As a little kid, I was lucky to have a babysitter, Donna, who told me Greek myths as bedtime stories. Later I checked out books of mythology from the public library. I read Edith Hamilton’s summaries under my desk in elementary school. The Iliad and the Odyssey followed, first in summaries or illustrated abridgments from the public library, then in full form. I read a few of the Greek dramas that began where the Iliad ended, such as Iphigenia in Tauris by Euripides. My father thought I should get out more.
And I was fortunate to grow up in a family that took me on journeys, whether I wanted to go or not. My parents knew Spanish and were comfortable in Latin America. As a fourteen-year-old on a trip to Costa Rica, I felt free, thanks to them. In the cloud forest of Monteverde, in May 1984, my brothers and I hiked every day, guided by a local kid, Ian. We walked or ran the paths from morning to evening, water and food and knives in backpacks, feeling self-sufficient and happy. We saw sloths and monkeys and the elusive quetzal.
One day Ian promised us something special, a mysterious quest. We walked on and on, but he remained taciturn. After three hours or so on a dirt road, we wandered through a maze of cloud forest paths, some visible, some of which seemed only to exist in Ian’s imagination, some where I wished I had brought a machete. Then we heard the rush, everything opened up, and we saw the waterfall. It had a clear pool, both in front and behind, where there was a cave. We could swim into the cave and look out at the green world through tons of falling water.
That evening, too tired to speak myself, I sat at the edge of a conversation of older men. I heard a term that fascinated me after a day on the paths. The people my family knew in Monteverde were Quaker Cold War refugees who had managed to establish a dairy commune on a plateau. The English they spoke was right out of the Midwest, in some cases right out of my parents’ home county in Ohio. The topic was the protection of habitat.
Two of the older gentlemen (Roy Joe and Wolf) got to talking about a path in the cloud forest, about whether it was available for public use. The term they used was right of way: Was this path a “right of way”? Did anyone have the right to use it? They pronounced the phrase like “right away,” which only added to its appeal.
That’s what I wanted, at fourteen. I wanted a right of way, right away. I wanted to know that there would be a path. As I didn’t quite then understand, someone else would have blazed it. I took what I could get. A public high school was awaiting me in Ohio, with a few teachers who could deal with me, and a debate team with a patient coach. The country highways, empty at night, invited me to speedy calm, as they had my father. And when the time came, I claimed my right of way, my right to get away, my little American Dream.
I visited Costa Rica twice more, once in my early twenties and once in my late forties. During those later visits, I continued to appreciate the beauty and gave some thought to the politics. Here is a country that designates more than a quarter of its territory as park or refuge, that generates its electricity from renewable sources, that provides health care to its citizens. Costa Ricans live longer than Americans. Their political system scores much higher on freedom than the American one (on the American measures kept by the American organization Freedom House).
Costa Ricans do far better than Americans on all the happiness scales. And though it is impossible to quantify, people there do seem to feel more free.
When I was hiking in Costa Rica as a kid, it was the paths through the cloud forests that liberated me. They existed, of course, only because of the work of other people, and they opened to me thanks to a guide and encouraging adults. If a trail is blazed, then someone else blazed it; if you blaze a trail, it’s for someone else. It’s still true that moving my body helps me to be free, to the point of enabling me to write. That I can do so, though, is the result of the labor of others.
We all need a right of way. Mobility is the third form of freedom: capable movement in space and time and among values, an arc of life whose trajectory we choose and alter as we go. For all of us, mobility means access to food, water, hygiene, health care, parks and paths, roads and railways, to help us make what we can of our bodies. Access includes safety: we are not free to go where it is not safe to go, especially when we are responsible for children.
For some of us, mobility means the time and encouragement to take care of our bodies. For others, it means more substantial support for our ability to move. None of us is capable of mobility without assistance. Those who require more assistance remind us of our general condition. We all need some help; beyond this general realization, it is all a matter of degree.
Although the individual Leib is mobile, mobility for all can be achieved only together. Mobility for individuals requires collective political attention to the logic of life: the risk of injury and illness, the progression from infancy to old age. Mobility is a form of freedom because we are free when we structure society with this in mind. It is not so much a final state as an accumulation of capacities and imaginings over the course of a life.
One of my relatives is blind and has limited movement. The better the technology around her, the better she can express herself. My friend stricken with ALS was more free, I like to think, when we were together doing something. Physical presence could generate a sense of spiritual freedom. But as I learned to operate his gear, another simple truth struck home: he was freer when he had a functional wheelchair (and would have been freer still had it been provided by American health care). Soldiers in Ukraine who have lost limbs to artillery are aided by prostheses and time and care. Rehabilitation belongs to freedom, and so does attention to aging. As the average population age, geroscience—preventive treatment of the afflictions associated with old age—becomes important to our liberty.
Care is important, as is the prior confidence that it will be there. We are more mobile when we can count on certain basic human requirements being met. If we knew that we had access to health care and a retirement pension, we would live more interesting lives. Lacking such confidence, we will be stuck where we are. Most Americans report receiving medical bills they cannot pay, which means being stuck in illness. For middle-class people, dependence on private health care makes it difficult to change jobs. This drastic restraint on mobility—and thus on freedom—is, sadly, taken for granted in the United States.
Poverty forces people into their most probable states. It impedes mobility. This is a point my students in prison made repeatedly. My student Marquis called poverty “the daily basis of unfreedom” and said that for many people he knows, freedom would begin with three meals a day and a decent school.
The first three forms of freedom—sovereignty, unpredictability, and mobility—should be present throughout our lives. There is nevertheless an order of development. In childhood, we attain sovereignty, with the help of others; in youth, we sustain unpredictability as we realize our own combinations of values. As we become adults, we need somewhere to go and the ability to get there.
Mobility is the challenge of maturity. To break free means to move in all five dimensions. It means having a waterfall to find or a mountain to climb, a day to do it, another to reflect on it. In the romantic imagery of freedom, we get to that idyll ourselves. In reality, all of us have help.
I love the places I am from, but I am glad that I could leave when I did. We all need mobility, but young adults need it in a special way. If everything goes as it should, they become sovereign and unpredictable, then break free of the structures (and the people) that allowed them to become so. But when those structures of mobility are not present, or when the structures are designed to immobilize and humiliate, rebellion takes on a different sense.
Irene Morgan came of age in America during the Second World War. In 1944 she was a working mother. She commuted from Maryland to work for a defense contractor in Virginia that was building American bombers. In Maryland, she could sit where she liked on the bus, but in Virginia, she was required by law to move to the back. One day, particularly tired after a doctor’s appointment, she was asked to yield her place in the back of the crowded bus to a white couple. She was then removed by force from the bus and beaten. But her case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and she won. In 1946 segregation in interstate travel became illegal, in theory. Nothing much changed in practice.
It was humiliating for African Americans to be segregated while traveling. Rather than simply moving from place to place, for purposes of their own, they were singled out. What should have been unreflective motion became a series of encounters (and the anxious anticipation thereof) that were meant to be reminders of inferiority. Black people had to sit at the back of the bus or in a certain part of a certain wagon of a train. At each station, they had to use a different restroom and order food at a different counter.
Irene Morgan was helping to build airplanes. During the Second World War, a few African American men were trained to fly them. As one future pilot crossed the Mason-Dixon Line on his way to Alabama for training, he had to leave one train car and board another, just behind the locomotive. He and the other Black men on the train noticed that their places were then taken by German prisoners of war. The enemy was given more consideration than they. This sort of thing was recalled by a number of African American veterans.
Leon Bass, who volunteered to serve in the army, was humiliated as he trained for service on military bases in the South. He recalled a restaurant beyond the base where German prisoners could eat but he could not.
Bass fought on the western front of the European Theater, including in the Battle of the Bulge. He ended up in a group of American soldiers who reached the German concentration camp at Buchenwald. (As a nurse pointed out at the time, liberation was not the word for it, since former inmates kept dying and the survivors needed much more than the departure of their guards to be regarded as free.) Recalling Buchenwald, Bass said, “Racism is at the root of all of this. Under that umbrella comes bigotry and prejudice and discrimination. We haven’t come to grips with that institution called racism. And we have to, because we see the ultimate of racism, which was what I saw at Buchenwald.”
More than a million African Americans served in the segregated American armed forces during the Second World War. Black veterans returning home found an unchanged Jim Crow regime, regulating where their bodies could be. Leon Bass was refused service at a restaurant. “Can you imagine?” he said. “I put in three years of my life, put it on the line to make it possible for people like that young lady and that manager or whoever owned that store to function and enjoy the rights and privileges of Americans, and they were saying to me, just like the Nazis did, just like they told me down in the South, what they told my father, ‘Leon, you’re not good enough.’ What a damnable kind of thing to say to somebody.”
Some returning Black veterans challenged customary immobility. Wilson Hood sat where he liked on a bus from Atlanta to Washington, D.C., though on the way he was threatened with murder in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. As Isaac Woodard tried to return from a military base in Georgia to his home in North Carolina, he was severely beaten and permanently blinded. Both of his eyes were gouged out by a white man using a billy club.
In 1960 the Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in bus terminals was unconstitutional. In May 1961 a group of “Freedom Riders” tested the new norm on the stops between Washington, D.C., and New Orleans. This first Freedom Ride was organized by the Congress of Racial Equality. One of its founders, Jim Peck, had watched the rise of Nazi Germany from Paris. Another Freedom Rider, John Lewis, wrote in his application to join the group of bringing “freedom to the Deep South.” The Freedom Riders sat on buses and used facilities heedless of local custom and state law. In South Carolina, Lewis and two other Riders were attacked. In Alabama, one bus was bombed and set aflame, and the passengers were beaten when they escaped.
