Hi, and welcome back to Amicus. This is Slate's podcast about the courts and the law.

And this week, again, about democracy itself and about freedom. I'm Dahlia Lithwick. I cover the courts for Slate.

And we're now just a clutch of days away from the

2024 election. And honestly, it's really hard to know what to brace for to that end. Later on

in this show, we're going to talk to our friend Rick Hassan, the director of the Safeguarding Democracy

Project at UCLA Law School. And he's going to help us understand when the election

might be called, which of the many election lawsuits already filed we should be paying

attention to. What the hell is the Purcell principle? Rick will be here to walk us through

it all. But first, we at Amicus are a little bit stuck here in the in-between, and I'm guessing that

you are too. And in the last few weeks, as my own sense of the in-betweenness and my sense of

alarm have been growing, I find myself diving further and further into the works of historians and

philosophers and smart observers of authoritarianism.

And top among them on my list right now is Timothy Snyder.

He is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.

His landmark 2017 book on tyranny that was derived from his

years of study of totalitarian regimes in Europe became the how-to manual for thinking about

how an authoritarian takeover can happen when we were right at the beginning of the Trump years. His brand new book on

freedom is kind of the companion volume offering a robust rethink of what we talk about when we

talk about freedom and how we sometimes chase the wrong versions of freedom into dark and

dangerous places. And so here in this in between, before the

election, it feels very right and incredibly essential to turn our minds away from tyranny and

toward freedom with Tim Snyder. Welcome to Amicus. It's just a total thrill to have you.

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