Republicans abandon Trump over disastrous Iran deal

21:25Brian Tyler Cohen:So any way you cut this, I don't see how Trump can do anything close to resembling a victory lap when we don't have anything that we wouldn't have already had under the JCPOA had we not engaged in this whole process. In some ways, what's even worse about this is, as I said, there were negotiations going on before this war began. There is no reason to believe that this deal was not available to the president without going to war, without putting Americans in harm's way. And by the way, there was significant loss of life among American service members during this conflict without all of the economic damage to many of our friends and partners and allies around the world and to the United States.

22:02Without doing all of that, by the way, drawing down America's supply of munitions that we need to deter our adversaries in other fields. We have now expended a massive amount of this to fight a totally unnecessary war. And the deal that we will ultimately get is not a good deal. And at least this good a deal and maybe better was available before we even launched this war in the first place. So a pretty bad strategic predicament. And when you have when you launch a bad war and it does not go well, ultimately, your options are limited, which is why the president is choosing to do this deal, even though I think he knows on some level how weak it is.

22:37Brian Tyler Cohen:Yeah, we'll leave it there. John Feiner, thank you so much for taking the time. I appreciate it. Thanks very much, Brian.

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24:35Brian Tyler Cohen:big question to begin with. But in your exploration of tyranny and autocracies in other countries, and then looking to what we have here in the United States, to what extent do you think what we have here in the US right now is salvageable? I don't think it's salvageable at all. I think we're beyond the point where reform or rescue or even healing is the right way to think about this. I think if the U.S. is going to make it through this, what we're going to have to have is rather something like a new beginning. I think just as a matter of practical politics, there aren't any reference points in the recent past, which most Americans find acceptable or interesting.

25:15I think the task after Trump, or rather late Trump, is to define what a better America will look like. So that's how I see it. It's not about salvaging something. It's about a pretty drastic rethinking.

25:30Brian Tyler Cohen:Okay, so let me ask a little bit of a different iteration on that question then, because people are going to be watching the extent to which the administration attacks the very concept of democracy on a daily basis, the extent to which Congress, Republican-led Congress, is willing to allow him to do that, the extent to which the Republican-led judiciary, the Supreme Court, is also willing to be an active participant in this whole scheme. And so to what extent do you think that democracy in this country, maybe it looks different in the aftermath of Trump as we were just talking about, but the very idea of democracy persisting is salvageable?

26:08Nope, not at all. Can't persist, has to be remade. So we are where we are, not just because of Trump, but because of prior mistakes that we made as a people. and Trump has brought to a point several things that were already wrong with the United States. And if we're going to get out of those, if we're going to get out of Trump, we were going to have to, for example, get money out of politics because there's a reason why Trump's line that everybody is corrupt and I'm just honest about it. There's a reason why that works. And the reason why it works has to be dealt with. If we're going to win this election, it's not going to be by way of conventional means.

26:44It's not just going to be because, okay, there's going to be a normal election, people are going to show up and vote. If we win in a meaningful sense, it's going to be because there's an abnormal, historically speaking, abnormal big coalition between center right and far left. It's going to be because there's enough protest potential that those who want to throw the elections are going to be deterred from doing so. And to win in a meaningful sense, the political party that wins, the Democrats, are going to have to recognize that they didn't win just because Trump lost, but they won because people were angry and that that anger has to be transformed into something positive right away.

27:18So I'm sorry if I sound pedantic, but I think any notion of persistence is also not helpful because too much is already gone mentally, psychologically, institutionally, legally, too much is already gone for us to be thinking about persisting or remaining or showing resilience. It has to be more about a stunning demoralizing defeat for Trump and the people around him and a creative impulse that pushes us towards something that's much better than we think could happen.

27:46Brian Tyler Cohen:Well, so that's basically this idea of like accelerationism and just tearing everything down so that something new can be built in its place. I mean, politics for so long has been focused on the complete opposite on incrementalism. It's like, we can't get Medicare for all, which Obama has been on record saying was the initial hope for the ACA, obviously, without enough support, it kind of devolved into the more incremental approach that the ACA, Obamacare, turned into. But this country has been pretty resistant to sweeping changes in kind of the more modern era, at least until Trump. I mean, it's been so difficult to get anything done, whether it's Medicare for all, whether it's a more just tax system, big sweeping infrastructure reforms.

