Episode 213: The Shallow, Power-Flattering Appeal of High Status #Resistance Historians
Citations Needed | December 4, 2024 | Transcript
[Music]
Intro: This is Citations Needed with Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson.
Nima Shirazi: Welcome to Citations Needed, a podcast on the media, power, PR, and the history of bullshit. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.
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Nima: “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 for 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 for MSNBC the following year in 2022.
Adam: In the past eight or nine years and especially since the 2016 election of Trump, these authors, Anne Applebaum, Timothy Snyder, and Ruth Ben-Ghiat in addition to several knockoffs 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, Xi made up a vague “authoritarian” axis hell-bent on destroying Democracy for its own sake.
Nima: But what good does this framing do and who does it absolve? 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 mad men. 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.
Adam: On today’s episode, we’ll look at the advent and influence of MSNBC-approved historians, dissect their selective anti-authoritarianism, and discuss how their work does little more than polish their careers and provide cover for US and US-allied militarism.
Nima: Later on the show, we’ll be speaking with Greg Grandin, the C. Vann 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. His new book, America, América: A New History of the New World will be published by Penguin in April 2025.
[Begin clip]
Greg Grandin: 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. I mean, there’s so many iterations of this argument, and you know, some of them maybe have some basis in fact. And certainly, Trump is an authoritarian. There’s no doubt about that.
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 has deep roots in US history and culture and politics.
[End clip]
Adam: 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 in opposition to so-called authoritarianism. And with the US being the protagonist of that moral narrative, that’s simply flawed and loses its way, but is fundamentally good. 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 that in and of itself, can be fine, but is, as we’ll discuss, fairly selective. And I think and 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 clap trap that orients Trump specifically as part of some broader global conspiracy, rather than an outgrowth of very specifically American currents.
Nima: 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, 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? But what we are discussing here is how this kind of contextualization and the analogies used, 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. And so much of that selectivity has to do with the political orientation of these historians and these commentators themselves.
Adam: Yeah. And the question becomes, can leftists or even really, I guess, liberals or progressive liberals make alliances with what is effectively a neoconservative project? 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. 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? 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.
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. In his 2021 anthology of the so-called Enlightenment, The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, Oxford professor Ritchie 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. Robertson notes in the 18th century, critics of the Ancien Régime, François Bernier and Montesquieu, often warned against the possible excesses of French absolutism by noting how French society was going the way of the Ottoman Empire. Robertson writes, quote:
Bernier was warning where Louis XIV’s autocracy and extravagance might lead. Montesquieu was worried about the absolutism of his successors. 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. 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 the Europe in which misgovernment was an occasional accident.
Unquote.
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?
Nima: Yeah, Adam, so let’s start with a Citations Needed all-star here, Anne Applebaum. Anne Applebaum has been a staff writer and resident authoritarianism expert at The Atlantic magazine since 2019. 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. By the early 2000s though, Applebaum was warmongering on behalf of Israel and the United States. On January 21, 2002, Slate Magazine published Apple bombs infamous piece entitled “Kill the Messenger: Why Palestine radio and TV studios are fair targets in the Palestine/Israeli war” 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.
Adam: To be clear, if you read this article, she’s not even using the pretense of terror or associations with Hamas or whatever, she’s speaking specifically about the West Bank but doesn’t even say that. She says simply by virtue of making Israel and the US 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. There’s not any kind of 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. 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 media work.
Nima: 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.
Adam: 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. And in the years 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. It would seem like she should be held accountable for that, 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, does Anne Applebaum 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. So, the question becomes, in your model of “authoritarianism,” is killing over 150 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. Palestinian journalists are just seen as not particularly human.
Nima: In the years since writing that, Applebaum has become a columnist for the Washington Post. 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.
In a column from June 14, 2013, for example, Applebaum scoffed at former intelligence contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden, sarcastically referring to him as a “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. 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.
Applebaum wrote this:
[Snowden] stole a hoard of documents and fled to Hong Kong. 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.”
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.
Adam: Well, let’s not forget her hits from 2009 and 2010 where she defended Roman Polanski from arrest. I guess that’s also a form of authoritarianism, arresting people who rape 13-year-olds. 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 framing.
