Marci Shore made news around the world when her family moved to Canada. She discusses Trump, teaching history and how terror atomises society<\/p>\n\n\n\n
S<\/strong>he finds the whole idea absurd. To Prof Marci Shore, the notion that the Guardian, or anyone else, should want to interview her about the future of the US is ridiculous. She\u2019s an academic specialising in the history and culture of eastern Europe and describes herself as a \u201cSlavicist\u201d, yet here she is, suddenly besieged by international journalists keen to ask about the country in which she insists she has no expertise: her own. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of baffling,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In fact, the explanation is simple enough. Last month, Shore, together with her husband and fellow scholar of European history, Timothy Snyder<\/a>, and the academic Jason Stanley, made news around the world when they announced that they were moving from Yale University in the US to the University of Toronto in Canada. It was not the move itself so much as their motive that garnered attention. As the headline of a short video op-ed<\/a> the trio made for the New York Times put it, \u201cWe Study Fascism, and We\u2019re Leaving the US\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Starkly, Shore invoked the ultimate warning from history. \u201cThe lesson of 1933 is: you get out sooner rather than later.\u201d She seemed to be saying that what had happened then, in Germany, could happen now, in Donald Trump\u2019s America \u2013 and that anyone tempted to accuse her of hyperbole or alarmism was making a mistake. \u201cMy colleagues and friends, they were walking around and saying, \u2018We have checks and balances. So let\u2019s inhale, checks and balances<\/em>, exhale, checks and balances.<\/em>\u2019 I thought, my God, we\u2019re like people on the Titanic saying, \u2018Our ship can\u2019t sink. We\u2019ve got the best ship. We\u2019ve got the strongest ship. We\u2019ve got the biggest ship.\u2019 And what you know as a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can\u2019t sink.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Since Shore, Snyder and Stanley announced their plans, the empirical evidence has rather moved in their favour. Whether it was the sight of tanks transported into Washington DC ahead of the military parade that marked Trump\u2019s birthday last Saturday or the deployment of the national guard to crush protests in Los Angeles, alongside marines readied for the same task, <\/strong>recent days have brought the kind of developments that could serve as a dramatist\u2019s shorthand for the slide towards fascism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt\u2019s all almost too stereotypical,\u201d Shore reflects. \u201cA 1930s-style military parade as a performative assertion of the F\u00fchrerprinzip,<\/em>\u201d she says, referring to the doctrine established by Adolf Hitler, locating all power in the dictator. \u201cAs for Los Angeles, my historian\u2019s intuition is that sending in the national guard is a provocation that will be used to foment violence and justify martial law. The Russian word of the day here could be provokatsiia<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n That response captures the double lens through which Shore sees the Trump phenomenon, informed by both the Third Reich and the \u201cneo-totalitarianism\u201d exhibited most clearly in the Russia of Vladimir Putin. We speak as Shore is trying to do her day job, having touched down in Warsaw en route to Kyiv, with Poland and Ukraine long a focus of her studies. Via Zoom from a hotel lobby, she peppers our conversation with terms drawn from a Russian political lexicon that suddenly fits a US president.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe unabashed narcissism, this Nero-like level of narcissism and this lack of apology \u2026 in Russian, it\u2019s obnazhenie<\/em>; \u2018laying bare\u2019.\u201d It\u2019s an approach to politics \u201cin which all of the ugliness is right on the surface,\u201d not concealed in any way. \u201cAnd that\u2019s its own kind of strategy. You just lay everything out there.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n She fears that the sheer shamelessness of Trump has \u201creally disempowered the opposition, because our impulse is to keep looking for the thing that\u2019s hidden and expose it, and we think that\u2019s going to be what makes the system unravel.\u201d But the problem is not what\u2019s hidden, it\u2019s \u201cwhat we\u2019ve normalised \u2013 because the whole strategy is to throw it all in your face.