In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, Yale history professor Timothy Snyder talks to Jeff Schechtman about what he sees as the very real possibility that our republic will go the way of history’s other failed democracies, like Athens or even the Weimar Republic. .
Both 1930s fascism and communism, Snyder warns, were responses to globalization and to rising inequality. We might be tempted to think that our democratic heritage automatically protects us from such threats, but he argues that this is a misguided reflex.