By 2015, Applebaum had cemented this kind of selective anti-authoritarianism. In an April 2015 column headlined, “How to make the world’s madmen think twice,” Applebaum advocated for arming Ukraine with nukes to defend against “a kleptocratic authoritarian state,” i.e. Russia and criticized lawmakers for being too dovish. The madmen, of course, are entirely Russia and Iran. Applebaum added:
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 will outlaw Russia forever’ — might just flip a switch and send a missile. Nowadays, it’s we who fear the madmen in foreign capitals, while our own large nuclear arsenal goes unmentioned and unacknowledged by a Western political class that is frankly embarrassed that it exists.
And suddenly, as Trump began his first presidential campaign in 2015, it was time to look inwards. Applebaum decided to join a chorus of pundits denouncing Trump as a unique evil within the US, an almost foreign import, alien to any native political currents — say, I don’t know, Ronald Reagan, Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot. He was something that was somehow exotic or from the Orient. One example was a piece headlined, “Is this the end of the West as we know it?” in which she devoted a token reference to concerns about Trump’s views on torture and mass deportation, probably because she mostly agrees with them and had historically. Her chief fear was that Trump, 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.
Nima: 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. 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.
In her writings for The Atlantic magazine since October 7, 2023, she has only devoted one piece to Israel, headlined “Netanyahu’s Attack on Democracy Left Israel Unprepared.” 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 “terrorism” of Hamas.
Applebaum makes similar arguments in her latest book, Autocracy Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, released this year. The book’s manuscript was finished before October 7, but Applebaum made adjustments to it afterwards. In a July 2024 interview with The Guardian, she said the following of the attacks on Gaza:
The fact that the [commentary] became so toxic online so fast, when I saw that happening, I thought: ‘OK, I’m staying out of this. 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.
Adam: Right. So, here we have a very typical cop-out. For all three of the historians that we’ll 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. 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. 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 as very few people have been. Rather than being consistent and saying, well, both of these things are bad. Obviously, they support Israel. They support Biden’s support of Israel, Applebaum specifically. Snyder’s a little more nuanced but 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.
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. She told The Guardian:
Clearly, Hamas, which is connected to Iran, is a part of that autocratic world. And clearly, Netanyahu has designs on Israeli democracy. I wouldn’t say he’s a dictator. But he clearly is willing to preside over a decline in Israeli democracy.
Again, 4.5 million Palestinians are under Netanyahu’s authoritarian rule in the West Bank and in Gaza, no control over imports, exports, 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. This, to her, is not authoritarian. There’s this precious Israeli democracy. 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. 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. Israel’s apartheid and genocide of Gaza over the past year that’s killed hundreds of thousands of people, maimed, endless amounts of children. 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. Undergrad student at Middlebury College interrupting Charles Murray: authoritarian. This is the kind of facile narrative that Applebaum specifically works under.
So, she kind of has no real choice but to sort of just avoid the topic. She would say:
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 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…
Now, of course, she didn’t say that when every single major university lent support for Ukraine after Russia’s invasion.
Nima: Right, exactly. 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.
Adam: And almost every university came out with a statement of support after October 7. But then suddenly, when this death count in Gaza starts to surpass October 7 as it did within the first few days…
Nima: Then, hey, she’s no expert, and people should stay out of it. Yeah, just report accurately as journalists.
Adam: And then it’s, you know, 20x, 30x, then suddenly it’s all very nuanced and complicated, and she’d rather stay out of it. And so, 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, genociding Gaza, US 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 it. None of that’s authoritarian. That’s just either something we don’t talk about or something we think is actually good.
And Applebaum is someone who openly supported the Iraq War. She was indexed as a neoconservative until she mostly migrated to more liberal spaces. Would have been considered a textbook neoconservative but suddenly is this liberal hero because she opposes Trump, again, oftentimes for good reason, but it’s a very superficial opposition that wants to preserve the City On A Hill mythology of US imperialism, that it’s kind of its primary goal.
And to move on to our next historian, then there is someone who’s done a ton of media events, panels with Anne 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 Anne Applebaum in Eastern European history. So, he is a Russian expert. 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. 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 to, for want of a better term, low information liberal who wanted to eat this sort of simplistic slop. You know, again, understandably so. But I think in many ways, removed Trump from history and removed his rise from American history specifically.
Nima: Snyder has written a number of best-selling books, including Black Earth from 2015, On Tyranny from 2017, and On Freedom, published this year 2024. One of his most famous books, Bloodlands, which was published in 2010, correlates Nazism and the Soviet Union as “twinned totalitarianisms.”