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n None of this has been an overnight realisation for Shore. It had been building for years, with origins that predate Trump. Now 53, she had spent most of her 20s focused on eastern Europe, barely paying attention to US politics<\/a>, when the deadlocked presidential election of 2000 and the aborted Florida recount fiasco made her realise that \u201cwe didn\u2019t really know how to count votes\u201d. Next she was wondering: \u201cWhy exactly were we going to war in Iraq?\u201d But the moment her academic work began to shed an uncomfortable light on the American present came in the presidential race of 2008.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhen John McCain chose Sarah Palin, I felt like she was a character right out of the 1930s.\u201d The Republican vice-presidential candidate lived, Shore thought, \u201cin a totally fictitious world \u2026 not constrained by empirical reality<\/a>.\u201d Someone like that, Shore believed, could really rile up a mob.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And then came Trump.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once again, it was the lack of truthfulness that terrified her. \u201cWithout a distinction between truth and lies, there is no grounding for a distinction between good and evil,\u201d she says. Lying is essential to totalitarianism; she understood that from her scholarly research. But while Hitler and Stalin\u2019s lies were in the service of some vast \u201ceschatological vision\u201d, the post-truth dishonesty of a Trump or Putin struck her as different. The only relevant criterion for each man is whether this or that act is \u201cadvantageous or disadvantageous to him at any given moment. It\u2019s pure, naked transaction.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n When Trump was elected in 2016, Shore found herself \u201clying on the floor of my office, throwing up into a plastic bag. I felt like this was the end of the world. I felt like something had happened that was just catastrophic on a world historical scale, that was never going to be OK.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Did she consider leaving the US then? She did, not least because both she and her husband had received offers to teach in Geneva. \u201cWe tore our hair out debating it.\u201d Snyder\u2019s instinct was to stay and fight: he\u2019s a \u201ccommitted patriot\u201d, she says. Besides, their children were younger; there was their schooling to think about. So they stayed at Yale. \u201cThese things are so contingent; you can\u2019t do a control study on real life.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n But when Trump won again last November, there was no doubt in her mind. However bad things had looked in 2016, now was worse. \u201cSo much had been dismantled \u2026 the guardrails, or the checks and balances, had systematically been taken down. The supreme court\u2019s ruling on immunity; the failure to hold Trump accountable for anything, including the fact that he incited, you know, a violent insurrection on the Capitol, that he encouraged a mob that threatened to hang his vice-president, that he called up the Georgia secretary of state and asked him to find votes. I felt like we were in much more dangerous territory.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Events so far have vindicated those fears. The deportations; students disappeared off the streets, one famously caught on video<\/a> as she was bundled into an unmarked car by masked immigration agents; the humiliation of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as Trump and JD Vance ordered the Ukrainian president to express his gratitude to them, even as they were \u201cabusing\u201d him, an episode, says Shore, \u201cright out of Stalinism\u201d \u2013 to say nothing of Trump\u2019s regular attacks on \u201cUSA-hating judges<\/a>\u201d who rule against the executive branch. It adds up to a playbook that is all too familiar. \u201cDark fantasies are coming true.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n She readily admits that her reaction to these events is not wholly or coldly analytical. It\u2019s more personal than that. \u201cI\u2019m a neurotic catastrophist,\u201d she says. \u201cI feel like we could just subtitle [this period] \u2018the vindication of the neurotic catastrophist\u2019. I mean, I\u2019ve been anxious and neurotic since birth.\u201d She draws the contrast with her husband: \u201cTim is not an anxious person by nature, and that is just hardwired.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n She\u2019s referring in part to their different backgrounds. Snyder is a child of Quakers; Shore is Jewish, raised in Allentown, eastern Pennsylvania. Her father was a doctor and her mother \u201ca doctor\u2019s wife\u201d who was later a preschool teacher. Shore grew up in a community with Holocaust survivors. \u201cI do think there\u2019s something about having heard stories of the Holocaust at a young age that was formative. If you hear these stories \u2013 people narrating what they went through in Auschwitz, even if they\u2019re narrating it for eight, nine or 10-year-olds \u2013 it impresses itself on your consciousness. Once you know it\u2019s possible, you just can\u2019t unknow that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n How bad does she think it could get? Matter-of-factly, she says: \u201cMy fear is we\u2019re headed to civil war.