On Tyranny

Many democracies collapse because a large portion of the population willingly cooperates with demagogues who then dismantle the republic and replace it with a dictatorship. “The first heedless acts of conformity could not then be reversed” (18). When Austria is annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938, Austrian anti-Semites cheer the invading forces as they round up Jews. This teaches the Nazis that citizens will turn in their neighbors.

How is it that people so willingly give up their freedoms? For one thing, “anticipatory obedience means adapting instinctively, without reflecting, to a new situation” (20). Psychologist Stanley Milgram believes at first that only Germans have this trait, but in 1961, he conducts an experiment in Connecticut that shows that most people will likely give in to authority. In the experiment, subjects are told to press a button that delivers electric shocks to other participants, and despite the screams and, sometimes, apparent deaths of the other participants, most subjects kept pressing the button on command. (The other participants are, in fact, actors who are not harmed.)

Milgram realizes that people “are surprisingly willing to harm and kill others in the service of some new purpose if they are so instructed by a new authority” (21). 

German Jews in 1933 did not believe Hitler would be able to carry out his campaign against them “because a number of crucial factors hold powers in check” (23). However, newly-minted dictators can and do dismantle institutional checks against tyranny as soon as they take power. Russian Bolsheviks destroy social institutions all at once; the Nazis strip German institutions of power but retain them as “a simulacrum of what they once were, so that they gird the new order rather than resisting it” (24).

The Nazis take over Germany in less than a year. Late in 1933, they hold sham public votes “where the ‘correct’ answer was known” (25), and many Jews vote properly in the hope that this will prove their loyalty. “That was a vain hope” (25). 

Americans believe they must be eternally vigilant against threats from outsiders, but the worst danger comes from within, “from Americans who would exploit its freedoms to bring about its end” (27). When citizens vote for an authoritarian, it may be the last time they get to vote. Snyder writes that “[a] party emboldened by a favorable election result or motivated by ideology, or both, might change the system from within” (28).

In the US, the minority party holds power in 2017, “and thus must either fear democracy or weaken it” (30). This puts the electoral process in danger. Much needs to be done, including “[fixing] the gerrymandered system so that each citizen has one equal vote” (30) and using re-countable paper ballots. Between elections, then, “there is much to do” (31).

When the state portrays certain citizens in a negative light, this prepares the people to tolerate future abuses. The Soviets portray wealthy farmers as pigs, and soon the poor feel justified in robbing them. The Nazis take to "marking one firm as ‘Jewish’ and another as ‘Aryan’” (34), and soon the Jewish stores lose value. Snyder writes that “[a]ccepting the markings as a natural part of the urban landscape was already a compromise with a murderous future” (35).

Wearing symbols of loyalty can also lead to the wearing of symbols of exclusion. Snyder writes that “[i]n the Europe of the 1930s and ’40s, some people chose to wear swastikas, and then others [Jews] had to wear yellow stars” (35). Putting up loyalty signs in windows—“Workers of the world, unite!” (36)—extends the power of tyrants even when no one any longer believes in the sentiment. Snyder states that “[w]hen everyone else follows the same logic, the public sphere is covered with signs of loyalty, and resistance becomes unthinkable” (36).