28:40Brian Tyler Cohen:It is so difficult to do things in this country. And so I guess the question is, do you think that there is an appetite now for some of these big sweeping changes that people have been angling to see for so long, but always feel like we just cannot get done? Yeah. I mean, I think the American population on most of the things that you're talking about is much more radical than either of the political parties. I think if you put the question the right way, most people, including a lot of Republicans, are in favor of a good deal of wealth redistribution. Most people, including a lot of Republicans, are in favor of rich people paying taxes, which is not the current American policy.

29:20Most people, including a lot of Republicans, are in favor of education and healthcare being run by people for people rather than being run by machines for a few individuals to make a lot of money. And the list is pretty long. Most people are in favor of decent public schools and are against vouchers. Like there's a long list of issues where there's a pretty deep consensus and it's not the people, it's not public opinion, but it's rather the structures themselves. And so if you are coming out of a victory in November, you have to be at least ready to talk about changing the structures themselves.

29:52And then if you have a majority in both houses in the presidency in 28, you know, so when we get that far, you have to be willing to change the structure themselves because I agree with you, the structures are not responsive and that's very demoralizing. And it's one of the things that went wrong for the Biden people, right? Like some of their policies were quite ambitious and they actually passed some ambitious stuff. But even when they passed it, the consequences weren't felt until three or four or five years later.

30:17Brian Tyler Cohen:I mean, that's like the standard democratic response to some of this stuff is like, okay, we're going to implement what we can even on healthcare and we'll make sure that it hits eight years down the road where it's basically scientifically engineered so that the party in power can never get credit for it. It's not felt by people. And therefore, the war can't continue because, you know, by then the parties have turned over and you have, you know, Trump that's run roughshod over everything. I mean, like back in the day, these are now old references, but when Obama won and the Democrats had both houses, I thought on day one, they should pass a law saying we are going to offer healthcare for Americans on the model of the healthcare that people in Congress have.

31:04End of story, right? Like, how could that be resisted? And if they had done that, I think they would have, you know, it'd be over. But instead, we had debates and we gave the other side a chance. And so I want to pause on one point, which is that a lot of this is about power and not expecting history to go your way. So, you know, the thing where Obama paraphrases, you know, was it Martin Luther King? the idea that the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice. 100 % not true. History does not have a single arc, and it doesn't bend. And justice is something that you fight for. I mean, not that Martin Luther King didn't know that or do it, but the notion that history is somehow on your side, and that if you can just somehow correct the parameters a little bit, then the juices of history will flow the right way.

31:51The Democrats have got to get out of that. That's just not the way things work. One of the things they have to learn from Trump is that power matters. And when you have the levers of power, you have to use them in the short term, in the time that you have. And to pick up one of your points, they have to be more aggressive about using government agencies and about making government agencies work faster. There's a way that Obama and Biden fell in love with the procedures themselves and praised themselves for following all the procedures, but the procedures are actually there to get things done and not to prevent things from getting done.

32:23Third thing, there has to be coming out of November, There has to be a trajectory which indicates that transformative action is possible. And I think that begins practically with investigation and prosecution of some of the very soft target corrupt people around the present United States. Because if you do that, you're showing that you actually care, that you're capable of some form of directed action. But also, you're bringing closer to the center of their conversation issues like corruption and bribery and wealth inequality, which when you have real power, you can then pursue. But if you don't have some kind of thing that you're planning to do right after January with your majority that signals that you're different, that you're not corrupt, that you aren't just controlled like the other party is, then you're going to have trouble down the line.

33:09Brian Tyler Cohen:You know, I have a book coming out in about a month called The Day After. And in that book, it's all about this idea of power and how Republicans have abused it, how Democrats have been too afraid to wield it. And finally, what Democrats can and must do if they're fortunate enough to get power back. But one theme that I talk about is that exact idea of Democrats are in power and there seems to be this automatic deference paid to the institutions and not to the outcomes. And so there's this focus on, OK, well, we're here in, you know, in government. And so now we have to pay homage constantly to the filibuster and the parliamentarian and norms and processes, as opposed to just saying these things are there in theory to actually to actually achieve some outcomes.

33:55Brian Tyler Cohen:But that gets lost. Like we lose the forest for the trees at some point in the process. And it just becomes, well, now we have to defend the filibuster because without the filibuster, all hell will break loose. And if that means we can't get anything done on the governing side, so be it. So long as our precious filibuster is still intact. Yeah. I mean, there's a structural explanation for this, which I'm going to give out of empathy, but also because I think it's true. A comparison would be the 20s and 30s in Germany and the Social Democratic Party in Germany, which was a bit like our Democrats.

