Shortly after Donald Trump won the election, Timothy Snyder, a professor of European history at Yale, posted a long note on Facebook that began: “Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.”

Snyder went on to lay out 20 lessons from the 20th century as they apply today. Then the post went viral, and became the basis of his new book On Tyranny.

The central theme was the relationship between truth and tyranny. “You submit to tyranny,” he wrote, “when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case.”

Snyder’s piece speaks directly to our present moment, given our president’s relationship with the truth.

One of the first things Trump did upon taking office was, naturally, to lie about the size of his inaugural crowds. Most recently, he lied about the firing of FBI Director James Comey. As my colleague Matthew Yglesias points out, Trump’s initial rationale for purging Comey was an abject lie and makes no sense given what we’ve since learned.

In this interview, edited for length and clarity, I talk to Snyder about Trump’s increasing indifference to the truth and how it aligns with his post-election concerns about tyranny and fascism. We also discuss the role of truth in a liberal democracy, and why illiberal regimes thrive on confusion and cynicism.

His message is simple: If there is no truth, there are no facts; if there are no facts, there is no rule of law; and if there is no rule of law, you can’t maintain a liberal democracy.

Sean Illing

Your book was in part a response to the incessant lying of Trump throughout the campaign. As the handling of the Comey firing illustrates most recently, the lying has continued. Are you more or less concerned than you were post-election?

Timothy Snyder

The lying is programmatic. It is designed to create the conditions for alternative realities and to train minds to follow changing lines rather than evaluate facts. I'm not more concerned or less concerned. I was very concerned early on and remain so.

Sean Illing

The indispensability of truth to liberal democracy is a recurring theme for you. Why?

Timothy Snyder

I think being skeptical about the existence of truth is the luxury that one can afford when everything else is going well. But when the political system is under threat, it deprives people of goodwill, of the ability to act, because it becomes very difficult to find a way to characterize what the problem is. If you don't have a confident sense that there's truth out there in the world, it becomes very difficult to articulate a threat in terms that aren't just emotional.

Sean Illing

A constitutional republic is more or less premised on the idea that a populace lives in, thinks about, and shares a common reality.

Timothy Snyder

The whole idea of a republic is that the state should belong to the people, that the state is a public good — that's what republic means. That only makes sense if you imagine that politics is basically about thinking about reality. The logic of monarchy is different, the logic of monarchy is that you need some kind of familial or mystical or even divine rationale for holding power. The logic of democracy assumes that people can be educated, and can make choices for themselves about who should represent them. That, too, depends upon the assumption that we can all see and agree upon the facts.

Sean Illing

And what is the logic of fascism? What is the attitude that fascism takes to truth?

Timothy Snyder

What we know is that people who oppose democratic republics do so by taking very different attitudes toward facts and factuality. Fascists tended to say that the whole enlightenment was a mistake, that you needed new forms of irrational politics, such as the idea that nation was made up of a mystical union with a mystical connection to the leader.

In fascists' paradigm, the so-called elites, all the people who try to use reason, they become the unlikable bureaucrats or the unlikable businessmen or whatever it is. The people who are responsible for all these troubles and laws and regulations that somehow separate the lovable people from the lovable leader.

With the Bolsheviks, the idea was that there's only one truth, and that truth is that of the future revolution. Therefore, it doesn't matter what the small facts about the present are, because what we think about the present is only interesting insofar as it moves us toward that larger truth. Then with the contemporary postmodern authoritarianism, or fascism, there's no larger truth and there's not, like in communism, even a claim about how it'd be attractive not to have truth. Under fascism, there's just a kind of device which leads to blunt skepticism and therefore inaction and turpitude.

Sean Illing

And how does that typically work?

Timothy Snyder

The way it works is that you first just lie a lot. You fill up the public space with things that aren't true, as Trump has obviously done. Next you say, "It's not me who lies; it's the crooked journalists. They're the ones who spread the fake news." Then the third step, if this works, is that everybody shrugs their shoulders and says, "Well, we don't really know who to trust; therefor, we'll trust whoever we feel like trusting." In that situation, you can't control political action and authoritarianism wins.

Sean Illing

Is the goal to get people to believe untrue things or to get them to disbelieve in truth as such, which is more pernicious in my mind.

Timothy Snyder

I don't think you have to choose. The mechanism by which you dissolve people's certainty about truth is that you get them to believe lots of untrue things. The final goal is total cynicism. One of the reasons that's available is that so many people on the left are also skeptical about truth, and also vulnerable to narratives where everything is explained by something very simple, or by conspiracy or whatever. There is stuff out there in the zeitgeist that this appeals to.

So even people who feel like they want to resist have a certain amount of trouble because in Trump, they hear a kind of distant echo of things they once might have heard in a lecture hall, and they're not really sure what to think about the establishment or democracy or political elites.

