On Tyranny
“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
So says William Faulkner, reminding us that there’s no grasping what’s going on today if we don’t have at least some understanding of what went on before. And so we give thanks for historians. Lately I’ve found myself reading several of them, including Timothy Snyder, whose On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century I first encountered several years ago. This time around I opted for the newer “graphic edition” from Ten Speed Graphic, illustrated by the talented Nora Krug.
The writing of On Tyranny was prompted, certainly, by political developments here in the United States. But the book’s lessons—drawn from all-too-real authoritarian movements of the last century—speak to dangerous impulses that are finding broad appeal well beyond the MAGA rallies to which we have by now become accustomed and desensitized.
In his prologue, after a brief historical rundown, Snyder issues this warning:
“We might be tempted to think that our democratic heritage automatically protects us from such threats. This is a misguided reflex. In fact, the precedent set by the Founders demands that we examine history to understand the deep sources of tyranny, and to consider the proper responses to it. Americans today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the twentieth century. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so.”
In an especially helpful chapter, Snyder identifies and contrasts two “antihistorical” ways of dealing with the past. The first, which he calls “the politics of inevitability,” emerged at the end of the Cold War, with the demise of the Soviet Union spawning the widespread belief that “history could move in only one direction: toward liberal democracy.” This myth was always mistaken, and once it had run its course, many were hungry for an alternative. Enter “the politics of eternity,” a currently recognizable mood as much as a movement, defined by “a longing for past moments that never really happened during epochs that were, in fact, disastrous.”
As we have seen time and again, the personalities adept at the politics of eternity have learned to peddle a sense of “national victimhood” in which every historical reference “seems to involve an attack by some external enemy upon the purity of the nation.” It doesn’t take a historian to know that history is more complicated than this, and that eternity politicians are trying to con us by preying on our fears.
We can resist being conned. If we know our history.
“History allows us to see patterns and make judgments,” Snyder writes. “It sketches for us the structures within which we can seek freedom. . . . If young people do not begin to make history, politicians of eternity and inevitability will destroy it. And to make history, young Americans will have to know some.”
