The party that exercises such control proposes few policies that are popular with the society at large, and several that are generally unpopular-and thus must either fear democracy or weaken it. Enter Timothy Snyder, professor of history at Yale University and a scholar of 20th-century European history, an era smeared with the blood of victims of just this sort of authoritarian regime his 2017 book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, became a major best-seller, remaining on the charts for over three years. We believe that we have checks and balances, but have rarely faced a situation like the present, when the less popular of the two parties controls every lever of power at the federal level, as well as the majority of state houses.

The odd American idea that giving money to political campaigns is free speech means that the very rich have far more speech, and so in effect far more voting power, than other citizens. In 2017, during the first year of Donald J. An artist illustrates Timothy Snyder’s treatise on combatting autocracy. We certainly face, as did the ancient Greeks, the problem of oligarchy-ever more threatening as globalization increases differences in wealth. The Road to Tyranny, a Graphic Narrative. The logic of the system they devised was to mitigate the consequences of our real imperfections, not to celebrate our imaginary perfection.

Does the history of tyranny apply to the United States? Certainly the early Americans who spoke of “eternal vigilance” would have thought so. Timothy Snyder TimothyDSnyder Levin Professor of History at Yale.

On tyranny by timothy snyder