The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America
Americans and Europeans were guided through the new century by a tale
about “the end of history,” by what I will call the politics
of inevitability, a sense that the future is just more of the present,
that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and
therefore nothing really to be done. In the American capitalist version of this
story, nature brought the market, which brought democracy, which brought
happiness. In the European version, history brought the nation, which learned
from war that peace was good, and hence chose integration and prosperity.
Before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, communism had its own
politics of inevitability: nature permits technology; technology brings social
change; social change causes revolution; revolution enacts utopia. When this
turned out not to be true, the European and American politicians of
inevitability were triumphant. Europeans busied themselves completing the
creation of the European Union in 1992. Americans reasoned that the failure of
the communist story confirmed the truth of the capitalist one. Americans and
Europeans kept telling themselves their tales of inevitability for a quarter
century after the end of communism, and so raised a millennial generation
without history.
The American politics of inevitability, like all such stories, resisted
facts. The fates of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus after 1991 showed well enough
that the fall of one system did not create a blank slate on which nature
generated markets and markets generated rights. Iraq in 2003 might have
confirmed this lesson, had the initiators of America’s illegal war reflected
upon its disastrous consequences. The financial crisis of 2008 and the
deregulation of campaign contributions in the United States in 2010 magnified
the influence of the wealthy and reduced that of voters. As economic inequality
grew, time horizons shrank, and fewer Americans believed that the future held a
better version of the present. Lacking a functional state that assured basic
social goods taken for granted elsewhere—education, pensions, health
care, transport, parental leave, vacations—Americans could be overwhelmed by
each day, and lose a sense of the future.
The collapse of the politics of inevitability ushers in another
experience of time: the politics of eternity. Whereas
inevitability promises a better future for everyone, eternity places one nation
at the center of a cyclical story of victimhood. Time is no longer a line into
the future, but a circle that endlessly returns the same threats from the past.
Within inevitability, no one is responsible because we all know that the details
will sort themselves out for the better; within eternity, no one is responsible
because we all know that the enemy is coming no matter what we do. Eternity
politicians spread the conviction that government cannot aid society as a
whole, but can only guard against threats. Progress gives way to doom.
In power, eternity politicians manufacture crisis and manipulate the
resultant emotion. To distract from their inability or unwillingness to reform,
eternity politicians instruct their citizens to experience elation and outrage
at short intervals, drowning the future in the present. In foreign policy,
eternity politicians belittle and undo the achievements of countries that might
seem like models to their own citizens. Using technology to transmit political
fiction, both at home and abroad, eternity politicians deny truth and seek to
reduce life to spectacle and feeling.
Perhaps more was
happening in the 2010s than we grasped. Perhaps the tumbling succession of
moments between the Smolensk crash and the Trump presidency was an era of
transformation that we failed to experience as such. Perhaps we are slipping
from one sense of time to another because we do not see how history makes us,
and how we make history.
Inevitability and eternity translate facts into narratives. Those
swayed by inevitability see every fact as a blip that does not alter the
overall story of progress; those who shift to eternity classify every new event
as just one more instance of a timeless threat. Each masquerades
as history; each does away with history. Inevitability politicians teach that
the specifics of the past are irrelevant, since anything that happens is just
grist for the mill of progress. Eternity politicians leap from one moment to
another, over decades or centuries, to build a myth of innocence and danger.
They imagine cycles of threat in the past, creating an imagined pattern that
they realize in the present by producing artificial crises and daily drama.
Inevitability and eternity have specific propaganda styles. Inevitability
politicians spin facts into a web of well-being. Eternity politicians suppress
facts in order to dismiss the reality that people are freer and richer in other
countries, and the idea that reforms could be formulated on the basis of
knowledge. In the 2010s, much of what was happening was the deliberate creation
of political fiction, outsized stories that commanded attention and colonized
the space needed for contemplation. Yet whatever impression propaganda makes at
the time, it is not history’s final verdict. There is a difference between
memory, the impressions we are given; and history, the connections that we work
to make—if we wish.
This book is an attempt to win back the present for historical time,
and thus to win back historical time for politics. This means trying to
understand one set of interconnected events in our own contemporary world
history, from Russia to the United States, at a time when factuality itself was
put into question. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014 was a reality test for the
European Union and the United States. Many Europeans and Americans found it
easier to follow Russia’s propaganda phantoms than to defend a legal order.
Europeans and Americans wasted time by asking whether an invasion had taken
place, whether Ukraine was a country, and whether it had somehow deserved to be
invaded. This revealed a capacious vulnerability that Russia soon exploited
within the European Union and the United States.
History as a discipline began as a confrontation with war propaganda.
In the first history book, The Peloponnesian Wars,
Thucydides was careful to make a distinction between leaders’ accounts of their
actions and the real reasons for their decisions. In our
time, as rising inequality elevates political fiction, investigative journalism
becomes the more precious. Its renaissance began during the Russian invasion of
Ukraine, as courageous reporters filed stories from dangerous locations. In
Russia and Ukraine, journalistic initiatives clustered around the problems of
kleptocracy and corruption, and then reporters trained in these subjects
covered the war.
