Timothy Snyder did not write On Tyranny as a history book simply because he is a historian by trade. After all, he is also widely respected as a scholar of present-day democracy and authoritarianism, and he could have shown Americans how to resist Donald Trump’s worst tendencies without getting into detail about the Warsaw ghetto or the Soviet secret police. Rather, Snyder used 20th-century authoritarianism as the basis for On Tyranny because he sees Americans’ unhealthy relationship to history as the source of their inability to make sense of the present or take organized political action against the Trump regime. Not only does history provide meaningful lessons about the way tyrannies function, but it also reminds everyday people that they, too, are agents of history. While many 21st-century Americans assume that their country will naturally improve a little bit with every generation and there is nothing they can do to change this tendency in either direction, in reality the future is not defined: it is the product of people’s choices, not some national destiny. By understanding history, Snyder argues, people will learn to fight tyranny, strengthen democracy, and take responsibility for their nation’s future.
Snyder uses history as a guide simply because “history does not repeat, but it does instruct.” Essentially, stopping authoritarianism now requires studying authoritarianism in the past. In his Prologue, Snyder notes that the American Founding Fathers structured the government of the United States around the need to avoid tyranny, which ancient Greek philosophers like Aristotle described as the domination of public life by private interests. This shows that tyranny—and especially the prospect of democracy falling into a tyrant’s hands—has been a political danger for millennia. In other words, the challenges that Snyder addresses are not new: the conflict between democracy and authoritarianism is as old as recorded history. So while Snyder uses examples from the 20th century because it is “more recent and relevant” to the present day, it is clear that the general principles of authoritarian government and citizens’ capacity to respond to it are more or less consistent throughout history, and he reminds the reader of this broad consistency throughout the book, even while insisting that no two situations are ever exactly alike. Of course, the fact that the American Founding Fathers addressed the problem of tyranny in establishing the government of the United States also shows that a certain concern for history is already baked into the founding principles and documents of American democracy.
Nevertheless, Snyder argues that Americans have conveniently forgotten the Founding Fathers’ wisdom by giving up on history. This ignorance about history, Snyder concludes, actually explains why Americans are unable to conceptualize or adequately address the threat of tyranny in the 21st-century United States. Specifically, Snyder argues that, since the fall of the communist Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, Americans have wrongly believed that capitalism and liberal democracy are inevitable—in other words, they have assumed that all governments will end up as democracies, and international politics is just a waiting game. Snyder calls this the “politics of inevitability,” but he argues that the global shift away from democracy and toward authoritarianism in the first two decades of the 21st century is proof that this politics of inevitability is simply false. In fact, Americans are only able to keep believing in the politics of inevitability because they have never truly studied history—namely, they do not know that even strong democracies have often crumbled and fallen. So when they realize that democracy is declining in the present, they fall into an opposite kind of politics, a despair that Snyder calls the “politics of eternity”: they decide to try and return to some kind of idealized past, assuming that things are only getting worse and will continue to do so. But this past is memorialized based on feeling, not historical fact: in most cases, it never existed in the first place. Snyder thinks that “Make America Great Again” is a typical example of this strategy. By studying history, people can understand what a specific time period they consider “great” was actually like. They might see the limits of this “greatness,” along with the result of specific conditions and policies that enabled it. For instance, Trump supporters who think of the 1940s and 1950s as “great” might remember that this time period was marked by widespread discrimination and the tragedy of World War II, and that it was only economically prosperous because of huge government investment and social welfare support—which Trump does not support. But in such instances of the “politics of eternity,” people explain “greatness” through the “inherent virtue” of some people, place, or historical moment, rather than actual historical factors. In short, they trade history for a fantasy version of the past. But learning about history demystifies the past by accurately describing what it was actually like, illustrating how others dealt with it, and helping citizens realize that they face comparable dilemmas in the present—and have a comparable kind of power and agency to respond to them.
If both the politics of inevitability and the politics of eternity lead people to get stuck in the present and give up all control over the future—whether because they believe things will inevitably get better or because they decide that human ingenuity cannot construct a future any better than a past that has already come and gone—then people must study the past in order to reclaim the future. In short, history shows that human decisions, both individual and collective, fundamentally shape the world. This understanding forces people to recognize that their political activity is consequential and has the potential to make a meaningful difference, and so by ensuring that his readers understand tyranny through the lens of history, Snyder ensures that they will grasp the importance of their own actions. Just like people could have acted differently in the past and changed the course of history forever, all people can change the future by acting differently now.
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History and Memory Quotes in On Tyranny
The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why.
After the Second World War, Europeans, Americans, and others created myths of righteous resistance to Hitler. In the 1930s, however, the dominant attitudes had been accommodation and admiration. By 1940 most Europeans had made their peace with the seemingly irresistible power of Nazi Germany. Influential Americans such as Charles Lindbergh opposed war with the Nazis under the slogan “America First.” It is those who were considered exceptional, eccentric, or even insane in their own time—those who did not change when the world around them did—whom we remember and admire today.
Staring at screens is perhaps unavoidable, but the two-dimensional world makes little sense unless we can draw upon a mental armory that we have developed somewhere else. When we repeat the same words and phrases that appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework. To have such a framework requires more concepts, and having more concepts requires reading. So get the screens out of your room and surround yourself with books.
History, which for a time seemed to be running from west to east, now seems to be moving from east to west.
Until recently, we Americans had convinced ourselves that there was nothing in the future but more of the same. The seemingly distant traumas of fascism, Nazism, and communism seemed to be receding into irrelevance. We allowed ourselves to accept the politics of inevitability, the sense that history could move in only one direction: toward liberal democracy. After communism in eastern Europe came to an end in 1989-91, we imbibed the myth of an “end of history.” In doing so, we lowered our defenses, constrained our imagination, and opened the way for precisely the kinds of regimes we told ourselves could never return.
Both of these positions, inevitability and eternity, are antihistorical. The only thing that stands between them is history itself.
