Whether communist, fascist, or neither, the authoritarian regimes that Snyder describes in On Tyranny all use similar tactics to amass, preserve, and exercise power—which they seek for themselves, not for the citizenry. In fact, according to Snyder, this is precisely what defines tyranny: the use of government power for the private ends of the people running government rather than the public good of society as a whole. Tyrants use political tactics to eliminate the institutional checks and balances on their power, psychological tactics to win loyalty and submission from citizens, and both kinds of strategies to identify and eliminate the people they label as “enemies.” Snyder highlights how leaders seeking to establish tyranny use these tactics to gradually increase their power, relative to civil society and other governmental institutions, until they reach a tipping point at which they can completely grab all power and begin using it however they wish.
When wannabe authoritarians take control of a democratic government, the most straightforward and ruthless way for them to proceed is by destroying the political structures and institutions that limit their power. This is why dictators’ first targets tend to be institutions. Authoritarians might seek to discredit other branches of government or threaten them into agreeing with their policies. For instance, after his election, Hitler used a fire at the Reichstag (the German parliament) to convince that same parliament to let him rule by decree. With one piece of legislation, all checks and balances were eliminated, and Hitler won absolute power for as long as he lived. Other tyrants do less extreme versions of the same thing, for instance by filling parliaments and courts with diehard loyalists or simply centralizing rather than delegating executive powers. By targeting nonpolitical institutions like professional associations and even private charities, authoritarians send the message that nobody may resist their policies. Gradually, by either silencing such organizations or turning them into mouthpieces for the government, authoritarians eliminate dissent and amass power. For instance, Hitler convinced the German legal and medical establishments to help him build concentration camps, even though they should have opposed his policies, according to their declared ethical and professional principles. Similarly, Snyder explains that authoritarians often set up private paramilitary organizations to do their bidding, circumventing the official state military. Through all these tactics, rulers completely destroy the rule of law—or the principle that justice is blind and everyone is equal before the law.
However, in addition to waging political campaigns to amass power, tyrannical governments almost always wage parallel psychological campaigns designed to control their citizens’ thinking and prevent them from rebelling. Snyder emphasizes that authoritarians carefully manipulate language and symbolism in order to delegitimate opposing groups and ways of thought. For instance, in authoritarian states, rulers speak as though “the people” always conveniently want whatever the government does, and they call any ideology that disagrees with the government “extremism.” Snyder argues that Trump makes both of these moves (and several others) on the campaign trail in order to portray his personal political successes as “winning” for the whole nation and help people lose the ability to discern the difference between the public interest of the nation and the private interests of its president. In order to disincentivize citizens from thinking independently and encourage them to obey rather than dissent, Snyder explains, authoritarians use such tactics to starve citizens of concepts, literally forcing them to think about things like “the people” and “extremism” in the terms that the leader wants rather than analyzing the world for themselves. When they can get away with it, authoritarians go so far as to throw away truth altogether and simply replace it with convenient, self-serving falsehoods that appeal to people’s feelings. Once people cannot tell the difference between the truth and the government’s lies, Snyder explains, they lose their freedom and independence as individuals. When they make politics about shared feelings and loyalty rather than facts and principles, authoritarians no longer have to show that their policies benefit anyone, so they can rule for their own private benefit.
Ultimately, this emphasis on loyalty has dangerous consequences. Authoritarians nearly always mobilize both the government and their loyal supporters against other groups—usually racial, ethnic, or religious—that they declare to be enemies. This conflict becomes the tyrant’s justification for staying in power and gives the tyrant’s supporters a source of meaning and purpose in politics. It also leads to catastrophic events like the Holocaust, when governments provide citizens with a mission to give meaning to their loyalty. People feel that they are special or chosen for following their leader, and in turn that those who do not are “enemies of the state.” To prove their faith and trust in the government, citizens actively help persecute scapegoated “enemies,” whom they often place at the center of elaborate conspiracy theories. This is why everyday Germans gave the Nazis lists of Jewish citizens to deport, and doctors, lawyers, and policemen enthusiastically agreed to participate in mass murder ordered by the government. This makes authoritarians uniquely dangerous: they invent enemies and then persecute them using all the tools of the state and the citizenry. In short, this explains why tyranny frequently leads to genocide and war—and why it must be stopped.