What has already
happened in Russia is what might happen in America and Europe: the
stabilization of massive inequality, the displacement of policy by propaganda,
the shift from the politics of inevitability to the politics of eternity.
Russian leaders could invite Europeans and Americans to eternity because Russia
got there first. They understood American and European weaknesses, which they
had first seen and exploited at home.
For many Europeans and Americans, events in the 2010s—the rise of
antidemocratic politics, the Russian turn against Europe and invasion of
Ukraine, the Brexit referendum, the Trump election—came as a surprise.
Americans tend to react to surprise in two ways: either by imagining that the
unexpected event is not really happening, or by claiming that it is totally new
and hence not amenable to historical understanding. Either all will somehow be
well, or all is so ill that nothing can be done. The first response is a
defense mechanism of the politics of inevitability. The second is the creaking
sound that inevitability makes just before it breaks and gives way to eternity.
The politics of inevitability first erodes civic responsibility, and then
collapses into the politics of eternity when it meets a serious challenge.
Americans reacted in these ways when Russia’s candidate became president of the
United States.
In the 1990s and in the 2000s, influence flowed from west to east, in
the transplant of economic and political models, the spread of the English
language, and the enlargement of the European Union and the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO). Meanwhile, unregulated spaces
of American and European capitalism summoned wealthy Russians into a realm
without an east-west geography, that of offshore bank accounts, shell
companies, and anonymous deals, where wealth stolen from the Russian people was
laundered clean. Partly for this reason, in the 2010s influence flowed from
east to west, as the offshore exception became the rule, as Russian political
fiction penetrated beyond Russia. In The Peloponnesian Wars,
Thucydides defined “oligarchy” as rule by the few,
and opposed it to “democracy.” For Aristotle “oligarchy” meant rule by the wealthy few; the word in this sense was revived
in the Russian language in the 1990s, and then, with good reason, in English in
the 2010s.
Concepts and practices moved from east to west. An example is the word
“fake,” as in “fake news.” This sounds like an American invention, and Donald
Trump claimed it as his own; but the term was used in Russia and Ukraine long
before it began its career in the United States. It meant creating a fictional
text that posed as a piece of journalism, both to spread confusion about a
particular event and to discredit journalism as such. Eternity politicians
first spread fake news themselves, then claim that all news is fake, and
finally that only their spectacles are real. The Russian campaign to fill the
international public sphere with fiction began in Ukraine in 2014, and then
spread to the United States in 2015, where it helped to elect a president in
2016. The techniques were everywhere the same, although they grew more
sophisticated over time.
Russia in the 2010s was a kleptocratic regime that sought to export the
politics of eternity: to demolish factuality, to preserve inequality, and to
accelerate similar tendencies in Europe and the United States. This is well
seen from Ukraine, where Russia fought a regular war while it amplified
campaigns to undo the European Union and the United States. The advisor of the
first pro-Russian American presidential candidate had been the advisor of the
last pro-Russian Ukrainian president. Russian tactics that failed in Ukraine
succeeded in the United States. Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs hid their money
in a way that sustained the career of an American presidential
candidate. This is all one history, the history of our moment and our choices.
Can history be so
contemporary? We think of the Peloponnesian Wars as ancient history, since the
Athenians fought the Spartans more than two thousand years ago. Yet their
historian Thucydides was describing events that he experienced. He included
discussions of the past insofar as this was necessary to clarify the stakes in
the present. This work humbly follows that approach.
The Road to Unfreedom
delves into Russian, Ukrainian, European, and American history as necessary to
define the political problems of the present, and to dispel some of the myths
that enshroud them. It draws on primary sources from the countries concerned,
and seeks patterns and concepts that can help us make sense of our own time.
The languages of the sources—Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, German, French, and
English—are tools of scholarship but also fonts of experience. I read and
watched media from Russia, Ukraine, Europe, and the United States during these
years, traveled to many of the places concerned, and could sometimes compare
accounts of events with my own experiences or those of people I knew. Each
chapter focuses upon a particular event and a particular year—the return of
totalitarian thought (2011); the collapse of democratic politics in Russia
(2012); the Russian assault upon the European Union (2013); the revolution in
Ukraine and the subsequent Russian invasion (2014); the spread of political
fiction in Russia, Europe, and America (2015); and the election of Donald Trump
(2016).
By suggesting that political foundations cannot really change, the
politics of inevitability spread uncertainty as to what those foundations
really are. If we think the future is an automatic extension of good political
order, we need not ask what that order is, why it is good, how it is sustained,
and how it might be improved. History is and must be political thought, in the
sense that it opens an aperture between inevitability and eternity, preventing
us from drifting from the one to the other, helping us
see the moment when we might make a difference.
