This arti­cle was first post­ed by Süd­deutsche Zeitung.

"We have at most a year to defend the Republic, perhaps less. What happens in the next few weeks is very important."

Tim­o­thy Sny­der is a pro­fes­sor of his­to­ry at Yale Uni­ver­si­ty and the author of numer­ous books of Euro­pean his­to­ry, includ­ing Blood­lands and Black Earth. His most recent book, On Tyran­ny: Twen­ty Lessons from the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry, will be pub­lished at the end of the month. This is the Eng­lish ver­sion of an inter­view pub­lished in Süd­deutsche Zeitung on Feb­ru­ary 7, with some addi­tion­al infor­ma­tion due to cur­rent developments.

Don­ald Trump has been pres­i­dent for three weeks. How would you describe his start?

The first thing that we have to notice is that the insti­tu­tions have not thus far restrained him. He nev­er took them seri­ous­ly, acts as if they don’t exist, and clear­ly wish­es they didn’t. The sto­ry that Amer­i­cans have told them­selves from the moment he declared his can­di­da­cy for pres­i­dent, was that one insti­tu­tion or anoth­er would defeat him or at least change his behav­ior — he won’t get the nom­i­na­tion; if he gets the nom­i­na­tion, he will be a nor­mal Repub­li­can; he will get defeat­ed in the gen­er­al elec­tion; if he wins the pres­i­den­cy will mature him (that was what Oba­ma said). I nev­er thought any of that was true. He doesn’t seem to care about the insti­tu­tions and the laws except inso­far as they appear as bar­ri­ers to the goal of per­ma­nent klep­to­crat­ic author­i­tar­i­an­ism and imme­di­ate per­son­al grat­i­fi­ca­tion. It is all about him all of time, it is not about the cit­i­zens and our polit­i­cal traditions.

You wrote an arti­cle for Slate in Novem­ber, com­par­ing the rise of Don­ald Trump with the rise of Adolf Hitler. Why did you feel the need to pub­lish such a piece?

It’s very impor­tant that we use his­to­ry to our advan­tage now, rather than find­ing in his­to­ry taboos and ways to silence one anoth­er. The his­to­ry of the 1930s is ter­ri­bly impor­tant to Amer­i­cans (and Euro­peans) right now, just as it is slip­ping from our mem­o­ries. I was not try­ing to pro­voke one more fruit­less series of con­ver­sa­tions about com­pa­ra­bil­i­ty. I was try­ing to help Amer­i­cans who were gen­er­al­ly either shocked (peo­ple who vot­ed against Trump) or sur­prised (peo­ple who vot­ed for him, who gen­er­al­ly thought he would lose) find their bear­ings in a new sit­u­a­tion. The temp­ta­tion in a new sit­u­a­tion is to imag­ine that noth­ing has changed. That is a choice that has polit­i­cal con­se­quences: self-delu­sion leads to half-con­scious antic­i­pa­to­ry obe­di­ence and then to régime change. Any­way, I didn’t actu­al­ly com­pare Trump to Hitler, I didn’t use these two names. What I did was to write a very short his­to­ry of the rise of Adolf Hitler to pow­er with­out using his name, which might allow Amer­i­cans to rec­og­nize cer­tain sim­i­lar­i­ties to the moment they them­selves were liv­ing through. I know that these com­par­isons are a nation­al taboo in Ger­many, but at the moment its rather impor­tant that Ger­mans be gen­er­ous with their his­to­ry and help oth­ers to learn how republics col­lapse. Most Amer­i­cans are excep­tion­al­ists, we think we live out­side of his­to­ry. Amer­i­cans tend to think: ​“We have free­dom because we love free­dom, we love free­dom because we are free.” It is a bit cir­cu­lar and doesn’t acknowl­edge the his­tor­i­cal struc­tures that can favor or weak­en demo­c­ra­t­ic republics. We don’t real­ize how sim­i­lar our predica­ments are to those of oth­er people.

You use the Weimar Repub­lic as a warn­ing example.

