On Tyranny Summary

In On Tyranny, a short guide to 20 different strategies that citizens can use to defend democracy against an authoritarian government, historian Timothy Snyder looks to 20th-century Europe in an effort to help 21st-century Americans cope with Donald Trump’s presidency. Indeed, this bestselling book began as a Facebook post after Trump’s election, when many Americans were starting to worry that Trump’s political ideology and rhetorical style closely resembled those of 20th-century fascists and contemporary dictators around the world. In his Prologue, Snyder echoes this fear and notes that democratic regimes have always fallen to tyranny ever since the very concepts of democracy and tyranny were invented in ancient Greece. And while Americans tend to assume that democracy is inherently stable and their government institutions are strong enough to withstand antidemocratic attacks, this is not true. In fact, people throughout history have made this same mistake, wrongly assuming that their democracies will survive, only to watch authoritarian governments destroy them in as little as a few years and set their nations on a path toward ruin and, in extreme cases, horrific campaigns of violence like the Holocaust. Snyder argues that American democracy now faces the same threat of collapse, and he offers Americans 20 ways to help preserve it.

Snyder’s first rule is “Do not obey in advance.” Throughout history, not only have significant portions of the public generally supported tyrants like Adolf Hitler, but most of the rest of the population has simply put their personal disagreements aside and reluctantly obeyed the government. This is essentially the worst thing people can do, because tyranny functions by winning obedience and then implementing oppressive and antidemocratic policies that harm the same people who are passively obeying.

Secondly, Snyder implores reader to “Defend institutions.” Institutions are only as strong as the people who make them up, and authoritarians always try to dismantle democratic institutions in order to avoid checks and balances on their power. On a similar note, Snyder’s third rule is “Beware the one-party state.” An effective multi-party system ensures that no one group will be able to completely turn the state into a machine for advancing their own private interests. According to Snyder, despite its famous two-party system, the United States is already on the brink of falling into one-party oligarchy because the Republican Party uses techniques like voter suppression and gerrymandering to gain and hold power, even though in reality only a minority of Americans support them and only a very small group of economic elites actually benefits from their policies.

Fourthly, Snyder asks citizens to “Take responsibility for the face of the world.” Specifically, he means they must refuse to display the signs of hate, exclusion, and loyalty that tyrants and their supporters ask them to put up. These symbols of obedience—like swastikas and gold stars in Nazi Germany, or pro-government propaganda signs in communist Eastern Europe—allow tyrants to bring their agendas even into people’s private lives. Next, Snyder implores his readers to “Remember professional ethics” when the government starts claiming that they no longer apply. He points out that, when the Nazi government demanded obedience, doctors, lawyers, and businessmen all made an exception and put their usual ethical obligations aside. As a result, they ended up directly participating in the Holocaust. When the government asks people to put professional ethics aside, they must do the opposite: these moral commitments are unwavering and uncompromisable, and they must be put first.

Snyder’s sixth and seventh rules concern the use of military force. In the sixth, he tells readers to “Be wary of paramilitaries,” like secret police forces and death squads, which tyrants use for their own private ends. And in the seventh chapter, Snyder asks readers to “Be reflective if you must be armed”—the Nazis and Soviets roped normal police officers and soldiers into their mass murder campaigns, and these individuals willingly chose to participate despite knowing that they were being asked to attack the same populace that it was their job to defend.

In the eighth chapter, Snyder insists that readers must “Stand out.” Just like Winston Churchill’s gave the Allies the upper hand in World War II by defending Britain against Hitler, and a Polish teenager named Teresa Prekerowa refused to abandon her Jewish friends when the Nazis ordered them into the Warsaw ghetto, contemporary people can also provide a counterexample to the status quo and help remind others of the moral principles and obligations that tyrants are asking them to abandon.