This form of historical collapsing is profoundly problematic as we will discuss and has drawn substantial criticism from other historians. Historian Adam J. Sacks, for example, has called Snyder “the most outspoken propagator of historical confusion, adding this:
From the World Economic Forum to virtually every major media outlet, [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 ‘ecological panic,’ as if the Jewish minority threatened the precious little fertile land Europe had at its disposal.
Sacks and other historians have also noted that contrary to Snyder’s claims, there is no evidence that “Nazis linked the Holocaust, or the genocide of the Roma and disabled, to anything perpetrated by the Soviet regime.”
Now, Snyder’s pat observations in media appearances and speculative arguments have proven very popular in powerful liberal circles in recent years. 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. He’s influential enough that in the spring of 2024, he appeared before the US House Oversight Committee to be told by California rep Ro Khanna, “A lot of my Democratic colleagues listen to you religiously.”
Adam: For The Guardian in October 2018, Snyder wrote a piece entitled “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, it’s consistent of both Hitler and Trump. But the issue is on the emphasis. 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 outgrowths of some foreign government or his psychoanalysis. 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.
Nima: Right. You don’t have to outsource it to some kind of historical analog. It’s coming from inside the house.
Adam: 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. 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.
On the issue of the genocide in Gaza, Snyder never makes any such sweeping statements or comparisons. 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, democratic, liberal state in Israel.
He wrote 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. 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 these are the comments he has made: “If anyone really is thinking of voting for Trump or abstaining because of Gaza, you should know that this is just what Netanyahu wants you to do,” 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.
But on the first point, this idea that Netanyahu is somehow pushing the war to stay out of jail became this popular liberal line, 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 “went too far,” 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. The reality 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. And this poll was before he killed the head of Hamas Sinwar and Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah. And his popularity has, in fact, skyrocketed.
The point is that instead of providing existential critiques of Israel 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 US as the country with fascistic or violent tendencies baked into the cake like he does for other countries, China, Russia, they are existentially evil. We have these kinds 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.
Snyder has never equated Zionism, especially hard-right Zionism with fascism in the Levant. But mostly, he’s just avoided the topic altogether. He’s handwrung 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, and so, he, like Applebaum, doesn’t really ever talk about it.
Nima: 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. So, let’s listen to a clip of one of Snyder’s recent appearances on The Rachel Maddow Show. 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.
[Begin clip]
Timothy Snyder: 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. The one thing we have in common is that when we’re free, we can realize those values. 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. 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. 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. 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.
[End clip]
Adam: Well, that’s kind of fatuous. This is the sort of caliber, 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, their favorite candidate of the network you’re on who’s eliminating people from the planet in whole or in part? 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. And when you’re doing a book tour and you’re talking about these lofty ideals, and you’re doing the ultimate “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?” 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 that omission is conspicuous.
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 on September 21, 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:
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. 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 of course, it mattered when the SS fled the camps. 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.
So, that’s the only real, sort of mention we get. 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, 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.
He went on the show Velshi, hosted by Ali Velshi on November 9, 2024, and advised his viewers to cope with Trump’s win as individuals. And “keep moving forward with dignity.” And then, of course, he compares Trump to the Soviet Union, which is his favorite topic. Let’s listen to that clip here.
[Begin clip]
Timothy Snyder: 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. 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, and people managed to find ways to cooperate, especially by way of an important labor union in Poland called Solidarity. 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 or all aspiring ones. They have their own problems, and when we work together, we make those problems worse, and we give ourselves a chance.
[End clip]
Adam: 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, not untrue. It’s just, how is that very meaningful?
Nima: 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 I think we do on our show a lot. 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 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, rather than the consistent white nationalism and white supremacy ideologies here in the United States. Those are lesser antecedents than these kinds of bigger-order global world historic Bad Guy enemies that these kinds of historians, Applebaum, Snyder, and our next one, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, 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 that is outside the US natural order rather than seeing him as part of the US natural order.
So, let’s get to our third example, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history and Italian studies at NYU. Ben-Ghiat first started making media appearances as an “anti-authoritarian” historian in August 2016, shortly before Donald Trump’s first electoral win. That month, Ben-Ghiat took to the pages of The Atlantic magazine to compare Trump to Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. 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. Rather, she was more concerned with idiosyncratic similarities between Trump and Mussolini, such as the following, which she pointed out in her piece: lacking interest in political protocols, bonding with voters, humiliating and threatening other politicians, and being frank about their own agendas.