34:29The Social Democratic Party, in principle, was about the future. But because of the existence of the Nazis, they had to defend the status quo, right? And so then they get caught in this position where, hey, in principle, we'd like to make the future better. But for the time being, we've got to defend things exactly the way they are, because look, they're the Nazis, right? And I just want to say that's a psychologically understandable position to be in. And that, you know, to proportion God day, right? Like that's the position our Democrats have been in since Tea Party, basically, where the Republicans have got them trapped because the Republicans say, hey, we're radical.

35:04We could like throw the baby out with the bathwater any day now. And so it's your job to protect the bathwater, right? And so then the Democrats buy this and they say, OK, the Republicans could destroy everything. It's our job to protect the bathwater the whole time. And that's kind of comfortable because you feel like you're doing the right thing, you know, the procedures, the status quo, but before you know it, you're in a rut and you've forgotten that you were supposed to be the party of the future. And so now we've reached a critical point where you can't say, I'm defending the status quo because nobody believes in the status quo.

35:34The status quo is dead, right? Nobody believes in it. And so you can't, you know, some of the Democratic Party is not where I am on this, obviously, but you can't say that because everybody will hate you if you do. And so you have no choice but to jump over your own shadow and say, all right, we're the party of the future again. We're going to do radical stuff.

35:51Brian Tyler Cohen:You know, you had described a lot of these popular policy positions, taxing the wealthy, making sure that health care is actually affordable. You know, the list goes on and on of what Americans would like to see. And it strikes me that a lot of these positions, if not most or all of these positions, are positions that Democrats have historically espoused. It is not popular to heap tens of billions of dollars every year in subsidies to fossil fuel companies. It's not popular to deny the existence of climate change. It's not popular to strip healthcare away from people, to strip food assistance away from people, to gut public education.

36:29Brian Tyler Cohen:And yet those are the things that they do constantly. And so it would lend itself to reason that when you have one party espousing these egregiously unpopular policies and the other side who is on the other side of that issue, that the de facto, the default position would be that more people would flock to Democrats. And so is it just a testament to the rank incompetence of the Democratic Party that even when all of these issues are on their side, they can't seem to have to win elections and to find themselves in the majority in any part of government right now? So again, I'm going to be a little empathetic because we don't live in a country where the playing field is level, right?

37:13So the media playing field, in my view anyway, is wildly right wing in a way that distorts these conversations in a fundamental way. And so the notion that we should have better healthcare, people agree with that. But if I say healthcare is a right, so much ideological work has been done for so long across so many popular media channels that that position is going to bump up against a lot of resistance. It shouldn't. In my view, healthcare is clearly a right, and we could start from there. But the media playing field isn't level, and the wealth playing field is also not level. So there are entrenched interests who are working for the things like – fossil fuels is a classic example.

37:58It's one of the wildest things that one could do to invest in fossil fuels right now because it's going to literally destroy the basics of the world that we take for granted. And yet we're doing it, but largely because there's a lot of money to be made there. And our politics, and this is where I want to land, because it's an issue that everybody agrees on, that really has to be done. Our politics is not insulated from money. It's just not. I mean, like from Canada, where I'm sitting now, or from Europe, or from other democracies, it's just bizarre the degree to which money penetrates our politics.

38:30And so where I would land is to say, if we had the dark money out of politics, if our campaigns were public finance and so on, I think the party that's called the Democrats would win everything because your argument would then hold. But that's not the system that we're living in. And so the Democrats have to bite the bullet. And some of them are thinking along these lines and say, hey, if we ever have power, we're going to get the money out of politics, even though it'll make our lives a little more complicated, too. We're just going to do it. We're going to be the party that leads that. Because if you don't do that, ultimately things are going to get clogged up because it's not just bureaucracy.

39:07It's also special interests. It's well-funded campaigns. It's big companies that are holding things back.

39:12Brian Tyler Cohen:We have seen instances where Democrats have tried to practice good governance in the past. I think in that instance, it's important not just to try and lead by example, but to make sure that it applies to everybody. Because for example, as we look at redistricting and gerrymandering, we have these democratic weapons, so to speak, of California, of New York, where these independent redistricting commissions are in place. And yet, because it's not a national standard, it's allowed the Republicans to gain a huge edge on on blue states, because while we're practicing good governance and making sure that everybody has fair districts and all of these places where we could garner a lot of a huge advantage.