When the Freedom Riders reached Montgomery, Alabama, they took refuge in the First Baptist Church, where they were received by Martin Luther King, Jr. The church was besieged by a white mob, and the Riders were rescued only by federal marshals. When they reached Mississippi, many were arrested. John Lewis sat for thirty-seven days in a Mississippi prison.
Comparisons to Nazi Germany were made by all sides. After the siege of the First Baptist Church in Montgomery, Martin Luther King, Jr., said that “Alabama has sunk to a level of tragic barbarity comparable to the tragic days of Hitler’s Germany.” American Nazis responded to the Freedom Rides by riding in their own “hate bus.” They proposed sending the Freedom Riders to “gas chambers.”
From prison, the cause might have seemed lost. But some of the Freedom Riders pressed on to their destination and made it to New Orleans. Jim Peck, bruised and beaten, spoke at Xavier University with Charles Person. And other groups of Freedom Riders had already started their own journeys. More than four hundred people from both North and South took part in Freedom Rides in 1961, about 40 percent of them Black and about 60 percent of them white. That fall the federal government issued orders integrating bus stations.
Freedom means movement, and movement means encounter. But what does it mean to encounter one another?
To enter into a public conveyance and be judged by your appearance is a common experience. When I moved to Europe at the age of twenty-two, I learned how to blend in: get rid of the Cincinnati Reds baseball cap; wear leather shoes; sit and stand up straight; keep the hands out of the pockets; save the smiles for moments of significance. My father is always asked for directions, wherever he goes. In my twenties, I found that this was true of me as well: from Cornwall to Minsk, everyone seemed to think I knew the way.
But this amusing experience reflected a certain basic advantage. I had the color of my skin. I did not look anxious. Other travelers have a harder time.
I rode the bus in middle school with a Korean friend who lived a few blocks beyond the swim club. He never got to be himself. He was the Asian kid on the school bus, just as his two older brothers had been before him. They had worked out which remarks were to be ignored and which ones had to be resisted. If the school bully made fun of their eyes, fists flew. My friend later played linebacker and went to West Point.
The inability to move without being frozen in stereotype was theorized by Frantz Fanon. In the world Fanon describes, colonialists could move freely across great spaces, whereas people of color could be coerced and traumatized. He was concerned with the mental health of those seeking to pass unnoticed or just to be left alone.
Like Leon Bass, Fanon fought against the Germans in the Second World War. In 1943, as a teenager from the French colony of Martinique, he volunteered to join the ranks of the Free French. Like Simone Weil, he was thus part of the French Resistance. Fighting German racism on the battlefield, he found French racism among his comrades in arms. After he was wounded in action, his unit was purged of people, such as himself, who were not of European origin.
When the war was over, Fanon studied medicine in France. On public transport in French cities, Fanon could not escape the words that he heard to describe his skin. He could not help seeing himself as others saw him: he had the “sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others,” as the American social scientist W. E. B. Du Bois put it. Fanon found that anyone, even a child, could trap his mind by attending to the exterior of his body. “I was coming into the world,” Fanon wrote, “wanting to make sense of it, to be at its origin; and suddenly it was revealed that I was nothing more than an object among objects.” His Leib became a Körper.
Past experience, Fanon’s own or that of people seen as his group, made it impossible for him to be neutral in the present. He could not freely move from place to place; he was buffeted by the winds of the past. My incarcerated student David made a similar point about the future. In a paper for class, he argued that incessant external reminders of Blackness are a kind of threat. Because a young African American anticipates violence, every reaction to his skin suggests future pain. For David, “thinking without the threat of trauma” comes before freedom.
Mobility feels personal, but is political. A fourteen-year-old longing for a right of way may or may not get one, but the outcome is unlikely to result from his own personal efforts. My experience as a student in France was different from Fanon’s. My experience of being a teenager in America was different from David’s.
For Fanon and Stein and Weil, a central enigma was Germany. Even for Havel and Kołakowski, who experienced the Nazi period as children, the human possibilities that fascism revealed could never be ignored.
One way to understand its special form of unfreedom is as immobilization and mobilization, rather than mobility. Within Germany after 1933, Nazis immobilized German Jews by making them second-class citizens, then setting other Germans against them. As the historian Peter Longerich has shown, to be a good German was to take advantage of the mobility Jews lost: a child’s place in kindergarten, a parent’s profession, a family’s home. Such personal and familial gains made it easier to mobilize Germans as a Volk, a race.
Hitler identified Jews with the fourth and fifth dimensions. He portrayed political imagination as a Jewish rather than a human capacity. It was only Jewish concepts, he claimed, that drew Germans away from their racial destiny: the permanent mindless struggle for land and food. Jews were responsible for every structure that might initiate nonviolent human interactions that extend over time.
Hitler wanted Germans in the third dimension. No range of possible futures (no fourth dimension) awaited, and no society could be better than natural selection (no fifth dimension). Any virtue that enabled people to accommodate one another was Jewish, be it constitutionalism in a state, contractualism in a market, class consciousness under Marxism, or the mercy of Christian gospels. For Hitler, it all came down to Jews hindering Germans from seizing what they could as a race. Jews had to be removed from the planet so that nature could be redeemed. This was a hideous version of negative freedom: the freedom was conceived of as racial, and the barrier as the Jews.
The earth in Mein Kampf was populous and poor. Germans had to be mobilized to seize land before they were starved out by others. If most peoples were doomed anyway, went the logic, then it might as well be we who survive and prosper. Nature wanted humans to starve one another, and doing so was the only good. Technology offered no hope of escape. For Hitler, the notion that science could improve the condition of humanity was a “Jewish swindle.” If there were no scientific solutions to human problems, all that remained was force. With time running out, Germans must compensate by seizing more land: Lebensraum, living space. This was a kind of imperial mobility: the world was covered by empire; Germans should impose their own.
Stripped of the fifth and the fourth, the first three dimensions are left barren and tragic. When Hitler spoke of “living space” for Germans, he meant killing space for others. As the strongest race, Germans should seize the rich soil of Ukraine, the most fertile in Europe. The idea was to dominate the western Soviet Union: “Our Mississippi must be the Volga River, and not the Niger River.”
Hitler had in mind a frontier colony created by conquest, murder, and slavery. Germany did not aspire to retake its lost colonies in Africa, Hitler was saying, but to found an empire in Ukraine, one where Ukrainians would be treated as Africans and Natives had been in the United States.
Mobility, as a form of freedom, has to do with values and time as well as with space. In dispelling the future and denouncing the virtues, Hitler created a politics in three dimensions, one of mobilization and demobilization. Killing the Jews and dominating eastern Europe became the only preoccupations. Mobility in only three dimensions means desperation and colonization.
In Stalinism, there was a future, a glimmer of the fourth dimension, but it was a single future, defined by the few. There was a hint of the fifth dimension, but it was the single value of communism, jealously crowding out all the others. The trouble began with Marxism. Although Marx’s analysis of capitalism was valuable, his proposed solution depended on the assumption that there was a single human nature to which we would return. In Marx’s view of the world, private property was a singular evil, and its abolition would restore to each person that lost essence.
This is a negative form of freedom: remove a barrier; consider no ethics; plan no institutions; expect miracles. When Marxism led to liberating policies, as in the Vienna built by social democrats in the 1920s and 1930s, it was not as a program of total transformation but as a series of everyday ameliorations, directed toward freedom. Even today Vienna is often ranked as the best city in the world.
Marx argued that history was moving in the direction of a dictatorship of the proletariat, as capitalism had built the great factories that the workers would one day liberate. The Bolsheviks (unlike the Austro-Marxists in Vienna) took the view that history should be hurried along, and they made their revolution in the Russian Empire, a land of peasants and nomads. They thought that they were sparking a world revolution; when that proved not to be the case, they were left to build “socialism in one country.” This was, again, not so much mobility as mobilization. Convinced that history could take only one course, they believed that they had to drive the USSR through an imitation of capitalism before they could create socialism.
Stalin had to plan an industrialization. His chosen measures, the crash industrialization of the Five-Year Plan of 1928–33, mobilized peasants to become workers, for about a generation. Millions of those peasants died of starvation or in the distant concentration camps of the Gulag, which was created at this same time. They suffered most in Soviet Ukraine, where about four million people were starved. Death had to have a meaning, and the available one was progress toward communism. Since there was only one future, and it was known to be good, then mass death along the way must have been necessary. At the 1934 congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, that was exactly what Stalin’s supporters said.
The certainty of a single future justified tyranny in principle, and it created a tyrant in practice. The classical form of tyranny was given the modern dress of scientific certainty. Until communism was reached, and all were liberated, people were just Körper to be manipulated. The consequences of this single future, which of course was never reached, swept through the twentieth century and into our own.
The Stalinist race against time provided the example for a Chinese revolution in 1949, which brought its own great famine in the 1950s and 1960s, killing at least forty million people. Without the certainty of a single future and the example of Stalinist mobilization, China’s Great Leap Forward would not have taken place. Indeed, without the Stalinist singularity, China could never have taken the form that it takes today.
Along the way, the idea that economics had to yield a single communist future engaged with and encouraged the idea that economics had to yield a single capitalist future. The Soviet version of Marxism was a copy of capitalism; capitalists (as we shall see) later returned the favor.
Mobility is about the free movement of individuals toward their own individual futures; mobilization is about everyone catching up (Stalinism) or returning (Nazism) to how history or nature must be. Both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were ersatz empires, late attempts to exploit the European colonial experience of previous centuries. Hitler drew examples from the colonization of India and Africa; Stalin believed that the USSR should exploit its periphery as capitalist empires had exploited their maritime colonies. Imperialism, said Lenin, was the highest form of capitalism, and that was what had to be imitated. Both Hitler and Stalin drew inspiration from the imperial mobility they saw in the United States.
