"The Bad Guys Are Winning," wrote Anne Applebaum for The Atlantic in 2021. "The War on History Is a War on Democracy," warned Timothy Snyder in The New York Times, also in 2021. "The GOP has found a Putin-lite to fawn over. That's bad news for democracy," argued Ruth Ben-Ghiat on MSNBC the following year, 2022.
Within the last 10 years or so, and especially since the 2016 election of Trump, these authors — Anne Applebaum, Timothy Snyder, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, in addition to several others — have become liberal-friendly experts on authoritarianism. On a regular basis, they make appearances on cable news and in the pages of legacy newspapers and magazines–in some cases, as staff members–in order to warn of how individual, one-off “strongmen” like Trump, Putin, Orban, and Xi, made up a vague “authoritarian” axis hellbent on destroying Democracy for its own sake.
But what good does this framing do and who does it absolve? Instead of meaningfully contending with US's sprawling imperial power and internal systems of oppression — namely being the largest carceral state in the world — these MSNBC historians reheat decades-old Axis of Evil or Cold War good vs evil rhetoric, pinning the horrors of centuries of political violence on individual "mad men." Meanwhile, they selectively invoke the "authoritarian" label, fretting about the need to save some abstract notion of democracy from geopolitical Bad Guys while remaining silent as the US funds, arms and backs the most authoritarian process imaginable — the immiseration and destruction of an entire people — specifically in Gaza.
On this episode, we look at the advent and influence of MSNBC-approved historians, dissecting their selective anti-authoritarian posture and discussing how their work does little more than polish their careers and provide cover for US and US-allied militarism.
Our guest is historian and author Greg Grandin.