39:54Brian Tyler Cohen:Instead, you look at places like Texas that just has gerrymandered maps on top of gerrymandered maps. You look at places like Florida. Again, same deal, gerrymandered maps on top of gerrymandered maps. And so in these instances where Democrats do try to practice good governance, I think the fatal flaw that they incur here is that they do it by thinking if we just do it ourselves, we'll set a good example and we'll be rewarded by the people for that, not recognizing that when you put yourself at that disadvantage, the disadvantage in and of itself is going to be crippling for you. You're not going to win because the other party is not going to be interested in playing by the rules.

40:28Brian Tyler Cohen:And they're going to take they're going to squeeze every benefit they can out of that asymmetry. So I want to push this in a slightly different direction, because while I agree with you about all of that, and I would add the point that there's been a lack of long term thinking, the factors you're talking about have to do with Republican control of state Republican control of state houses. which was a long-term project, which they successfully implemented. The Republicans understood the necessity of appreciating the federal character of our system, and they invested intellectual and financial resources in getting hold of state houses.

41:07And state houses control elections, not just state elections, right? And so that was a project of theirs, which was not seen and not answered. So I would add that to the list of grievances or problems. That said, I want to add that the Democrats are who they are right now. And I don't expect them to change without people inviting them to change. Right. So I mean, look, I look forward to your book. But it's a matter not just of showing like their internal contradictions and their weaknesses. It's a matter of pushing them. And I think the elections in November, if they're going to work out, have to be a matter of people pushing the Democrats towards more radical positions.

41:55That's where I think the whole thing hangs, because if they win in November and they say, oh, we won, that's because everything we've done so far has been OK. And now we'll make a few gestures about affordability. Then I think we're really in trouble. That's the thing that I fear the most, because then the Democratic Party fails to function and we don't have any viable political parties. So I think the thing that we have to think about in November is not, are the Democrats going to win? In my view, they're going to win. What we have to think about is what they do with that victory and whether they take drastic radical steps afterwards, which will tell people they have in mind something significant that they're going to do down the road.

42:35And what I'm trying to say is we can't we're not going to get them there just by debating. They have to be gotten there by massive voter turnout, by demonstrations, by other organizations who are making these arguments. Being who they are in June 2026, they're not going to get there on their own.

42:52Brian Tyler Cohen:I completely agree. And I think, I think a this moment right here is the moment to have that argument to let them know so that we don't waste time doing what I think would be the would be the the default reaction, which is okay, now that we have power, we can start doing commissions, we can start really giving this a good think we can try and convince ourselves by having, you know, all of our teams go out and do and do their meetings and come back in six to eight months with their findings and decide whether we want to implement something. I feel like that's the default position for a lot of Democrats.

43:23Brian Tyler Cohen:And I think that you're exactly right by focusing on this stuff now so that if and when we get power again, we don't waste any valuable, precious time dawdling over it and talking about it, but rather just doing it is going to be crucial here. I'm going to add criminal prosecution. Yes. And I'm glad you said that. And I'm sorry to interrupt, but that's actually a great point. And I wanted to jump in on this. And I want to get your opinion. I'm going to ask a general question here, and then you can add on to this. But a lot of what we saw in the aftermath of Trump 1.0 was a return to normalcy. I think we can all agree that that didn't I mean, it objectively didn't work like we are not more normal.

44:09Brian Tyler Cohen:There was not some yearning, longstanding desire to just go back to the status quo. We also watched as Merrick Garland sat on his hands for most of the Biden administration, as opposed to aggressively prosecuting the misconduct from Trump 1.0 and offering something of a deterrent effect. And so do you think that had Merrick Garland moved quickly and aggressively to take on Trump, that we would be in the position that we're in today? And then just more broadly, I just want to hear your thoughts on the idea of prosecuting misconduct and corruption as we move forward from what we're seeing right now.

44:49uh so short answer yes i mean there are two there are two kinds of conclusions one could draw from the last from those four years one is that you shouldn't try to prosecute because it's too complicated you know and and and people don't like it per se and the other is that you should do it and you should just be more determined about it and i'm definitely in the second camp so if you are here's where i think they went wrong at theoretical level if you're going to say okay we're the good guys in the sense that we're the defenders of the rule of law and the constitution and the republicans are the wild and crazy people if that's your position then you damn well better defend the rule of law and the constitution when you got a chance you can't be if you're going to you can't then compromise on that right like if that's your fallback that's your bulwark that's where you are then you've got to hold tight to that and not just be like oh well you know things will work themselves out.