I want­ed to remind my fel­low Amer­i­cans that intel­li­gent peo­ple, not so dif­fer­ent from our­selves, have expe­ri­enced the col­lapse of a repub­lic before. It is one exam­ple among many. Republics, like oth­er forms of gov­ern­ment, exist in his­to­ry and can rise and fall. The Amer­i­can Found­ing Fathers knew this, which is why there were obsessed with the his­to­ry of clas­si­cal republics and their decline into oli­garchy and empire. We seem to have lost that tra­di­tion of learn­ing from oth­ers, and we need it back. A quar­ter cen­tu­ry ago, after the col­lapse of com­mu­nism, we declared that his­to­ry was over — and in an amaz­ing way we for­got every­thing we once knew about com­mu­nism, fas­cism and Nation­al Social­ism. In this lit­tle arti­cle for Slate, I was try­ing to remind us about things that we once knew.

How sim­i­lar is the sit­u­a­tion between Ger­many of the 1930 s and today’s Unit­ed States?

Of course, not every­thing is sim­i­lar. Some things are bet­ter now than they were in the 1930s but some things are worse. The media is worse, I would say. It is very polar­ized and it is very con­cen­trat­ed. In Ger­many before the state shut down Ger­man news­pa­pers, there was authen­tic vari­ety that we don’t have now. Peo­ple in the 1930s gen­er­al­ly had longer atten­tion spans than we do. On the oth­er side, the Unit­ed States is a larg­er coun­try, with pock­ets of wealth dis­trib­uted wide­ly, and it is more con­nect­ed to the world. The main advan­tage that we have is that we can learn from the 1930s. Again, it’s very impor­tant to stress that his­to­ry does not repeat. But it does offer us exam­ples and pat­terns, and there­by enlarges our imag­i­na­tions and cre­ates more pos­si­bil­i­ties for antic­i­pa­tion and resistance.

When did you real­ize this lack of knowl­edge about 20 th cen­tu­ry his­to­ry here in the Unit­ed States?

I got an ear­ly hint of that when I was tour­ing the Unit­ed States for my book Blood­lands: Europe Between Hitler and Stal­in. This was in 2011 and I real­ized that Amer­i­cans had real­ly for­got­ten about the crimes of Stal­in — which is strange because we were edu­cat­ed, dur­ing the Cold War about Stal­in­ist ter­ror. I thought that Amer­i­cans would be sur­prised because I was say­ing that num­ber of Sovi­et cit­i­zens killed (although still hor­ri­fy­ing­ly large) was much small­er than we had been taught. Instead I real­ized that Amer­i­cans had sim­ply for­got­ten that there was Stal­in­ism and ter­ror. That struck me: What else could we for­get? The idea of the Holo­caust is cer­tain­ly present, but it is almost total­ly lack­ing in con­text. And with­out con­text it is hard to see resem­blance. A Holo­caust that is reduced to a few images or facts can­not teach about larg­er pat­terns. And Amer­i­cans risk of stress­ing its unique­ness is that it allows peo­ple to dis­miss any learn­ing from his­to­ry. Peo­ple will ask: Is he wear­ing a Hak­enkreuz, did he kill six mil­lion Jews? if the answer is in the neg­a­tive, then they will reply: then his­to­ry has noth­ing to do with the present. Over the last 25 years, we have not only for­got­ten much of what we once knew but we have raised a whole gen­er­a­tion which doesn’t have these ref­er­ence points.

You would argue that this knowl­edge had exist­ed before but it was forgotten.

Schol­ars knew much more know about the 1930s — whether we are speak­ing of Nation­al Social­ism, fas­cism, or Stal­in­ism. But publics are much less inter­est­ed. And we lack, for what­ev­er rea­son, the con­cepts that we used to have that allowed us to con­nect ideas and polit­i­cal process­es. When an Amer­i­can pres­i­dent says ​“Amer­i­ca First” or pro­pos­es a polit­i­cal sys­tem with­out the two par­ties or attacks jour­nal­ists or denies the exis­tence of facts, that should set of a series of asso­ci­a­tions with oth­er polit­i­cal sys­tems. We need peo­ple who can help trans­late ide­o­log­i­cal utter­ances into polit­i­cal warn­ings. Thinkers of the mid­dle of twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry are now being read again, and for good rea­son. The Amer­i­can canon includ­ed native and refugee ex-com­mu­nists who came to this coun­try of the 1930s, refugees from fas­cism and Nation­al Social­ism in the 40s, and the Cold War lib­er­als of the 1950s. There was this time where we engaged in polit­i­cal the­o­ry and his­to­ry, where peo­ple thought about what fas­cism and com­mu­nism meant for democ­ra­cy. Now, one rea­son why we can­not for­get the 1930s is that the pres­i­den­tial admin­is­tra­tion is clear­ly think­ing about them — but in a pos­i­tive sense. They seem to be after a kind of redo of the 1930s with Roo­sevelt where the Amer­i­cans take a dif­fer­ent course, where we don’t build a wel­fare state and don’t inter­vene in Europe to stop fas­cism. Lind­bergh instead of FDR. That is their notion. Some­thing went wrong with Roo­sevelt and now they want to go back and reverse it.

