Longtime historian and fascism expert Timothy Snyder spoke Thursday with fellow historian and teacher Sharon McMahon about the evolution of fascism and how technology and wealth in politics have changed it and American democracy.
McMahon asked Snyder to walk through how he defines fascism for those who hear it a lot but don't fully understand the specifics.
"I think it's fair for everyone to make up their own mind whether people are fascists or whether a movement is fascist fascist or whether that's the direction we're heading," Snyder explained. "So, for me, the first point would be a fascist is someone who believes in will or emotion over reason."
Second, he said a fascist is someone who "explains the world in terms of conspiracies, invisible things, half-invisible things, rather than terms of what we can understand with the evidence."
He added, "A fascist will be somebody who doesn't talk much about the state or the republic or the government, but will talk instead about civilization and nation and race."
Snyder explained that he thinks that above all else, "fascism is a tool to divide, to divert, to direct people towards a false 'us and them.' Whereas the real 'us and them' is that they have their hands in our wallet.”
"The Trump people are trying hard to be fascist, but they don't quite have what it takes," he continued. "That's sort of my judgment.
Like, they — the fascists actually believed in struggle. Like, their whole view of the world was that everything was about struggle. And this is a terrible worldview. I'm not trying to praise it. But, the Trump people kind of want everybody else to do the struggling for them, right? So, like, they'll fight wars, but they're not going to go to the front themselves, right?"
Trump and his allies instead want to delegate all of the difficult work to other people. Many of them "lack attention span. And the main thing, which is different between them and the fascists of 100 years ago, was the money," he added.
So, as much as Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler were all in on fascism, they didn't want the money, Snyder explained. That's not the case for Trump world. They want the money and fascism is simply a means to divert attention while they clean up.
The problem with an old-school way of understanding fascism is that it's viewed through this World War II lens of people like Mussolini and Hitler. So, McMahon wondered how fascism can be viewed in the modern era.
"They couldn't have dreamed of the kind of technology that we now have, right?" Snyder explained. "The kind of attention-diverting or attention-attracting technology of social media and AI, which today's fascists are very good at using. And so that's another difference. I mean, I would tend to say it's something like fascism is evolving, you know? And that we ourselves have to adapt as we try to understand what it is."
McMahon recalled one of Snyder's comments is that an indication of pre-fascism is "a post-truth society" or "one in which we don’t acknowledge that truth is real.”
She pointed to a video of a friend of hers that was AI and was very clearly not her friend and even badly done. People said it didn't matter and they didn't care if something was AI if it made them feel good and affirms the way that they want to see the world. That, she said, is an example of a post-truth society.
Snyder joked that the question is going to be better than his answer.
"So, yes, it is an example because a post-truth society ultimately is not about the technology that surrounds us. It's about the conviction or lack of conviction within us," he said. So, for people who are in that post-truth society and are making decisions based on how they feel, "then we all become vulnerable to those who can make us feel certain ways. And the people who can feel certain ways are the people who own social media platforms, who own AI companies, or who happen to be president of the United States."
He said it would essentially turn into the worst version of mass politics. It makes it easy to say "oh, there's no such thing."
"And once you make that move, then you won't put any resources, either personal or institutional, into figuring out what is, in fact, true," Snyder said. "Which means you no longer care about journalism, you no longer care about science, you no longer care about educating your children, and then all those institutions start to float away, and then you have a second-order phenomenon, right? Which isn't just we're throwing up our hands and saying, 'What is truth?'"
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