45:44Brian Tyler Cohen:Otherwise, you just look weak. Yeah, but also you make things worse. I mean, you make things, it's not neutral. You're participating. I mean, Trump looked at that and got emboldened by virtue of the fact that he was not held to account. I mean, there's no doubt that the lawlessness is multiple levels higher in Trump 2.0 than it was in 1.0. And I'm in the same camp as you. had action been taken to hold these people to account in Trump 1.0, we wouldn't be here. He wouldn't think, oh, if my opponent is this unwilling to hold me to account for what I did the first time, sky's the limit. Yeah, it's more than that, though, because since he wasn't prosecuted and convicted, he could raise tons of money.

46:28Since he wasn't prosecuted and convicted, his whole story, his whole story is like, I'm an outlaw, the rules don't apply to me, right? Oh, well, looks like his story is true because nobody made the rules apply to him in any meaningful way. But I'm going to add something from outside the US here, which I think is very important. We do know that these democratic, small d, democratic comebacks are possible. But in the recent cases where they have succeeded, Poland in 23, Hungary in 26, the person running the campaign said, I'm going to prosecute the people who have broken the law. And that's a very important message for two reasons.

47:09The first is that it communicates to people that you're not in La La Land, that you actually are going to dig into stuff, right? But the second reason is that it deters people from committing more crimes, which is relevant in the US now, because whether or not we have a decent election in November depends partly on whether people think it's going to be safe for them to do criminal things on Trump's behalf. And if you're talking about prosecuting, you're giving people a reason not to take part in criminal conspiracies to overthrow the elections in November 2026. So that legal language is there, not just out of principle, and not just to change the corrupt practices of the country, but it also has to be there to deter things from happening that could otherwise happen.

47:52Brian Tyler Cohen:Yeah, I think that's an excellent point. Look, I know that you are a historian and your job is to make sense of how history kind of informs the present. And so not necessarily your job to make predictions about the future, but insofar as you're comfortable making a prediction, what do you think America looks like in late January of 2029, based on the trajectory that we're on right now?

48:20um so about i mean just about predictions i think historians can be invited to make them as much as anyone else since like everybody else seems to be wrong all the time about everything there's nothing wrong i mean right like totally think try to think quickly of a political scientist being right about something about the future or you know like anybody um so what i would i mean i to dodge, but what I think is that we are heading towards an axial moment, which is November. And that the critical thing is, do the Democrats win with a big coalition? And are they ready to act afterwards? If that's the case, I think there's a pretty decent chance the American Republic survives.

49:05And we'll have a more or less normal election in 28. And we'll have a more or less We'll get a decent president. But if if the Democrats win and they don't have an aggressive agenda and they discredit themselves before they even take power in January, which is all entirely possible, then I think we're in a very bad situation. Because no matter how unpopular Trump is, if people think, well, he's terrible, but the other side are completely ineffectual, they just won power, but they didn't do anything. If the Democrats don't do the things they can do, and this, by the way, is why investigation and corruption are low-hanging fruit.

49:44Because you can seem to be doing something about something people care about, right? So you go after people who are making money because of Trump. Sure, Trump can pardon them or whatever, or he can veto your legislation. But that just identifies him with the corruption. It creates some daylight between you and him on the corruption issue, which is what you want. So the Democrats have to go after the low hanging fruit. They have to do aggressive, obvious things. They have to announce they're going to do them like the day after the election. If we go that way, then I think we're going to be OK. But if we go the other way, where the Democrats, as we've been talking about, say, okay, we won, forces of history on our side, now we're just going to wait until January, we're going to pretend everything's normal.

50:20Then I think we, then I don't, my negative scenario is that then the US becomes dysfunctional. Like I'm more worried about the dysfunctionality of the republic than I am about Trump succeeding in some kind of plot to make the whole country authoritarian. That's what he would like. But what I worry about is that if we have Trump levels of dysfunctionality continuing and no effective resistance inside Washington, D.C., we'll be in a different national conversation, which will be more about why am I paying taxes at all for this? Why am I involved at all in this? That's my negative scenario for 2027, 2028 is that Americans – like Trump keeps doing worse things.

51:01He does things that don't work. He tries to use the military in politics. It doesn't work. But the fact that it doesn't work doesn't mean that people like America more. They just kind of throw up their hands and say, well, okay, why are we in this thing, right? That's what I worry about. That's my negative scenario.