Pres­i­dent Trump’s polit­i­cal strate­gist, Steve Ban­non, has said that he wants to ​ “ make life as excit­ing as it was in the 1930 s.“ The first two weeks have shown how big his influ­ence is, it seems much big­ger than Reince Priebus’s or Jared Kushner’s.

I can’t speak to intra-White House con­flicts. I can only say that Mr. Trump’s inau­gur­al address was extreme­ly ide­o­log­i­cal. Dur­ing the cam­paign he used the slo­gan ​“Amer­i­ca First” and then was informed that this was the name of a move­ment that tried to pre­vent the Unit­ed States from fight­ing Nazi Ger­many and was asso­ci­at­ed with nativists and white suprema­cists. He claimed then not to have known that. But in the inau­gur­al address he made ​“Amer­i­ca First” his cen­tral them, and now he can’t say that he doesn’t know what it means. And of course Ban­non knows what it means. Amer­i­ca First is pre­cise­ly the con­ju­ra­tion of this alter­na­tive Amer­i­ca of the 1930s where Charles Lind­bergh is the hero. This inau­gur­al address reeked of the 1930s.

When Ban­non calls him­self a ​ “ Lenin­ist,” do Amer­i­cans know what is he talk­ing about?

No, they usu­al­ly have no idea. It is a good ques­tion. Amer­i­cans have this idea that comes from Jef­fer­son and the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion that you have to rebel every so often. And they some­times don’t make the dis­tinc­tion between a rebel­lion against injus­tice and the extinc­tion of the whole polit­i­cal sys­tem, which is what Ban­non says that he is after. The Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion actu­al­ly pre­served ideas from Britain: the rule of law being the most impor­tant. The whole jus­ti­fi­ca­tion of the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion was that the British were not liv­ing up to their own prin­ci­ples, were not includ­ing Amer­i­cans in their own sys­tem. In a broad way that was also the argu­ment of the civ­il rights move­ment: the sys­tem fails itself when it does not extend equal rights to all cit­i­zens. So there can be resis­tance and even rev­o­lu­tion which is about meet­ing stan­dards rather than about sim­ple destruc­tion. What Ban­non says cor­rect­ly about the Bol­she­viks was that they aimed to com­plete­ly destroy an old régime. We can slip from one to the oth­er very eas­i­ly, from rebel­lious­ness to a com­plete nega­tion of the sys­tem. Most Amer­i­cans had a rule of law state for most of their lives, African Amer­i­cans are an excep­tion, and so most Amer­i­cans think this will be there for­ev­er. They don’t get that a ​“dis­rup­tion” can actu­al­ly destroy much of what they take for grant­ed. They have no notion what it means to destroy the state and how their lives would look like if the rule of law would no longer exist. I find it fright­en­ing that peo­ple who talk about the destruc­tion of the Amer­i­can state are now in charge of the Amer­i­can state.

Trump put a por­trait of Andrew Jack­son on the wall of the Oval Office, anoth­er pres­i­dent that was a pop­ulist. But peo­ple around him seem to have a wider agenda.

In the same inter­view with the Hol­ly­wood Reporter in which Ban­non talks about the ​“excit­ing 1930s,” he talks about how he is oper­at­ing in the dark­ness. He com­pares him­self with Satan and Darth Vad­er and says in essence that he mis­leads the pub­lic and the media deliberately.

The White House state­ment for the Holo­caust Day on Jan­u­ary 27 didn’t men­tion Jews. At first it looked like a mis­take, but now it is offi­cial that it was intentional.

The Holo­caust ref­er­ence is very impor­tant on our side of the Atlantic. If Amer­i­cans have a ref­er­ence point in world his­to­ry, it is pre­cise­ly the Holo­caust, the Holo­caust and let’s say Nor­mandy, the Sec­ond World War, are the one aper­ture into a broad­er his­to­ry, one where republics fall and extremes tri­umph. So if Steve Ban­non turns the Holo­caust into talk about ​“a lot of peo­ple have suf­fered” what is hap­pen­ing is that he is clos­ing that aper­ture. The next step is to say that main­ly Amer­i­cans are the vic­tims. His­to­ry then dies com­plete­ly and we are trapped in myth.

Which are the dif­fer­ences in how Ger­mans and Amer­i­cans remem­ber the Holocaust?

Let me answer this in a dif­fer­ent way. Nor­mal­ly when I speak to Ger­man jour­nal­ists, I try to empha­size parts of the his­to­ry of the Holo­caust that Ger­mans over­look or min­i­mize, and how those can allow Ger­mans to over­look cer­tain kinds of his­tor­i­cal respon­si­bil­i­ty or draw lessons that are too nar­row. In the Unit­ed States it is obvi­ous­ly very dif­fer­ent. It is not a mat­ter of tak­ing a debate about nation­al respon­si­bil­i­ty and try to make it broad­er by mak­ing it more inclu­sive of what we know about the his­tor­i­cal Holo­caust. It is rather a mat­ter of how a dis­tant non-Ger­man nation can try to see pat­terns, analo­gies, polit­i­cal lessons. And right now the com­par­i­son we need to pon­der is between the treat­ment of Mus­lims and the treat­ment of Jews. It is obvi­ous­ly the case that the point of the Mus­lim ban is to instruct Amer­i­cans that Mus­lims are an ene­my: a small, well-assim­i­lat­ed minor­i­ty that we are sup­posed to see not as our neigh­bors or as fel­low cit­i­zens but as ele­ments of an inter­na­tion­al threat. More than that, Trump’s pol­i­cy is a provo­ca­tion, which is prob­a­bly meant to pro­voke an event like the assas­si­na­tion of the Ger­man diplo­mat Ernst Eduard vom Rath on Novem­ber 7, 1938.

When Ban­non calls the press the main ​“oppo­si­tion par­ty“ that should make every­one con­cerned. This is not only intend­ed to cheer up Trump supporters.

When you say that the press is the oppo­si­tion, than you are advo­cat­ing a régime change in the Unit­ed States. When I am a Repub­li­can and say the Democ­rats are the oppo­si­tion, we talk about our sys­tem. If I say the gov­ern­ment is one par­ty and the press is the oppo­si­tion, then I talk about an author­i­tar­i­an state. This is régime change.

Last week Trump called those who take part in demon­stra­tions ​ “ thugs” and ​ “ paid pro­tes­tors.” This doesn’t show respect for First Amend­ment rights, it sounds more like Putin.

That is exact­ly what the Russ­ian lead­er­ship does. The idea is to mar­gin­al­ize the peo­ple who actu­al­ly rep­re­sent the core val­ues of the Repub­lic. The point is to bring down the Repub­lic. You can dis­agree with them, but once you say they have no right to protest or start lying about them, you are in effect say­ing: ​“We want a régime where this is not pos­si­ble any­more.“ When the pres­i­dent says that it means that the exec­u­tive branch is engaged in régime change towards an author­i­tar­i­an régime with­out the rule of law. You are get­ting peo­ple used to this tran­si­tion, you are invit­ing them into the process by ask­ing them to have con­tempt for their fel­low cit­i­zens who are defend­ing the Repub­lic. You are also seduc­ing peo­ple into a world of per­ma­nent Inter­net lying and way from their own expe­ri­ences with oth­er peo­ple. Get­ting out to protest, this is some­thing real and I would say some­thing patri­ot­ic. Part of the new author­i­tar­i­an­ism is to get peo­ple to pre­fer fic­tion and inac­tion to real­i­ty and action. Peo­ple sit in their chairs, read the tweet and repeat the clichés: ​“Yes, they are thugs” instead of ​“it is nor­mal to get out in the streets for what you believe.” He is try­ing to teach peo­ple a new behav­ior: You just sit right where you are, read what I say and nod your head. That is the psy­chol­o­gy of régime change.

