Summary
Chapter 16: Learn from peers in other countries.
Snyder’s advice here is to update passports and keep friends in other countries. He explains that when Trump started gaining ground and overcoming all the obstacles people thought would stop him in 2016, that Americans were surprised but Eastern Europeans were not. Ukrainians in particular thought Americans were “comically slow to react to the obvious threats of cyberwar and targeted lies” (96), having dealt with such things with Russia. History seems once to have moved from west to east but is now switched, moving east to west. Everything happening here already happened there.
Chapter 17: Listen for dangerous words.
A useful example from the Nazis is “exception,” or “exceptional,” because using those words gave the Nazis license to do what they wanted. Germans conceded their freedom because they thought it was an extreme, exceptional situation. “Extremism” is a word that doesn’t really mean anything, and is used just to demonize people outside the mainstream when tyrants decided what the mainstream was.
Chapter 18: Be calm when the unthinkable arrives.
There will be a sudden disaster that authoritarians use to justify suspending checks and balances, ending opposition parties, suspending freedom of expression, and more. It is the oldest trick in the book and one that Snyder urges us not to fall for. The example is Hitler and the 1933 Reichstag fire that he used to justify the suppression of basic rights and propel him to victory in elections. An “enabling act” allowed Hitler to rule by decree, plunging Germany into a calculated state of emergency for twelve years. Vladimir Putin did nearly the same thing, using a series of terrorist acts, some real and some fake, to “remove obstacles to total power in Russia and assault democratic neighbors” (105). Two of the main things he eliminated were private television and elected regional governorships, and he replaced everything with terror management.
In 2016, the United States also saw a series of fake crises like a refugee “invasion,” but then proceeded to ignore real crises over the next few years like Covid, the murder of George Floyd, and the assault on the Capitol. The lesson of the Reichstag fire, Snyder warns, is that “one moment of shock enables an eternity of submission” (110). We should not let fear and grief at the dissolution of our freedoms and institutions cripple us.
Chapter 19: Be a patriot.
In order to define patriotism, Snyder, gives examples of what patriotism is not by using some of Trump’s more egregious statements and actions. Nationalists do these things, but they are not patriots. Nationalists want us to do our worst and then say it’s our best. Patriots, by contrast, have universal values and standards and always wish the country well and want it to do better.
Chapter 20: Be as courageous as you can.
This chapter contains one line: “If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny” (115).
Epilogue: History and Liberty
Snyder claims that we have forgotten history, that we’ve told ourselves history can only move in one direction. We think there was an end to history; we evoke a politics of inevitability. We say there is forward movement, a teleology, expanded globalization, reason, and prosperity. But this is an “intellectual coma” (119), and we forget the details that help us understand how the past happened and to be able to see how it’s happening again.
There is also the politics of eternity, which is a concern with the past but in a self-absorbed way. These adherents long for the past, for a “vast misty courtyard of illegible monuments to national victimhood” (121). Trump wants to “Make America Great Again” and says “America First” but does not fully understand the past at the same time as he molds it to fit what he and his followers want in the present. The “habit of dwelling on victimhood dulls the impulse of self-correction” (123) and forces everything into good and evil binaries. Reform cannot stand up to the possibility of an enemy at the gate.
Thus, the politics of inevitability is a coma and the politics of eternity is hypnosis. We are moving from the former to the latter, first shocked and then convinced that nothing ever turns out well in the end. Both of these lenses are antihistorical. We need history to let us see patterns and make judgments. Young people need to make history, not just fall into those modes. And, ultimately, they will need to know history to make history.
Analysis
In lesson sixteen, Snyder suggests we keep in contact with our friends abroad and keep our passports updated. On a somewhat related note, he notes that those peers in European countries (his example is Ukraine) have gone through similar things as we are going through now, and can provide advice and warnings if necessary.
In lesson seventeen, we return to the need to pay attention to language, as tyrants and would-be-tyrants use certain words and terms to rally those to them and leave others out. They also use those words to mold the situation to their desires: “A Nazi leader outmaneuvers his opponents by manufacturing a general conviction that the present moment is exceptional, and then transforming that state of exception into a permanent emergency” (100).
That “permanent emergency” is what Snyder is referencing in the next chapter on being calm when the unthinkable arises. He provides a compelling example in the Reichstag fire, which allowed Hitler to take actions to consolidate his power and stamp out resistance because it was an “exceptional” circumstance. Snyder notes some real and fake crises that have already happened, including the biggest of them all—the “stolen election” and the attack on the Capitol—and warns, “One coup has been attempted. A failed coup is usually practice for a successful one. The emergency might be more favorable next time, and we cannot afford to be surprised” (110).
Comparing Trump to Hitler and some imminent “exceptional event” (perhaps a terrorist attack by the Islamic state) to the Reichstag fire has been going on since 2016. A 2017 Harper’s article, “The Reichstag Fire Next Time” by Masha Gessen, deals with this at length, explaining that we can first look to Trump’s campaign rallies: “To totalitarianism watchers, Trump’s campaign rallies, which segued into his victory rallies, including his ‘America First’ inauguration, have looked familiar and perhaps more worrisome than an imaginary future fire. To historians of the twenty-first century, however, they will likely look like logical steps from the years of war rhetoric that preceded them, not quantum leaps. A nation can be mobilized only if it knows its enemy and believes in its own peril.” Perhaps if there isn’t an outright war, it might not matter: “Trump does not have to declare war—this has already been done—or even proffer an assessment of the danger. But he has already shown that he can deftly use the coercive power of the state of being at war—this is, possibly, the only political tool of which the president has instinctive mastery.” She concludes, “when we talk about the Reichstag fire, we talk about the consequences of a catastrophic event. But in our case, these consequences—a legal state of exception, a sense of living under siege, popular mobilization, and an epidemic of conspiracy thinking—are already in place. Indeed, they are the preconditions of our current predicament. Trump used the conspiracy thinking and the siege mentality to get himself elected.” Gessen certainly has a lot more fodder for her claim in 2025.
The final two lessons are about being a real patriot (not a nationalist, which is not the same thing but certainly is what Trump is) and being courageous when the time comes. That lesson is just the preface itself and has no further text, giving it a rather ominous tone.
The epilogue does not exactly offer hope, but it does offer instruction about how to view history. In a Penguin Books article, Snyder explains the point of this book and of studying history: “The idea of lessons from history is to give us some place to stand, some leverage, a realization that nothing is entirely new, a program for action. I wrote the book so that Americans could get some distance on themselves, get away from shock and from normalization, and decide for themselves how to preserve democracy. The darkness of the twentieth century were the new forms of tyranny: fascism and communism. But we have the wisdom of people who experienced them and resisted. Some of these people were my teachers. The book is meant to put us in touch with people who are wiser than ourselves and who have experienced more.”
