The late American president Ronald Reagan told a press conference in 1986: ‘The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”’ That remark typified a growing neoliberal American conviction that freedom should be conceived negatively. The role of the government wasn’t to provide citizens with a ladder and a safety net, as in postwar Britain. It should not supply educational opportunities to help the most disadvantaged rise or a welfare state to catch them if they fall. Rather, government should butt out. It should allow markets to operate freely and let ruggedly self-sufficient individual utility maximisers find their own ways of attaining satisfaction.

Reagan and many of his successors saw taxation as an unwarranted constraint on freedom rather than a means of raising the wherewithal for a welfare state. Such presidents have forgotten the words of the US Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: ‘Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.’

In this timely, angry yet profoundly philosophical book, Timothy Snyder argues that America is not so much the land of the free as an undemocratic plutocracy rife with Orwellian doublethink. This doublethink, he argues, goes all the way back to the Declaration of Independence. In 1976, at the age of