Article by Karen J. Greenberg*
3 Fordham L. Voting Rts. & Democracy F. 145
In their new books, Anne Applebaum and Timothy Snyder explore the vulnerabilities that plague democracies globally and in the United States. Documenting the elements that threaten democracy, they share a vision of the future that demands a deepened understanding of the forces that oppose democracy—among them, corruption, disinformation and isolation. Offering visions of a more enlightened public space, and a heightened sense of empathy, they each attempt to provide a roadmap to a more equitable, just, and life-affirming future.
Introduction
Walk into almost any bookstore these days and you will doubtless see an array of non-fiction books warning about the threat of autocracy and the demise of democracy. The authors’ approaches vary in focus from global to national to comparisons between the current state of affairs in the U.S. and the paths to dictatorship abroad. For example, Ben Rhodes’s After the Fall: Being American in the World We’ve Made (2021) examines the intersection between the U.S. and autocratic movements worldwide.1See generally Ben Rhodes, After the Fall: Being American in the World We’ve Made (2021). And Erwin Chemerinsky’s No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the U.S. Constitution Threatens the United States (2024), takes on the country’s founding document, and places democracy and the constitution in opposition to one another.2See generally Erwin Chemerinsky, No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the U.S. Constitution Threatens the United States (2024). In these and other deep dives, the takeaways are dire. Whatever analytical frameworks underlie their arguments, the experts lead us to the conclusion that the future of our democracy lies in serious peril.
Two recent books by award-winning historians assess this peril in eye-opening ways, sounding alarms both old and new. Following up on her book Twilight of Democracy (2020),3Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism (2020). Anne Applebaum has now given us Autocracy, Inc., a tour de force series of reflections on the trends that are crushing democracy worldwide.4Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc. (2024). Timothy Snyder, whose 2017 pamphlet On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century compared the Trump era to the Third Reich,5Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017). has now produced On Freedom, an attempt to reveal the vast array of threats confronting our democracy, many of which lie in unexplored misconceptions about power, powerlessness, and the lies that dominate the public space.6Timothy Snyder, On Freedom (Amanda Cook ed., 2024).
I. From Autocracy, Inc. to Democrats United
Applebaum argues that, though distinct and often at odds with one another politically, autocracies around the globe have come together to support one another and to undermine democracy. Despite their many differences, strongly autocratic countries like Russia, China, and Venezuela, as well as “softer autocracies and hybrid democracies”7Applebaum, supra note 4, at 2. such as Turkey, India, and Hungary, have bonded together aiming “to rewrite the rules of the international system itself,”8Id. at 96. and thus “to bring the international system to an end.”9Id. at 98.
At the heart of Applebaum’s searing analysis is the destructive impact of the link between autocracy and kleptocracy, with Russia as the prime example.10Id. at 13. The politics of autocracy and the corruption of kleptocracy, Applebaum argues, “go hand in hand” with one another, “undermining any other institutions that they touch.”11Id. at 42. In this union of money and power, “theft is rewarded. Taxes are not paid. Law enforcement is impotent and underfunded. Regulation is something to be dodged.”12Id. at 39.
As a potent example of the influence of Autocracy, Inc., Applebaum turns our attention to Venezuela. After the former president Hugo Chavez died in 2013 and Nicolás Maduro took office, country-wide protests followed.13Daniel Wallis & Brian Ellsworth, Venezuelan Rivals Rally Supporters After Clashes Over Election Results, Reuters (Aug. 16, 2013, 2:14 AM), https://www.reuters.com/article/world/venezuelan-rivals-rally-supporters-after-clashes-over-election-results-idUSBRE93C0B1 [https://perma.cc/4QEA-96CJ]. During this moment of threat to Maduro’s regime “Autocracy, Inc.,” stepped in, helping to buttress the country’s financial resources. Russia, China, Turkey, Cuba, and Iran all came to Maduro’s aid.14Applebaum, supra note 4 at 53, 157. Together, they kept “the profoundly unpopular Venezuelan regime afloat.”15Id. at 53. Elsewhere, in countries like Zimbabwe, kleptocratic mechanisms from abroad similarly facilitated the growth of autocracy in Africa and Middle Eastern countries.16Id. at 54–64. Collaborating internationally, these countries “evade sanctions and mutually profit,” aided by loopholes within the international financial systems, thereby strengthening oligarchy worldwide.17Id. at 56.
