- Jul 11, 2001
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Experts explain where we are heading, what can be done to counteract it.
The decision by these three Yale professors to move to Canada is both a warning and a call to action. By Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley
~7 minute video and written article.
This link will get anyone through The New York Times' paywall for 14 days, i.e. until May 28, 2025:
There are reader comments accessible with a button click at the end of the written article. Here is one exceptional comment:
This honestly brought me to tears. As a child who lived in Communist Eastern Europe, and as someone who has always loved history, they just so eloquently said everything I’ve been trying to tell anyone who would listen for the last few years. All the signs are there and so glaring! Yet I’ve been so distressed because so few listen, dismiss concerns so easily because of a false sense of safety. Many are just trying to ride out the next four years but that could be a false hope. The last line hit me in the gut. Everyone needs to watch this video. Thank you for this brave piece of journalism!
To which co-author Marci Shore replied:
@Repatriated Expat Thank you so much! I’ve spent much of my adult life in East and Central Europe; I was formed as a historian in the 1990s, going into the Communist Party archives as they were just beginning to open. So many of the people who intellectually mentored me were former political prisoners. Everything I understand about the present moment is deeply inflected by what I’ve learned as a historian of that part of the world. If I panicked much sooner than most of my American friends and colleagues in 2015, it’s not because I was any smarter, but because I’d been watching what was happening in Russia and Ukraine, and because the history of East and Central Europe had taught me something that Czesław Miłosz famously expressed with the phrase “the habit of civilization is fragile.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/opinion/yale-canada-fascism.html#permid=142130658
Tidbit: I personally met Czeslaw Milosz one odd day, around 1980 - Muse
By Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley
Video by Francesca Trianni and James Robinson
Professors Shore, Snyder and Stanley have studied and written extensively on authoritarianism. Ms. Trianni is a producer for Opinion Video. Mr. Robinson is a producer and editor for Opinion Video.
In the Opinion video above, Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley, all professors at Yale and experts in authoritarianism, explain why America is especially vulnerable to a democratic backsliding — and why they are leaving the United States to take up positions at the University of Toronto.
Professor Stanley is leaving the United States as an act of protest against the Trump administration’s attacks on civil liberties. “I want Americans to realize that this is a democratic emergency,” he said.
Professor Shore, who has spent two decades writing about the history of authoritarianism in Central and Eastern Europe, is leaving because of what she sees as the sharp regression of American democracy. “We’re like people on the Titanic saying our ship can’t sink,” she said. “And what you know as a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.”
Professor Snyder’s reasons are more complicated. Primarily, he’s leaving to support his wife, Professor Shore, and their children, and to teach at a large public university in Toronto, a place he says can host conversations about freedom. At the same time, he shares the concerns expressed by his colleagues and worries that those kinds of conversations will become ever harder 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 do, and that is a decision that people will make,” he wrote in a Yale Daily News article explaining his decision to leave.
Their motives differ but their analysis is the same: ignoring or downplaying attacks on the rule of law, the courts and universities spells trouble for our democracy.
The decision by these three Yale professors to move to Canada is both a warning and a call to action. By Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley
~7 minute video and written article.
This link will get anyone through The New York Times' paywall for 14 days, i.e. until May 28, 2025:
There are reader comments accessible with a button click at the end of the written article. Here is one exceptional comment:
This honestly brought me to tears. As a child who lived in Communist Eastern Europe, and as someone who has always loved history, they just so eloquently said everything I’ve been trying to tell anyone who would listen for the last few years. All the signs are there and so glaring! Yet I’ve been so distressed because so few listen, dismiss concerns so easily because of a false sense of safety. Many are just trying to ride out the next four years but that could be a false hope. The last line hit me in the gut. Everyone needs to watch this video. Thank you for this brave piece of journalism!
To which co-author Marci Shore replied:
@Repatriated Expat Thank you so much! I’ve spent much of my adult life in East and Central Europe; I was formed as a historian in the 1990s, going into the Communist Party archives as they were just beginning to open. So many of the people who intellectually mentored me were former political prisoners. Everything I understand about the present moment is deeply inflected by what I’ve learned as a historian of that part of the world. If I panicked much sooner than most of my American friends and colleagues in 2015, it’s not because I was any smarter, but because I’d been watching what was happening in Russia and Ukraine, and because the history of East and Central Europe had taught me something that Czesław Miłosz famously expressed with the phrase “the habit of civilization is fragile.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/opinion/yale-canada-fascism.html#permid=142130658
Tidbit: I personally met Czeslaw Milosz one odd day, around 1980 - Muse
By Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley
Video by Francesca Trianni and James Robinson
Professors Shore, Snyder and Stanley have studied and written extensively on authoritarianism. Ms. Trianni is a producer for Opinion Video. Mr. Robinson is a producer and editor for Opinion Video.
- May 14, 2025
In the Opinion video above, Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley, all professors at Yale and experts in authoritarianism, explain why America is especially vulnerable to a democratic backsliding — and why they are leaving the United States to take up positions at the University of Toronto.
Professor Stanley is leaving the United States as an act of protest against the Trump administration’s attacks on civil liberties. “I want Americans to realize that this is a democratic emergency,” he said.
Professor Shore, who has spent two decades writing about the history of authoritarianism in Central and Eastern Europe, is leaving because of what she sees as the sharp regression of American democracy. “We’re like people on the Titanic saying our ship can’t sink,” she said. “And what you know as a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.”
Professor Snyder’s reasons are more complicated. Primarily, he’s leaving to support his wife, Professor Shore, and their children, and to teach at a large public university in Toronto, a place he says can host conversations about freedom. At the same time, he shares the concerns expressed by his colleagues and worries that those kinds of conversations will become ever harder 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 do, and that is a decision that people will make,” he wrote in a Yale Daily News article explaining his decision to leave.
Their motives differ but their analysis is the same: ignoring or downplaying attacks on the rule of law, the courts and universities spells trouble for our democracy.
Last edited:
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