It all seems absurd to her. For Professor Marcy Shore, the idea that The Guardian, or anyone else, would want to interview her about the future of the United States seems ludicrous. She is an academic specialising in the history and culture of Eastern Europe and describes herself as a “Slavist”, yet she finds herself besieged by international journalists eager to ask her about a country she insists she is not an expert on – her own. “It’s a bit confusing,” she says.
Actually, the explanation is quite simple. Last month, Shore, along with her husband, historian Timothy Snyder, and academic Jason Stanley, made headlines around the world when they announced they were leaving Yale University in the US and moving to the University of Toronto in Canada. The attention was not so much on the move itself, but on the reason for doing so. As the title of a short video commentary the trio recorded for The New York Times read: “We Study Fascism — and Leave the US.”
Without mincing words, Shore invoked the ultimate warning from history. “The lesson of 1933 is: you leave sooner, not later.” She seemed to be saying that what happened in Germany back then could happen again today in Donald Trump’s America, and that anyone tempted to accuse her of exaggeration or panic-mongering was making a serious mistake. “My colleagues and friends were going around saying, ‘We have a system of checks and balances. So, inhale: checks and balances, exhale: checks and balances.’ And I thought, ‘Oh my God, we’re like the people on the Titanic who said, ‘Our ship can’t sink. We have the best ship. We have the strongest ship. We have the biggest ship.’ And what you know as a historian is that there is no ship that can’t sink.”
Since Marcy Shore, Timothy Snyder, and Jason Stanley announced their plans, the empirical evidence has increasingly seemed to support their case. Whether it was the sight of tanks rolling into Washington ahead of Trump's birthday parade last Saturday, or the deployment of the National Guard to quell protests in Los Angeles, with Marines standing by for the same purpose, the past few days have brought developments that, in the hands of a playwright, could serve as a prelude to a slide into fascism.
“It’s all almost too stereotypical,” Shore points out. “A 1930s-style military parade as a performative affirmation of Leadership principles,” she says, alluding to Adolf Hitler’s doctrine that all power is concentrated in the hands of the leader. “As for Los Angeles, my historical instinct tells me that sending in the National Guard is actually a provocation, which will be used to incite violence and justify military rule. The Russian word of the day here might be provocation — provokatsiia.”
That response reflects the dual lens through which Marcy Shore views the Donald Trump phenomenon, shaped simultaneously by the experience of the Third Reich and the “neo-totalitarianism” most clearly manifested in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. We chat as Shore tries to go about her daily business—she’s just landed in Warsaw, en route to Kiev, Poland and Ukraine having long been a focus of her research. Over Zoom from the hotel lobby, she pepperes our conversation with terms from the Russian political lexicon, which suddenly fit the American president.
“Reckless narcissism, a level of narcissism reminiscent of Nero, and completely without a shred of apology... in Russian it is called obnazhenie - ‘baring’.” It is an approach to politics “in which all the ugliness is immediately on the surface”, nothing is hidden. “And that is actually the strategy. You just bring it all out, completely openly”.
He fears that Trump’s utter shamelessness has “seriously rendered the opposition senseless, because our reflex is to constantly look for what is hidden, to expose it, and we believe that this is what will lead to the collapse of the system.” But the problem is not what is hidden, but “what we have normalized, because the essence of the whole strategy is to throw everything right in your face.”
None of this came to Marcy Shore overnight. It had been building for years, with roots that predate Trump. Now 53, she spent most of her twenties focused on Eastern Europe, paying little attention to American politics, until the 2000 presidential election and the aborted recount fiasco in Florida made her realize that “we don’t really know how to count votes.” She soon wondered, “Why exactly are we going to war in Iraq?” But the moment her academic work began to cast an uneasy light on contemporary American reality was during the 2008 presidential campaign.
“People bow their heads, fall silent, fall into line, if only for a perfectly understandable, rational reason: every rationally acting individual has reason to believe that the personal cost of refusing to compromise will be greater than the social benefit of their single act of resistance. And so you have the classic problem of collective action.”
“When John McCain chose Sarah Palin, I felt like she was a character straight out of the 1930s.” The Republican vice presidential candidate, according to Shore, “lived in a completely fictional world… disconnected from empirical reality.” Someone like her, Shore believed, could really be carried by the masses.
And then came Trump.
And again, what scared her most was the complete absence of truth. “Without a distinction between truth and lies, there is no basis for distinguishing good from evil,” she says. Lying is essential to totalitarianism, she knew from her academic research. But while the lies of Hitler and Stalin were in the service of some grand “eschatological vision,” the post-truth insincerity of Trump or Putin seemed different to her. The only relevant criterion for each of them is whether an act is “beneficial or harmful to him at a given moment. It is a pure, naked transaction.”
When Trump was elected in 2016, Shore, she says, “was lying on the floor of her office and vomiting into a plastic bag. I felt like it was the end of the world. I felt like something catastrophic on a world-historical scale had happened, something that would never be right again.”
Did she think about leaving the US at the time? Yes, especially since both she and her husband had received offers to teach in Geneva. “We were tearing our hair out discussing it.” Snyder’s instinct was to stay and fight—he is, she says, “a dedicated patriot.” Besides, their children were young then; they had school to think about. That’s why they stayed at Yale. “These are all circumstantial things; you can’t do a controlled study of real life.”
