Summary
Prologue: History and Tyranny
Snyder begins with the succinct claim that “History does not repeat, but it does instruct” (9). The Founding Fathers knew this, so they studied civilizations of the past. Americans have usually turned to history when our political order is threatened, and though we have the Greeks and Romans, we also have modern examples to help us chart democracies' declines and falls. Those are the examples Snyder, a renowned historian of Europe in the 20th century, plans to use in his list of 20 lessons on tyranny.
There are three major democratic moments in European history: after WWI in 1918, after WWII in 1945, and after the end of communism in 1989. But many of these democracies failed, and those circumstances look a lot like our own right now. It is important to understand why those democracies failed so we can hopefully prevent America from undergoing the same fate.
Fascism and communism were “responses to globalization: to the real and perceived inequalities it created, and the apparent helplessness of the democracies in addressing them” (12). In America we might think that we are different from the countries afflicted by those tyrannies, but this is misguided.
1: Do not obey in advance.
Snyder states that “[a]nticipatory obedience is a political tragedy” (18). He provides examples of Germans and Austrians under Hitler, who taught “the high Nazi leadership what was possible” (19). Similarly, SS officers invading the Soviet Union considered on their own what their superiors might want, which was more than even Hitler had conceived. Anticipatory obedience thus means that people are adapting instinctively without sitting back to reflect on what they are doing.
Snyder asks if perhaps it is only Germans that do this—maybe it’s something particular to this society? He answers his question by explaining scientist Stanley Milgram’s experiment at Yale in 1961, in which volunteers continued to deliver shocks to people at the request of an authority even though those people were clearly experiencing pain. Milgram concluded that there was no reason to take his experiment to Germany since he “found so much obedience” (21) here in America.
2: Defend institutions.
Institutions, such as courts, laws, labor unions, bureaucracies, and more, help preserve decency and democracy and they need our help. It is wrong to assume that they will be able to withstand assaults on them. Rulers such as Hitler are more than willing and able to change institutions or even destroy them. Sometimes they even announce it in advance, and we cannot afford to ignore their stated aims.
Historically, it took less than a year for Nazi Germany to become a one-party state. Some German Jews even voted the way Nazi leaders wanted to because they hoped “that this gesture of loyalty would bind the new system to them” (25). That, of course, did not happen.
Analysis
Timothy Snyder, renowned historian on Europe in the 20th century, started compiling what would become these 20 lessons on tyranny on Facebook. When people asked him to turn his musings into a book, he complied and produced On Tyranny in 2017. The book is a slim volume, easy to read in terms of its prose but difficult to read in terms of what the content suggests about where we are now. In fact, what makes it even more disturbing is the fact that it was written and updated before Donald Trump was reelected in 2024 and unleashed a barrage of once unfathomable changes to the federal government.
In the prologue, Snyder warns us not to be seduced by the oft-invoked refrain of “it can’t happen here.” In fact, he says, it can happen here and if we look to Europe for examples of the path to tyranny, it is clear that “it” is already happening and is only going to get worse. It is the height of hubris to think that America’s democracy is exceptional, not to mention diametrically opposed to what the Founding Fathers knew when they created this government, as they looked to the rise and fall of democracies in the ancient world to instruct and warn. At the moment, we don’t need to look that far back, as we have examples in Europe from less than one hundred years ago to do that same instruction and warning.
Critic Darryl Holter sums up Snyder’s views: “Perhaps because he is a scholar of European history, Snyder has little affection for the American Exceptionalism argument — the long-standing and widespread notion among American writers that our country remains largely immune to the wars, political upheavals, and economic calamities that plagued Europe. Deeply familiar with democratic experiments, and their eventual failures in Europe after World War I, World War II, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Snyder detects dangerous trends in American politics that may be less visible to most citizens who cannot believe that our country, with its system of checks and balances, could succumb to illiberalism or authoritarianism. It is precisely this complaisant attitude that Snyder wants to expose as erroneous and anti-historical. In doing so, Snyder offers an affirmation of the value, even necessity, of understanding history.” His 20 lessons are lessons in history as well as calls to action.
In the first lesson, Snyder warns against anticipatory obedience. This might not sound like something people are inclined to do, but he provides several examples from Nazi Germany and from basic psychology to show how this is more common than nought. The Milgram experiment in particular showed how people—Americans—were willing to keep administering pain to people they didn’t know even when it was some nebulous authority asking them to do so. It isn’t a far leap to imagine that people may give Trump what he wants before he demands it from them in order to keep him and his cronies away from them, their family, their business, etc.
In regards to Trump, Snyder writes about him in nearly every chapter but does not refer to him by name, instead using “a President” or “a presidential candidate.” Tim Adams explains in The Guardian that “Snyder does not name America’s 45th president in the course of this book, but the nascent administration is never far from his thoughts. Throughout his march to power, Trump used a narrowing of language in an identical way to that which Klemperer described, and has emphasised his populist project by the subordination of word to image. This is a presidency being shaped by the techniques and tone of television and Twitter and YouTube, rather than the progression of rational argument through sentence and paragraph. Trump’s admission that he never reads a book all the way through is symptomatic of his rhetorical style. He offers a ‘highly constrained [language] to starve the public of the concepts needed to think about the past, present and future’, Snyder argues. In the president’s frame of reference events are only ever bad or sad or mad. With his Dr Seuss vocabulary, he can present the world as a place of simplistic oppositions, stripped of nuance.”
In the second lesson, Snyder says we need to defend our institutions, as they are not as strong as we think they are. Indeed, right now in 2025 we can see the courts straining to stop Trump (and his escalation of calls to somehow curb their power, such as impeaching judges who stand in his way), laws faltering, bureaucracies hemorrhaging people and authority, and more.