\u201d She restates a basic truth about the US. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of guns. There\u2019s a lot of gun violence. There\u2019s a habituation to violence that\u2019s very American, that Europeans don\u2019t understand.\u201d Her worry is that the guns are accompanied by a new \u201cpermissiveness\u201d that comes from the top, that was typified by Trump\u2019s indulgence of the January 6 rioters, even those who wanted to murder his vice-president. As she puts it: \u201cYou can feel that brewing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n She also worries that instead of fighting back, \u201cpeople become atomised. The arbitrariness of terror atomises people. You know, people put their heads down, they go quiet, they get in line, if only for the very reasonable, rational reason that any individual acting rationally has a reason to think that the personal cost of refusing to make a compromise is going to be greater than the social benefit of their one act of resistance. So you get a classic collective action problem.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Later she speaks of the beauty of solidarity, those fleeting moments when societies come together, often to expel a tyrant. She recalls the trade union Solidarity in communist-era Poland and the Maidan revolution in Ukraine. By leaving America \u2013 and Americans \u2013 in their hour of need, is she not betraying the very solidarity she reveres?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI feel incredibly guilty about that,\u201d she sighs. All the more so when she sees the criticism directed at her husband. They were on sabbatical together in Canada when Trump won the 2024 election, but \u201chad he been alone, he would have gone back to fight \u2026 That\u2019s his personality. But he wouldn\u2019t have done that to me and the kids.\u201d To those minded to hurl accusations of betrayal and cowardice, she says: \u201cDirect them all to me. I\u2019m the coward. I take full blame for that.\u201d It was she, not Snyder, who decided that \u201cno, I\u2019m not bringing my kids back to this\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I linger on that word \u201ccoward\u201d. It goes to one of the fears that led to Shore\u2019s decision. She does not doubt her own intellectual courage, her willingness to say or write what she believes, regardless of the consequences. But, she says, \u201cI\u2019ve never trusted myself to be physically courageous.\u201d She worries that she is, in fact, \u201ca physical coward\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She began to wonder: what would I do if someone came to take my students away? \u201cIf you\u2019re in a classroom, you know your job is to look out for your students.\u201d But could she do it? Many of her students are from overseas. \u201cWhat am I going to do if masked guys in balaclavas come and try to take this person away? Would I be brave? Would I try to pull them away? Would I try to pull the mask off? Would I scream? Would I cry? Would I run away?\u201d She didn\u2019t trust herself to do what would need to be done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So now she is in what she calls \u201ca luxurious position\u201d: at a university across the border, safely out of reach of both Trump\u2019s threats to cut funding and the ICE officials currently striking terror into the hearts of international students and others. As a result, she feels \u201cmore obligated to speak out \u2026 on behalf of my colleagues and on behalf of other Americans who are at risk\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At one point in our conversation, we talk about those US citizens who put Trump back in the White House, even though, as she puts it, they knew who he was. \u201cNothing was hidden. People had plenty of time to think about it, and they chose<\/em> this. And that disgust, I couldn\u2019t shake that. I thought: \u2018People wanted<\/em> this \u2013 and I don\u2019t want to have anything to do with this.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Does that mean she will never return to the US? \u201cI would never say, \u2018I would never go back.\u2019 I always feel that what history teaches you is not what will happen, but what can<\/em> happen. The possibilities are generally much more capacious than anyone is expecting at that moment.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Contained in that remark is, if not optimism, then at least the possibility of it. And, right now, that might be as much as we can ask for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n