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"Fascists rejected reason... denying objective truth in favor of glorious myth articulated by leaders who claimed to give voice to the people."
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Timothy D. SnyderOur second basic founding document, the Constitution, is basically a d — Timothy D. Snyder
"Our second basic founding document, the Constitution, is basically a design how to prevent someone becoming a tyrant. It assumes that if we have three parts of the government they will balance each other, but what we saw unfold in the impeachment trial was the opposite. The Congress gave way, and then Justice Roberts also gave way. So that at the end... we have a much, much stronger executive claiming nearly absolute power, which is something that the Founders were precisely trying to prevent."
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Timothy D. Snyder
Timothy D. Snyder
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Timothy David Snyder is an American historian specializing in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust. He holds the inaugural Chair in Modern European History, supported by the Temerty Endowment for Ukrainian Studies, at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. From 2017 to 2025 he was the Richard C. Levin Professor of
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"The mistake is to assume that rulers who came to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions..."
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Timothy D. SnyderQuote
"[E]ternal vigilance is the price of liberty,"...We see ourselves as a city on the hill, a stronghold for democracy, looking for threats from abroad. But the sense of the saying was entirely different: that human nature is such that American democracy must be defended from Americans who would exploit its freedoms to bring about its end."
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Timothy D. SnyderQuote
"Americans reasoned that the failure of the communist story confirmed the truth of the capitalist one. Americans and Europeans kept telling themselves their tales of inevitability for a quarter century after the end of communism, and so raise a millennial generation without history."
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Timothy D. SnyderQuote
"The financial crisis of 2008 and the deregulation of campaign contributions in the United States in 2010 magnified the influence of the wealthy and reduced that of the voters."
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Timothy D. SnyderQuote
"Since the American colonies declared their independence... [m]any... democracies... failed, in circumstances that in some important respects resemble our own."
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Timothy D. Snyder