Timothy Snyder (Yale professor) has written two books that not only demonstrate—with exhaustive annotation—the intricate links between Russian and American oligarchs and autocratic fascism, but make pertinent observations about how to respond in a way that can retain and build up democratic institutions.
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America.
In this crazy year, these books remain remarkably pertinent in a summer of pandemic, economic meltdown, and long-delayed social turmoil over profound, historic racial injustice.
I will be interested to read his upcoming book Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary (to be published September 2020). Snyder fell ill on December 29, 2019; he did not have COVID 19. Yet his experience led him to reflect on how American health care is part and parcel of an evolving tyranny of "who deserves and who doesn't." The current pandemic and consequent economic collapse seems to have been precisely aimed at the pretentions of the politics of inevitability and the politics of eternity (his terms). Facts come back to bite, as authoritarian fascists are discovering, from Putin to Trump to Bolsonaro to Xi Jinping. Will the world be able to respond in a manner than builds up healthy, human freedom, and economic and racial justice?