are the same thing that permit a genocide in Gaza to go on funded and armed by the US. So I'm not sure how valuable they are in and of themselves. Right.

00:57:59 Speaker_02
They have to be norms pursuant some social justice end, but they're not. Like, for example, he he tried to overthrow the 2020 election by by sending a fascist mob into the Capitol to attack legislators is like objectively a bad thing. Right.

00:58:10 Speaker_02
That's not good. That's not good. Right. And that is something that Reagan or Clinton would not do.

00:58:17 Speaker_03
Something Andrew Jackson would do, though.

00:58:20 Speaker_02
Yes, true. So there is this violation of norms that's very real.

00:58:24 Speaker_02
But I think to your point, and this is an argument others have been making recently as well, like you can't have this highfalutin democracy norms obsessed party when the people themselves in general don't see these norms as being very valuable or really protecting them.

00:58:40 Speaker_02
or something that is inherently good, because liberal norms are only good insofar as they make people's lives better.

00:58:47 Speaker_02
And you see this a lot with the way people talk about, like, sending billions of dollars to Israel and Ukraine, regardless of whether or not one thinks, you know, that's justified.

00:58:56 Speaker_02
Just the sort of general vibe is that it seems like the government prints money to send overseas to other countries to fight wars, again, justified or not. Of course, I would all agree Israel's not justified.

00:59:07 Speaker_02
And then people look around, they see surging homelessness, they see schools falling apart, they see in their lives infrastructure falling apart, the pothole in the way to work.

00:59:16 Speaker_02
And there's this cognitive dissidence, I think, that emerges where it's like, how do we always have – there's this sort of vague sense. And then they put, you know, they prosecute Trump, they convict him of felonies 34 times, and that did nothing.

00:59:26 Speaker_02
And I think one of the reasons that didn't do anything

00:59:29 Speaker_02
is because there's a broader sense among a certain percentage of the population, you know, 20, 30 percent, 40 percent of the population that like the system fucking sucks or it's rigged or it's a scam to rip you off.

00:59:40 Speaker_02
And this gets muddied politically. This is not necessarily left or right orientation, right? It's kind of all over the place. It's kind of the Joe Rogan right left sort of quantum politics.

00:59:49 Speaker_02
But Trump was good at channeling this this ideologically incoherent vibe into something that looked like a political project.

00:59:56 Speaker_02
Whereas, like you said, Democrats and liberals in general just keep fetishizing these norms without saying, OK, well, what are the norms going to get me? What does freedom get me?

01:00:04 Speaker_02
And I think that's kind of why maybe the framing is not that liberalism itself is inherently flawed, although I think it is. But it's like liberalism has been divorced from any of its progressive or social endpoints.

01:00:17 Speaker_02
And so if you could kind of comment on this, this fetishizing of institutions, with a political project in a party that doesn't seem to say where they're going.

01:00:26 Speaker_03
Yeah, I mean, I think you're right about liberalism.

01:00:29 Speaker_03
And this is where I was gesturing to in my previous answer when I was talking about the gap between the rhetoric and the reality that for all of its faults and all of its crimes and all of its horrors, the United States during the Cold War did the GI Bill, the advance of civil rights, the high paying jobs to a certain sector of the working class, a more equitable distribution of wealth,

01:00:55 Speaker_03
than I've ever been seen before in a country this powerful and this rich. Those are all real tangible things that gave the rhetoric of liberalism and the ideals of liberalism some ballast and some weight and some heft and some truth.

01:01:12 Speaker_03
And that's what's all been gutted, and I think that that is exactly what Trump has seized on. You know, actually, Trump has been on this for a long time. He's incoherent.

01:01:23 Speaker_03
I don't want to assign too much coherence to Trump, but he has had a critique of free trade and deindustrialization. You can go back when he flirted with a run for president in 2000. on the Reform Party.

01:01:37 Speaker_03
There's actually a really funny op-ed in the New York Times. Nobody's made anything of this op-ed, but it's explaining why he's leaving the Reform Party, because it's become too kooky.

01:01:46 Speaker_03
It's become too full of cranks and nutcases, so he feels like he has to leave it. But he had a critique of NAFTA and free trade and deindustrialization. I don't know where a realtor from New York gets that.

01:02:00 Speaker_03
But he had it then and he continues, like when he praises Reagan, because they have to praise Reagan, because we all have to praise Reagan, you know, and he's a Republican still, you know, he has to praise Reagan, he'll always quickly get in except for his trade policies.

01:02:19 Speaker_03
You know, there is this kind of sense that he is a defender of the idea of a national economy.

01:02:27 Speaker_03
And that idea, obviously, there's a herring folk version of it that is deeply racist, the national economy for a white working class, for a white middle class.

