6/20/2023 0 Comments Snyder on tyranny![]() ![]() ![]() Through discussing 20 brief historical lessons, it. The book provides a powerful warning against a cavalier attitude regarding the vigour of American democracy. ![]() 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. History does not repeat, but it does instruct ( 2017, 9) is Timothy Snyder’s opening line in On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. 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. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century is a 2017 book by Timothy Snyder, a historian of 20th-century Europe. 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. We certainly face, as did the ancient Greeks, the problem of oligarchy-ever more threatening as globalization increases differences in wealth. 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. ![]()
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