![]() A lot of weight is given to the everyday measures anyone can take to resist authoritarianism. Snyder is emphatic that similar delusions not afflict the opposition to Trumpism.Īs alluded to at the beginning, On Tyranny is a very practical book. They cannot do this because a number of critical factors hold powers in check.” Incredible as it seems in retrospect, this was a fairly common attitude toward Nazism at the time. ![]() There’s equivocation: “A previous administration did the same thing.” Underestimation: “Either he’ll have to change his program or he won’t be able to get anything done.” Wishful cynicism: “It’s all talk-he won’t actually try to implement any of the things he said he would during the campaign.” Institutional optimism: “Congressional retaliation, judicial oversight or even security-state obstruction will stop him if he tries to do anything too heinous.” And political indifferentism: “Those in power are really all the same-and folks, after all, were ringing the fascist alarm bell over Mitt Romney and John McCain too.”įor a historical example of wishful cynicism and institutional optimism, Snyder quotes from a Jewish newspaper, published after the 1933 German elections, that doubted Hitler’s victory meant the policies circulated in Nazi propaganda would actually come to be: “ will not suddenly deprive German Jews of their constitutional rights, nor enclose them in ghettos, nor subject them to the jealous and murderous impulses of the mob. ![]() As one of the world’s premier experts on the tragedies of the twentieth century (his Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning and Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin are required readings for those who wish to fully understand the horror story that was World War II), he is all too familiar with the kind of flawed thinking (or unthinking) the average person on the street undergoes in reaction to dictatorial power grabs. Snyder clearly sees in the Trump presidency a potential, or even likely, authoritarian outcome. ![]() Some of his worries are plainly obvious (“Any election can be the last”), while some of his practical advice is dishearteningly ominous-“Make sure you and your family have passports.” Yale historian Timothy Snyder has written a book on all matters concerning state tyranny-how it comes to be, what to look out for, and how to resist it. ![]()
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