On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

The months after Donald Trump was elected president have been boom times for scholars of authoritarianism. Masha Gessen wrote a widely circulated essay on the New York Review of Books website entitled “Autocracy: Rules for Survival.” In that vein, Snyder offers practical advice to #TheResistance in “On Tyranny,” a brief book that started life as a Facebook post.

Unlike public intellectuals who casually toss around the word “fascist” to describe a disappointing restaurant salad, Snyder knows this subject cold. He is a Yale University historian who has written at length on fascism, Communism and the Holocaust. That gives “On Tyranny” a particular urgency. It is littered with vignettes of how Germans in the 1930s aided and abetted Hitler’s rise to power. It is impossible to read aphorisms like “post-truth is pre-fascism” and not feel a small chill about the current state of the Republic. Snyder warns, “Americans today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism or Communism in the 20th century.” He offers political advice ranging from straightforward (“Defend institutions”) to insightful (“Be calm when the unthinkable arrives”). For such a small book, Snyder invests “On Tyranny” with considerable heft.