Three professors from Yale –Timothy Snyder,, Jason Stanley And Marci Shore– The have spent their careers studying fascism and authoritarianism. They know the signs of authoritarianism emerge when they see it. Now they see those signs Here in the United States, and they are not lazing lazily. They moved to the University of Toronto where they can speak freely, without fear of personal or institutional compensation. Above, they share their opinions in Op-Doc Nytimes. It is prefaced from the text below:
Legal residents of the United States have sent foreign prisons without regular procedure. Students detained after expressing their opinions. Federal judges have threatened to dismiss for the priorities of the administration.
In this opinion video, Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley, all Yale teachers and authoritarian experts, explain why America is particularly vulnerable to a democratic decline – and why they leave the United States to take positions at the University of Toronto.
Professor Stanley leaves the United States as an act of protest against attacks by the Trump administration against civil freedoms. “I want the Americans to realize that it is a democratic emergency,” he said.
Professor Shore, who has spent two decades to write about the history of authoritarianism in central and eastern Europe, leaves because of what it considers the strong regression of American democracy. “We are like people on the Titanic saying that our ship cannot flow,” she said. “And what you know as a historian is that there is no ship that cannot flow.”
It borrows political and apolitical Slavic patterns and expressions, arguing that the English language does not fully capture democratic regression in this American moment.
Professor Snyder's reasons are more complicated. Mainly, he leaves to support his wife, Professor Shore, and their children, and teach in a large public university in Toronto, a place which, according to him, can organize conversations on freedom. At the same time, he shares the concerns expressed by his colleagues and worries that this kind of conversations become more and more difficult to have in the United States.
“I did not leave Yale because of Donald Trump or because of Columbia or because of threats to Yale-but that would be a reasonable thing to make, and this is a decision that people will make,” he wrote in an article by Yale Daily News explaining his decision to leave.
Their motivations differ but their analysis is the same: to ignore or minimize attacks against the rule of law, the courts and the universities emit problems for our democracy.
To deepen their work, see the respective works of Stanley and Snyder: How fascism works: the policy of us and them And On tyranny: twenty lessons from the 20th century.
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