Ben-Ghiat has since become a fixture on MSNBC. In 2021, she began publishing columns for MSNBC, almost exclusively about either Trump or Putin. Many of Ben-Ghiat’s columns have two common themes: an outsize focus on individual leaders’ demeanors and behaviors and more attention given to the destruction of an abstract “liberal democracy” than to actual reactionary policies that directly harm people and entire communities.
Adam: And since October 7, 2023, though Israel’s authoritarianism, of course, has long been on display, 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, that doesn’t fit within the neat and tidy anti-authoritarian framework. Her commentary on global authoritarianism has instead focused on the following. In February of 2024, “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’ comment worse.” May of 2024: “Denial about Donald Trump is deeper than ever. August of 2024: “Trump can’t take a joke. Democrats need to use that,” in which she argued that fascism can be defeated by making jokes at them. Unfortunately, none of these efforts worked, and Trump was re-elected.
Now, Ben-Ghiat has referenced Israel once. In a column in December of 2021, 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. So, this is an attack on Trump from the right as being insufficiently pro-Israel. Ben-Ghiat concluded with an observation that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu “enjoyed a good relationship with Trump — until he congratulated President Joe Biden on his election victory.” Ben-Ghiat added a quote from Trump in an interview with Axios resident pro-Israel laundromat Barak Ravid, in which Trump revealed that he hasn’t spoken to Netanyahu since Netanyahu congratulated Biden.
But of course, who cares? 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 because, again, it all has to fit neatly within this neoconservative and Democratic Party geopolitical playbook. Modes of authoritarianism which are inconvenient to the US are mostly just not talked about or rationalized away.
And Biden tried this, right? Biden, who supposedly watches MSNBC religiously as does everyone in his cabinet. He gave a famous speech last year when he was going to Congress basically to try to get billions more dollars for Israel and Ukraine. And he tried to tie Ukraine and Israel together as part of some nexus against authoritarianism. And he tried to put Hamas in this league with, you know, Iran and Russia and China. And even some pro-Biden liberals were like, I don’t know. That doesn’t really pass the sniff test, right?
And it really just shows how this Applebaum, Snyder, Ben-Ghiat model, again, it doesn’t really go very far. It begins to kind of break down when one goes beyond the superficial and says, well, okay, if there is this kind of Axis of Evil, this kind of authoritarian axis, where does the US support of dictatorships in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the UAE, despotism in India, right? The world’s largest, so-called largest democracy, the US supports the sort of quasi-fascist government there. Where does the US support of other dictatorships in Central Asia fall into this paradigm? And it sort of doesn’t really because the US supports some liberal democracies, it supports monarchies, it supports fascists, and it, of course, supports a genocide in Gaza. So, how is this valuable?
And of course, it’s all about chauvinist flattery. It’s all about making the US’s enemies existentially evil, and the US, when it does bad things, is simply deviating or it’s, you know, the foreign import of Trumpism but ultimately, fundamentally, at the end of the day, has to have good, righteous institutions. And that is why this shit is so popular. It flatters the ego of both the audience and the corporate owners of these media outlets. 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. [Chuckles] 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 in liberalism as fundamentally, at best, useless and at worst, I think, deeply cynical.
Nima: To discuss this more. We’re now going to be joined by Greg Grandin, the C. Vann 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. His new book, America, América: A New History of the New World will be published by Penguin in April 2025. Professor Grandin will join us in just a moment. Stay with us.
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Nima: We are joined now by Greg Grandin. Greg, thank you so much for joining us today on Citations Needed.
Greg Grandin: Oh, thanks so much for having me. I love the work that you do.
Adam: 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 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 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 ontologically evil. 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. We discussed Anna Applebaum, Timothy, Snyder, among others. 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 of US support of 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. 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.
Greg Grandin: Yeah, well, Gaza just explodes the whole liberal Resistance myth in many ways, and it has baleful effects, forcing basically decent people to wind up supporting, you know, actions like the expansion of the military industrial complex and uncritical support for proxy wars. I mean, you know, basically, I just said it started in 2016 as a reaction to Trump. And some of it is understandable. You know, people had a reaction to Trump. Trump does seem to be outside of expected decorum and protocols and so, there was this natural tendency to cast him as outside the mainstream. But you know, as you said, 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. I mean, there’s so many iterations of this argument, and you know, some of them maybe have some basis in fact. And certainly, Trump is an authoritarian. There’s no doubt about that.
