The road to unfreedom is the passage from the politics of inevitability to the politics of eternity.
Americans were vulnerable to the politics of eternity because their own experiences had already weakened inevitability. Trump’s proposal to “make America great again” resonated with people who believed, along with him, that the American dream was dead. Russia had reached the politics of eternity first, and so Russians knew the techniques that would push Americans in the same direction. It is easy to see the appeal of eternity to wealthy and corrupt men in control of a lawless state.
They cannot offer social advance to their population, and so must find some other form of motion in politics. Rather than discuss reforms, eternity politicians designate threats. Rather than presenting a future with possibilities and hopes, they offer an eternal present with defined enemies and artificial crises. For this to work, citizens have to meet eternity politicians halfway. Demoralized by their inability to change their station in life, they must accept that the meaning of politics lies not in institutional reform but in daily emotion. They must stop thinking about a better future for themselves, their friends, and their families, and prefer the constant invocation of a proud past. At the top and throughout society, material inequality creates the experiences and the sentiments that can be transformed into a politics of eternity.
— The Road to Unfreedom (Timothy Snyder), Loc. 3732–42
October 23, 2016 comment:
They must stop thinking about a better future for themselves, their friends, and their families, and prefer the constant invocation of a proud past.
That’s my Russian relatives. On top of that, they don’t care about me or my family. They know we live in Lviv, Ukraine, and they give zero fucks about our wellbeing. Heck, us being alive.
Fuck them. That’s their problems.
In this climate, I cannot care less about fellow Americans too. They chose that fucker, who destroys their state, that’s their problem to deal with that.