This view from the outside, partial and exaggerated though it might be, can help us to see ourselves. For about four hundred years, from the arrival of Columbus in the Americas in 1492 through the beginning of the First World War in 1914, European powers could expand thanks to their technological and immunological advantages. Twenty generations of Europeans had an unprecedented degree of imperial mobility (although, to be sure, much of the migration was flight from poverty or persecution or was a form of criminal punishment).
The United States emerged during the age of empires, which accustomed some Americans to an experience of mobility via dominance. The backdrop of American independence was the Seven Years’ War, a global conflict between the British and French empires, of which the American Revolutionary War was an epilogue. The British won the Seven Years’ War in 1763, extending their empire elsewhere, but also running up debts and accumulating arrogance.
The Declaration of Independence of 1776 was directed against a British Empire that was making financial and political claims on its American colonies. The rebellious colonists defeated the British in the Revolutionary War with the help of a French empire, which thereby gained a measure of revenge on Britain. Colonists loyal to the British Empire emigrated north to what became Canada. Americans established a republic in 1787. With the British and the French nicely out of the way, it was a republic marked for imperial expansion.
That same year, 1787, the United States organized the Northwest Territory, lands around the Great Lakes that France had just ceded to Britain in 1763. That is the Midwest of my youth. After American arms defeated Native peoples, a treaty at Greenville in 1795 opened Ohio to settlement. My maternal ancestors left North Carolina, where slavery was legal, to settle in Ohio. In 1803, the year Ohio was added as a state, Thomas Jefferson negotiated the Louisiana Purchase from a French empire. This opened settlement to the Mississippi River and a next wave of conquest and dispersion of Natives.
In the War of 1812, between the British Empire and the new United States, the British backed certain Native peoples, then withdrew. This separated Natives from their last European ally and generated justifications for revenge. American power spread westward, displacing Native populations. In 1846 the United States declared war on Mexico, where Spanish imperial rule had ended less than thirty years earlier. American expansion to the southwest followed the victory of 1848.
It is typical for former colonies to display imperial features. The global norm was (and is) for new postcolonial regimes, even as their leaders spoke of liberation, to introduce scaled-down forms of exploitation. The American case was exceptional in that the former colonies had enormous potential for territorial expansion. For more than a century after 1776, Americans had tremendous technological and immunological advantages over Natives. In effect, the United States took the place of the European powers—the British, the French, the Spanish, the Russians.
An issue in American politics after 1848 was whether slavery should be allowed in states that were added to the Union. That question was settled by the northern victory in the Civil War in 1865 and the associated abolition of slavery. African Americans were allowed to join political life in the South, for just over a decade. In the Compromise of 1877, Union troops were withdrawn from the South, and racial authoritarian regimes were established (by the then all-powerful Democrats). The Union Army then returned to combat Native Americans in the West. As the West became a land of displacement, the South became a land of repression.
The late nineteenth century, then, set certain expectations for how mobility was achieved: by suppressing some, and by driving out others.
The famous appeal “Go west, young man!” expressed an American spirit of imperial mobility. The vagueness of west and frontier suggested that there was always somewhere to go. A life can be shaped amid the certainty of superiority and the uncertainty of new terrains. The young man of European origin brought to the frontier his bravado and his hopes—and his bullets and his germs. (It was harder for African Americans to get land, even if they were not enslaved. African Americans did become cowboys, which was seasonal, transient work.)
The American frontier was vast but not unlimited. The U.S. border to the east and west was an ocean; to the north and south, it changed little after the middle of the nineteenth century. Spain ceded Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines to the United States after its defeat in the war in 1898. The last great imperial drive was the “race for Africa” by European powers of the 1880s through 1914. In the First World War, some European empires (aided after 1917 by the Americans) defeated other European empires. This led to some reshuffling (Germany lost colonies in Africa and the Pacific, Ottoman land was placed under the care of France or Britain) but no change in the system.
The First World War brought about revolution in the Russian Empire, made by people convinced that imperialism was collapsing around the world. The Bolsheviks then updated empire, destroying young republics along the way and taking control of most of the territories of the former Russian Empire. Stalin then promoted “internal colonization,” forced collectivization, and industrialization. Germany was ruled from 1933 by a Nazi Party bent on making a new empire in eastern Europe. The Nazis saw the Soviet Union (or its western part) as a future colony, intending to reverse Stalin’s modernization and exploit Ukraine for food.
From 1941 to 1945, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union fought a colonial war for Ukraine, which we remember as the Second World War. The fact that two European powers were contesting an east European borderland indicated that territory elsewhere was unavailable. Ukraine was now the focus of global colonialism.
Hitler treated the Soviet Union as a fragile state and Ukrainians as a people destined for domination, but that did not make it so. The differences in technology between Nazi Germany and the USSR were minimal. Germany had no immunological advantages; indeed, Germans were afraid of pathogens as they invaded. The Soviet Union was supported by American economic power, which made the difference. Having defeated Nazi Germany, the Soviets regained control of Ukraine and restored empire. It lasted only forty-six years.
Around the world, the immunological and technological advantages ran out during the third quarter of the twentieth century. After 1959, when Alaska and Hawai‘i became states, the United States would add no more territory. The United States often lost the actual wars that it fought in what came to be called the Third World. In this respect, it was typical. France could not return to its prior imperial holdings in Indochina: Laos became independent in 1949, as did Cambodia in 1953. Even funded by the United States, France had to concede northern Vietnam in 1954. The United States took over the war in Vietnam directly in 1965, killed about a million Vietnamese, then departed in defeat in 1973. After withdrawing from Vietnam, France fought a colonial war in Algeria until it was defeated in 1962.
British, Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese empires left Asia and Africa in the third quarter of the twentieth century. The USSR was on a slightly different schedule. It expanded its own territory and added an external empire of east European replicate regimes in and after 1945. It was able to intervene militarily in Hungary and Czechoslovakia in 1956 and 1968. Yet when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, it suffered defeats. Soviet leaders pushed Polish communists to suppress the Solidarity movement in 1981 on their own rather than ordering the Red Army to invade Poland. In 1989 the USSR was forced to retreat from Afghanistan; it lost its external empire in Poland and eastern Europe that same year.
If what Stalin and Hitler tried in the 1930s and 1940s was neocolonialism, then Putin’s wars on Ukraine of 2014 and 2022 were neo-neocolonialism. Russia’s leaders applied every argument from the history of imperialism, including Nazi and Soviet neocolonialism, to Ukraine and Ukrainians. The state did not exist; the nation did not exist; international law did not apply; borders were not real; Ukrainians were colonial people yearning for domination whose alien elites were to be destroyed and whose food and other resources were to be plundered. The scale of Russian atrocities after 2022 was comparable to that of the worst colonial wars of the past.
As a military struggle, however, the Russo-Ukrainian war followed the usual pattern. Without major technological and immunological advantages, even countries that regard themselves as superpowers will have difficulty seizing and holding much territory. In our historical moment, the larger country (the empire) tends to lose wars. Imperial mobility is no longer viable.
A free person ranges through the borderland of the unpredictable. But how to do so in our crowded century?
Imperial mobility brought to bear some powerful weapons of predictability: superior arms and infectious diseases. Both immunity and technology spread, eventually aiding the victims of colonization.
Anti-colonialists, generally victorious against overseas metropoles from the late 1940s, fastened on national sovereignty as the response to empire. National self-determination became the global norm, codified by the new United Nations.
The language of national self-determination was borrowed from liberal ideas of individual freedom; the notion of sovereign states, nevertheless, left open the question of how individuals become sovereign. Nationalism was effective as resistance, defining freedom collectively and negatively as the removal of imperial rule. But it provided no formula for the freedom of the individual.
The anti-colonial struggle in Europe, against the Nazi empire in 1939–45, took a different form than the anti-colonial struggle beyond Europe against European rule. Aiming to restore rather than create states, west Europeans could think about how not to repeat the mistakes of the 1930s. Those who resisted German occupation were almost never fighting just for the removal of the Germans, and certainly not for a return to the prewar status quo. The freedom that they had in mind was usually positive, about a future with a broader sense of possibility.
Americans helped Europeans adjust to a postwar era, which was really a postimperial era, by encouraging European economic cooperation. They indirectly subsidized the health care systems, social services, redistribution, and state investment of the European welfare states. That created an idea of mobility that did not depend on imperial expansion. The new social mobility improved on imperial mobility, while reducing the exploitation of some people by others.
The one form of mobility bled into the other. Germany, having lost its imperial war in 1945, was suddenly home to more than ten million refugees, most of them driven from Poland and Czechoslovakia. But they did not find a land of stasis. Expelled Germans who arrived in a democratic West Germany found themselves in the midst of a new project of social mobility. The same could be said of the French who arrived later from Southeast Asia and North Africa, the Dutch who arrived from Indonesia, the Belgians from the Congo, and the Spanish and Portuguese from Africa. Europeans who left former colonies in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s found new possibilities for movement in Europe itself.
The European (and Canadian) welfare states created after 1945 built infrastructure and public transport, trained workers, and spared citizens anxiety about the difficult passages of life. Public education, health care, and pensions also allowed Europeans (and Canadians) to choose more freely throughout their lives. Such policies helped to generate the first three forms of freedom: sovereignty, unpredictability, mobility.
Beginning in 1957, European states joined in a project of economic and political cooperation that in 1992 was named the European Union. The EU permitted not only free trade but also freedom of movement. It subsidized roads and agriculture and financed student exchanges. Imperial mobility was forgotten as social mobility became the rule.
