Monday
After years of autocratic regimes being on the rise, there are some glimmers of hope. Few reversals have been as stunning as the student-led protest that recently brought down Serbian strongman Aleksandar Vučić. My two Serbian students were ecstatic, although one of them missed last week’s classes after contracting a cold when she traveled to Serbia to vote. I told her that a cold was a small price to pay for having participated in history-making change.
Americans can also take heart from what happened in Hungary earlier this year and in Brazil more recently. And while genocidal Bibi Netanyahu continues to cling to power in Israel, the surprising success of the two Arab parties is presenting Israeli liberals the opportunity to radically change Israeli politics by allying with non-Jews. We’ll see if they take it.
A couple of weeks ago I shared a puppet poem to dramatize how Trump is dancing to Vladimir Putin’s manipulation. In “Freedom,” the great Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore applies the puppet image to all those who mindlessly move to the wires of “the master of the show”:
Freedom from the insult of dwelling in a puppet’s world,
where movements are started through brainless wires,
repeated through mindless habits,
where figures wait with patience and obedience for the
master of show,
to be stirred into a mimicry of life.
“Mimicry of life” brings to mind Christopher Armitage’s “zombie democracies,” which are countries “that continue to vote, even though the elections themselves have ceased working.” (He includes Russia, Belarus, Venezuela, Turkey, and–until recently—Hungary on that list.) Such mimicry could also take the form of Yeats’s “passionate intensity,” where hatred is ginned up against (in 2026 America) trans people, immigrants, and above all Muslims. With the help of the money that American billionaires are pouring into the elections, the MAGA faithful, who have been waiting with “patience and obedience” for Trump to deliver on his promises, are once again being stirred. We’ll know soon if America can free itself from that “insult.”
Those who take freedom for granted would do well to read the passage where Tagore mentions freeing ourselves from the shackles of slumber. (Perhaps he echoes here William Blake’s “mind-forg’d manacles.”) When we fasten ourselves to “night’s stillness,” we come to mistrust “the star that speaks of truth’s adventurous paths.”
An exciting and more egalitarian future beckons if we can heed the call. We need not passively surrender to “blind uncertain winds,” fatalistically calling them “the anarchy of destiny.” Tagore describes the helmsman in that scenario as “rigid and cold as death.”
One wonders, in this nautical analogy, whether Tagore is echoing Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” where the speaker speaks of that “untravell’d world whose margin fades/ For ever and forever when I move.” While the future is uncertain—”It may be that the gulfs will wash us down”—we must exercise our freedom to imagine (and “to strive, to seek, to find”) a better world:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho’ much is taken, much abides…
In his book On Freedom, authoritarianism expert Timothy Snyder distinguishes between “freedom from” and “freedom to,” saying that true freedom is “the freedom to thrive, to take risks for futures we choose by working together.” Such freedom, he explains, “is the value that makes all other values possible.”
While Tagore uses the phrase “freedom from” throughout his poem, his mention of the beckoning future and “truth’s adventurous paths” shows us his goal. When Americans vote in 2026, they should be guided less by freedom from Trumpism and more by freedom for an egalitarian and diverse society where all are respected and honored.
Freedom
By Rabindranath TagoreFreedom from fear is the freedom
I claim for you my motherland!
Freedom from the burden of the ages, bending your head,
breaking your back, blinding your eyes to the beckoning
call of the future;
Freedom from the shackles of slumber wherewith
you fasten yourself in night’s stillness,
mistrusting the star that speaks of truth’s adventurous paths;
freedom from the anarchy of destiny
whole sails are weakly yielded to the blind uncertain winds,
and the helm to a hand ever rigid and cold as death.
Freedom from the insult of dwelling in a puppet’s world,
where movements are started through brainless wires,
repeated through mindless habits,
where figures wait with patience and obedience for the
master of show,
to be stirred into a mimicry of life.
