Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in On Tyranny, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Collapse of American Democracy
Tyranny and the Consolidation of Power
Political Action and Civic Responsibility
History and Memory
Summary
Analysis
People should support, read, and share high-quality investigative print journalism. People are only free and independent because they can tell the truth from falsehoods. Accordingly, authoritarians like Trump try to limit this ability by promoting propaganda, suppressing honest journalists, and accusing critics of lying. In 1971, philosopher Hannah Arendt argued that truth will always defeat lies, but today, the internet dominates politics and promotes misinformation. In contrast, longform print journalism can help people think through and analyze stories on their own terms—like Trump’s offensive behavior toward women and business failures.
In addition to refining their own capacities for objective political analysis, Snyder explains, citizens should also try to help ensure that such analysis is available to their fellow citizens. The only thing better than supporting reporters is becoming one. Print journalism’s advantage over television is that reporters actually have to put significant time and effort into verifying facts and assembling a comprehensive narrative over multiple drafts. These narratives can therefore connect events over a longer period of time: the weeks to years that it takes to accurately measure the effects of policies and discern lasting political trends.
Themes
Screens reduce politics to spectacles, turning reality into “a reality show” in which people thrive off of drama without actually putting the information they receive together into a coherent whole or recognizing that the events they see impact real people’s lives.
Television news generally focuses on immediate events, limited to a period of days to weeks, and selects what is newsworthy based on what is likely to get audience attention rather than what actually impacts people. This is why it turns politics into a “reality show”: like Trump’s rhetoric, it elevates emotion at the expense of reason.
Themes
No journalism is perfect, but good journalism is governed by ethical standards that ensure its accuracy, unlike much of what now passes for journalism on the internet. Of course, journalists need to make a living, so people should financially support journalism if they can. The people Snyder cites throughout his book—like Kołakowski, Arendt, Klemperer, and Havel—all had it much harder than writers today: they struggled to publish their writings, which they often ended up disseminating in secret. Now that everyone can publish their thoughts the internet, everybody must take “some private responsibility for the public’s sense of truth,” so everybody should verify what they read and support trustworthy reporters. While the internet makes it harder for people to see how their words affect others, people are still responsible for these words.
Again, Snyder emphasizes that democracy does not function unless people actively participate in it. His argument that people should take “some private responsibility for the public’s sense of truth” is really an alternative way of framing citizens’ civic responsibility as members of a democracy: just as they are all collectively responsible for the health and stability of society, they are all collectively responsible for the nation’s relationship to truth. The internet transforms this relationship by making information far easier to disseminate but much more difficult to verify.
Themes