The process was far from innocent. Europeans suppressed (and forgot) their own colonial pasts, which was frustrating to others. That lack of historical self-reflection made it harder for Europeans to recognize Russia’s colonial wars of 2008 (Georgia), 2014 (Ukraine), 2015 (Syria), and 2022 (Ukraine) as such. Wealthy Europeans found ways to extract their cash from their former colonial homes and stash it out of sight of European tax authorities. This made economic development in postcolonial states more difficult, and it created a culture of tax avoidance that spread globally. It now threatens freedom in the United States.
For about four decades in the twentieth century, the American trajectory resembled the European: imperial mobility gave way to social mobility.
Beginning in the 1930s, an incipient American welfare state took shape. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” John F. Kennedy’s “New Frontier,” and Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” described the shift from imperial expansion to social mobility. For many Americans, these were the decades of the American Dream. Through the 1970s, the gap between the richest and the rest was closing, enabling ever more Americans to join a broad middle class.
The American Dream meant social mobility. Rather than promising more land forever, it offered a sense of unpredictable but possible social advancement on the present territory of the United States. Mobility was no longer about families settling down on land but about new generations creating new kinds of lives. In this conception, the permeable borders were those of social classes.
In the American Dream, society was fluid, subject to achievement by individuals over the course of a single life. Unlike historical estates, such as the peasantry or the nobility, the middle class was defined not by ancestry or vocation but by life. Entering the middle class was not only about individual Americans achieving a certain level of prosperity but about the general possibility that everyone could live unpredictably and end up somewhere new. Children would not be stuck in the estate or profession of their elders, as in previous centuries, nor caught in a race or class mobilization, as in the Nazi or Soviet regimes.
Although sometimes presented as the natural result of capitalism, the American Dream depended on social policies developed after the capitalist collapse of the Great Depression. It lasted until its origins were forgotten and capitalism itself was enthroned as the lone source of freedom. That happened in the 1980s.
During that decade, the west European and American responses to the postimperial age diverged (though Britain was more like the United States, and Canada was more like western Europe). Beginning in 1981, under the presidential administration of Ronald Reagan, American policies of social mobility were reversed. Union busting weakened workers’ ability to bargain. The neglect of antitrust law suppressed small business. A relaxation of taxes on the rich placed burdens on everyone else. The explicit rationale was negative freedom: President Ronald Reagan maintained that government can never help, only hurt.
The end of communism in eastern Europe in 1989 was taken as confirmation of this American version of negative freedom. Interestingly, in America’s northern neighbor, there was no such turn. In Canada, no ideological case was made against the welfare state. In 1981 Canadians on average lived 1.5 years longer than Americans. The difference has increased to 5 years. If we multiply that out over the population, the price that living Americans will pay is about 1.5 billion years of being unnecessarily dead. And that’s not the price of freedom, as some like to think. Pointless dying is unfreedom.
Social mobility into the middle class was a matter of positive freedom, a mixture of values and institutions, the notion that each life might have a unique trajectory thanks to enabling structures. In the United States, the elevation of negative freedom in the 1980s set a political tone that lasted deep into the twenty-first century: the purpose of government was not to create the conditions of freedom for all but to remove barriers in order to help the wealthy consolidate their gains. Wealth was allowed to flee the country, to the postcolonial tax havens.
The oligarchical turn made mobility very difficult and warped the conversation about freedom. The more concentrated the wealth became, the more constrained was the discussion—until, in effect, the word freedom in American English came to mean little more than the privilege of a few wealthy Americans not to pay taxes, the power of a few oligarchs to shape the discourse, and the unequal application of criminal law.
Prison halts movement in space and takes away time. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, prison deprived millions of Americans of the years when they might have been educated, found a job, or had children. It also stripped many of them of the vote, their voice in the political future.
Denying the franchise to felons is morally hazardous. It incentivizes aspiring tyrants to define felonies in a way that suits their own political aspirations—in short, to lock up people who might vote against them. More fundamentally, it is inconsistent with any program of freedom to create urban zones of hopelessness as a matter of policy. Those Americans who were incarcerated from the 1970s through the 2010s were disproportionately Black. A Black man was about five times more likely to be imprisoned than a white man.
A second moral hazard is the American procedure known as prison gerrymandering. Incarcerated people are counted as residents for the purposes of deciding how many elected representatives a given district will have. When prisons are built and filled, the bodies of prisoners increase the electoral power of the nonincarcerated people around them. Urban Americans are extracted from cities where they would have voted and placed in the exurbs or countryside where their bodies magnify the voting power of others—very often others who vote for politicians who run on the platform of building prisons.
The Connecticut prison where I taught was beyond the electoral districts of the cities from which my students came. In my home state of Ohio, people are moved from counties with big cities to rural counties. In this way, not only are the incarcerated denied a voice, but their voice is taken by others—and precisely by those who have an incentive to see prisons as a source of jobs and of political power.
Leib becomes Körper here in an especially sinister way: what people might want counts for nothing, while the physical existence and location of their bodies count in someone else’s quest for power.
The historical precedent of counting bodies against people does not go unnoticed by imprisoned Black people. By the terms of the Constitution, slaves could not vote, but their bodies were reckoned (as 60 percent of a body each) in the calculations of how many representatives the slave states could elect. Representation in Congress was therefore structured directly by slavery to the benefit of the slaveholders and to the detriment of those enslaved. The more slaves lived in a state, the more people could be elected to preserve and expand slavery.
When state political authorities plan to build a prison, they are also planning to remove democratic representation from one area and supply it to another. What does it mean to vote for such candidates? Or to vote in a district where your voice counts more than others’ because a prison is nearby? For people purporting to live in a democracy, it is a failure to “live in truth”—as Evan, one of my incarcerated students, pointed out after reading Havel’s “The Power of the Powerless.”
Prison gerrymandering is a phenomenon that Black and Latino people know and white people do not, or at least convince themselves that they do not. But for Black people and for Latinos, who tend to live in cities and who together comprise the majority of the imprisoned, the logic of the situation is clear. Their imprisoned bodies are converted into someone else’s right to elect people who build more prisons.
It is true that individuals commit crimes, and that they should be held responsible. It is also true that others can create larger injustices around those individuals that make crime more likely and its punishment more political. Both of these things can be true at once. The truth we have to live in is not a single, comfortable one.
In the class on freedom I taught in prison, we read works by dissidents under communism. Soviet political prisoners spoke of the “little zone,” their concentration camp, and the “big zone,” the USSR itself. American incarcerated students, once they heard this formulation, picked it up and applied it to the United States. They were not doing this to provoke me, though I did find it startling. It just fit an experience.
The extreme immobility of prison (little zone) seemed to them to be the focal point of the immobilization they had experienced their whole lives (big zone). These incarcerated students were not cynical: they had competed to be admitted to the university program, they wanted to earn a degree, and they were working at a high level. It was rather that they had begun their lives in an America where social policies to aid mobility had largely collapsed, in a way especially unfavorable to them. The idea that Black people were proto-criminals worked against the welfare state, even as white politicians defined policies of social mobility as a benefit for Black people.
In fact, white politicians had designed the welfare state to create a white middle class. Black people were often excluded. The National Housing Act (1934) created the Federal Housing Administration, which guaranteed mortgages, making it easier for Americans to purchase a house. But it only did so for white people in white neighborhoods. If a Black family could afford to move into a white neighborhood without federal assistance, the Federal Housing Administration would no longer guarantee the mortgages of white families in that neighborhood. The result was the segregation of neighborhoods known as redlining, which mutated into new forms after housing discrimination as such was later banned.
The Wagner Act (1935) created the legal basis for private sector unionization, but it also allowed unions to exclude Black workers. Like the Social Security Act of the same year, the Wagner Act excluded agricultural and domestic workers, who were disproportionately Black. Unions did become one of America’s important multiracial institutions by the 1970s—which was one of the reasons they were attacked in the 1980s.
In his “I Have a Dream” speech of 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr., meant the American Dream as a dream for everyone. An American Dream for everyone would have to involve a reconception of freedom as positive. Without an understanding of the past (which takes a sense of sovereignty), some of us will (if we are predictable) seek forms of mobility that are no longer available. In a sad symphony of misunderstanding and vice, we can reproduce the mental habits of empire, this time with no material benefit to the exploiters. Those who seek to immobilize others end up immobilizing themselves.
In positive freedom, we recognize that there are many good things, and we try to bring them together. Social justice and entrepreneurship were brought together as the American Dream. Under a regime of negative freedom, we imagine a tragic choice, whereby we must sacrifice everything else for a small, dysfunctional government. Racism stops us from being pluralists and so prevents us from being free.
The American idea that we must choose between entrepreneurship and social justice is racist. It works in politics insofar as white (and other non-Black) people think of themselves as entrepreneurs, and of Black people (or immigrants, or other groups) as slackers.
The image of work-shy or inherently criminal Blacks dates back to the period before the Civil War, when enslaved people of African origin were performing the hard labor, and their main “crime” was their attempt to escape. This lingering racist specter displaces the reality that the welfare state served the American Dream. Seduced by a sense of ethnic honor, whites (and other non-Blacks) looked away as the world’s largest prison system grew up around them, replacing a welfare state that, in many cases, had helped them or their families.
Socrates thought that disabling others prevents us from enabling ourselves. As Toni Morrison has argued, punishing a minority educates a majority. My lifetime has been the mass incarceration period of U.S. history, and this half century has left a mark on the minds of Americans. The imprisonment of Blacks communicated that being white was superior and safer. White Americans have accordingly grown up with a racialized notion of freedom as negative: as not going to prison. That absence of oppression, though a poor sort of privilege, is nonetheless awkward to acknowledge. And so the very subject of law and order immediately triggers angry emotion. It becomes hard to talk about freedom at all.
