The SS
Snyder writes of the SS: "The SS began as an organization outside the law, became an organization that transcended the law, and ended up as an organization that undid the law" (44). Perhaps this isn't pure irony, but it has an element of it in that the SS, an essentially rogue outside force, became the law and then dismantled the law. This is not normally the way we think about paramilitaries, which we assume stay on the outside until they are destroyed.
Journalism
Snyder encourages us to engage in and support real journalism. He writes wryly, "We find it natural that we pay for a plumber or a mechanic, but demand our news for free" (77). The irony in this statement comes from the fact that a plumber or mechanic offers services that certainly matter but not in an existential, fate-of-the-democracy way. We will pay them, but we balk at paying for people doing the good work to try and illuminate abuses and oppression and erosions of democracy.
2025
Snyder first wrote this book in 2017 and updated it before the 2024 election. There is no possible way Snyder could know that Donald Trump would win in 2025, though he certainly could guess that it was a real possibility. Readers picking up this text in 2025, though, know that Trump won and have been witness to several months of his doing many of the things Snyder warned about. So, while this isn't exactly an example of dramatic irony in the way we traditionally understand it in literature, it still feels like an accurate way to describe what it feels like to read this text knowing more than Snyder knows about the future.
Readers of the book
This is also a sort of extra-textual type of irony, but it will probably not be lost on many readers of this book that some of the people least likely to pick this book up and learn from it are the ones who most need it. They are people who didn't fully understand what they were voting for when they voted for Trump, or who do not know about the history Snyder mentions in the text, or who do not understand the nuances of how all these things like courts, laws, shocks to the system, language, symbols, and more, work together.