01:02:40 Speaker_03
But, you know, the reality of the United States means that you can't you can only push that so far. The United States is remarkably diverse demographically.

01:02:49 Speaker_03
So so the United States can't he can't ratchet up a full scale race war no matter how bad he is. And he's bad. and he's racist and he's misogynist. But the fact of the matter is he has to deal with the diversity of the United States.

01:03:03 Speaker_03
So all of a sudden, within Trumpism, we're seeing a multicultural coalition taking shape around this idea that, like, you know, we need a nation, we need a nation state, we need a national economy.

01:03:16 Speaker_03
And, you know, we need a policy that talks about material benefits, even if You know, even if it's often expressed in brutal ways, like being carried out by a mass deportation program in order to keep jobs for U.S. citizens.

01:03:30 Speaker_03
The contradictions within Trumpism are many, but there's also – there is a certain kind of coherence there, I think. And let's not forget that this is taking place with massive shifts within the uber-bourgeoisie, the upper capitalist class.

01:03:45 Speaker_03
This was the first election that saw billionaires actually as surrogates and players, justifying that role because they're billionaires.

01:03:55 Speaker_03
You know, both the Democrats and the Republicans had their billionaires and they were out there making their case. And, you know, I don't understand. I don't understand all of it exactly. I don't understand.

01:04:07 Speaker_03
But, you know, the rise of Silicon Valley tech industry and cryptocurrency and all of that stuff, that's kind of profound. And that's also what is missed by resistance history narratives. You know, like there's no discussion at all of

01:04:22 Speaker_03
of that kind of power, what's behind all of that. And one of the reasons is because it's bipartisan. The Democratic Party has its crypto billionaires. And we saw the Harris campaign trying to cozy up to them even more, you know, during the election.

01:04:39 Speaker_03
So that's another level. that the narratives of resistance and the narratives of Trump is a fascist, Trump is an authoritarian, all true. But these are just labels. These are just words. And words and typologies can either be generative.

01:04:57 Speaker_03
They can either open up discussion and analysis. You can use them to think more broadly about things, or they could be used to shut down discussion and analysis.

01:05:08 Speaker_03
And without doubt, the way Trump has been positioned by mainstream liberals who have the ear of MSNBC and the New York Times, it's been used to shut down discussion, not open up discussion.

01:05:23 Speaker_04
Yeah, I think that's such a critical point.

01:05:26 Speaker_04
And as a historian yourself, I'm curious about what you think about this, this idea that the Monday morning quarterbacking of the 2024 election, as we're seeing it play out and as we will continue to, I'm sure, in this Applebaum-esque contextualization of authoritarianism personified by Trump and Trumpism, uses history, uses context in a certain way while

01:05:53 Speaker_04
similarly, shutting down a vision that could be different, right? So it's looking at history and the consistency of history rather than the change of history.

01:06:03 Speaker_04
And as a historian yourself who's, you know, documented whether it's slavery in the United States or imperialism and colonialism in Latin America and elsewhere,

01:06:13 Speaker_04
What do you see as the lessons that are consistently not learned, yet pushed forward by ostensibly what's going to be the resistance, right?

01:06:23 Speaker_04
Like the liberal center, liberal resistance over the next four years that don't seem to be learning from the past. They maybe recognize the past. They maybe harken back or they contextualize Trump within a certain kind of past, maybe a Cold War past.

01:06:39 Speaker_04
yet refuse to then use that knowledge to look to a different future where maybe doing the same thing is maybe not the winning strategy, but rather have a different way forward.

01:06:52 Speaker_04
How do you see the kind of historian's take on the past and their analysis for the future playing out across our media?

01:06:59 Speaker_03
Yeah, I mean, well, clearly the biggest mistake, the biggest thing that they miss is, you know, you don't defeat fascism by calling fascists fascists. You defeat them by offering a political alternative. You know, we all have ideology.

01:07:13 Speaker_03
They have ideology. We have ideology. But if we deny that we have ideology, and our ideology should be a social democratic ideology in which everybody's equal, everybody deserves a dignified life, and the government, you know, should be

01:07:27 Speaker_03
capacitated to deliver effective means for people to survive catastrophes and to survive the routine traumas of just everyday life, you know, through social security, through national health care, through rapid response to climate change catastrophe, flying squads, whatever that might be.

01:07:49 Speaker_03
There's a whole slate of positive actions one could imagine in a progressive policy program that would defeat fascism.

01:07:58 Speaker_03
I mean, maybe not the next election because, you know, you have to push the window, you know, you have to push the Overton window back to the left, like they've done so long.

01:08:07 Speaker_03
Like, you know, all of these things that the Republicans are doing, you know, they lost election after election running on them. until they started winning, and the Democrats have to do the same.

