Three Yale professors who have spent their careers studying how democracies die are now fleeing America – and they want us to understand why.
In a six-minute New York Times Opinion video, historians and philosophers Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder, and Jason Stanley explain their decision to leave their prestigious positions at Yale for the University of Toronto. Their evidence of democratic decay is specific and chilling: federal judges threatened with impeachment for ruling against the administration, students detained for expressing opinions, and U.S. residents sent to foreign prisons without due process.
For Shore, who has studied totalitarianism in Eastern Europe for decades, America's confidence in its democratic institutions is dangerously naive. Her colleagues keep chanting "checks and balances" like a magic spell, she says, "like people on the Titanic saying our ship can't sink… And what you know as a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can't sink." She reaches for Russian vocabulary to capture what's happening: "Proizvol – it's the idea that the powers that be can do anything they want to you, and you have no recourse."
Professor Timothy Snyder warns that American exceptionalism breeds fatal complacency: "If you think that there's this thing out there called America, and it's exceptional, that means that you don't have to do anything. Whatever is happening, it must be freedom. And so then what your definition of freedom is just gets narrowed and narrowed and narrowed, and soon you're using the word freedom, but what you're talking about is authoritarianism."
Philosophy professor Jason Stanley, who studies fascist rhetoric, puts it bluntly: "You know you're living in a fascist society when you're constantly going over in your head the reasons why you're safe." More ominously, Shore borrows another Eastern European expression that's become relevant to America: "There's a saying in Polish, 'I found myself at the very bottom, and then I heard knocking from below.' In Russian, that gets abbreviated to 'there is no bottom.'"
"What starts to matter is not what is concealed, but what has been normalized," Shore concludes. "There's no limit to the depravity and the cruelty that we are watching now play out in real time."
Previously:
• Yale history professor Timothy Snyder predicts the horrific aftermath of a Trump coup in 2024
• Worried academics run for the Canadian border
• This book explains how to tell when your country's going to hell and how to stop it