Sean Illing

Whatever becomes of his presidency, Trump has already exposed how unimportant the truth is. It’s hard to know what kind of lasting damage that will do.

Timothy Snyder

It's awful, but it's not unprecedentedly awful. I think the real question is not whether it's possible that we move past this but rather what will constitute a turning point. If you want a reality-based society today with excellent press and with pretty rational public discussions, look at Germany. But if you look at Germany circa 1937, you see the opposite. The problem there is not that it's impossible; the problem is that they had to be utterly defeated in the worst war in the history of the world, and then occupied by both the Soviet Union and the United States in between. The question is, can you escape periods of mass hysteria without paying that kind of price?

Sean Illing

Right, and obviously this isn’t Germany circa 1937, so it’s not as though we’ve crossed the Rubicon just yet.

Timothy Snyder

I can see all kinds of little things that people are doing, that actually have significance in the other direction. Some of the newspapers are fighting hard, and you see that at least some young people realize that engagement is the only path to change. So there are countervailing tendencies, but I guess what I worry about is whether we have to get hit with something really hard before we realize that something's gone wrong. It's hard to imagine exactly what that would be. You don't wish that upon anyone.

Sean Illing

Are there historical examples of societies that fell into fascism or some other form of unreality and managed to escape without a painful transition or a violent shock of some kind?

Timothy Snyder

I guess the thing I would stress is that it is really worth fighting now because we're not as far gone as other 21st-century places are. The example I have in my mind is Russia, where it's very difficult to get out from under the dominant discourse of Putin-style fascism. There are smart people who do it, there are some good newspapers, and hearteningly the very youngest generation is, I think, maybe the first post-internet generation in the world, and they've proven to be quite savvy.

We haven't gotten that far yet, so in a way the important thing now is let's support the newspapers, let's support the people who are putting their hearts in defending what's actually factual and reminding us in one way or another there are things that are true.

But your point's well taken — often some kind of a shock is needed. Maybe that shock turns out to be that a majority of people come to understand that Trump's campaign for president of the United States was basically a Russian operation. Breitbart.com isn’t going to swing, but maybe Fox News does, even if it’s just a little, and if it did, that would constitute a shock.

Frankly, we're in uncharted waters here. A lot of people believed in Trump because of his charisma and the simplicity of his promises and because, in many cases, they were facing real problems. What they believed in, unfortunately, has zero substance. It's very hard for people to recognize that. It's much easier for people to be fooled than it is for people to be unfooled.

Getting people out of a con takes a really long time, and I'm just not sure how that's going to work.

Sean Illing

I suppose the question is, when people realize that they’ve been conned, will they snap out of their stupor or will they become more resentful, more frustrated, and more vulnerable to demagogues like Trump? I don’t know the answer.

Timothy Snyder

Nobody does. I think a lot of smart people thought that Trump was going to lose, but that he was paving the way for something worse. I think a lot of this depends upon whether the country's able to address some of the deeper problems. People are vulnerable to Trump's shortcuts to the American dream because they've stopped believing in the American dream, and that has a lot to do with bad policy.

People are vulnerable to fake news in part because they don't have local news, which means the things they think about are not things they have personal contact with. That's something that perhaps can be addressed consciously. What just happened is that people moved from their own houses to the wider world of the internet with less and less mediation. These are problems which make it possible for someone else like Trump to pop up. They're also problems that can be addressed.

Sean Illing

As a historian, what have you noticed in terms of the conditions — economic, political, social — that tend to precede a climate like this, where passions overwhelm reason and truth?

Timothy Snyder

What I would suggest is that people are vulnerable to these kinds of shortcuts when the physical, three-dimensional reality around them doesn't offer immediate opportunities. That may or may not mean that the whole economy is tanking, or that some other conventional metric is declining. I think part of the problem with the Democrats is that they tend to look at the overall average and assume things are going well. But if you get down to the right fractal level, then in many parts of the country they're not. I think those people were intellectually vulnerable.

Sean Illing

Maybe now is a good time to circle back to the original theme of truth and democracy. Do you think a constitutional democracy, however imperfect, is possible at all without a shared conception of truth?

Timothy Snyder

That's a great question. I think they work together. Part of the problem with our country is that we're not really a democracy. We've reached this stage where people are asking, "Oh, is democracy dead?" Well, it is if we kill it. Or young people are disillusioned with democracy and I think to myself, "How?" You haven't fought yourselves out of democracy yet; you don't have one yet. It's a little premature to be disillusioned.

Why I say they go together is that if you have this tremendous degree of wealth concentration, then that's going to impact information flows. If the main sources of information are highly concentrated, or there are two or three major broadcast companies, that's obviously going to impact the way that information is communicated. I'm no expert, but that seems pretty straightforward.

If people are poorly educated, if the state keeps pulling back from its role in educating people, there are less and less people to filter and make decisions for themselves.