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.
—Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2018), p. 13.
I’m finding Snyder’s writing a useful way to explain my own observations of Americans seeming to hunker down as if to endure what they see as a passing phenomena they call Trump, as if all that needs to be done is to keep one’s head down and somehow truth in the form of Mueller or the Democratic Party or reason will out.
I wrote the above two years ago, July 25, 2018. Snyder’s insight here remains quite a good one, I think.