Rhetoric, Applebaum points out, is an essential piece of Autocracy, Inc.’s onslaught against democracy. “Antidemocratic rhetoric,” she writes, “has gone global.”18Id. at 80. The “metastasis” of kleptocracy relies on a parallel “smear campaign” against the West, trumpeting out a narrative that discredits democracy and the international order.19Id. at 140. The goal is to flip the narrative by claiming ideals that are traditionally associated with democratic forms of government. Russia lays claim to “multipolarity” defining it as “fair and equitable” in contrast to the hegemonic “America-centric world” they aim to replace.20Id. at 103. China embraces the language of “win-win cooperation” and “mutual respect” to replace the language of human rights and political rights.21Id. at 102. Collectively, Autocracy, Inc, strives “to connect democracy with degeneracy and chaos, to undermine democratic institutions, to smear not just activists who promote democracy but the system itself.”22Id. at 85.
However, the West, in Applebaum’s view, is not without blame for Autocracy, Inc.’s successes. “From the beginning of this story to the end,” she informs us, “Western cooperation was essential.”23Id. at 32. Speaking out of one side of their mouths about the rule of law and the promotion of democracy, leaders in Western countries have knowingly weakened democracy through their own compromising practices, opting for profits and dealing as they wish with kleptocratic countries.24See generally Applebaum, supra note 4. And the linkages go well beyond financial dealings. The West, Applebaum notes, adopts techniques and behaviors associated with autocracies, such as supporting the use of spyware and surveillance tactics for their own gain.25Id. at 70–71. The upshot is that the West’s adoption of these practices ultimately helps “autocracies justify their own abuse of these systems” and of their populations.26Id. at 71.
Applebaum is not one to take the course of affairs lying down. Americans and Europeans alike need to “wake up to the reality” that they are being outmatched by the power and messaging of Autocracy, Inc., the collaborative framework that the West enables.27Id. at 174. “We are used to thinking of ‘the West’ influencing the world, but nowadays the influence often runs the other way.”28Id. at 173–74.
It’s past time, Applebaum concludes, for measures to counter the successes of Autocracy, Inc. She underscores the urgency of stopping the habit of allowing wealthy Americans and Europeans to play “ambivalent roles” in the areas of wealth and power.
We no longer live in a world where the very wealthy can do business with autocratic regimes, sometimes promoting the foreign policy goals of those regimes, while at the same time doing business with the American government, or with European governments, and enjoying the status and privileges of citizenship and legal protection in the free markets of the democratic world. It’s time to make them choose.29Id. at 172–73.
It’s time, she insists, for the West to mount its own connected enterprise, one that will counter kleptocracy, nefarious messaging, and blatant attacks upon democracy: “Democrats United.” As she explains, “no single politician, party, or country can reform this system alone. Instead, an international coalition will have to change the laws, end secretive practices, and restore transparency to the international financial system.”30Id. at 161.
Applebaum’s book reads like a warning. The Autocracy, Inc. machinations she describes are “not some distant dystopia. That world is the one we are living in right now.”31Id. at 120. And, in case you missed her implicit warning to the United States, she leaves us with this message: “[n]obody’s democracy is safe.”32Id. at 173.
II. From “Freedom From” to “Freedom To”
Snyder’s book begins in this space, focusing directly on democracy in America.33See generally Snyder, supra note 6. Mingling history, philosophy, and much of his own life story, Snyder is even more alarmist than Applebaum. On Freedom is a highly ambitious treatise meant to address the ills facing mankind at this existentially precarious moment. Layering his own challenges as a youth, including while studying in the Soviet Union,34Id. at 9. his struggle as an adult with life-threatening illness and as a mentor in prisons to inmates,35Id. at xviii–xix. and his role as a leading expert on Russia and Eastern Europe, Snyder ties together the challenges he has faced as an individual with the threats that have mounted over decades to bring us to today’s polycrisis.36See generally Snyder, supra note 6.
