![]() 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. 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. 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. ![]() Donald Trump ’s election to the American presidency in 2016 is what motivated Snyder, a renowned historian of authoritarianism in 20th-century Europe, to pen the book. Timothy Snyder is the Levin professor of history at Yale University and the author of histories of political atrocity including Bloodlands and Black Earth, as well as the book On Tyranny, on America’s turn toward authoritarianism. We certainly face, as did the ancient Greeks, the problem of oligarchy-ever more threatening as globalization increases differences in wealth. In On Tyranny, Timothy Snyder presents various strategies that authoritarian governments use to gain power and ways that citizens can resist them. 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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