Snyder explains that authoritarians generally seize power slowly at first, even imperceptibly so, by “slicing off layers of opposition” and gradually introducing their exclusionary ideas into the mainstream. Once they see an opportunity to win enough power that they can never be ousted or outvoted, however, they tend to grab it quickly, all at once. In particular, many take advantage of national emergencies to seize powers that they simply never give up. With this power, tyrants go about fulfilling their personal whims while distracting the public, whether by hypnotizing them with slogans or by giving them an enemy to fight on the nation’s behalf.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Tyranny and the Consolidation of Power ThemeTracker
Tyranny and the Consolidation of Power Quotes in On Tyranny
In politics, being deceived is no excuse.
Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.
People whom they did not know, and against whom they had no grievance, seemed to be suffering greatly—pounding the glass and complaining of heart pain. Even so, most subjects followed Milgram's instructions and continued to apply (what they thought were) ever greater shocks until the victims appeared to die. Even those who did not proceed all the way to the (apparent) killing of their fellow human beings left without inquiring about the health of the other participants.
Milgram grasped that people are remarkably receptive to new rules in a new setting. They are surprisingly willing to harm and kill others in the service of some new purpose if they are so instructed by a new authority.
Does the history of tyranny apply to the United States? Certainly the early Americans who spoke of “eternal vigilance” would have thought so. The logic of the system they devised was to mitigate the consequences of our real imperfections, not to celebrate our imaginary perfection. We certainly face, as did the ancient Greeks, the problem of oligarchy—ever more threatening as globalization increases differences in wealth. The odd American idea that giving money to political campaigns is free speech means that the very rich have far more speech, and so in effect far more voting power, than other citizens. We believe that we have checks and balances, but have rarely faced a situation like the present, when the less popular of the two parties controls every lever of power at the federal level, as well as the majority of state houses. The party that exercises such control proposes few policies that are popular with the society at large, and several that are generally unpopular—and thus must either fear democracy or weaken it.
You might one day be offered the opportunity to display symbols of loyalty. Make sure that such symbols include your fellow citizens rather than exclude them.
We have seen that the real meaning of the greengrocer's slogan has nothing to do with what the text of the slogan actually says. Even so, the real meaning is quite clear and generally comprehensible because the code is so familiar: the greengrocer declares his loyalty in the only way the regime is capable of bearing; that is, by accepting the prescribed ritual, by accepting appearances as reality, by accepting the given rules of the game, thus making it possible for the game to go on, for it to exist in the first place.
Most governments, most of the time, seek to monopolize violence. If only the government can legitimately use force, and this use is constrained by law, then the forms of politics that we take for granted become possible. It is impossible to carry out democratic elections, try cases at court, design and enforce laws, or indeed manage any of the other quiet business of government when agencies beyond the state also have access to violence. For just this reason, people and parties who wish to undermine democracy and the rule of law create and fund violent organizations that involve themselves in politics. Such groups can take the form of a paramilitary wing of a political party, the personal bodyguard of a particular politician—or apparently spontaneous citizens' initiatives, which usually turn out to have been organized by a party or its leader.
Because the American federal government uses mercenaries in warfare and American state governments pay corporations to run prisons, the use of violence in the United States is already highly privatized. What is novel is a president who wishes to maintain, while in office, a personal security force which during his campaign used force against dissenters.
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.
Fascists despised the small truths of daily existence, loved slogans that resonated like a new religion, and preferred creative myths to history or journalism. They used new media, which at the time was radio, to create a drumbeat of propaganda that aroused feelings before people had time to ascertain facts. And now, as then, many people confused faith in a hugely flawed leader with the truth about the world we all share.
Post-truth is pre-fascism.
“What is truth?” Sometimes people ask this question because they wish to do nothing. Generic cynicism makes us feel hip and alternative even as we slip along with our fellow citizens into a morass of indifference. It is your ability to discern facts that makes you an individual, and our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society. The individual who investigates is also the citizen who builds. The leader who dislikes the investigators is a potential tyrant.
The better print journalists allow us to consider the meaning, for ourselves and our country, of what might otherwise seem to be isolated bits of information. But while anyone can repost an article, researching and writing is hard work that requires time and money. Before you deride the “mainstream media,” note that it is no longer the mainstream. It is derision that is mainstream and easy, and actual journalism that is edgy and difficult.
What the great political thinker Hannah Arendt meant by totalitarianism was not an all-powerful state, but the erasure of the difference between private and public life.
People who assure you that you can only gain security at the price of liberty usually want to deny you both.
Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power. The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Do not fall for it.
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.