01:08:18 Speaker_03
In terms of history, there's two ways of thinking about history. I mean, there's a lot of ways of thinking about history, but history has analogy. It's always 1938, and we're always in danger of being Neville Chamberlain, giving away Czechoslovakia.

01:08:34 Speaker_03
And, you know, and we're always ready with peas, and we can't do that. Or this history as cause and effect. Like, how did we get here? What were the things that were done in the past that got us here? And cause and effect is never a simple process.

01:08:49 Speaker_03
There's multiple chains of causes and effects that lead to the present.

01:08:52 Speaker_03
But certainly one of them we've talked about is the transformation of the Democratic Party, the de-alignment from a party that had overwhelming working class support to a party that supported WTO, NAFTA, all of the stuff that we've talked about in the 1990s.

01:09:10 Speaker_03
And even if they are like the lesser of two evils and they still kind of on some platonic ideal represent the closest thing the United States has to the social democratic polarity of politics, you know, the reality is that, you know, the Democrats have become a party of the suburbs, a party dominated by consultants, by wealthy donors that has no political imagination.

01:09:37 Speaker_03
that all reform is talked about in terms of tax credits or means testing. You know, there's no big vision. There is no vision of the future.

01:09:47 Speaker_03
I mean, if there's one thing that we can learn from the past is how one defeats fascism is that you have to have a vision for the future. you know, what's going to happen after you defeat fascism. FDR had a vision for the future.

01:10:01 Speaker_03
You know, he defeated, he was the world leader in confronting fascism and his vision for the future was a social democratic future. And that's what people fought for. And the fact that none of these people who were on the fascist gravy train

01:10:18 Speaker_03
publishing their books and whatnot and talk about that. You need an ideology to defeat an ideology. And you have to know what your ideology is. You have to know what your morality is. You have to know what you care about. You have to have an alternative.

01:10:33 Speaker_03
And they offer no alternative.

01:10:36 Speaker_04
Yeah, I think that is such a great place to end this. Before we let you go, though, Greg, I'd love to hear about your new book, which is coming out in spring of next year, April 2025. It's called America, America, A New History of the New World.

01:10:53 Speaker_04
Tell us a little bit about the book and what readers can look forward to.

01:10:57 Speaker_03
Yeah. So the book basically looks at the new world from the conquest to the present.

01:11:02 Speaker_03
I mean, a subtitle, if they would have let me, could have been from Cortes de Netanyahu or something, because the book really kind of looks at the creation of the modern world, particularly in terms of global governance through the prism of the new world, conflicts in the new world, first between the English and Spanish empires, and then independent Latin American nations and the United States.

01:11:27 Speaker_03
It looks at the new world as a kind of crucible in which ideals of liberalism were fought over and democracy and different ideals were given content through struggle between Latin America and the United States over time. I mean, this is a book that

01:11:45 Speaker_03
that I think, you know, coming during a time in which plans are being drawn up for mass deportations and bigger and higher walls, talks about how basically what we for shorthand called the United States and Latin America were integrated from their inception.

01:12:04 Speaker_03
And, you know, when the new world was integrated and there was, there was an intimacy and influence within the Catholic realms and the Protestant realms, you know, from the 16th century on.

01:12:16 Speaker_03
And so it's a big book, and it covers a lot of ground, but hopefully it's readable.

01:12:22 Speaker_04
I'm sure it will be. And, you know, somehow history is always the most timely subject. So thank you. This has been this has been amazing to talk to you.

01:12:31 Speaker_04
We've been speaking with Greg Grandin, the C. Van Woodward Professor of History at Yale University and the author of a number of books, including Empire's Workshop, one of my very favorites.

01:12:42 Speaker_04
Fordlandia, The Empire of Necessity, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The End of the Myth, From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America.

01:12:49 Speaker_04
His new book, which we just heard about, America, America, A New History of the New World, will be published by Penguin in April of 2025. So pre-order that now. Greg, it has been so wonderful to speak with you on Citations Needed. Thank you.

01:13:03 Speaker_03
Thanks so much. It's been great to speak with you.

01:13:16 Speaker_02
Yeah, even if you're sort of a liberal and you think we're being overly idealistic, you would still want liberalism to abide by its own logic and its own reasons.

01:13:25 Speaker_02
For liberalism's own sake, and this is something that others have written about better than we have, which is that liberalism is collapsing in and of itself because of its gross hypocrisy.

01:13:33 Speaker_02
And this is accelerated with the condemning and total 180 of the ICC arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Defense Minister Gallant. The Washington Post even said this. The Washington Post wrote an editorial

01:13:46 Speaker_02
on November 24th, they pretty much explicitly said the ICC is to be used for non-western countries. It's to be used for China and Russia and African nations, right?

