12 hours ago
Why a professor of fascism left the US: ‘The lesson of 1933 is – you get out'
She finds the whole idea absurd. To Prof Marci Shore, the notion that the Guardian, or anyone else, should want to interview her about the future of the US is ridiculous. She's an academic specialising in the history and culture of eastern Europe and describes herself as a 'Slavicist', yet here she is, suddenly besieged by international journalists keen to ask about the country in which she insists she has no expertise: her own. 'It's kind of baffling,' she says.
In fact, the explanation is simple enough. Last month, Shore, together with her husband and fellow scholar of European history, Timothy Snyder, and the academic Jason Stanley, made news around the world when they announced that they were moving from Yale University in the US to the University of Toronto in Canada. It was not the move itself so much as their motive that garnered attention. As the headline of a short video op-ed the trio made for the New York Times put it, 'We Study Fascism, and We're Leaving the US'.
Starkly, Shore invoked the ultimate warning from history. 'The lesson of 1933 is: you get out sooner rather than later.' She seemed to be saying that what had happened then, in Germany, could happen now, in Donald Trump's America – and that anyone tempted to accuse her of hyperbole or alarmism was making a mistake. 'My colleagues and friends, they were walking around and saying, 'We have checks and balances. So let's inhale, checks and balances, exhale, checks and balances.' I thought, my God, we're like people on the Titanic saying, 'Our ship can't sink. We've got the best ship. We've got the strongest ship. We've got the biggest ship.' And what you know as a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can't sink.'
Since Shore, Snyder and Stanley announced their plans, the empirical evidence has rather moved in their favour. Whether it was the sight of tanks transported into Washington DC ahead of the military parade that marked Trump's birthday last Saturday or the deployment of the national guard to crush protests in Los Angeles, alongside marines readied for the same task, recent days have brought the kind of developments that could serve as a dramatist's shorthand for the slide towards fascism.
'It's all almost too stereotypical,' Shore reflects. 'A 1930s-style military parade as a performative assertion of the Führerprinzip,' she says, referring to the doctrine established by Adolf Hitler, locating all power in the dictator. 'As for Los Angeles, my historian's intuition is that sending in the national guard is a provocation that will be used to foment violence and justify martial law. The Russian word of the day here could be provokatsiia.'
That response captures the double lens through which Shore sees the Trump phenomenon, informed by both the Third Reich and the 'neo-totalitarianism' exhibited most clearly in the Russia of Vladimir Putin. We speak as Shore is trying to do her day job, having touched down in Warsaw en route to Kyiv, with Poland and Ukraine long a focus of her studies. Via Zoom from a hotel lobby, she peppers our conversation with terms drawn from a Russian political lexicon that suddenly fits a US president.
'The unabashed narcissism, this Nero-like level of narcissism and this lack of apology … in Russian, it's obnazhenie; 'laying bare'.' It's an approach to politics 'in which all of the ugliness is right on the surface,' not concealed in any way. 'And that's its own kind of strategy. You just lay everything out there.'
She fears that the sheer shamelessness of Trump has 'really disempowered the opposition, because our impulse is to keep looking for the thing that's hidden and expose it, and we think that's going to be what makes the system unravel.' But the problem is not what's hidden, it's 'what we've normalised – because the whole strategy is to throw it all in your face.'
None of this has been an overnight realisation for Shore. It had been building for years, with origins that predate Trump. Now 53, she had spent most of her 20s focused on eastern Europe, barely paying attention to US politics, when the deadlocked presidential election of 2000 and the aborted Florida recount fiasco made her realise that 'we didn't really know how to count votes'. Next she was wondering: 'Why exactly were we going to war in Iraq?' But the moment her academic work began to shed an uncomfortable light on the American present came in the presidential race of 2008.
'When John McCain chose Sarah Palin, I felt like she was a character right out of the 1930s.' The Republican vice-presidential candidate lived, Shore thought, 'in a totally fictitious world … not constrained by empirical reality.' Someone like that, Shore believed, could really rile up a mob.
And then came Trump.
Once again, it was the lack of truthfulness that terrified her. 'Without a distinction between truth and lies, there is no grounding for a distinction between good and evil,' she says. Lying is essential to totalitarianism; she understood that from her scholarly research. But while Hitler and Stalin's lies were in the service of some vast 'eschatological vision', the post-truth dishonesty of a Trump or Putin struck her as different. The only relevant criterion for each man is whether this or that act is 'advantageous or disadvantageous to him at any given moment. It's pure, naked transaction.'
When Trump was elected in 2016, Shore found herself 'lying on the floor of my office, throwing up into a plastic bag. I felt like this was the end of the world. I felt like something had happened that was just catastrophic on a world historical scale, that was never going to be OK.'
Did she consider leaving the US then? She did, not least because both she and her husband had received offers to teach in Geneva. 'We tore our hair out debating it.' Snyder's instinct was to stay and fight: he's a 'committed patriot', she says. Besides, their children were younger; there was their schooling to think about. So they stayed at Yale. 'These things are so contingent; you can't do a control study on real life.'
