{"id":83,"date":"2025-01-12T20:58:51","date_gmt":"2025-01-12T20:58:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theimbroglio.com\/blog\/?p=83"},"modified":"2025-01-12T20:58:51","modified_gmt":"2025-01-12T20:58:51","slug":"timothy-snyder-is-a-national-treasure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theimbroglio.com\/blog\/timothy-snyder-is-a-national-treasure\/","title":{"rendered":"Timothy Snyder is a national treasure"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you aren\u2019t familiar with Timothy Snyder<\/a>, now is the time to get to know him. He is a history professor at Yale but \u00a0probably most famous as the author of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century<\/em><\/a> and On<\/em> Freedom<\/em><\/a> (which astoundingly, does not seem to have a Wikipedia entry!?). \u00a0The first of the 20 lessons<\/a> in\u00a0On<\/em>\u00a0Tyranny<\/em> is \u201cDo not obey in advance,\u201d which we can see the oligarchs and \u00a0companies are already violating by giving millions<\/a> to the Trump \u201cinauguration\u201d fund. As John Gruber noted<\/a> on Daring Fireball<\/em>, most of these companies either gave much less or nothing at all to Biden\u2019s inauguration 4 years ago. \"On<\/a><\/p>\n

Back to Snyder, who is one of (if not the)<\/em>\u00a0most brilliant and incisive of the public intellectuals in the \u201cresistance\u201d we are going to need if the U.S. is going to make it through the next four years. For evidence, look no further than his recent proposal<\/a> that the Democrats form an official \u201cshadow cabinet\u201d to stand in public and ongoing opposition to all of the madness that\u2019s about to descend upon us. I won\u2019t try to explain what he means by this; you should read it yourself<\/a>, as well as his followup post<\/a> digging a little deeper into how the \u201cshadow\u201d or \u201cpeople\u2019s\u201d cabinet might work. It\u2019s not just a brilliant idea, it may be the best idea I\u2019ve heard since the election on how the opposition should move forward.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve cut way back on my news and politics consumption since the election in November and I\u2019m far happier not to be following every development second-by-second as I was before then. Again, Gruber has explained this<\/a> better than I ever could:<\/p>\n

\n

\u00a0My take on Trump post-election has been to stop paying attention, as best I can, to anything he says. I\u2019m only paying attention to what he does. With any other national leader, there\u2019s a correlation between their words and their eventual actions that makes paying attention to what they say worthwhile. With Trump, there\u2019s almost no correlation, and his endless stream of outrageous proclamations amounts to nothing but a distraction.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

For me, this applies not just to Trump, but to all of the Trump-related sycophants and psychos filling just about every media channel with lies and fantasies, or \u201cflooding the zone with shit,\u201d<\/a> as Steve Bannon so famously put it. \u00a0My wife says this is what Rachel Maddow has been saying for a long time, too \u2014 ignore what they say; pay attention to what they do. It may not be an original or surprising idea, but it\u2019s one that has been helping me stay sane, nonetheless.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Still, Timothy Snyder is someone who cuts through the bullshit and to whom it\u2019s always worth paying attention. His analysis of Trump\u2019s cabinet picks as basically a decaptitation strike<\/a> on the U.S. government seems terrifyingly correct, and his arguments that what we\u2019re facing is a Musk-Trump, or Mump<\/a>, regime also seems spot on. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Snyder writes on Substack and I would recommend you follow him, except Substack sucks and I don\u2019t think anyone should give it a penny. It\u2019s really a shame that Snyder puts his work there because Substack is the sort of enshittified coporate platform that is the antithesis of what he otherwise writes about \u2014 open, democratic systems where all voices are welcome acknowledged, safe, and equal. As to why Substack sucks, you could start with \u201cDon\u2019t call it a Substack\u201d<\/a> by Anil Dash, as well as one of the general critiques<\/a> of its apparent support for nazis<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Nobody\u2019s perfect and I understand how Substack provides a busy person with little or no technical expertise \u2014 someone like Snyder, maybe \u2014 a push-button way to start a blog\/newsletter and reach an audience. Still, there are plenty of alternatives<\/a> and I bet if Snyder asked, he would immediately have hundreds of highly qualified readers ready to help him move to one of them for free. (I\u2019m certianly not qualified, sorry.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

Instead of subscribing to Snyder\u2019s blog via Substack, just subscribe to its RSS feed<\/a> in your favorite RSS reader. I like Reeder Classic, but there are many others<\/a>. \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you aren\u2019t familiar with Timothy Snyder, now is the time to get to know him. He is a history professor at Yale but \u00a0probably most famous as the author of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century and On Freedom (which astoundingly, does not seem to have a Wikipedia entry!?). \u00a0The first of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-83","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theimbroglio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theimbroglio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theimbroglio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theimbroglio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theimbroglio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=83"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.theimbroglio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":84,"href":"https:\/\/www.theimbroglio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83\/revisions\/84"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theimbroglio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theimbroglio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theimbroglio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}