Was I freer as a teenager because the police did not arrest me in circumstances where someone else, someone Black, would likely have been detained? Certainly, I was better off than a Black peer who entered the criminal justice system. But if such an experience taught me to define freedom as just the absence of state power, I was enticed into making a huge mistake. The notion that what was good about the state was that it arrested other people was a trap laid for white Americans, a preparation for social stasis and anger.
Tyrannies make anxiety seem normal. They attach a threat to a group (in this case Blacks) whom the authorities don’t really fear, then boast to their supporters of having protected them from that threat. They substitute relief from fear for freedom and teach citizens to confuse the two. The cycle of anxiety and release is not liberation, of course, but manipulation.
It is not immobilizing the way that prison is. It is nevertheless a policy of immobility that extends from the Black bodies on the inside to other American minds on the outside.
In the final quarter of the twentieth century, rhetoric about Black criminality and laziness convinced some American whites that they were too good for social policies that had enabled their own social mobility for two generations. Wrongly convinced that economic justice was for other people, they settled for the self-deception that independent spirits such as themselves needed no help from the government. This was certainly a very strong sentiment in my high school in the 1980s.
In 1968 Richard Nixon, then a presidential candidate, brought together the concepts of crime and race. Ronald Reagan then linked welfare and race (which, thanks to Nixon, was already associated with crime). Reagan publicized the idea of the “welfare queen” during his failed 1976 presidential campaign and then again in his successful 1980 one; it was a stereotype that white kids growing up in the 1970s and 1980s were bound to hear. I can’t remember not knowing what it designated: a stereotype of Black women claiming the tax dollars of hardworking white people to raise delinquent broods. In accepting this logic, and in voting against the welfare state, white Americans brought anxiety into their own lives—thereby making themselves and their children more vulnerable to future racist tactics.
A white person growing up in the late twentieth or early twenty-first century was taught to associate welfare with something that Black people exploited; yet very likely, it had earlier allowed his parents or grandparents to join the middle class. American kids now lost the American Dream, in large part thanks to their parents’ and grandparents’ votes. As the philosopher Richard Rorty mused, “It is as if, sometime around 1980, the children of the people who made it through the Great Depression and into the suburbs had decided to pull up the drawbridge behind them.”
Many Americans of European origin were accustomed to mobility. They were, generally speaking, used to the system working for them. Told that the system was working for other people, they voted against it—and thus against the social mobility of their children and grandchildren. In the 1980s, Americans blocked themselves from completing the transition from imperial to social mobility, then looked around for people to blame. Resentment arising from bad policy became a political resource for the very politicians who had designed that policy. Immobility created an opening for politicians who claimed that one race was innocent and another was guilty, and that the only problem in America was the presence of those others.
Since the late twentieth century, the ghostly prestige of empire has gotten in the way of lively freedom. The prestige of a past of imperial expansion, a time when we were “great,” is attractive because of its mixture of affirmation and rejection. It promises people that they are part of a winning group by reference to a triumphant past, then makes them losers in their own unconsidered futures. This addictive mix, postimperial immobility, leads to stagnation and isolation. In the United States of the early twenty-first century, it brought suicide and addiction.
Postimperial immobility summoned a tragic echo of the age of imperial mobility. Where once prison inmates were forced to work, now they are forced to do nothing. Where once disease was a tool of empire, now drugs have become a means of self-oppression. Where once guns allowed men to tame a frontier, now they are instruments of self-annihilation. Postimperial immobility is not simply personal tragedy but the birth of tyranny.
We don’t live in truth as often as we might. White Americans know more about race than they admit they do, but the knowledge tends to emerge only when they are talking about white suffering that is Black-adjacent, as in my hospital story. Still, it is helpful to be “shaken,” as the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka put it. The moments when we do live in truth, when we do glimpse the predicament of the other, can stay with us. My stories come from a certain position, the recognition of which enables a general point to be made.
In October 1990, as a junior in college, I was helping to run a conference of Soviet and American officials and security specialists in Washington, D.C. At the end of its first day, a friend and I were sent to fetch an important guest for an evening reception: Giorgy Arbatov, a prominent Soviet specialist on the United States and an adviser to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. As we entered the hotel where he was staying, we passed a sign in the lobby welcoming the Philadelphia Eagles, the professional football team, in town to play the Washington Redskins. My friend and I were in high spirits. Arbatov had graciously agreed to be interviewed for the Brown Foreign Affairs Journal, which we edited. We had an interesting conversation in his room. Afterward, the three of us were in a cordial mood as we took the elevator down.
It stopped after a couple of floors, the opening doors revealing two large men wearing green hoodies, obviously Eagles players. Even without the clues of the sign and the jerseys, I think I would have guessed. I had gone to a high school where football was king. Eight of its graduates have played in the NFL. I remember from the weight room the feats of a couple of other guys, two years older than me, who went on to play football for Ohio State and UCLA. The kid who sat next to me in driver’s ed in high school was, in that fall of 1990, maybe third on the depth chart at quarterback at Ohio State, where he would start his senior year. After that he would become ESPN’s best commentator on college football. The kid who sat next to me in Physics 1 in high school was, that fall, playing linebacker at Kent State; he would play pro football with the Eagles, and become an all-pro linebacker.
Arbatov did not have this background. And while his English was excellent, he had no way of knowing certain American usages around race. The two men entering the elevator were Black. Arbatov, who was about five feet tall in his shoes, looked up at them and offered a surprising overture: “My, you are certainly very big boys!”
One football player turned to the other: “Did you hear that?” His teammate had indeed heard the words but had registered something else, maybe the accent. “Let it go, man,” he said quickly and almost inaudibly; the words were little more than a quick breath. Then he looked at the wall, as though nothing had happened. But the first man then turned to me, still angry: “Did you hear what he just said?” I had. A little nod, meant to suggest that I was listening and not confronting but that maybe there was more to be said. One kind of America, confident late–Cold War America, confronted another America, perplexed and injured racial America. Our job of getting the scholar to the banquet had become complicated.
The elevator bell dinged as we passed each floor; it seemed to take forever to reach the lobby. When we did, the angry football player got out, turned toward us, crossed his arms, and blocked the way. He wanted an explanation. His teammate put a hand on his shoulder, in a gesture that could have been support or restraint and was probably both. I took a little step forward, looked up to make eye contact, and said quietly, “He’s Russian, man. He didn’t know.”
The body in front of me relaxed. Arms uncrossed. The second football player stepped away, threw his shoulders back, and fell into an everyday saunter through the lobby and toward the exit.
Arbatov didn’t grasp what was happening but knew he had given offense. He came out of the elevator with outstretched arms. This time the first football player greeted him with a huge smile, put an arm around the academician’s shoulders, and started making small talk about D.C. nightlife. Suddenly they were guys going out on the town.
Now I had a new worry: Arbatov was following the athlete’s stream of schmooze into the wrong car. “You like cigars? Have one of mine. These are excellent, man.” The word excellent was extended, like the arm. Arbatov gave him a beautiful smile back, eyes alive behind the thick plastic glasses, and took what was offered. My friend and I had to disentangle the two men to get the Soviet scholar to his conference.
When the football player got angry at Arbatov, he was reacting not only, I take it, to Arbatov’s words. He was presumably experiencing one in a lifelong series of reactions to his body. No matter what he wore or how he comported himself, he was a Black man in America and would be treated as such. In this sense he was unfree, immobile, the way Fanon described. In a world in which there had been slavery and we all knew that there had been slavery, the word boy could not be neutral: he had to react or not react, and either would have risks and costs. He could not just move along.
As a twenty-one-year-old American from the (let’s call it lower) Midwest, I knew that Arbatov would be seen as white and that a white person can’t say “boy” to a Black man, and I knew more or less why. In a flash, I knew what I needed to know about race, though most of the time I didn’t think about it at all or suppressed what I knew. Right then, I grasped that disassociating Arbatov from American ways of seeing and speaking was the only exit from the situation. My part was easy. The heroes of the story are the football player who dropped his guard when he realized his mistake and the bespectacled, diminutive foreigner who hung in there and kept smiling.
As the elevator descended the last few floors, I had been silently rehearsing what I would say: Russian, Russian, Russian. I told the football player that Arbatov was Russian because I knew that would be understood. Soviet might have been more accurate. Back in the Soviet Union, Arbatov was seen as Jewish, a characterization he could not escape and never did.
Arbatov’s father, Arkady, was from a poor Jewish family in what is now the Dnipro region of Ukraine, then in the Russian Empire. As a boy, Arkady Arbatov migrated to Odesa, where he worked as a laborer. In 1918, Arkady joined the Bolsheviks and fought on their side in the Russian Civil War, which brought most of what is now Ukraine into the Soviet Union.
Giorgy Arbatov was born in 1923 in Kherson, Soviet Ukraine, six months after the founding of the Soviet Union. Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941; Arbatov came of age just in time to be drafted into the Red Army and sent to the front. Romanian occupiers and local Soviet collaborators murdered the Jews of Odesa. German occupiers and Soviet local collaborators murdered the Jews of Kherson and Dnipro. Arbatov never knew anything about the Jewish side of his family; by the time he asked, they were all dead.
In late 1941, Arkady Arbatov was sent to a Soviet labor camp. The year 1942 was hard for Giorgy Arbatov’s mother: her son at the front, her husband in the Gulag. In his memoir, which he was writing at the time of our interview, Arbatov wrote about his father’s grotesque predicament: a Jewish communist imprisoned in a Soviet camp, even as invading Nazis claimed to be liberating locals from a Jewish regime. Arbatov referred to George Orwell’s 1984—adding only that Orwell did not go far enough in his description of totalitarian perversity.
