Are we on 'The Road to Unfreedom’? Timothy Snyder considers this political moment through history's lens

• Published in: Chicago Tribune (Online)
• Main Author: Day, Jennifer
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: Chicago Tribune Interactive, LLC 04.04.2018
• Subjects: Capitalism; Cooperation; Inequality; Politics; Snyder, Timothy; United States > US; Europe; Ukraine; Russia

“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. presidential election. 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.” When it comes to what the Russians really care about, Russians really care about fossil fuels, because that’s how the oligarchical clan that’s in power has resources and stays in power. What I mean by the politics of responsibility is the attempt to create a political system that makes sense over the course of one life, where there’s enough equality that young people think the system is not stacked against them and that they can grow up without resentment.