But when Trump won again last November, she had no doubt. As bad as everything had seemed in 2016, it was even worse now. “So many things had been dismantled… the safeguards, the checks and balances—everything had been systematically removed. The Supreme Court’s immunity decision; the failure to hold Trump accountable for anything, including the fact that he incited a violent riot on Capitol Hill, that he encouraged a mob that threatened to hang his vice president, that he called the Georgia secretary of state and asked him to ‘find’ votes. I had a feeling we were on much more dangerous ground.”
The events that followed only confirmed those fears. Deportations; students disappearing from the streets—one of whom became famous after being filmed being led into an unregistered vehicle by masked immigration agents; the humiliation of Volodymyr Zelensky, who was ordered by Trump and J.D. Vance to publicly thank them, even as they, as Shore puts it, “bullied” him—an episode that, she says, “is like pure Stalinism”—not to mention Trump’s regular attacks on “US-hating judges” whenever they rule against the executive branch. It’s all a familiar scenario. “Dark fantasies become reality.”
She openly admits that her reaction to all of this is not entirely rational or coldly analytical. It’s much more personal than that. “I’m a neurotic catastrophist,” she says. “I feel like we could subtitle this era ‘the triumph of the neurotic catastrophist.’ I mean, I’ve been anxious and neurotic since birth.” She draws a comparison with her husband: “Tim is not naturally anxious, it’s just something in the genetic code.”
She is referring in part to their different backgrounds. Snyder is a Quaker; Shore is Jewish, raised in Allentown, in eastern Pennsylvania. Her father was a physician, and her mother was a “physician’s wife” who later worked as a kindergarten teacher. Shore grew up in a community of Holocaust survivors. “I really think there’s something formative about hearing stories about the Holocaust at a young age. If you hear those stories, when people tell you what they went through in Auschwitz, even if they’ve been telling it for eight or nine years, it’s etched into your consciousness. Once you know that something like that is possible, you just can’t forget it.”
When asked how bad she thinks it could get, she says coolly and matter-of-factly: “I’m afraid we’re heading towards civil war.” She reiterates a basic truth about the US. “There are a lot of guns there. A lot of gun violence. There’s a habit of violence that is very American and that Europeans don’t understand.” Her worry is that with the guns has come a new form of “permissiveness,” coming from the top—embodied in Trump’s appeasement of the January 6 insurgents, even those who wanted to kill his vice president. As she puts it: “You can feel it boiling.”
She also worries that instead of resisting, people are “atomizing.” The arbitrariness of terror, she says, destroys social cohesion. “People bow their heads, fall silent, fall into line, if only for a perfectly understandable, rational reason: every rational individual has reason to believe that the personal cost of refusing to compromise will be greater than the social benefit of their single act of resistance. And so you have the classic problem of collective action.”
Later in the conversation, she talks about the beauty of solidarity—those moments when societies unite, often to overthrow a tyrant. She recalls the Solidarity movement in communist Poland and the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine. If she abandons America and Americans in their hour of need, isn't she betraying the very solidarity she values most?
“I feel incredibly guilty about it,” she sighs. Even more so when she sees the criticism directed at her husband. They were together in Canada when Trump won the 2024 election, but “if he was alone, he would have come back to fight... that’s his character. But he wouldn’t do that to me and my children.” To those ready to level accusations of betrayal and cowardice, she says: “Let it all be directed at me. I’m a coward. I fully accept the blame for that.” She, not Snyder, was the one who decided: “No, I’m not going to drag my children back into all of that.”
I dwell on that word—“coward.” It taps into one of the deepest fears that led Shor to her decision. She has no doubt about her intellectual courage, her willingness to say or write what she believes, regardless of the consequences. But, she says, “I never believed I would be physically brave.” She worries that she is, in fact, a “physical coward.”
Yes, protests can help tyrants like Trump, because the scenes of chaos work in their favor. But that's no reason to stay home.
She began to wonder: What would I do if someone came to take my students away? “If you’re in a classroom, you know it’s your job to take care of your students.” But could she really do it? Many of her students come from abroad. “What would I do if people wearing balaclavas came and tried to take someone away? Would I be brave? Would I try to drag them away? Would I take their mask off? Would I scream? Would I cry? Would I run?” She didn’t believe she would have the strength to do what she had to do.
That’s why she now finds herself, as she says, “in a luxurious position” — at a university across the border, safe and out of reach of Trump’s threats to cut off funding, as well as the ICE officers who are currently striking fear into the hearts of international students and others. That’s why she feels “even more obligated to speak out publicly… on behalf of her colleagues and other Americans who are at risk.”
At one point in the conversation, we talk about those American citizens who re-elected Trump, even though, as she says, they knew who he was. “There was nothing hidden. People had plenty of time to think, and they decided on this. That contempt... I couldn't shake it. I thought, 'People wanted this, and I don't want anything to do with it.'”
Does that mean she'll never return to the US? "I would never say, 'I'll never go back.' I always feel that history doesn't teach us what will happen, but what can happen. The possibilities are generally much wider than anyone expects at that moment."
That statement contains, if not exactly optimism, then at least the possibility of it. And at this point, perhaps that's the most we can ask for.
The text is taken from "The Guardian"
Translation: NB
Bonus video:
