On Freedom

Snyder recalls reading ancient Greek myths and literature in childhood and travelling with his family, arguing that these experiences trained his imagination toward movement and discovery. At 14 in Costa Rica’s Monteverde cloud forest, he and his brothers follow a local guide, Ian, to a hidden waterfall with a cave behind the falls, an experience he links to autonomy and adventure. That night, he overhears Quaker neighbors debating whether a forest path is a public “right of way,” a phrase he hears as “right away,” fusing the ideas of lawful access and immediacy and settling in his mind as an early figure of freedom of movement. He later returns to Costa Rica and observes how the nation’s policy choices, geared toward protecting wilderness, developing renewable energy, and offering universal health care, correlate with longer life, higher freedom scores, and greater happiness than in the United States despite the country’s far lower GDP.

Snyder defines mobility as the third form of freedom: movement through space and time (and among values), dependent on collective supports like food, water, hygiene, health care, safety, parks and paths, roads and rails. Mobility allows people to make something of their bodies, but it depends on collective effort. Trails are only available because others build and maintain them; likewise, individual mobility is always social. He illustrates with examples of assisted mobility: A blind relative uses voice dictation software to write; Snyder’s friend Tony Judt uses a wheelchair to increase his freedom while living with ALS; Ukrainian soldiers rely on prosthetics and rehabilitation for recovery. He stresses aging and geroscience as public commitments tied to liberty. Confidence that care will be there—health coverage, pensions—enlarges life choices. In the US, by contrast, medical debt and job-tied insurance immobilize people. Poverty functions as “the daily basis of unfreedom” (131), as one incarcerated student, Marquis, says; for many, freedom begins with reliable meals and decent schools. Developmentally, he frames the first three freedoms as a life arc: sovereignty in childhood (with help), unpredictability in youth, and mobility in adulthood, when people need destinations and the means to reach them.

He turns to US racial history to show how mobility is constrained or weaponized. Irene Morgan’s 1946 Supreme Court win in Morgan v. Virginia formally outlawed segregation in interstate travel, but little changed immediately. Black servicemen in World War II were humiliated by segregated public transit even as they fought fascism; Leon Bass helped liberate Buchenwald, then returned to Jim Crow restrictions. Some veterans asserted their right to move; others—like Isaac Woodard, beaten and blinded after his service—were brutally attacked. In 1961, Freedom Riders tested desegregation rulings on buses and in terminals; violent white supremacists beat activists, firebombed a bus, and besieged a church in Montgomery, Alabama. Many Freedom Riders were arrested in Mississippi. More than 400 people participated in the Freedom Riders’ activism that year; by fall, the federal government ordered bus-station integration.

Mobility also involves public encounters and perception. Snyder notes how appearance shapes transit experiences: In Europe he learns to blend in; at home, his Korean American friend endures harassment on the city bus and learns which taunts must be resisted. Snyder invokes postcolonial theorist Frantz Fanon’s account of being seen through others’ eyes, and W. E. B. Du Bois’s “double consciousness,” to argue that stereotype can convert the lived body (Leib) into an object (Körper). An incarcerated student, David, writes that “thinking without the threat of trauma” (136) must precede freedom.

Snyder frames fascism and Stalinism as distinct immobilizations of time and value. Under Nazism, Jews are immobilized in ghettos and concentration camps so others can gain; Hitler rejects the “fourth and fifth dimensions” (175)—multiple futures and values—reducing politics to a three-dimensional struggle for Lebensraum (living space). Under Stalinism, a single planned future justifies crash industrialization, collectivization, famine (especially in Ukraine), and the Gulag; certainty about the future licenses coercion in the present. Both regimes are ersatz empires, late imitations of earlier imperial mobility. Snyder then sketches American expansion, arguing that imperial mobility historically depends on technology and immunity. By the mid-20th century, global decolonization and failed great-power wars (Vietnam, Afghanistan) show that imperial mobility is no longer viable.

He argues that in the US, a false binary between entrepreneurship and social justice functions to reinforce racial injustice: Many white voters are encouraged to see themselves as self-reliant “earners” while viewing Black people and other groups as undeserving. He links this to the long history of depicting Black Americans as lazy or criminal and contends that mass incarceration taught whites to equate “freedom” with the negative freedom of not being imprisoned, substituting anxiety management for actual liberty. He describes this as immobilization radiating from prisons into society, shaping minds as well as bodies.

Tracing late 20th-century immobilization politics, he notes Richard Nixon fusing race and crime in 1968 and Ronald Reagan racializing “welfare” with the “welfare queen” stereotype. In Snyder’s account, these cynical political maneuvers led many white voters to reject the welfare state that had enabled their families’ upward mobility, producing stagnation for their children and opening a space for resentment-driven politics. He calls this “postimperial immobility”: The allure of a triumphant past (“greatness”), paired with present decline, leads to societal despair—visible in suicides, addiction, prisons, and self-harm via guns and drugs.

Snyder then develops a comparative argument about convergent stagnation in the US and the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union, early, violent “mobility” in the form of forced collectivization, the Great Terror, and Soviet imperialism in Easter Europe yielded, by the 1970s, to immobility: consumerism without alternatives and nostalgia for World War II. Snyder says Americans misread the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, concluding that the concept of the welfare state had been discredited. Americans imported a version of Soviet-style immobility by abandoning social mobility while clinging to imperial imagery.

On infrastructure, Snyder contrasts Poland’s EU-funded road and rail improvements after 2004—enabling reliable movement and longer life expectancy—with deteriorating US roads and underperforming rail. He coins the term “sadopopulism” to describe leaders who offer no redistribution but instead the spectacle of others’ suffering, turning immobility into comparative consolation (“my roads are bad, yours are worse”). He presents Donald Trump as an example, stoking contempt while declining to build infrastructure.

Snyder outlines three problems, which he calls “time warps,” that undermine mobility. He calls the first  “the politics of inevitability”: After 1989, the US and Western Europe believed that free markets guaranteed a single, good future, collapsing values and facts into a deterministic story and dampening agency. The second time warp is “the politics of eternity”—political narratives that replace a shared future with a narrow, nostalgic vision of the past, denying factual reality altogether. The third is “the politics of catastrophe,” a constant, fear-driven countdown to societal collapse that shortens horizons and invites authoritarian responses.

Snyder ties all these deceptive narratives to the rise of oligarchic inequality since the 1980s—especially the capture of nearly all new wealth by the top 0.01%—which blocks competition, depresses wages, and normalizes immobility through narratives that recast suffering as progress. Concentrated wealth distorts policy toward monopoly, tax evasion, and the dismantling of public services that sustain middle-class mobility, while making frank discussion of inequality itself difficult.

Linking eternity politics to Putin’s Russia, Snyder notes parallels in American tech and political culture, including nostalgia and attempts to halt democratic time. Denying science and the future speeds climate disaster, which then feeds catastrophe politics, redirecting anger toward victims (e.g., climate refugees). In his view, the path back to freedom is “responsibility politics”: recovering history and science to restore a shared future, rebuilding social mobility through institutions and infrastructure, and re-anchoring freedom in multiple possible futures rather than fear, nostalgia, or fatalism.