After the war, Stalin began a purge directed at Jews. Propaganda presented Jewish bodies as different, as cowardly. It became “common knowledge” that Jews had not gone to the front. Arbatov’s Jewish background did not help him in his postwar career in the Soviet Union. But he remained, by the standards of the Cold War, an optimist about politics: learning English, trying to point the USSR away from confrontation, always ready to give the conversation another try.
When my friend and I spoke to Arbatov in that hotel room in 1990, he said, “I do not rule out convergence.” He had in mind a positive scenario, that the United States and the Soviet Union might meet somewhere around social democracy: unhindered elections, markets, the welfare state. This optimism was one reason the three of us were in a good mood when we entered the elevator.
As the years and decades pass, I keep his words in mind in a broader sense. In the moments when Russia and America seem very different, they might have hidden similarities. One of these is the collapse of social mobility, first in the USSR, then in the United States.
Soviet crash industrialization created mobility from the peasantry into the working class. Peasants who were not starved to death during collectivization or worked to death in the Gulag became workers. The Great Terror of 1937–38 killed much of the communist elite and much of the secret police command, allowing younger people—such as future Soviet leaders Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev—to quickly advance. It also allowed Soviet citizens to denounce their neighbors, move into their apartments, and take their possessions.
Stalin’s alliance with Hitler in 1939 allowed Soviet citizens to make careers in territories annexed from Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. After 1941, the Germans (with local Soviet collaborators) murdered Soviet Jews (such as Arbatov’s father’s family) in cities, opening apartments for non-Jewish Soviet citizens from the suburbs and the countryside. Victory in the German-Soviet war of 1941–45 brought the opportunity to rebuild the western Soviet Union, to annex (again) the Baltic states and eastern Poland, and to plunder the east and central European territories occupied by the Red Army after its victory. And so for a time there was postwar mobility in the USSR.
Stalin’s successor Khrushchev and Khrushchev’s successor Brezhnev agreed on one thing: there would be no more murderous terror against communist party cadres. The bloody mobility that had enabled their own careers ceased. The Stalinist economic transformation was complete by Brezhnev’s time. Peasants could become workers once; this mobility could not be repeated for a second generation. Brezhnev reoriented the Soviet economy toward the export of natural gas and oil, a policy shift that could not be imagined as heralding some kind of positive social transformation. There would be no territorial expansion and so no more plunder and seizure of empty residences.
By the 1970s, the Soviet Union was in the grip of postimperial immobility. Even the vision of a different future was gone. No one believed in a promise of future communism, least of all Brezhnev. He wanted to sustain the Soviet state by consumerism, while making it plain that no alternative was possible. He offered Soviet citizens a mythical past: nostalgia for the victory of communism over fascism in the Second World War. But as communism lost its meaning in the USSR, so did fascism. It designated Moscow’s chosen enemy, losing all connection to a specific political regime or ideology. The reference to the victory of 1945 enabled a simple politics of “us and them.”
Insofar as Brezhnev’s rule involved class war, it was one of the old against the young. Brezhnev’s generation then, much like Putin’s now, blocked younger generations from attaining power. In the 1980s, President Reagan, no young man himself, complained that Soviet leaders kept dying on him. Brezhnev died in November 1982, his successors Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko quickly following suit. Mikhail Gorbachev was borne to power in 1985 on this progression of wakes.
After four years of Gorbachev, Soviet collapse began in the outer empire, in the satellite states of eastern Europe. Poland was in a deep crisis generated by the lack of social mobility. The consumerism of the 1970s reached its limits, in part because Poles were comparing themselves to west Europeans in prosperous welfare states, in part because of the inherent flaws of central planning. The strikes of 1976 resulted in the Workers’ Defense Committee; those of August 1980 brought the labor union Solidarity.
Gorbachev believed that the east European states would remain acceptably communist even without the threat or use of Soviet force. The Polish communist party took this as an invitation to legalize Solidarity and negotiate with its members. After roundtable talks, Solidarity won partially free elections in June 1989 and formed a non-communist government that September. Other east European communist regimes then also held elections. The new governments that emerged opposed the presence of the Red Army and preferred a “return to Europe.” In 1990 the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, annexed by the USSR in 1945, declared their independence.
Within the Soviet Union itself, vested interests in the communist party blocked Gorbachev’s attempts to reform the economy. He wanted to put the state above the party and govern as president rather than general secretary, but that meant defining the state. The USSR was nominally a federation of national republics, and the leaders of the non-Russian ones now demanded recognition. The non-Russian nationalities believed that they had been exploited by the center; predictably, Russians believed that they had been ill used by the periphery. Communists in Russia itself, led by Boris Yeltsin, spoke out for a greater role for the USSR’s largest republic.
In summer 1991, as Gorbachev prepared a new union treaty among the Soviet republics, reactionaries tried to remove him from power. Their coup attempt that August brought about the very outcome they had feared: the disintegration of the Soviet Union into its constituent republics. While the coup plotters held Gorbachev in his dacha, Yeltsin led the resistance to the coup, which led to an assertion of Russian power within the USSR. With the cooperation of Ukraine and Belarus, two other founding republics of the USSR, Yeltsin extracted Russia from the Soviet Union that December. The Soviet Union was no more.
The deep source of Soviet collapse was the end of mobility. Prewar Stalinist mobilization had never given way to anything like the postwar social mobility on display in western Europe. Brezhnev was right that the system would be hard to reform. Gorbachev was right that nostalgia could not go on forever. The West might have taken the collapse of communism as a warning. Instead, in a convergence of the worst sort, Americans chose to repeat the basic failure of the Soviet Union.
President Ronald Reagan was right about the ethical emptiness of Soviet rule. His description of the USSR as an “evil empire” was apt. But he and his successors brought stagnation to the United States. The worst possible analysis prevailed: the collapse of the USSR was somehow the fault of the welfare state. Having won the Cold War with social mobility, Americans cast it away. They brought the emptiness of failed empire home.
Since the decade of Reagan, Americans have been drowning in the syrup of a postimperial immobility: sweet references to a time when Americans could move forward and upward, the 1940s through the 1970s, to distract from the crystallization of an oligarchical social order. The political trick was to swap real social mobility for just the intimation of imperial mobility, which was no longer possible. Reagan’s cowboy hat and boots brought an image of conquest but no frontier to conquer.
At an elemental level, mobility involves building roads and keeping them up, a project the United States neglected in my lifetime. When I visited Poland for the first time in January 1992, a few weeks after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Polish roads were horrible. As a young historian, I knew that this had been true for a millennium—and it remained the case for another decade. As the twenty-first century began, a journey eastward from Warsaw, on the terrains of the old Russian Empire, was still bumpy misery. After Poland joined the European Union in 2004, its roads were finally built. It was entering a Europe of social mobility, and its people benefited tremendously. I have visited the country every year of the twenty-first century and so have experienced the change firsthand.
In 2022 and 2023, when I needed to get to wartime Ukraine, it was impossible to fly over its territory. So I would get myself to Warsaw, then drive east to the border to catch a Ukrainian train to Kyiv. Polish roads, even in this easterly direction, are now impeccable. The contrast with the drive from New Haven to New York is discomfiting. So, for that matter, is the fact that Poles now live longer than Americans. My Polish friends would have found this unthinkable when I met them in the early 1990s. Now they take it for granted.
For thirty years, I have been riding the trains of post-communist Europe, which even in the rougher years of the early 1990s afforded an easy mobility I never knew in the United States. The railway also opens our eyes to society: As the Ukrainian poet Serhiy Zhadan asks, “What don’t you see in a train station?” It has been impressive, if also unsettling, to benefit from the superior performance of the Ukraine railways during the Russo-Ukrainian war. Despite regular bombing and missile attacks, Ukrainian trains are incomparably more functional than American ones. While disposing of much greater wealth than Poland and Ukraine, the United States has found ways to have worse infrastructure.
How did Americans come to think of immobility as normal? Postimperial immobility involves a sleight of hand, a trick that might be called sadopopulism. In the twenty-first century, politicians who claim to oppose “the system” are often called “populists.” That is not always accurate. Some of them are rather sadopopulists.
Populism offers some redistribution, something to the people from the state; sadopopulism offers only the spectacle of others being still more deprived. Sadopopulism salves the pain of immobility by directing attention to others who suffer more. One group is reassured that, thanks to its resilience, it will do less poorly than another from government paralysis. Sadopopulism bargains, in other words, not by granting resources but by offering relative degrees of pain and permission to enjoy the suffering of others.
Donald Trump proved to be a compelling sadopopulist, teaching his supporters contempt for others during his campaigns, then declining to build infrastructure as president—precisely because it would have helped people. When sadopopulism works, the majority is satisfied with what is, never asking for sensible things like roads or railroads. My roads are bad, but yours are worse. I am trapped in my social class, but you are trapped in a ghetto.
Sadopopulism replaces the American Dream with that American nightmare. It directs the attention of a fragile middle class toward those who are doing still worse, rather than toward those who collect the wealth and decline to be taxed on it. It activates racism as the substitute for a better future. It creates barriers that block the many, then defines freedom as their absence for the few. Putting Black people in prison offers no social mobility (except to newly employed guards), but it might leave white people feeling less stuck than others.
Sadopopulism normalizes oligarchy. If I am comfortable with stagnation because others are drowning, my attitude to the highfliers will be one of supplication.
Social mobility has three meanings. Politically, it is the alternative to postimperial immobility and its sadopopulism. Historically, it was the twentieth-century alternative to mobilization and imperial mobility that allowed European societies to flourish. Philosophically, it is an example of the third form of freedom.
