If you thought in our politics of inevitability that there were no alternatives to capitalism or that you can’t even modify capitalism, you can’t even dream about having a welfare state, that itself generates economic inequality both of income and of wealth. I’d say economic inequality has everything to do with this. The idea of making America great again: You don’t give anyone a future, you deny the future exists.Īn elderly man, a relative of Maidan activist who was killed during the Maidan protests, reacts near the portraits of activists during during a memorial ceremony marking the second anniversary of the beginning of the protests in Kiev on November 21, 2015. A slogan like “America First” reflects this, because it loops back to the 1930s. And what’s cut us off from that hazy past is not ourselves or our policies or our rulers, but other people - foreign enemies, native enemies.
What can come next is what I call in the book the politics of eternity, which is this notion that there really isn’t a future, there’s just kind of a hazy past where things were better. In the U.S., you could say this started in 2008 for a lot of folks and then in 2016 it caught up to a lot of different people, but in the last decade or so, I think it’s fair to say this notion that things are just automatically going to get better has fallen away. It dawns on you that there aren’t really rules to history. Eventually you hit some sort of a crisis where it dawns on you that progress is not automatic. The American version of (the politics of inevitability) is something like, the free market’s going to bring about democracy and happiness, and those are just the rules and there’s not really much that can be done one way or the other. “Virtues are inseparable from the institutions they inspire and nourish.” These qualities are not mere platitudes or preferences, but facts of history,” he writes. “(I)ndividuality, endurance, cooperation, novelty, honesty and justice figure as political virtues. Snyder centers on the notion that the world may be lurching from a “politics of inevitability” - the notion, as Snyder writes, that a better future is ahead, “the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing to be done” - and a “politics of eternity,” or the idea that time is “a circle that endlessly returns to the same threats from the past … (that posits) that government cannot aid society as a whole, but can only guard against threats.”įraming the book with six political virtues, Snyder offers alternatives in his chapter titles: Individualism or Totalitarianism Truth or Lies.
“The Road to Unfreedom” offers a brief, potent and carefully documented history of Vladimir Putin’s consolidation of power in Russia, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S.
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