Lessons for a democratic future

Reading Timothy Snyder's "On Tyranny"

We stand, I believe, on the brink of a tyranny that America has never been threatened by before.

Our country has grappled with and overcome a variety of threats and challenges to our democratic heritage over the years. At one point, the debate over the rights of individuals to live free plunged our entire country into war with itself. At another, the lingering restrictions on the democratic rights of minorities pulled our Constitutional order into a whole new era of law making. The story of our common political development is that of a gradual opening towards more political liberty and greater democratic impulses.

Of course, there were fits and starts; for every two or three major steps forward, there was always one or two back: the end of slavery was tempered by Reconstruction, the civil rights gains of the mid-twentieth century by the expansion of market demands into every aspect of American lives. But, it has always been a slow steady march forward: towards greater democratic participation, a larger understanding of human and political rights, greater freedom and prosperity for the average person.

Until now. The rise of Donald Trump and his MAGA movement over the last decade seemed at first like the final throes of a particular American strain of twentieth century conservatism that had persisted into the new millennium. The eight years of the Obama presidency were felt to promise a new future, one that was finally slipping free from the old battles over civil rights and towards a new polity with new battles to fight. Far from the old fights over what seemed like a limited distributional pie of rights and prosperity, it seemed we were poised to move into a new era of abundance, where the fights would be more about a better distribution of the things we all took for granted as being readily available to most of us, more of us, every day: wealth, democracy, health care, technology, leisure, peace. Barack Obama was elected on a mandate of an end to culture war, an end to foreign military excursions, and to usher in a new, green, and prosperous techno-future.

It was not to be, of course. It’s now 2025, and our country has been reckoning will the failure of that new fight for a decade. Instead, we are stuck in a fight we could scarcely imagined in the heady days of 2008: the looming end of democracy, and the specter of oligarchy at best, and more realistically, a personalist dictatorship, akin to that of Latin America in the post-war years, or Eastern Europe at the edge of the Iron Curtain. The second Trump administration is a threat to the American constitutional order unlike anything else our country has faced before, something grounded in our particular political neuroses, but wholly new, wholly different from how these neuroses have manifested themselves before. Rather than a policy program and political project being advanced and promoted via Congress and the Courts and democratic engagement with the electorate, the Trump movement is one defined by loyalty to him as a person, and dominance: over his enemies, over other centers of power, over anything that threatens him or his ego. All policy is subservient to loyalty to Donald Trump, and domination over everything else.

In short, the moment we are in has all the classic hallmarks of tyranny. What we are seeing pursued is dictatorship, and we have been so free of its threat throughout our 250 years of history that we are struggling to recognize it now. It is a threat taking all the old worst impulses in the American political stew, and bending them towards the advancement of one man, at the expense of our Constitution and the People and the democracy we’ve managed to hold on to for so long.

At the advent of the first Trump administration, Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale, wrote a prescient little book, titled On Tyranny: Twenty Lesson from the Twentieth Century. In it, Professor Snyder is marshalling his knowledge of 20th century history to hold up a stark warning: the slide into tyranny is easier than most people imagine. “The European history of the twentieth century,” he writes, “shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands.” None of these things is so far-fetched; America in the 21st century is not immune to the forces of history or the predations of the human will, no matter the optimism of the first fifteen years of the millennium. Our constitutional democracy sets us apart, makes us exceptional in some ways, but it does not save us from ourselves. Democracy is only as good, as just, as merciful, as the people going to the ballot box, and the leaders we elect to represent us. “We might be tempted to think that our democratic heritage automatically protects us from such threats. This is a misguided reflex. Americans today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the twentieth century.”

How do we define this threat facing us? I’ve used the terms “autocracy”, “dictatorship”, “tyranny”, and “oligarchy” interchangeably throughout my essays over the past weeks, but each has its own definition, all of which could each be applied to different aspects of what is happening. You can also apply the term “revolution”, modified with “radicalism” or extremism.” Snyder centers the term “tyranny”, defining it as “the usurpation of power by a single individual or group, or the circumvention of law by rulers for their own benefit.” I think any sober analysis of the last two months of American political life would line up pretty clearly with this definition, making tyranny an apt description of what it is Donald Trump and his cronies are pursuing.

On Tyranny is twenty short lessons, drawn from history, on how to confront and grapple with the encroachment of tyranny in America. Over the course of the next few weeks, I want to take some time to look at these twenty lessons, and try to discern where we are seeing them breaking into our current political moment. Most of all, I want to try to present a sort of roadmap for what we can be doing, as regular citizens of this endangered democracy. I feel compelled to do this because of the fecklessness of the Democratic Party and the aimlessness of the political left in this country. Long experience has left me with no trust in Democrats to present any effective resistance, and besides, theological and ideological concerns caution me against hitching my wagon to any political party or partisan movement at this point. What can we, the citizens - the ones who should be holding the power - actually do to resist the dismantling of our democracy.

I'll be exploring each lesson one at a time, slowly, amidst other writing I do here. I imagine you'll find these lessons as relevant and eerily prescient as I do. That's kind of the point, for Professor Snyder: "History does not repeat, but it does instruct...History can familiarize, and it can warn." Let us familiarize ourselves, and find some direction for preserving our democratic rights. We have no other choice.