In the next three chapters, Snyder starts looking at the rhetorical and psychological strategies that authoritarian governments, and particularly extreme totalitarian ones, use to repress dissent and control the populace. In chapter nine, he tells readers to “Be kind to our language.” While tyrants strategically change the meaning of words like “the people” in order to make citizens think that everyone agrees with and will benefit from their policies, citizens must remember that these words have real meanings and refuse to join everyone else’s “collective trance.” Rather than simply watching the nightly news, contemporary Americans must read books in order to refine their capacities for analysis and build “a mental armory” of ideas about politics and history. In chapter ten, Snyder argues that it is essential to “Believe in truth.” He asserts that Donald Trump never distinguishes between truth and fantasy, makes obviously contradictory promises (like lowering taxes, increasing spending, and reducing debt all at the same time), and bases his politics on loyalty and emotion rather than reason and policy. This strategy allows him to win people’s support without actually needing to help them in any way. In order to support the truth, Snyder asks readers to “investigate” in chapter eleven. Specifically, they must fact-check what they read online and try to support high-quality investigative journalism rather than simply sticking to opinion writers who are already on their side.

In the next four chapters, Snyder shows how citizens can preserve freedom in their everyday lives. First, they must simply “Make eye contact and small talk” in order to remind their neighbors that they will not let politics invade and destroy the private sphere. Next, they should “Practice corporeal politics” and actively protest together in the streets rather than sitting at home and simply hoping that the government will change. Thirdly, citizens must “Establish a private life,” most of all by guarding their digital privacy, in order to set a line that government cannot cross and ensure that future authoritarians cannot use their data against them. And fourthly and finally, citizens should “Contribute to good causes” by dedicating both time and money to supporting organizations that matter to them. This allows citizens to both specifically fight oppressive policies and exercise their freedom of association to sustain civil society—or the sphere of collective life that is separate from formal government control.

In his sixteenth chapter, Snyder asks his readers to look outward to the rest of the world and “Learn from peers in other countries.” Americans tend to forget that other countries are tackling problems similar to theirs, and most Americans do not even have passports. This is a problem because it limits Americans’ perspective and political imagination—it's also part of why they tend to arrogantly assume that American democracy cannot collapse. In fact, Snyder notes, Russian and Ukrainian journalists were able to analyze Trump’s campaign more accurately than American ones, because Russia and Ukraine have already seen their democracies toppled by Trump-style propaganda and nepotism.

In the last four chapters, Snyder warns citizens about a key turning point on the road from freedom to tyranny: at a certain point, authoritarians stop gradually accumulating power in the background and instead start taking huge steps to topple democracy all at once. In chapter seventeen, “Listen for dangerous words,” he points out how the Nazis and other tyrannous governments have used propaganda words like “extremism,” “terrorism,” “emergency,” and “exception” to suspend the rights and freedoms that allow democracy to function. In the face of a terrorist attack or other national emergency, for instance, they will declare that all citizens must give up their rights for the sake of the nation as a whole. But this is usually a trap, and authoritarians usually never give these rights back, even long after the emergency has passed.

In chapter eighteen, Snyder looks at the most famous example of such a power grab: the mysterious fire at the Reichstag (Germany’s parliament) a month after Hitler came to power. Hitler declared a national emergency, started suspending citizens’ rights and jailing his opponents, and then convinced the parliament to give him absolute dictatorial power. He never gave any of these powers up—ultimately, the fire (which historians think the Nazis probably set) give Hitler a pretext for completely dismantling German democracy in a matter of days. Russian dictator Vladimir Putin used a similar tactic several times in the late 1990s and early 2000s, exploiting terrorist attacks launched by his own secret police in order to destroy institutions and opposition groups. Donald Trump has openly declared his admiration for Putin and his intention to use the same “terror management” strategy, so citizens must be ready and vigilant. In other words, as Snyder argues in the next chapter, every American must try to “Be a patriot.” They must remember what is really in the national interest—the preservation of democracy—and refuse to let Trump’s government convince them that whatever he happens to want for himself is best for the country as a whole. Patriotism can even mean self-sacrifice: in his brief final chapter, Snyder tells citizens to “Be as courageous as you can” because “If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny.”

In his Epilogue, Snyder warns against two political tendencies that he calls the “politics of inevitability” and the “politics of eternity.” Ignorant the past, many Americans simply assume that history is consistent progress and democracy will never fail them. This is the “politics of inevitability.” Recognizing that things seem to be getting worse, other Americans start fixating on an idealized past that never existed. This is the “politics of eternity,” which Trump exemplifies with the slogan “Make America Great Again.” But, both of these ideologies rely on a misunderstanding of the past and a mistaken assumption that the future is already determined and outside citizens’ control. In reality, Snyder concludes, people’s political choices do have the power to shape the future, and Americans must step up to defend their democracy unless they want to see it disappear.