Though every person’s path is different, everyone’s mobility depends on a sense that the future is open. Since the 1980s, American politics has succumbed to three time warps that deny us any such confidence: (1) a politics of inevitability after the end of communism; (2) a politics of eternity in the early twenty-first century; and (3) a politics of catastrophe emerging now.
After the revolutions of 1989 in eastern Europe, Americans took up the politics of inevitability. Capitalism was expected to fill the world with democracy. The market shifted from being a source of alternatives in life to a jealous behemoth that permitted no rivals. Americans traded a future full of possibility for a false sense of certainty. Negative freedom was enough: lift the barriers, and all would fall into place. History was over, only one future was possible. The politics of inevitability sucks the life from values as well as facts, then presses the dry shells together. It abolishes the difference between what is and what should be: the world as it is supposedly brings the world as it should be.
Facts about the present, for example, about inequality, were finessed into a narrative of progress. The propaganda of the politics of inevitability was “rationality” in the sense of “be rational”: accept that things are good even if they don’t seem so; everything is objectively good even if you experience it subjectively as bad; dismiss your values and personality and do what I say. Such “rationality” was contrary to the facts and obviously self-contradictory. Freedom cannot be inevitable, because in a world governed by inevitability, there can be no freedom. The politics of inevitability generates passivity, dampening the fighting spirit of individuals. Free people resist impersonal forces or turn them to their own purposes; they do not kneel before abstractions.
The politics of inevitability created the conditions for its own collapse. The American prison population more than doubled in the 1980s, and nearly doubled again in the 1990s. Whatever this was, it was certainly not the inevitable rise of freedom; nor was it democracy, since it involved mass disenfranchisement. Twenty-first-century wars were justified by the false premise that destroying bad states would generate the conditions for good ones. The disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the twenty-year defeat in Afghanistan proved that liberation was not a result of inevitable laws that come into operation when something is destroyed. Some Americans were shocked by a financial crisis in 2008, others by an election in 2016, or a pandemic in 2020, or an attempted coup in 2021.
Purporting to guarantee mobility, the politics of inevitability closed it down. Family by family, personal experience undid the story of inevitable progress. Faith in negative freedom brings staggering inequality, which freezes social mobility. The politics of inevitability, though it promised a better future for everyone, delivered imperial immobility, which is to say nothing or less than nothing for almost everybody. The claim that everything is getting better for everyone justified policies that left most people worse off than they had been before.
Freedom is positive, not negative. It is a presence, not an absence. The American Dream does not come true on its own. Older people have to enable younger people to be free. Young people do not choose the conjuncture in which they come of age. If they are sovereign and unpredictable, they will have the capacity to make choices. But they will be frustrated when mobility has been halted and few options are available.
Born in 1969, I had the sense, as the twentieth century gave way to the twenty-first, that I’d had an easier time than my brothers, born in 1970 and 1973. When I began teaching university students in 2001, at the age of thirty-two, I was dealing with undergraduates who were not so much younger than my youngest brother, and graduate students who were the same age as he. Since then I have had a steady view of the experiences of people ever younger than me, as the age gap between me and my undergraduates has widened from one decade to three. The unmistakable trend, even before Covid, was increasing anxiety and accordingly greater reluctance to learn things that might complicate a planned life path.
As the corner was turning on wages, the welfare state was disassembled, and labor unions were besieged. The American Dream had been a combination of earnings and institutions, and both were in decline. The statistics bear this out. Children born in America at the end of the Second World War were almost certain to earn more money than their parents. An American born in the 1980s had only about a fifty-fifty chance. Since then, inequality has only gotten worse.
I graduated from high school in 1987. Since the 1980s, new wealth generated by the U.S. economy has remained in the hands of an almost invisibly minuscule fraction of the population. The number of the oligarchs is numerically insignificant. The people in question are not really the 1 percent made notorious by the Occupy Wall Street movement, but the 1 percent of the 1 percent. Not 1 percent, but 0.01 percent. Not 1 of 100, nor even 1 of 1,000, but 1 of 10,000.
Essentially all new wealth generated by the American economy since 1980 is in the hands of that tiny percentage of the population. The group of Americans who control as much wealth as half of the population is even smaller: as numerous as my high school class. And those few hundred oligarchs are paying less tax now than the actual members of my high school class—which is to say they have a lower effective tax rate than working-class and middle-class Americans.
Mobility depends on distribution. If I own everything and put a fence around it, you will not be very mobile. If I own a huge company that can prevent competition, you are unlikely to have an exciting first job. If a few pals and I can control a market with our monopoly power, we can keep prices up, making it very hard for people to break free into a new social class. In monopoly conditions, earnings will come from stocks rather than from wages, keeping the wealthy up and the rest down.
The politics of inevitability normalized this situation. Since capitalism was identified with freedom, any suffering was interpreted as necessary. Since freedom was negative, there was supposedly nothing government could do. In any event, there were, we were told, no alternatives. Politicians of inevitability presented growing inequality as a side effect of progress rather than its contradiction. The future was supposedly known and certain and good; once this premise was accepted, it seemed logical that pain in the present must be a meaningful step along the way.
The truth was simpler. Inequality meant immobility. And immobility meant unfreedom.
Politicians of inevitability and their acolytes like to talk about averages, but they are worse than meaningless. If Jeff Bezos is in a room with a hundred impoverished working mothers, their average wealth is north of $1 billion, but that means nothing to the women. If you have $12 million, and each of your ten friends has $100,000 in college debt, you and friends are, on average, $1 million in the black. But your friends can’t pay off their debts with that average.
It only seems that the typical American has some money because the wealth of a few hundred families—again, a group the size of my high school class—gets into the mix and spoils the math. Since half the national wealth is owned by an irrelevantly small group of people, the country is only half as wealthy as the numbers present it to be. If we remove oligarchs from the sample, it becomes brutally clear that the national wealth is spread thin. Typical Americans live from paycheck to paycheck, which is a polite way of saying that they are poor. A typical American cannot come up with $1,000 in an emergency. A typical American cannot pay for the funeral that negative freedom hastens.
Matters are still worse than this. It is not enough to remove the wealth of those top few hundred families in order to correct the math of national freedom. We actually have to count that wealth against the national welfare, because its concentration leads to practices and policies that leave almost everyone less mobile and less free. The tiny group of “have yachts” are more politically coherent and powerful than the enormous mass of “have-nots,” and they will act to keep it that way.
As the French philosopher d’Holbach noted more than two centuries ago, and as contemporary research confirms, the consumption patterns of the very wealthy act to weaken the sway of everyone else, the 99.99 percent. Oligarchs spend wealth to protect wealth, which brings only detriments to other citizens (except to the handful of accountants, lawyers, and lobbyists they employ). This behavior warps the system into their service. It cuts off revenue that would fund public services that would allow tens of millions of Americans to create better lives. It spreads stagnation and undoes the American Dream.
Oligarchs do not just have the biggest piece of the pie. They often have the pie cutter. And when they do, it does not matter much if the pie gets bigger. Very important redistributive policies were passed by Congress in the early 2020s. But the first two years of the Biden administration was the very laudable exception, not the rule.
In the twenty-first century, federal and state governments have generally been outmatched by American oligarchs and their hirelings. Tax evasion and fraud have become the norm. The wealthy lobbied against policies meant to support a middle class. Monopolies blocked competition, and big firms stopped unionization. Inequality is not merely a set of numbers but a distressing experience. People who see unfairness from the beginning of life are discouraged and demobilized.
As oligarchy intruded, even talking about mobility became difficult. As more educated and articulate people were instrumentalized to serve wealth, those who tried to ask the why questions were mocked by the burgeoning chorus. Everything had to be the way it was because rich people paid others to say so. Without history and the humanities, ridiculed inside and outside the academy for decades, American minds were less able to conjure up defenses. It all seems normal until it seems intolerable.
The Tsar Bell in Russia is so heavy that it has never been rung. If a bell is always silent, is it really a bell? If the weight of inequality is so great that we cannot even speak about it, are we really free people? The language itself warps and cracks. In conditions of extreme inequality, truths are not only ignored but considered awkward or shameful. As the French thinker Raymond Aron noted, “At a certain level of inequality, there is no longer human communication.” In the Republic and the Laws, Plato maintained that it was impossible for the wealthy to be just to others. He has Socrates speak of a “city of the rich” and a “city of the poor.” Two different modes of existence make a single society impossible.
In conditions of extreme inequality, the word freedom, which should belong to everyone, attaches instead to abstractions that suit oligarchs. When we speak of “free markets” instead of “free people,” we are in trouble. In American oligarchy, “free speech” all too often means the privilege of the very wealthy to transmit anonymous propaganda and to fund electoral campaigns. In such a situation, we the people will have little to say.
There are many values, and we all need a chance to realize our own combinations of them. Any attempt to select just one at the expense of all the others will end in tyranny. The politics of inevitability acknowledged only a single value: entrepreneurship. To be sure, entrepreneurship is a very good thing. But no value is enough in itself, and no value alone generates all the others.
Left on its own, untempered by other values, entrepreneurship becomes (and became) an argument for wars of profit and private prisons, for the impotence of government, and for the nonexistence of communities. It becomes an excuse for blaming others for their poverty. Treating entrepreneurship as the only value actually hinders entrepreneurship, by creating monopolies that prevent competition; by weakening the public services that young people need to gain skills; and by littering minds with exculpatory nonsense about how the status quo is the only alternative, the end of history, and so on.
A single value and a single future will collapse into a politics of eternity, in which values and the future vanish entirely. Fake cheerfulness and real determinism give way to nostalgia and resentment. This happened in the USSR and in Russia, then in the United States.
