On Tyranny

Early 20th-century European democracies are fragile and easily disrupted by political events. Russia’s nascent republic is taken down by Soviet Bolsheviks in 1922 during a civil war; its institutions are destroyed and replaced by a dictatorship. In Germany, both internal and external stresses become fodder for a tyrant’s takeover, as Hitler uses propaganda, appeals to nationalism and racism, staged “emergencies,” and strong-arm tactics to wrest control from Germany’s struggling democratic republic.

Russia extricates itself from Soviet despotism in the late 20th century, only to have its emerging republic dismantled by the despotic strategies of Vladimir Putin. Any democracy can become a victim of a takeover, and America is not exempt. Snyder warns that the American president in 2017 uses many of the tactics employed by recent demagogues, including Hitler, Stalin and Putin, in an effort to win more authority and control over the American system.

A chief reason, then, for a democracy’s fall is the willingness of its citizens to go along with a leader who violates the norms of civil society. When enough people accept, passively and over time, an accumulation of actions that normally would be considered offensive violations of civic tradition, the tyrant’s grip on a nation becomes vicelike.