It's not us — it's them. Why it's time to end the affair with the U.S.

Ideas53:58Why this Yale professor warns it's time to end the affair with the U.S.

It has to be done. It's time to break up with America: "You have to see the catastrophe for what it is," said intellectual historian Marci Shore.

She wouldn't normally give the world relationship advice but she feels an urgent need to send a clear message.

"This is the end of the affair."

Shore, a professor of history at Yale University who will be teaching at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy this fall, has been studying the history of totalitarianism for nearly 30 years. She blames the U.S. for the failed romance. 

To put it simply, it's not us — it's them, she said. 

"You cannot trust this government. You cannot trust the United States. Don't think you can finesse the situation you are dealing with, you're looking into an abyss," she said in a lecture delivered at the Toronto Metropolitan University in April, as part of its International Issues Discussion series.

Shore says it's "wrenching" that she can no longer rely on her country to defend democracy. As a scholar who has studied the arc of fascism in Eastern Europe, she saw the red flags waving well ahead of many others.

"If I panicked sooner than most other Americans, it's not because I was any smarter, but because I had been watching what was going on in Russia and Ukraine," she said.

Shore and her husband, Timothy Snyder, are two of three prominent Yale scholars who recently accepted teaching posts at the University of Toronto. While the offer was on the table before the U.S. election, Shore says the re-election of Donald Trump tipped the scales.

IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed spoke to Marci Shore about her talk.

Here is an excerpt from their conversation.

You often make references to words from the Russian language to help us understand what is going on in this moment. In your speech, you referred to the Slavic word for 'laying bare.' What's the word?

Obnazhaya. It's the idea that there's no attempt to cover up wrongdoing anymore. A recent example, I guess, might be President Trump accepting a luxury jet from Qatar. So you'd expect this kind of blatant disregard for accepted norms would cause outrage. Why doesn't it? That's one of the curious phenomenon.

Obnazhaya is a word ... used to describe the esthetic methods of the avant-garde, that you lay bare the device. You show people what you're doing. And it then became a kind of theme of the political technologists, the postmodern spin doctors, who bring Putin to power.

What is remarkable about our system is that nothing is hidden. All of the ugliness is right there, not disguised by any architectural excesses. And that's the whole strategy. There's something disempowering about it.

Another example of 'laying bare' could be the extraordinary moment that we saw in the Oval Office, where Ukrainian President [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy is basically being admonished publicly by JD Vance and Donald Trump. What new insight, if any, did you glean about the moment that we're in? 

That was one of the most revolting things I've ever seen on television. I think it affected me very viscerally on a couple different levels. I would point to at least three things.

One is as a historian of Stalinism, that motif of you must say "thank you," you have to say "thank you." This is, first of all, what the abusive husband says to his wife. This is also what the people being interrogated by the Stalinist secret police hear from their interrogators. This is what the victims of the show trials are made to [do]. You thank the party for giving you your just punishment.

In fact, [former Polish president] Lech Wałęsa and a whole collection of former Polish political prisoners, including several people I know well and who sat in prison in communist Poland, wrote a letter saying, this is how our secret police interrogator spoke to us...

Then the second thing was — you're not holding any cards — which was just a 'laying bare' of the fact that everything is transactional, everything is a game. Zelenskyy's response was perfect — we're not playing cards — because for him it was not a game, for him he's responsible for the lives of these millions of people.

[IMAGE

But then I think what really punched me in the stomach was Trump saying to Zelenskyy, he [Zelenskyy] has such hatred for Putin. It's really hard to make a deal with someone who's got this hatred. And when you are watching day after day your cities burned and your children buried alive under rubble, and [this] young journalist captured and ... tortured with electric shocks, you might not feel very warmly to that person. You might not even have instrumentalist "let's make a deal" kind of feelings toward that person.

And the moral nihilism of not being even able to make that empathetic leap, I just thought we are looking into an abyss. 

You talk bluntly about Europe, as well as Canada, needing to recognize that this is the end of the affair as you describe it with America, and its commitment to defending democracy. And we're seeing signs of it on a daily basis, the questioning of NATO and the need to protect Europe against the possible Russian threat. Do you see any signs that this message is actually sinking in either here in Canada or in Europe? 

I'm not yet qualified to comment on Canadian politics. But the wake-up call to Europe, it's clearly going in that direction, but too slowly. And the fact that those four presidents went to Kyiv was a very good sign. I think that the grotesque scene in the Oval Office helped that. But it's very, very hard I think for Europeans than Canadians, to let go of that myth of America as the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Gabrielis Landbergis, the former foreign minister of Lithuania, just gave this New York Times interview a couple of days ago, and he said, you have to understand it's like ripping through our bodies. It's like you're tearing your heart out. You grow up with this idea of the arsenal of democracy and what it means to have that taken away.

And it doesn't mean that all Americans have changed their mind. I constantly get messages from Americans saying, "please tell all the Canadians you see that we still love them. Please tell them that this is not representative of us." Certainly, that's not what everybody feels. But the people in power should absolutely not be trusted.

The idea that you can get inside Trump's psyche and figure out how to have a good relationship with him, I think that's a mistake because there's no operative: true, false, good, evil — it's only what is advantageous or disadvantageous to him at any given moment in time.  

You've only been in Canada for a few months, but I'm curious what you've been able to glean looking at your home country of the United States from this side: any new insights observing from over here?

Well, I feel calmer here. I'm in a very privileged position, because now I've given myself a little bit of distance. Canada always felt to me like a place that was less edgy, which was part of the appeal, even independently of American politics.

It's a place where there are gun control laws. It's a place where there's more of a social support system. It's a place where I feel in my kids' schools that there's less of a competitive edge among the kids, among the parents. And so I feel like it gives me a little space to take a deep breath, but I also feel guilty about being in this relatively safe place and taking advantage of it. 

But does it in any way inform your thinking about what is happening in your country? Do you have more clarity or a different posture being here and watching what's happening in the States? 

I would say the one thing I thought about was the way in which all the Canadian commentators were saying that it was Trump's election that saved the Liberal Party in Canada because it warned people about what could happen. That sense of, could people be attentive to what was happening across the border in such a way that would shake them into responsibility for themselves, I found that quite inspiring.

If this is, as you say, the end of the end-of-history, what do you hope comes next?

My fantasy when I'm not being a neurotic catastrophist is that there will be a domino effect of the fall of tyranny, that Putin's regime will fall, that Lukashenko's regime will fall, the Iranian regime will fall, that Trump's regime would fall. That there'll be a complete Ukrainian victory and that Ukraine will be the vanguard no longer of catching up with the West — the [Francis] Fukuyama end-of-history model that we're all moving inevitably and exorbitantly to liberal democracy, and you should follow the people who are further along down the road. We know now that that did not work. 

Download the IDEAS podcast to listen to this episode.

*Q&A was edited for clarity and length. This episode was produced by Dawna Dingwall.