51:17Brian Tyler Cohen:Yeah, I think when we see mass disillusionment, along the lines that we saw in 2028 and beyond, when we see this kind of mass disillusionment, I think the parties that are going to lean into that are parties that exhibit autocratic behavior. And the fact that Trump won again in an era of such disillusionment already is a testament to exactly that. I want to finish off with one question, international. And you had mentioned Hungary this year. Was that a surprising development for you to see? And how unorthodox in a historical context is watching an illiberal state like Hungary was turn into what I presume will be a much more liberal democracy?

52:03I want to remark before answering that question that it's not just a comparison that Hungary and the U.S. overlap. There's a reason why Trump and Trump Jr. and Vance, etc., all wrote love letters to Orban, or in Vance's case, actually went to Budapest and told Hungarians that God needed them to vote for Orban. There's a reason why they did that. And that is because they all belong to a transnational network of the far right, which shares money and memes. It's mostly Russian money, which was filtered through Hungary. And now that's going to stop. But I make this point because I think we fail often to see how cosmopolitan or how international the far right is, that the stuff that Trump is doing, almost none of it's original.

52:55It's mostly laundered Orban stuff or some of it's laundered Putin stuff. None of it's original. And in that sense, these guys are not American in that sense. They believe that they belong to a kind of international oligarchy and that's how they act. And then they pretend that, okay, this is all somehow about American nationalism or whatever. So I just want to make that point that before we get to the lessons that Democrats might draw, we should note that the fact that Hungary lost, that Orban lost in Hungary, isn't just, it's a sign that democratic oppositions can work, but also it was a body blow to the Trump people.

53:32Like it was, it's for them, it was an important moment marking their own decline. And we should notice that. We should notice that that was a huge loss from their point of view of their guy. On the positive side, it's not unusual. It doesn't always happen, but it's not unusual for there to be democratic comebacks. And it's a very pertinent question. David Shimer wrote a really good op-ed about this in the New York Times about a year ago now. There's scholarly literature on this about how democratic combats happen. And I think, you know, since we're Americans, it can help sometimes to look back and sort of take a broader view of this stuff.

54:09Democratic comebacks depend upon, number one, you have to have a big coalition from center right to far left, which means that you've got to get along with people who you might not agree with about everything. And you have to do it in practice, like in demonstrations, in organizing and stuff, not just in theory. Second, so that is what you need. You need that thing if you can't have that thing. So it's like the way these things work, it's center right to far left, plus like some sponsors against foreign oligarchs, native billionaires and the far right. I mean, I put it in a very primitive way, but like that is the clash.

54:45And you can only win that clash if you can hold that coalition together. Second thing is personal politics really matter. In both Poland and Hungary, the guy who ended up winning the campaign spent a huge amount of time actually engaging human beings. So America is a big country and it's harder, but there's still a lesson there, which is that if you go out and actually talk to people, you'll learn stuff and you'll learn how to talk to people in a way that maybe not all of our leading Democrats have. And the final thing is you have to have a strong message and stick to it as the leader of the coalition or the political party.

55:22It doesn't matter even so much exactly what the message is, but you have to not be boxed in as the opposition. you have to have your own affirmative message. And that affirmative message tends to involve how we're going to prosecute people. It tends to involve like a willingness to assert that you're going to use power when you get power, because people respect that and listen to it. Like being against is not enough. In order for that coalition to actually get across the finish line, there has to be somebody who at the end of the day says, I am positively going to do these things. And it's going to have costs for the other side when I do these things.

55:59Brian Tyler Cohen:Tim, for those who are looking to follow your work, where can they go? Well, there are a whole bunch of history books, and Bloodlands and Black Earth, and Road to Unfreedom. You kindly mentioned On Tyranny. My philosophy book, On Freedom, is my positive vision of where the United States can go. Most of my writing about day-to-day stuff is on my sub stack. So that's where you can find me. Great. Well, I'm going to link that right here on the screen and also in the post description. For those who are listening on the podcast, I'm going to put it in the show notes. Thank you so much for the work you do and for taking the time with me today.

56:33It's been great. Thanks for having me.

56:35Brian Tyler Cohen:Thanks again to John Feiner and Timothy Snyder. That's it for this episode. Talk to you on Sunday. You've been listening to No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen. Produced by Sam Graber, music by Wellesley, and interviews edited for YouTube by Nicholas Nicotera. If you want to support the show, please subscribe on your preferred podcast app and leave a five-star rating and a review. And as always, you can find me at Brian Tyler Cohen on all of my other channels, or you can go to BrianTylerCohen.com to learn more.