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 has deep roots in US history and culture and politics. And you don’t have to look at Putin to understand the rise of Trump. You have to look at Bill Clinton, which US historians who had access to MSNBC and were very prominent in pushing a narrative are totally incapable of doing. They’re totally incapable of understanding how, say, 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 sociologist calls the de-pacification of society with the deep polarization that’s happening in the United States. You don’t have to look outside.
Greg Grandin: And then, of course, this is then expanded and extrapolated when domestic pathologies within the United States then become civilizational, it becomes about the West, right? 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. 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, you could look at Israel and AIPAC. They’ve had a much more direct bearing on the shaping of domestic politics and political culture than Russia has.
Adam: I want to hook into this because I think some people, they listen to this and they think, okay, y’all are just being a bunch of hipper than thou leftists. But there’s actually a prescriptive element to this, which I want to get into. If the goal is to prevent future Trumps, then you have to understand the antecedents. 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. And again, because big donors loved it, Reid Hoffman, you know, all these kinds 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. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with investigating Russiagate initially because 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, and he pumped money and influenced into one 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? You have to really understand the initial causes to really have a long-term actual Resistance. Why is understanding this history and Trump’s antecedents necessary in terms of orienting opposition to his frighteningly appealing message?
Greg Grandin: Yeah, I mean, there’s no doubt that the way that it’s framed by, you know, Rachel Maddow on MSNBC or Resistance historians shut down and preclude coming up with a more comprehensive, robust strategy for defeating Trump. It’s a fact that you don’t beat fascism by calling fascist fascists. I work mostly in Latin America, and it has its share of fascists. They don’t have a fascist debate. They call the conservative right fascist, 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. Just the way so much of the political discourse, look at already the autopsy of the 2024 election is taking shape, you know, it’s basically, you know, blaming this micro voting group or that micro voting group or whether, you know, whether woke is a strategy or not. But nobody talks about what actually wins elections — or at least, what could shape the political 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.
I mean, when they picked Tim Walz to be the Vice President, I thought that was where they were going. I thought that was what the Harris campaign was going to do because that’s basically what Minnesota did. Coming out of that form of labor tradition, they passed a whole series of not means tested, not tax credits but universal programs like everybody in school eats breakfast and lunch for free, no matter what your family salary is. And, you know, it took a long time to get to that point, but they got it through. But then, this is what circles back to Gaza. Gaza put a lot of limiting pressure on what kind of campaign Harris could run. She couldn’t run a center-left campaign, the kind Biden ran in 2020, beating Trump by a slim margin. You know, the whole kind of 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. 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 amazing. 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.
Nima: And this kind of gets back to the classic Chomsky critique. When the US does something objectively authoritarian or violent or evil, it’s painted as a deviation from the natural state 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, 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. And so, it kind of gets us back to this idea of 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. 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?
Greg Grandin: There’s a political theorist named Corey Robin who has been making this argument for almost a decade now, since 2016, focusing on the institutions and holding up the institutions and positing Trump as a violator of proceduralism and institutionalism, what that misses is 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 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. So, right there, there’s a kind of original mistake among these liberal Resistance historians and posing Trump to the institutions. 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 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, there are scales of degradation, scales of decline. At the beginning of the Cold War, when the United States searched around, 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 the dichotomy. It’s associated with Hannah Arendt, but other people, other philosophers of political theorists also contributed to this idea that there was a distinction between totalitarianism and authoritarianism. That authoritarianism allowed civil society to function 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, and there was no space for democracy to take root, and therefore, it had to be contained and counted. 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. And of course, this is a framework that is highly ideological, that had no real bearing on the facts on the ground. But at least, it was something of a justification. Then, Jeane Kirkpatrick rehabilitated it, 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.
But there’s long been a way in which the United States found ways to justify complete support for Saudi Arabia, say, in complete opposition to Iran, you know, and that’s where we are today. I mean, we’re locked in this kind of foreign policy that makes gestures towards civilizational struggle, towards defending the West or defending universal values, but the hypocrisy of it is so glaring. You know, during the Cold War, you could point out the contradictions and the irony and the hypocrisies like Noam Chomsky did decade after decade after decade. 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 but compared to now, 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. That’s what the Clinton administration was. You know, 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. But starting with the first Gulf War, soldiers came back to a country that was literally taking itself apart, physically moving factories from Detroit to Mexico but also taking apart its social contract. 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, and the hypocrisy became more apparent, I think. And I think that that’s the space that Trump fills. In a way, he’s turned at least half of the nation from citizens into basically the Joker, you know, where they see the only response to the bullshit is to tear it all down.