01:13:57 Speaker_02
Because 47 out of the 47 public indictments from its creation in 2002 to 2022 were all African, right? And we've discussed this before. It wasn't until Russia's invasion of Ukraine that they indicted

01:14:09 Speaker_02
a non-African, which was a Russian, but obviously Russia's an enemy of the West.

01:14:13 Speaker_02
And so for the ICC to have any credibility, it just had to issue arrest warrants while people were watching these war crimes play out in 8K on their social media feeds every day.

01:14:22 Speaker_02
And so the pretense has to have some veneer of objective truth to it, or it can't really survive. And I think that what Gaza has done is it's, I think, taken that credibility from 3% to 0.0001%.

01:14:35 Speaker_02
And I think it's kind of like how liberal Zionists always talk about how, oh, we're this close to having a permanent one state, and we've got to save liberal Zionism. And it's always asymptotic, right?

01:14:43 Speaker_02
We're always kind of not quite there, but almost there.

01:14:46 Speaker_04
But it's always just around the corner. Yeah.

01:14:49 Speaker_02
And then liberal Zionists will be like, I'm trying to save you from yourself, similar to how this was kind of Bernie Sanders' pitch. I'm trying to save capitalism from itself. FDR made the same pitch. And liberalism.

01:14:58 Speaker_02
the sort of last remaining liberals who are trying to be consistent are trying to save it from itself.

01:15:02 Speaker_02
But the naked hypocrisy of Western media institutions, the White House, the UK has been, well, they've been a little hit or miss, but countries like Germany. I mean, it's just it's not credible.

01:15:14 Speaker_02
I mean, you can't have these kind of lofty, fake, universalist principles while saying, well, except for us, you can't arrest us for war crimes because blah, blah, blah reasons.

01:15:23 Speaker_04
Well, right, because the pearl clutching is also coupled with

01:15:27 Speaker_04
like an academic reading of history to provide the context, which then allows liberal commentators or allows liberal media consumers, readers, voters, of course, to say, oh, look, you know, I'm informed in my worldview because I'm listening to the context, right?

01:15:47 Speaker_04
Because I know that Trump is now replicating what we saw

01:15:52 Speaker_04
in such-and-such fill-in-the-blank with whatever MSNBC and CNN approved authoritarian regime is inserted and then you have your Applebaum's and your Snyder's and your Benghazi to like provide that academic resource and that context and that should be good, right?

01:16:10 Speaker_04
Like it is good to learn from history as we've been saying. This is pro-history not anti-history. It's just that the academic readings and the context givers, the historians that are relied on

01:16:22 Speaker_04
and put forth on these cable news shows are doing such a selective reading of history that it winds up just continuing this kind of liberal mythology rather than actually being illuminating.

01:16:37 Speaker_04
And there's something maybe a bit more sinister in this sort of reading of like, this is what fascism means. And it's a total aberration.

01:16:44 Speaker_04
And that's why we have to get back to democracy, then more like Americana type historians, pop historians, like John Meacham and Michael Beschloss, but they have their own issues, which we didn't get into on this episode.

01:16:57 Speaker_02
Well, because look, it's just audience flattery. I mean, it's 101 audience flattery. You're special. You're on the inside. You get the threat of Trump. Here's this guidebook to resist Trump.

01:17:06 Speaker_02
There's not anything that's going to challenge the kind of average media consumer. I think that's why it kind of smacks of grift because it is a classic. demagogue tactic. Like you said, NPR does this when they fundraise.

01:17:18 Speaker_02
You know, you have discerning taste. You're smart. I mean, PBS does it, right?

01:17:21 Speaker_04
There's so much out there. But to get the truth, you come to us.

01:17:24 Speaker_02
Yeah. Yeah. And I think that kind of audience flattery is really where I think the red flag is, because it's like we're not going to challenge you to question your your level of comfort.

01:17:32 Speaker_02
You can just rah-rah, vote for Biden, you know, rah-rah, you know, Brad Summer. And I don't have to actually question my position or my preferred candidate's position within this larger regime of violence.

01:17:43 Speaker_04
Well, I think that's a good place to leave it, Adam, and thank you all for listening to Citations Needed and for continuing to support and share the show. We cannot do it without you.

01:17:52 Speaker_04
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01:18:05 Speaker_04
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01:18:14 Speaker_04
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01:19:12 Speaker_04
I am Nima Shirazi. I'm Adam Johnson. Citations Needed. Senior Producer is Florence Borough Adams. Producer is Julianne Tweeton. Production Assistant is Trenda Lightburn. The Newsletter is by Marco Cardellano. Transcriptions are by Makhnoor Imran.

01:19:24 Speaker_04
The Music is by Grandaddy. Thanks again everyone, we'll catch you next time.