But when Trump won again last November, there was no doubt in her mind. However bad things had looked in 2016, now was worse. 'So much had been dismantled … the guardrails, or the checks and balances, had systematically been taken down. The supreme court's ruling on immunity; the failure to hold Trump accountable for anything, including the fact that he incited, you know, a violent insurrection on the Capitol, that he encouraged a mob that threatened to hang his vice-president, that he called up the Georgia secretary of state and asked him to find votes. I felt like we were in much more dangerous territory.'
Events so far have vindicated those fears. The deportations; students disappeared off the streets, one famously caught on video as she was bundled into an unmarked car by masked immigration agents; the humiliation of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as Trump and JD Vance ordered the Ukrainian president to express his gratitude to them, even as they were 'abusing' him, an episode, says Shore, 'right out of Stalinism' – to say nothing of Trump's regular attacks on 'USA-hating judges' who rule against the executive branch. It adds up to a playbook that is all too familiar. 'Dark fantasies are coming true.'
She readily admits that her reaction to these events is not wholly or coldly analytical. It's more personal than that. 'I'm a neurotic catastrophist,' she says. 'I feel like we could just subtitle [this period] 'the vindication of the neurotic catastrophist'. I mean, I've been anxious and neurotic since birth.' She draws the contrast with her husband: 'Tim is not an anxious person by nature, and that is just hardwired.'
She's referring in part to their different backgrounds. Snyder is a child of Quakers; Shore is Jewish, raised in Allentown, eastern Pennsylvania. Her father was a doctor and her mother 'a doctor's wife' who was later a preschool teacher. Shore grew up in a community with Holocaust survivors. 'I do think there's something about having heard stories of the Holocaust at a young age that was formative. If you hear these stories – people narrating what they went through in Auschwitz, even if they're narrating it for eight, nine or 10-year-olds – it impresses itself on your consciousness. Once you know it's possible, you just can't unknow that.'
How bad does she think it could get? Matter-of-factly, she says: 'My fear is we're headed to civil war.' She restates a basic truth about the US. 'There's a lot of guns. There's a lot of gun violence. There's a habituation to violence that's very American, that Europeans don't understand.' Her worry is that the guns are accompanied by a new 'permissiveness' that comes from the top, that was typified by Trump's indulgence of the January 6 rioters, even those who wanted to murder his vice-president. As she puts it: 'You can feel that brewing.'
She also worries that instead of fighting back, 'people become atomised. The arbitrariness of terror atomises people. You know, people put their heads down, they go quiet, they get in line, if only for the very reasonable, rational reason that any individual acting rationally has a reason to think that the personal cost of refusing to make a compromise is going to be greater than the social benefit of their one act of resistance. So you get a classic collective action problem.'
Later she speaks of the beauty of solidarity, those fleeting moments when societies come together, often to expel a tyrant. She recalls the trade union Solidarity in communist-era Poland and the Maidan revolution in Ukraine. By leaving America – and Americans – in their hour of need, is she not betraying the very solidarity she reveres?
'I feel incredibly guilty about that,' she sighs. All the more so when she sees the criticism directed at her husband. They were on sabbatical together in Canada when Trump won the 2024 election, but 'had he been alone, he would have gone back to fight … That's his personality. But he wouldn't have done that to me and the kids.' To those minded to hurl accusations of betrayal and cowardice, she says: 'Direct them all to me. I'm the coward. I take full blame for that.' It was she, not Snyder, who decided that 'no, I'm not bringing my kids back to this'.
I linger on that word 'coward'. It goes to one of the fears that led to Shore's decision. She does not doubt her own intellectual courage, her willingness to say or write what she believes, regardless of the consequences. But, she says, 'I've never trusted myself to be physically courageous.' She worries that she is, in fact, 'a physical coward'.
She began to wonder: what would I do if someone came to take my students away? 'If you're in a classroom, you know your job is to look out for your students.' But could she do it? Many of her students are from overseas. 'What am I going to do if masked guys in balaclavas come and try to take this person away? Would I be brave? Would I try to pull them away? Would I try to pull the mask off? Would I scream? Would I cry? Would I run away?' She didn't trust herself to do what would need to be done.
So now she is in what she calls 'a luxurious position': at a university across the border, safely out of reach of both Trump's threats to cut funding and the ICE officials currently striking terror into the hearts of international students and others. As a result, she feels 'more obligated to speak out … on behalf of my colleagues and on behalf of other Americans who are at risk'.
At one point in our conversation, we talk about those US citizens who put Trump back in the White House, even though, as she puts it, they knew who he was. 'Nothing was hidden. People had plenty of time to think about it, and they chose this. And that disgust, I couldn't shake that. I thought: 'People wanted this – and I don't want to have anything to do with this.''
Does that mean she will never return to the US? 'I would never say, 'I would never go back.' I always feel that what history teaches you is not what will happen, but what can happen. The possibilities are generally much more capacious than anyone is expecting at that moment.'
Contained in that remark is, if not optimism, then at least the possibility of it. And, right now, that might be as much as we can ask for.