Adam: Yeah, it’s raw nihilism.
Greg Grandin: Yeah.
Adam: I want to try to give liberalism its due 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. So, I want to talk about the kind of failures of liberalism, but given their due, which is to say, Trump does deviate from quote-unquote “norms” in certain ways. 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? They have to be norms pursuant some social justice end. But they’re not. For example, he tried to overthrow the 2020 election by sending a fascist mob into the Capitol to attack legislators. It’s like, objectively, a bad thing, right?
Greg Grandin: Yeah. [Laughs]
Adam: That’s not good, right? And that is something that Reagan or Clinton would not do.
Greg Grandin: Something Andrew Jackson would do, though. [Laughs]
Adam: That’s true. So, there is this violation of norms that’s very real. But I think to your point, and this is an argument others have been making recently as well, 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, or something that is inherently good because liberal norms are only good insofar as they make people’s lives better.
And you see this a lot with the way people talk about sending billions of dollars to Israel and Ukraine, regardless of whether or not one thinks that’s justified. 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, I, of course, I think we would all agree Israel’s not justified. And then people look around, they see surging homelessness. They see schools falling apart. They see in their lives, infrastructure falling apart, the pothole on the way to work. And there’s this cognitive dissonance, I think, that emerges.
And then, you know, they prosecute Trump. They convicted him of felonies 34 times. And that did nothing. And I think one of the reasons that didn’t do anything is because there’s a broader sense among certain percentages of the population, you know, 20, 30, 40% of the population that the system fucking sucks or it’s rigged, or it’s a scam to rip you off. 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.
But Trump was good at channeling this ideologically incoherent vibe into something that looked like a political project whereas like you said, Democrats and liberals in general just keep fetishizing these norms without saying, Okay, well, what are the norms going to get me? What does freedom get me? 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. And so, if you could kind of comment on this fetishizing of institutions with a political project and a party that doesn’t seem to say where they’re going.
Greg Grandin: Yeah, I mean, I think you’re right about liberalism. And this is where I was gesturing to him 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, more equitable distribution of wealth than had ever been seen before in a country this powerful and this rich. You know, 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. 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. 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 to when he flirted with a run for president in 2000 on the Reform Party. There’s actually a really funny op-ed in the New York Times, and 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. 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, but he had it then, and he continues. When he praises Reagan, because he has 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.
You know, there is this kind of sense that he is a defender of the idea of a national economy and that idea, obviously, there’s a Herrenvolk version of it that is deeply racist, the national economy for a white working class, for a white middle class. But you know, the reality of the United States means that you can only push that so far. The United States is remarkably diverse demographically. So, the United States 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. So all of a sudden, within Trumpism, was seeing a multicultural coalition taking shape around this idea that we need a nation, we need a nation state. We need a national economy. And you know, we need a policy that talks about material benefits even if it’s often expressed in brutal ways like being carried out by a mass deportation program in order to keep jobs for US citizens. The contradictions within Trumpism are many, but 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. This was the first election that saw billionaires actually as surrogates and players justifying that role because they’re billionaires. 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 all of it exactly. 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. There’s no discussion at all 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 during the election. 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, 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. And without doubt, the way Trump has been positioned by mainstream liberals who have the ear of MSNBC and the New York Times has been used to shut down discussion, not open up discussion.
Nima: Yeah, I think that’s such a critical point. And as a historian yourself, I’m curious 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 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. And as a historian yourself who’s documented whether it’s slavery in the United States or imperialism and colonialism in Latin America and elsewhere, what do you see as the lessons that are consistently not learned yet pushed forward by ostensibly what’s going to be the Resistance, the 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 hearken back, or they contextualize Trump within a certain kind of past, maybe a Cold War past, 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. How do you see the historians’ take on the past and their analysis for the future playing out across our media?
Greg Grandin: 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. 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 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 healthcare, through rapid response to climate change catastrophe, flying squads, whatever that might be. There’s a whole slate of positive actions one could imagine in a progressive policy program that would defeat fascism. I mean, maybe not the next election because, you know, you have to push the window, you have to push the Overton window back to the left like they’ve done so long. All of these things that the Republicans are doing, they lost election after election running on them, until they started winning. You know, and the Democrats have to do the same.