Where Applebaum exposes the unseen connections and collective power of those who are expanding the grip of autocracy worldwide, Snyder addresses the underlying misguided and destructive mindset that has promulgated contemporary threats to democracy. Our ideas, our categories for understanding our world, and our refusal to think critically about our values, even those we proclaim to be most sacred, have gone astray, he argues. Nowhere is this clearer than in our misconceptions of freedom.
Snyder sets out to redefine the term and to restore it to its true meaning. We are prisoners, he tells us, to the notion that “freedom” means “freedom from,” or “negative freedom,” when in fact we, for our survival, need to understand “freedom” as “freedom to,” and specifically, “freedom to make a better world.” In the “freedom from” mindset, he explains, human beings are grateful not to be deprived, abused, imprisoned, or killed. In the “freedom to” scenario, humans can realize the full potential of their lives.37See generally id.
Snyder identifies five forms of freedom: sovereignty, unpredictability, mobility, factuality, and solidarity.38Id. at xvii. He sees each as currently under attack. Sovereignty, autonomy that takes interconnectedness as a foundation principle, has come to mean isolation and separateness rather than a shared humanity and the acceptance of empathy.39Id. at 22. Unpredictability, the freedom not to have the future “predictified” for us, has been undermined by the massive data collection and algorithmic predictions of the internet which has thereby robbed us of our sense of a future based on as yet unknown choices.40Id. at 107. As we grow to adulthood, mobility, the ability to choose when, where, and by which values we live, is stymied by the crippling reality of poor safety, poor security, and poverty in which so many find themselves.41Id. at 115. Factuality has given way to lying and deception.42Id. at 163. Solidarity has been replaced by the divisiveness of racism, greed, discrimination, and the selective protection of rights.43Id. at 195–96.
Throughout, Snyder drives home the importance of humans overcoming the separateness that we have grown accustomed to. Our job in each one of these contexts, he tells us, is to reach out to one another across the divides, to help each other out, and to realize that a good life for some on this earth cannot be cordoned off from the suffering of others.44Id. at 44. We are interconnected. After all, our experiences in life, from birth to death are shared.
The villains in Snyder’s story include those who impede this interconnectedness, aiming to demolish the freedom in its many forms—and so far succeeding in their attempts.45Id. at 70. Silicon Valley, with its massive collection of data and its algorithmic predictions has dealt a potentially lethal blow to freedom.46Id. at 217, 259. It has taught us to think that we are alone, isolated from one another, and that we are without freedom because our world is “predictified” by data collection and algorithms.47Id. at 100, 162. The internet has thereby bestowed on us a version of the “death principle,” a reference to Plato’s allegory of the cave. In the allegory, the subjects are in chains, able only to see shadows of others. Separated from a truly connected existence in the world, they experience essentially a living death.48Id. at 58–61.
Freedom’s enemies include libertarians and oligarchs as well. Libertarians have created a “mindless binarism” of “free market good, government bad,” embracing selfishness rather than solidarity, and “spread[ing] unfreedom and death.”49Id. at 219. Snyder sees Charles Koch as premier among “fossil oligarch libertarians,” purveyors of lies, divisions and destructive agendas—the opposite of those who honor truth, solidarity and allegiance to a future in which mankind shares true well-being.50Id. at 217. Charles Koch is the CEO of Koch industries and a billionaire donor to conservative causes. Katherine Doyle, Leonard Leo, Koch Networks Pour Millions into Groups Prepping for Potential Second Trump Administration, NBC News (Mar. 21, 2024, 1:03 PM), https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/leonard-leo-koch-networks-pour-millions-prep-potential-second-trump-ad-rcna144360 [https://perma.cc/Q7NN-BNVX]. The oligarchs claim to oppose bureaucracy, but they have formed their own bureaucracy in their enhancement of global warming. They claim to “favor small government” but “by spending money on elections, they make the government larger, by glomming their corporations on to it,” as Koch did with his support for Citizens United v. FEC.51558 U.S. 310 (2010); Id. at 217–18. Theirs, Snyder claims, is a “death cult.”52Id. at 219.
