When the leading historian of tyranny decides he can no longer remain in the United States, we should all take note.
Timothy Snyder—author of Bloodlands, On Tyranny, and The Road to Unfreedom—has left Yale University for the University of Toronto. Though his move was, in his words, not made because of Donald Trump or political pressure on Yale, Snyder’s departure comes at a moment of profound democratic crisis in the United States. It coincides with the exit of fellow Yale professors Jason Stanley and Marci Shore, and it’s impossible to ignore what their collective decision symbolizes: a growing belief among some of America’s most incisive thinkers that the institutions meant to protect freedom are no longer guaranteed to do so.
“I did not leave Yale because of Donald Trump, or because of Columbia, or because of threats to Yale,” Snyder wrote in a deeply personal farewell letter published by the Yale Daily News in April. “But that would be a reasonable thing to do, and that is a decision that people will make.”
That sentence should send a chill down the spine of anyone still invested in the future of American democracy. If it is now reasonable for scholars to consider leaving the country because of the federal government’s posture toward universities, freedom of speech, and dissent, we are already far down the path Snyder has spent his career warning us about.
It is worth recalling Snyder’s central lessons in On Tyranny: do not obey in advance; defend institutions; be wary of paramilitaries; believe in truth. These were not abstract platitudes, but specific warnings drawn from the study of Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union. They were lessons about how democracies die—not through sudden coups, but through the slow corrosion of norms, the normalization of propaganda, and the silencing of dissent.
Snyder’s move to Toronto, as he emphasized, is not an act of exile or fear.
“I was not and am not fleeing anything,” he wrote. He is going because he sees in the University of Toronto, and in Canada more broadly, a place where “clear and significant conversations about freedom and unfreedom, unfortunately ever harder in the U.S., will take place.”
But the context around his departure makes clear just how embattled those conversations have become in the United States.
As Snyder writes, “What is coming to the United States now is an attempt by the federal government to encourage conformism and denunciations for the purpose of spreading terror and idiocy.”
Some will argue this is hyperbole or even paranoia—but the historical record argues otherwise.
In recent months, legal residents of the United States have been deported to foreign prisons without due process. Students have been detained for expressing their political views. Federal judges have been threatened with impeachment for ruling against the administration’s agenda. Professors, especially those speaking out against state-sanctioned abuses, have come under attack. These are the warning signs of a regime in retreat from democratic accountability.
Snyder sees clearly what is at stake.
“The business of universities is to exemplify and create the conditions of liberty,” he writes. “There are reasons why tyrants come after universities first, and this is the main one.” That is why he urges universities to resist—to name themselves explicitly as champions of freedom. In his view, “self-defense begins with claiming the concepts.”
And yet, the United States seems increasingly unable to claim those concepts with clarity. In Bloodlands, Snyder documented the horrific convergence of Nazi and Soviet mass murder in Eastern Europe.
That book is not only a study of atrocity, but in fact a study of how state power becomes lethal when institutional resistance collapses.
The most terrifying killers, Snyder has argued, are not always the monsters, but the bureaucrats—those who obey, rationalize, or stay silent.
That is why his decision to continue teaching, speaking, and organizing from Toronto matters. “I have been writing and speaking for a long time about self-induced regime change in the United States and about the origins of modern tyranny,” he wrote. He is not withdrawing from the fight—he is changing venues so he can continue the fight more freely.
The current administration, Snyder notes, has twisted the concept of antisemitism into a political weapon while enabling the rise of actual antisemitism.
“History shows that the people who attack universities are not friends of the Jews,” he warns. “The present American government is seeking not to combat antisemitism but to foment it.” The attack on higher education, he suggests, is not a side issue—it is a front in a larger war on truth and democratic values.
Snyder’s analysis cuts through the partisan noise. He is not sounding an alarm because of Trump per se. He is warning about the structural erosion of democratic norms: the collapse of the rule of law, the discrediting of journalism, the attacks on universities, the co-opting of the judiciary, the silencing of dissent. These are the patterns that historians of the 20th century recognize—not because they are identical to the past, but because they rhyme.