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 there’s history as analogy. You know, it’s always 1938, and we’re always in danger of being Neville Chamberlain, giving away Czechoslovakia, and we’re always ready to appease, and we can’t do that. Or there’s 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? Cause and effect is never a simple process. There’s multiple chains of causes and effects that lead to the present, but certainly, one of them we’ve talked about is the transformation of the Democratic Party, the dealignment from a party that had overwhelming working-class support to a party that supported WTO, NAFTA, all of the stuff that was talked about in the 1990s. And even if they are 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, the reality is that the Democrats have become a party of the suburbs, a party dominated by consultants, by wealthy donors, that has no political imagination, 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.
I mean, if there’s one thing that we can learn from the past, 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. You know, 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, you know, publishing their books and whatnot, 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. And they offer no alternative.
Nima: 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, América: A New History of the New World. Tell us a little bit about the book and what readers can look forward to.
Greg Grandin: Yeah, so the book basically looks at the New World from the conquest to the present. I mean, a subtitle, if they would have let me, could have been “From Cortez to Netanyahu” or something because the book really 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. 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, coming during a time in which plans are being drawn up for mass deportations and bigger and higher walls, it talks about how basically the United States and Latin America were integrated from their inception. And you know, when the New World was integrated, and there was an intimacy and influence within the Catholic realms and the Protestant realms, you know, from the 16th century on. And so, it’s a big book that covers a lot of ground but hopefully, it’s readable.
Nima: I’m sure it will be. And you know, somehow history is always the most timely subject. So, thank you. This has been amazing to talk to you. We’ve been speaking with Greg Grandin, the C. Vann Woodward Professor of History at Yale University and the author of a number of books, including Empire’s Workshop, one of my very favorites, 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. His new book, which we just heard about, America, América: A New History of the New World, will be published by Penguin in April 2025 so pre-order that now. Greg, it has been so wonderful to speak with you on Citations Needed. Thank you.
Greg Grandin: Thanks so much. It’s been great to speak with you.
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Adam: 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 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. 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 on November 24 that pretty much explicitly said, the ICC is to be used for non-Western countries, to be used for China and Russia and African nations. Right?
Nima: Yeah.
Adam: 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 till Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that they indicted a non-African, which was a Russian. But they obviously, Russia is an enemy of the West, 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. 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, taking that credibility from 3% to .0001% and I think it’s kind of like how liberal Zionists always talk about how, Oh, you know, we’re this close to know, we’re this close to having a permanent one state, and we got to save liberal Zionism. And it’s always asymptotic, right? It’s always, we’re always kind of not quite there, but almost there.
Nima: But it’s always just around the corner. Yeah.
Adam: And then liberal Zionists will be like, I’m trying to save you from yourself. Similar to how, you know, this was kind of Bernie Sanders’s pitch, I’m trying to save capitalism from itself. FDR made the same pitch. And liberalism, the sort of last remaining liberals who are trying to be consistent, are trying to save it from itself. 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. 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, uh, blah, blah, blah reason.
Nima: Well, right, because the pearl-clutching is also coupled with 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 world view, because I’m listening to the context, right? Because I know that Trump is now replicating what we saw in such-and-such, fill in the blank with whatever MSNBC- and CNN-approved authoritarian regime is inserted, and then you have your Applebaums and your Snyders and your Ben-Ghiats to provide that academic resource and that context, and that should be good, right? 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 and put forth on these, you know, 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. 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, and that’s why we have to get back to democracy, than more like Americana-type historians, pop historians like Jon Meacham and Michael Beschloss, but they have their own issues, which we didn’t get into on this episode.
Adam: 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. 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 we said, NPR does this when they fundraise. You know, you have discerning taste. You’re smart. PBS does it, right?
Nima: There’s so much out there, but to get the truth, you come to us.
Adam: Yeah. Yeah. 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 level of comfort. You can just, rah, rah, vote for Biden, you know, rah, rah, you know, Brat Summer. And I don’t have to actually question my position or my preferred candidate’s position within this larger regime of violence.
Nima: 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. Of course, you can follow us on Twitter @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and if you are so inclined, and we hope that you are, become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated, as we are 100% listener funded. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: Citations Needed’s senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Producer is Julianne Tveten. Production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. The newsletter is by Marco Cartolano. Transcriptions are by Mahnoor Imran. The music is by Grandaddy. Thanks again, everyone. We’ll catch you next time.
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This Citations Needed episode was released on Wednesday, December 4, 2024.
Transcription by Mahnoor Imran.