Today’s media envi­ron­ment is very dif­fer­ent from the 1930 s, every­thing hap­pens so fast.

This is part of what con­tem­po­rary author­i­tar­i­ans do: They over­whelm you with bad news and try to make you depressed and say with res­ig­na­tion: ​“Well, what can I do?” I think it is bet­ter to lim­it your­self. Read the news for half an hour a day, but don’t spend the whole day obsess­ing about it. Amer­i­cans have to pick one thing to be con­fi­dent about, and then act on it. If you care about and know about refugees, the press, glob­al warm­ing — choose one and talk with peo­ple around you about it. Nobody can do every­thing but every­one can do a lit­tle bit. And peo­ple doing their lit­tle bit will meet oth­ers doing the same, and the depres­sion lifts.

You post­ed ​ “ 20 Lessons from the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry“ on your Face­book page in Novem­ber. Did your stu­dents here at Yale ask for advice?

No, that wasn’t it. It was unprompt­ed, I was in Scan­di­navia dur­ing the elec­tion. I thought Trump would lose, that it would be close but he would lose. On the plane on the way back I start­ed think­ing about what we could learn from his­to­ry. When I had writ­ten about Trump ear­li­er in 2016, it was about his con­nec­tions to Rus­sia. The 20 lessons was the first attempt to bring some­thing I under­stand about Euro­pean his­to­ry to my fel­low Amer­i­cans in a way that is polit­i­cal­ly salient. I don’t usu­al­ly write direct­ly about Amer­i­can pol­i­tics; I am an Amer­i­can but inso­far as I have some­thing to offer it is rather because I know some­thing about con­tem­po­rary and his­tor­i­cal East­ern and Cen­tral Europe. Nobody asked me, but this was a way for me to start act­ing. We have to do some­thing. This is what I can do.

“ Do not obey in advance“ is the first rec­om­men­da­tion in this Face­book post. You also ref­er­ence the ​ “ Reich­stags­brand“ as a warn­ing sign. How should the Amer­i­can pub­lic react?

Amer­i­cans love to use the word ​“play­book,” which is a metaphor from sports. There is a play­book from the 1930s that some peo­ple in the pres­i­den­tial admin­is­tra­tion are fol­low­ing. This includes pick­ing a minor­i­ty in your coun­try, asso­ciate it with a glob­al threat and use the notion of a glob­al strug­gle as a way to cre­ate nation­al sol­i­dar­i­ty while neglect­ing the nation’s actu­al prob­lems. The Reich­stag Fire is the cru­cial moment when Hitler’s gov­ern­ment becomes a Nazi régime. An event of that type, whether unex­pect­ed, pro­voked, or planned by the gov­ern­ment, can be a turn­ing point in the Unit­ed States today. This goes back to the begin­ning of our con­ver­sa­tion: If we think about the 1930s, then we can be aware of events, and of cer­tain forks in the road. If a ter­ror attack hap­pens in the Unit­ed States, that is sim­ply the Trump admin­is­tra­tion fail­ing to keep its most basic promise. It is not a rea­son to sus­pend the rights of Amer­i­cans or declare, have a state of emer­gency. His­to­ry teach­es us the tricks of author­i­tar­i­ans. We can’t allow our­selves to fall for them.

There were a lot of demon­stra­tions in hun­dreds of cities, but the opin­ion of Trump sup­port­ers has­n’t changed. They are not moved by the huge crowds. Would this be too ear­ly to expect?