Snyder writes movingly of his time at Yale, especially of the students he taught, the books he wrote, and the archives he studied in the Sterling Library.
“Yale has been a wonderful place to write,” he says. “The lecture classes as well as the specialized seminars helped me to work on Bloodlands, Black Earth, Road to Unfreedom, On Tyranny, and On Freedom.” His gratitude is sincere. But gratitude is not the same as complacency. And Snyder has never confused comfort with moral clarity.
He closes his letter with an invocation of solidarity: “People will have things to offer from various positions. We will have to work together.”
We should take that seriously: Snyder, Shore, and Stanley are not retreating from a fight but building new spaces for freedom—spaces they fear the United States can no longer sustain—and their departure is not a condemnation but a diagnosis, accompanied by a clear prescription: wake up.
The ship can sink—the signs are there—and if we wait too long, it won’t be the historians who failed us, but ourselves.
“That sentence should send a chill down the spine of anyone still invested in the future of American democracy.”
Not feeling that chill. Leftist professors leaving colleges gives me a warm fuzzy feeling.
“the discrediting of journalism”
Journalism has discredited itself. Hardly anyone trusts our country’s media anymore and they did it to themselves.
Ever read Bloodlands?
Assuming the answer is no. Here’s the thing, Bloodlands is one of my favorite books and really changed historians thinking of the mass killings before and during WWII.
Timothy Snyder reshapes our understanding of mass killing in 20th-century Europe by focusing on the region where 14 million civilians were deliberately murdered by Nazi and Soviet regimes.
Snyder argues that the greatest atrocities occurred not in camps but through starvation, mass shootings, and purges carried out as policy.
Moreover, the book is equally damning of Stalin and Hitler, portraying them as dual architects of political mass murder whose actions often overlapped and reinforced each other.
So hey, let’s try to pigeonhole this guy as some sort of leftist. It’s like calling Anne Applebaum a leftist because she left conservative circles and became a critic of Trump.
When I read this it certainly appears that Timothy Snyder is at the very least left leaning:
“Recently, Timothy Snyder suggested Democrats set up a shadow government to provide alternatives to the Trump fascist administration (which he calls the “Mumps Regime” in honor of its leaders, Elon Musk and Donald Trump).”
“He goes on to say that Harris, Pelosi, or somebody should have a list of people who are the shadow government whose job it is to talk to the press every day. Okay, we are somebodies, and we could have exactly that list of people.”
“I think Kamala Harris, as the nominal head of the Democratic Party (our most recent standard bearer) has the primary responsibility to take this on. Not only does she have the legitimacy to name names, she would strengthen her opposition to the Mumps Regime by doing to. This also would give us a sense of who would be in her cabinet, should she be elected in 2028.”
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/12/22/2293316/-Timothy-Snyder-and-Shadow-Government
And there’s this:
“Snyder has become a one-man industry of panic, a prophet whose profitability depends on his prophecies never coming true.”
https://www.city-journal.org/article/blurring-distinctions
“When the leading historian of tyranny decides he can no longer remain in the United States, we should all take note.”
When someone joins a handful of persons that includes Rosie O’Donnell, that isn’t an action that brings respect or concern.
“The current administration, Snyder notes, has twisted the concept of antisemitism into a political weapon while enabling the rise of actual antisemitism. “History shows that the people who attack universities are not friends of the Jews,” he warns. “The present American government is seeking not to combat antisemitism but to foment it.” The attack on higher education, he suggests, is not a side issue—it is a front in a larger war on truth and democratic values.”
Blank Stare on my part. Not seeing the logic there.
Big whoop. Three professors left and one of those three is the wife of Timothy Snyder which wasn’t mentioned in the article. What a surprise that she left with her husband. Talk about a big ado about nothing.
It’s not like they ended up in a Gulag.