III. Paths Forward
And then there are heroes. For both Snyder and Applebaum, one leader who stands out is the former president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel.53Snyder, supra note 6, at 63; Applebaum, supra note 4, at 125. Imprisoned as a dissident during Soviet times, Havel played a major role in helping topple the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia and eventually rose to the presidency of the new democracy.54See generally Vaclav Havel, The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central Eastern Europe (International ed. 2018.) In 1978, Havel had written “The Power of the Powerless,”55Id. an essay which Snyder aptly describes as “a profound meditation on freedom,” and one which guides Snyder in his dedication to helping our world restore its potential for freedom in all of its forms.56Snyder, supra note 6 at 65.
“Living in truth” is the core concept of Havel’s philosophy.57See generally Havel, supra note 54. It is a diatribe against conformity and fear and a call for autonomy, solidarity, and unpredictability—the very forms of freedom that Snyder holds most dear. As Applebaum reminds us, Havel uses the example of a greengrocer who puts the sign “workers of the world unite” in his store window.58Applebaum, supra note 4, at 125. The greengrocer thereby bows to the regime, telling himself he is doing so in order to avoid the trouble that might otherwise follow.59Id. Applebaum sees this as self-deception.60Id. The greengrocer can deceive himself into thinking he isn’t actually obedient to the state underneath it all but is making the gesture of allegiance necessary for him to survive. The truth is that the greengrocer creates, in Havel’s words, “a bridge of excuses between the system and the individual.”61Snyder, supra note 6, at 219. But once dissidents appear in his shop, the greengrocer is no longer able to see himself as truly separate from the state.62Applebaum, supra note 4, at 125. His support for the regime as evident in his acts is exposed.63Id. at 125–26. For Snyder, Havel is the lodestar, offering up not just a brilliant and comprehensible analysis but an homage to the future writ large. Havel envisioned this responsibility to the future in terms of “the world” and the “earth.”64Snyder, supra note 6, at 161. Havel’s message, Snyder reminds us, is intended to widen our horizons beyond our political realities and personal circumstances, to extend as far as “nature and the universe.”65Id.
While Applebaum and Snyder share a hero, they also share a reading of present-day America as emblematic of the vulnerabilities they have described.66See generally Snyder, supra note 6; Applebaum, supra note 4. For Applebaum, the behavior Trump embodies attests to the passive acceptance of the world which Autocracy, Inc. has created. His instigations of violence, his targeting of enemies, his kleptocratic corruption and his use of social media to spread falsehoods belong to the autocratic enterprise she portrays throughout her book. Her concern, therefore, is not just about his behavior, but the complacency with which it has been greeted. Trump’s dealings with anonymous shell companies while president “should have set off alarm bells” she warns.67Applebaum, supra note 4, at 172. “That it did not is evidence of how accustomed to kleptocratic corruption we have become.”68Id.
With his primary focus on the United States, Snyder takes the critique of Trump further. Charting the course of negative freedom from Reagan to Trump, Snyder describes that path as one in which freedom morphed into “privilege,” and in particular into the “privilege of a few wealthy Americans not to pay taxes, the power of a few oligarchs to shape the discourse, and the unequal application of criminal law.”69Snyder, supra note 6, at 132. Having coined the term “sadopopulist” in his 2018 book The Road to Unfreedom,70Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom (2018). Snyder uses the term in On Freedom as the embodiment of negative freedom in which “the pain of immobility” is assuaged “by directing attention to others who suffer more.”71Snyder, supra note 6, at 148. As he explained in an interview several years ago: “What if you can have a politics based not on people pursuing their rationally understood best interest in being happy but a politics based upon some people hurting others and taking their pleasure from it?”72Shalini Randeria & Timothy Snyder, A Trumpian blip or a fundamental flaw in American democracy (Nov. 25, 2020), https://www.eurozine.com/democracy-in-question [https://perma.cc/8HPX-C8MA].
The contempt for others that Trump embodies, his refusal as president to build infrastructure “precisely because it would have helped people” is, in Snyder’s framework, intentionally aimed to result in deprivation, racism, and inequality, and to encourage “supplication” to the highfliers as Havel’s greengrocer so well illustrated.73Snyder, supra note 6, at 148. This sadopopulism, Snyder tells us, “replaces the American Dream with the American nightmare.”74Id.
