It is, finally, embarrassing.Īs I say, the title The Road to Unfreedom is an awkward one, not only because Prof. It is tediously repetitious and tendentious. Snyder’s method is argument by assertion (a logical fallacy) and guilt by association (another), with a heavy dose of unsubstantiated innuendo. It ends up being a slightly (ever so slightly) more sophisticated version of what one gets every day from one’s disgruntled leftist friends: Donald Trump colluded with the Russians and stole the election! He is destroying American democracy! Prof. His clunky title, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, should be The Russian Road to Trumpian Tyranny, for that is the true thesis of the book. Snyder has an immediate political goal in narrating this history. Thus far, it is a valuable book by an expert in the field. Putin’s disinformation campaign that covered over his invasion of the Ukraine in 2014 is particularly alarming. Putin’s campaign to demonize the west and sacralize his vicious, self-serving regime. Snyder describes in great detail, year by year, Mr. Putin’s strategy is to undermine Europe and America, making them out to be the enemy of the Russian people and their culture. Putin has been systematically building just such a state. Snyder argues, with much supporting evidence, that Mr. He became a proponent of fascism and Nazism, envisioning a Russian fascist state with a totalitarian ruler.

Putin, we learn from Professor Snyder, was influenced by a Russian writer named Ivan Ilyin who, after the Bolshevik Revolution, became a counter-revolutionary, was exiled, and lived in Germany and Switzerland.

The author, a professor of history at Yale, is an expert in recent Russian history, and most of the book is a riveting description of the ways in which Vladimir Putin has manipulated the minds of his people to get them to accept and support his kleptocratic government and his expansionist ambitions. I found it extremely interesting and informative. Finally a colleague, an emeritus professor of history, recommended this book to me. I have been asking my liberal and progressive friends for some time to recommend to me a book of political philosophy that argues for their ideas, but I have not gotten a single recommendation and was beginning to wonder whether all those intelligent and highly-educated people were reading anything more serious and thoughtful than the latest screed by Paul Krugman in the New York Times. The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, by Timothy Snyder (353 pages, Tim Duggan Books, 2018)

In “The Road to Unfreedom,” Timothy Snyder speaks for them in bemoaning the fact that the founders created not a direct democracy but a republic. After the shock of the 2016 election, liberals got a civics lesson on the electoral college established by the Constitution, and they didn’t like it.

The road to unfreedom amazon