Freedom needs the fourth dimension—time, an open future. The politics of inevitability reduced the future to a single possibility. When there is only one vision of the future, the moral muscles grow limp. If there are no alternatives, why imagine them? Once political imagination fades, the alternatives seem to be the official future or none at all. When the promise of the politics of inevitability is broken, we despair. Its parting curse is thus the politics of eternity. One future becomes none.
The future has vanished: social mobility is lost, we are disoriented by crises. And so we need a still more reassuring story, one that is invulnerable to our fears or that turns them against another people. Politics can be safely located in legend. Time loops back to a mythical moment when the tribe was great. What was lost since then is the fault of some other group. We are innocent. They are guilty.
The politics of inevitability wore away at factuality in the 1990s and 2000s by insisting that all data fit into a larger story of a rosy future. Many Americans got used to a “narrative” to which the facts must bow. The politics of eternity takes the next step, denying factuality as such. Eternity politicians say (with some justification) that inevitability politicians selected the truths they liked; they then move on (with no justification) to the indefensible position that truth is just personal preference.
Politicians of inevitability are fake economists who lull us to sleep with the idea that larger forces will always bring us back to equilibrium. Politicians of eternity are real entertainers who assuage our sense of loss with an appealing tale about the past. They gain our confidence by circling us back to a mythical era when we as a nation were (supposedly) innocent. These time-looping con artists nudge us away from democracy and toward their own feeling that they should rule forever and never be sent to prison (a motive especially apparent in the case of Trump and also Benjamin Netanyahu). Deprived of historical knowledge and of the habit of ethical thinking by the politics of inevitability, we are easy marks. Rising authoritarians succeed in this century not by proposing futures but by making any conversation about them seem pointless or absurd.
Vladimir Putin was the most important politician of eternity. His Russia drew directly from Brezhnev’s 1970s, a time of nostalgia for the victory of 1945. Putin and his generation were raised with the idea that the supposed innocence of an older generation justified any action by a younger one. He looped back to Brezhnev’s 1970s, and from the 1970s to an imagined 1945, and then to a baptism a thousand years before that, which supposedly joined Russia with Ukraine forever and made Russians eternally innocent. Russia was always the victim and always the victor. Russians had the right to determine whether or not Ukraine and Ukrainians existed; anyone who denied that right was an enemy. A Russian fascist tradition that spoke in just this way was discovered and celebrated.
And so Ukraine could be invaded, cities leveled, millions of people forced into flight, hundreds of thousands killed, on the logic that this was somehow a replay of the Second World War or a restoration of the tenth century. Russia was innocent, all was permitted. The full-scale invasion of 2022 demonstrated how the atavistic whining of the wealthiest fossil oligarch, Putin himself, could direct the world’s attention away from the future—and draw resources away from where they were needed most. Putin’s genocidal undertaking was supported by the wealthiest digital oligarch, Elon Musk.
Americans, as this suggests, did not have to look to Russia for a politics of eternity. Our own materialists, the Silicon Valley ones, have followed the same trajectory as the Soviet and post-Soviet elite: they no longer promise a brighter future but instead tell us that the present is as good as it gets. Musk and others wax nostalgic for the racial purity of an imagined past. Donald Trump offered a time when America was “great.” Like Putin’s invasions of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022, Trump’s attempted coup of 2020–21 was an effort to stop time, to keep a democracy from moving forward.
Eternity politics comes down to the idea that some single person should rule forever, usually to preserve personal wealth and avoid responsibility for crimes.
When the future is lost, so are we. Political tomfoolery does not actually stop time. The fourth dimension still has rules, even if we ignore them. Time moves forward, even when we fail to keep pace, as in the 2010s. The law of necessity does not take pity on us when we abandon the law of freedom. On the contrary: as we choose to be less free, we also abandon our power to change the world around us. And then the future, a spurned lover, comes for us, breathing vengeance.
Both the politics of inevitability and the politics of eternity lack contact with the most basic elements of reality: physics, chemistry, biology; the earth, its atmosphere, life. The politics of inevitability molded inconvenient facts into a story of progress. The one true inevitability was overlooked: the more carbon dioxide we emit, the more sunlight is trapped, and the warmer Earth becomes. The science of global warming was well established by the 1980s. Dissidents warned about it, from Sakharov to Havel. Most of the human-made carbon dioxide now in the atmosphere has been emitted since communism came to an end in Europe in 1989.
Inevitability politicians and their cheerleaders rationalized this, and everything else. The climate may be warming, they said, but the problem will generate its own solution. It will all somehow turn out fine. Wealth inequality may be increasing, but that’s just a side effect of general prosperity. We may be leading shorter, sadder lives in front of screens, but somehow that just proves our laudable autonomy. The cheerleaders wrote books to spread rationalization memes: we are getting smarter (we’re not); it’s not as bad as the newspapers portray (it’s worse); in the end, maybe all this is just a simulation (it’s not), so we are not responsible (we are) and shouldn’t worry since we don’t really exist (we do).
After politicians of inevitability bent the facts, politicians of eternity broke them. Politicians of inevitability understated the problem of climate change. Today politicians of eternity deny that climate change matters, or they deny the underlying science or science as such—because, after all, there is no truth. The only true eternity they can bring is extinction.
The politics of eternity gives way to a politics of catastrophe. Oligarchs fiddle, the world burns. A Trump mocks science; a Putin invades Ukraine with an army funded by fossil fuels; a Musk opens Twitter to a flood of lies about both Russian fascism and global warming.
By turning away from the future and denying science, eternity politicians bring climate calamity closer to the present. Then when the droughts and the fires and the storms and the floods affect our daily lives, eternity politicians blame those who are harmed. They shift attention from the greenhouse effect, which they have caused, to climate refugees, their victims.
At that moment, the politics of eternity becomes the politics of catastrophe. The politics of inevitability proposes a single positive future; the politics of eternity does away with the future; the politics of catastrophe summons a negative future ever closer. It fills the ever-shorter remaining time with undifferentiated fear. We are not striding forward into multiple futures as free people; instead, the bleakness comes to embrace us.
Vladimir Putin is a product of the politics of inevitability, in that Western leaders understand him as a technocrat tamed by money. An outstanding eternity politician, he leads the vanguard of catastrophe. He established a myth of Russian innocence. He worried about a future in which there would not be enough Russians. He then sent his armies to invade Ukraine and to deport to Russia women and children deemed assimilable, among a series of other genocidal policies. The horror of the war in Ukraine foreshadows the politics of catastrophe generally.
The fear of catastrophe takes two forms: for some, that of an ecological disaster that is indeed all around us but could be resolved by political and technical means; for others (such as Putin), that of a demographic crisis that can be solved only by insisting upon racial superiority. These are, so to speak, the objective and subjective catastrophes. When the objective catastrophe comes, those who have chosen the subjective one will be ready to blame, harm, and kill other people (as Russia under Putin is doing).
That is a familiar historical pattern. Our future, if we proceed through the politics of catastrophe, looks ever more like Hitler’s dark fantasy of ecological war. The fourth and fifth dimensions are abandoned, and so we struggle for space in a crowded third. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has this feel, with its kidnapped children, eugenic deportations, fascist propaganda, and atavistic racism. Time has run out, is the message. Land must be seized and colonized, and whoever says otherwise is just getting in the way of collective survival and must be eliminated.
We know the way back toward freedom: a reclamation of the future. We must restore social mobility and prevent the coming catastrophe. Both can be done, but only through the conscious activity of sovereign, unpredictable people. Fear is not enough. It will not get us where we need to go. From the most basic facts we can build a scaffolding of hope. We need to ground ourselves in history and science to take a turn toward a better future. It is all within our reach.
In the time warps of inevitability, eternity, and catastrophe, we lose history. We lose knowledge of the past and the sense of time’s flow.
In the politics of inevitability, the facts about the past are just dispensable details since we see a general trend and a happy end. In the politics of eternity, the past is a morality play of innocence and guilt. In the politics of catastrophe, the approaching disaster enervates the present and occludes the past. Then the oligarchs appear, naked in their power, perfect in their petulance, fighting wars of racial competition and global famine.
History is a foundation of mobility and thus of freedom. We need history to slip free of the time warps and find our way to a more reassuring sense of time. When we think historically, we see structures inherited from the past, plausible choices in the present, and multiple possibilities for the future.
Mobility depends on a sense of the future, which depends on a sense of the past. The same holds for freedom itself. We draw values from the past, consider them in the present, and apply them toward some future that we wish to realize. The practice of considering and combining values is impossible without a sense of time past and time to come.
Nothing is entirely new. Everything has some instructive connection to past events. Nor is anything really eternal or inevitable. If we have the references, we remember that past catastrophes have been survived, overcome, and even exploited. Then the present seems less shocking, and the future more open. The possibilities are more numerous than they seem, and some of them are good. Indeed, some of them are wonderful. The future could be far better than we can presently imagine.
History defends us against the politics of inevitability by reminding us of the multitude of possibilities at every point. History undoes the politics of eternity by teaching us to learn responsibility from the past rather than resentment from the present. Confronting catastrophe, as we do today, we need to extend time, first backward and then forward, stretching our minds, extending ourselves. Indeed, to see our way forward, we will have to look back.
More than anything else, Václav Havel wrote of “the world” and “the earth” and of responsibility to it. “Living in truth” could make sense in politics only when it was an attitude toward nature and the universe, not just ourselves. As the future crashes in, we can panic and blame others. Those predictable reactions make us part of the mob and the catastrophe. Or we can, as free people, take responsibility, look deep into Earth’s past, and save our world.