As we emerge from inevitability and contend with eternity, a history of
disintegration can be a guide to repair. Erosion reveals what resists, what can
be reinforced, what can be reconstructed, and what must be reconceived. Because
understanding is empowerment, this book’s chapter titles are framed as
alternatives: Individualism or Totalitarianism; Succession or Failure;
Integration or Empire; Novelty or Eternity; Truth or Lies; Equality or
Oligarchy. Thus individuality, endurance, cooperation, novelty, honesty, and
justice figure as political virtues. These qualities are not mere platitudes or
preferences, but facts of history, no less than material forces might be.
Virtues are inseparable from the institutions they inspire and nourish.
An institution might cultivate certain ideas of the good, and it also
depends upon them. If institutions are to flourish, they need virtues; if
virtues are to be cultivated, they need institutions. The moral question of
what is good and evil in public life can never be separated from the historical
investigation of structure. It is the politics of inevitability and eternity
that make virtues seem irrelevant or even laughable: inevitability by promising
that the good is what already exists and must predictably expand, eternity by
assuring that the evil is always external and that we are forever its innocent
victims.
If we wish to have a better account of good and evil, we will have to
resuscitate history.
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o experience its
destruction is to see a world for the first time. Inheritors of an order we did
not build, we are now witnesses to a decline we did not foresee.
To see our moment is to step away from the stories supplied for our
stupefaction, myths of inevitability and eternity, progress and doom. Life is
elsewhere. Inevitability and eternity are not history but ideas within history,
ways of experiencing our time that accelerate its trends while slowing our
thoughts. To see, we must set aside the dark glass, and see as we are seen,
ideas for what they are, history as what we make.
Virtues arise from the institutions that make them desirable and
possible. As institutions are destroyed, virtues reveal themselves. A history
of loss is thus a proposal for restoration. The virtues of equality,
individuality, succession, integration, novelty, and truth depend each upon all
the others, and all of them upon human decisions and actions. An assault upon
one is an assault upon all; strengthening one means affirming the rest.
Thrown into a world we do not choose, we need
equality so that we learn through failure but without resentment. Only
collective public policy can create citizens with the confidence of
individuals. As individuals we seek to understand what we can and should do
together and apart. We might join in a democracy with others who have voted
before, and will vote after, and in so doing create a principle of succession
and a sense of time. With this assured, we might see our country as one among
others, recognize the necessity of integration, and choose its terms. The
virtues reinforce one another, but not automatically; any harmony demands human
virtuosity, the incessant regulation of the old by the new. Without novelty,
virtues die.
All of the virtues depend upon truth, and truth depends upon them all.
Final truth in this world is unattainable, but its pursuit leads the individual
away from unfreedom. The temptation to believe what feels right assails us at
all times from all directions. Authoritarianism begins when we can no longer
tell the difference between the true and the appealing. At the same time, the
cynic who decides that there is no truth at all is the citizen who welcomes the
tyrant. Total doubt about all authority is naïveté about the particular
authority that reads emotions and breeds cynicism. To seek the truth means
finding a way between conformity and complacency, towards individuality.
If it is true that we are individuals, and if it is true that we live
in a democracy, then each of us should have a single vote, not greater or
lesser power in elections as a result of wealth or race or privilege or
geography. It should be individual human beings who make the decisions, not the
dead souls (as the Russians call cybervotes), not the internet robots, not the
zombies of some tedious eternity. If a vote truly represents a citizen, then
citizens can give time to their state, and the state can give time to citizens.
That is the truth of succession.
That no country stands alone is the truth of integration. Fascism is
the falsehood that the enemy chosen by a leader must be the enemy for all.
Politics then begins from emotion and falsehood. Peace becomes unthinkable,
since enmity abroad is necessary for control at home. A
fascist says “the people” and means “some people,” those he favors at the
moment. If citizens and residents are recognized by law, then other countries
might also be recognized by law. Just as the state requires a principle of
succession to exist over time, it needs some form of integration with others to
exist in space.
If there is no truth, there can be no trust, and nothing new appears in
a human vacuum. Novelty arises within groups, be they entrepreneurs or artists,
activists or musicians; and groups need trust. In conditions of distrust and
isolation, creativity and energy veer towards paranoia and conspiracy, a
feverish repetition of the oldest mistakes. We speak of freedom of association,
but freedom is association: without it we cannot
renew ourselves or challenge our rulers.
The embrace of equality and truth is close and tender. When inequality
is too great, the truth is too much for the miserable, and too little for the
privileged. Communication among citizens depends upon equality. At the same
time, equality cannot be achieved without facts. An individual experience of
inequality might be explained away by some story of inevitability or eternity,
but the collective data of inequality demand policy. If we do not know just how
unequal the distribution of the world’s wealth is, or how much of it is hidden
from the state by the wealthy, we cannot know where to begin.
If we see history as it is, we see our places in it, what we might
change, and how we might do better. We halt our thoughtless journey from inevitability
to eternity, and exit the road to unfreedom. We begin a politics of
responsibility.
To take part in its creation is to see a world for a second time.
Students of the virtues that history reveals, we become the makers of a renewal
that no one can foresee.
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