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Epilogue
Themes and Colors
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
In On Tyranny, Timothy Snyder presents various strategies that authoritarian governments use to gain power and ways that citizens can resist them. Donald Trump’s election to the American presidency in 2016 is what motivated Snyder, a renowned historian of authoritarianism in 20th-century Europe, to pen the book. According to Snyder, Donald Trump poses a unique and unprecedented threat to American democracy: because of his political style and ideology, indifference to facts and…
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Tyranny and the Consolidation of Power
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…
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Political Action and Civic Responsibility
Often, governments are not as resilient as people hope, and citizens themselves are all that holds democracy back from the forces of tyranny. In order to save democracy, citizens must know when and how tyrants are trying to overthrow it, and then act to stop this process. In other words, citizens have a responsibility to understand and critically analyze their governments’ actions, work actively to strengthen democracy when it is threatened, and never give…
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History and Memory
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…
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