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Chapter 2
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 fight parties that try to consolidate power. The famous saying “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty” is often misattributed to Thomas Jefferson and understood as meaning that Americans must protect their democracy from foreigners, but actually its author was the abolitionist activist Wendell Phillips, who wanted to point out how power-hungry Americans pose the greatest threat to their own democracy.
“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty” is simply an eloquent way of saying that citizens must constantly protect their democratic institutions in order to maintain the freedom that it gives them. Democracy is always under attack because there are always people who would rather use the powers of the government for their own private interests rather for the greater good. That this quote is frequently misunderstood and misattributed demonstrates the importance of accurately understanding and remembering history. The fact that people attribute it to a slaveholding politician, not an antislavery activist, shows how people tend to wrongly assume that the people at the top defend democracy and equality rather than everyday people who are willing to put themselves on the line for their fellow citizens.
Themes
This is how 20th-century European democracies fell into single-party rule: elected parties started slowly eliminating opposition. Nobody knows when they are voting in their last free election—as in Germany in 1932 (until 1945), Czechoslovakia in 1946 (until 1989), or Russia in 1990 (until the present). As the United States is already becoming an oligarchy, ruled by the wealthy and a party with minority support, the 2016 election could be its last truly free one. The nation desperately needs to reform its electoral system.
Although a one-party state seems like an extreme version of a state in which institutions have collapsed, leading to the collapse of democracy, Snyder emphasizes that the United States is practically already there: even though there are still two parties in American politics, it is still completely possible for the Republican Party to implement procedures that determine that they will never give up power, even if they lose elections by a significant majority.
Themes