While critical of Trump as the current manifestation of the downward spiral of events they describe, both Snyder and Applebaum see Trump as a piece of a much larger trajectory in which the fate of the earth and its peoples are increasingly at risk, a reality that is only heightened by the blindness and complacency into which we have fallen.
As the analyses provided by both authors converge on several points, so, too, do their recommendations for discovering a new path forward. Both encourage us to rethink the categorizations and definitions that frame our understanding of power. Applebaum encourages us to expand our definition of autocracy. Rather than see democracies as at war with autocracy per se, we should see the struggle as a “war against autocratic behaviors.”75Applebaum, supra note 4, at 159. In this vein, democracies should unite to impose legal barriers to kleptocracy.76Id. at 164. They should counter harmful disinformation, the rhetoric and falsehoods that accompany Autocracy, Inc., by “pre-bunking” disinformation campaigns before they get underway—a tactic the State Department’s Global Engagement Center has recently employed.77Id. They should reform the social media platforms themselves. And they should regulate AI before it is too late. But above all, those who seek to deter the continuing spread of Autocracy, Inc. must recognize the importance of working together as a network, of creating “broader international coalitions,” which can include nation states as well as private actors such as media and civic organizations.78Id. at 166.
Snyder’s remedies likewise include a mixture of policy recommendations and wholistic reforms. He asks that we “abandon any notion of a war on drugs,”79Snyder, supra note 6, at 254. restructure our financial system and its “absurd distribution of wealth,”80Id. at 256. reduce our carceral footprint, including stopping the incarceration of teenagers and young adults,81Id. at 254. and create policies that protect us from social media.82Id. at 207. Concerned like Applebaum with disinformation and its uses by anti-democratic forces, Snyder offers a vague yet valiant goal. “We cannot get free of the internet,” he tells us, “but we can assert human values upon it.”83Id. at 265.
In keeping with his orientation towards a deeper understanding of our vulnerabilities and their political and psychological underpinnings, Snyder insists that policy reforms, however idealistic, constitute but a piece of the fundamental overhaul that reconstituting true freedom requires. Pleading for the reconceptualizing of rights and wrongs in our world, Snyder posits that history is the ultimate savior, the lynchpin that will enable us to reclaim true freedom and create a thriving, fair, and just future. History reminds us that we can overcome catastrophe, that we can create brighter futures for one and for all, and that we can once again reside within the unpredictability, community, and truth that collectively fuel the lifeblood of freedom.
Conclusion
Taken together, the lessons of Autocracy, Inc. and On Freedom, as dire as their analyses are, leave us with some hope. Lifting the veil of lies and deceits that distort and obfuscate the true perils of our present moment, Applebaum and Snyder have given us a clearer vision not only of our times and its devastating ills, but also of the “scaffolding of hope”84Id. at 160. which can guide us forward. Invoking the vastness of Havel’s vision, Snyder concludes, “As the future crashes in, we can panic and blame others. . . . Or we can, as free people, take responsibility, look deep into Earth’s past, and save our world.”85Id. at 161. For Applebaum and Snyder, the choice is clear—democracies and those who live inside them must act and act now to save their future.
* Director, Center on National Security, Fordham University School of Law; Editor-in-Chief, Aon Cyber Brief; Future Security Fellow, New America/ASU.
Karen J. Greenberg is the Director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law. Greenberg specializes in the intersection between national security policy, the rule of law and human rights. Greenberg is editor-in-chief of the CNS/Aon Cyber Brief (2011-present), She has written and edited numerous books including: Our Nation at Risk: Election Integrity as a National Security Issue (2024), co-edited with Julian Zelizer; Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of American Democracy from the War on Terror to Donald Trump (2021), Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State (Crown, 2016), and The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First 100 Days (Oxford, 2009). Her work has been featured in the NYTimes, the Washington Post, the LA Times, the Nation Magazine, the Atlantic and many other major news outlets. She is a frequent guest on national television and radio shows. She is a Future Security program fellow at New America, a Senior Fellow at the Soufan Center and a permanent member of the Council on Foreign Relations.