These are two dif­fer­ent things. With some­thing like the Mus­lim ban, it is impor­tant a lot of peo­ple react very quick­ly because if the gov­ern­ment can slice off one group, it can do the same to oth­ers. This is a polit­i­cal log­ic that requires quick action rather than wait­ing for pub­lic opin­ion polls. Amer­i­cans were actu­al­ly bet­ter than Ger­mans, they got out right away. Some Amer­i­cans do seem [to] under­stand the log­ic, they move quick­ly. So the air­port protests are not in the first instance about com­mu­ni­cat­ing with the Trump sup­port­ers; they [are] about mak­ing clear to the admin­is­tra­tion that we rec­og­nize what you are doing and that we oppose this log­ic. Indi­rect­ly, the protests com­mu­ni­cate to the major­i­ty that there are two sides to the issue, and that they should think for them­selves. Com­mu­ni­cat­ing with Trump sup­port­ers is dif­fer­ent. You have to have peo­ple out, wav­ing flags and describ­ing them­selves as patri­ots, even as they decry and resist par­tic­u­lar poli­cies. It is impor­tant for peo­ple to con­sid­er that author­i­tar­i­an­ism, though it claims all the nation­al sym­bols, is not patri­o­tism. Over time, protests that are for a bet­ter Amer­i­ca are impor­tant to change minds and swing over Repub­li­cans — and I should say that I have already seen a num­ber of Repub­li­cans whom I know per­son­al­ly in the protests. It needs time, this is more about six months or one year. They just elect­ed him three months ago, for now there is still the frame in place that that he will change every­thing and improve their lives, oth­er things can seem like details so long as this basic hope remains. It might take a while for peo­ple to real­ize that mak­ing Amer­i­ca into a Trump fam­i­ly wel­fare state is not in the inter­est of Amer­i­cans whose name is not Trump. One of the main prob­lems is the Inter­net and the polar­iza­tion and sim­ple unre­al­i­ty that it gen­er­ates. It is impor­tant to talk about these issues in per­son. I have a lit­tle book called On Tyran­ny and I will do my best to talk about it with peo­ple who think in var­i­ous ways about politics.

We are here in New Haven, a lib­er­al bub­ble. Do you encour­age your stu­dents to do that?

They are doing it. An under­grad­u­ate who is from New York took the train all the way to the south­west, just to talk to pas­sen­gers. Young peo­ple have to do that. The risk is that they shift from tak­ing free­dom for grant­ed to tak­ing unfree­dom for grant­ed, with­out real­iz­ing that it is pre­cise­ly their choice and their voice that can make the dif­fer­ence. And keep in mind that these con­ver­sa­tions can cre­ate com­mon ground. Some of the rea­sons some peo­ple vot­ed for Trump make sense. You sim­ply dis­miss all of them accord­ing to your own stereo­types. It is not always as sim­ple as the East Coast peo­ple will tell you. Trump has unleashed pub­lic racism of a kind we have not seen for decades. That is true. This racism in turn releas­es ener­gies that can change the whole sys­tem. Also true. But at the same time, he would not be pres­i­dent with­out white peo­ple in cru­cial states who vot­ed for Oba­ma twice. So you can’t sim­ply dis­miss all of these peo­ple as racists, because in some cas­es their votes also brought us our first black pres­i­dent. A lot of Trump vot­ers would have vot­ed for Bernie Sanders, who is a Jew­ish social­ist. There are prob­lems and that have to do with glob­al­iza­tion and inequal­i­ty that can’t be wished away. Maybe not every cit­i­zen can artic­u­late these prob­lems in the best way, but many vot­ers have good rea­sons to be wor­ried about glob­al­iza­tion. Hillary Clin­ton did have actu­al poli­cies that would have helped — that’s the tragedy. But she wasn’t able to com­mu­ni­cate that she under­stood the problem.

On Face­book there are a lot of count­downs: 3 years, 11 months, 1 week until Pres­i­dent Trump’s first term is over. How is your mood, do you see hope?

The march­es were very encour­ag­ing. These were quite pos­si­bly the largest demon­stra­tions in the his­to­ry of the Unit­ed States, just in sheer num­bers on one sin­gle day. That sort of ini­tia­tive has to con­tin­ue. The Con­sti­tu­tion is worth sav­ing, the rule of law is worth sav­ing, democ­ra­cy is worth sav­ing, but these things can and will be lost if every­one waits around for some­one else. If we want encour­age­ment out of the Oval Office, we will not get it. We are not get­ting encour­age­ment thus far from Repub­li­cans. They have good rea­sons to defend the repub­lic but thus far they are not doing so, with a few excep­tions. You want to end on a pos­i­tive note, I know; but I think things have tight­ened up very fast, we have at most a year to defend the Repub­lic, per­haps less. What hap­pens in the next few weeks is very important.