by Dean Goldberg

It may not be much of an exaggeration to say that last year’s electoral victory of real estate mogul and reality television star Donald Trump and his team of right wing bankers and soldiers may be the biggest threat to our democratic system since ex-CIA agent James McCord and four other “plumbers” bungled their way into the Democratic National Committee office in the Watergate complex in 1972.

Okay, maybe you don’t agree. But Timothy Snyder, author of this remarkable new text, On Tyranny, does. Maybe not about Watergate, after all, we came out of that one hailing our system of checks and balances, but Dr. Snyder does agree that the new boys in town represent a low point in our political history and the possibility of the loss of real democracy in our time.

I first heard professor/author Timothy Snyder while listening to NPR on my way down to school. Dr. Snyder is the Housum Professor of History at Yale University. His books include, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin and Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning. In On Tyranny, which runs all of 125 pages, Snyder reflects on many of the issues contained in his prior work and sets out to provide the reader with lessons learned through the history of governments and systems that espoused hegemony to solve economic and social problems. This small paperback book—one might even call it a back-pocket pamphlet—serves up historical precedents and lessons of advice in twenty bite sized fast food portions, only these bites are organically grown and historically accurate. The “secret sauce” in this instance is made out of pure fear.

While adage that age brings wisdom may be a rather musty cliché, experience does, at least, give us the opportunity to learn from the history that we’ve personally lived through.

My own included a cultural and political revolution that tore the country apart through the 60s and 70s. It also found me ducking tear gas on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley and a couple of years later watching the Nixon impeachment hearings back east on my portable television set every day after class. After college, I fell into a job editing political commercials. I was pretty young and naïve in those days but got to witness the inner workings of the American political process first hand. I was a fly on the wall watching politicians like Tip O’Neil, Pat Moynihan and Henry Scoop Jackson letting their preverbal hair down during frequent gaps in filming speeches or making campaign commercials. When I finally moved out of the edit room to directing I was lucky enough to have face to face interviews with political wonks like George Will of Newsweek and Hugh Sidey of Time Magazine as well as the pols themselves—John Glenn, Howard Baker, Henry Jackson, Geraldine Ferraro and others.

And while these leaders came from both sides of the political aisle, they were to a person shaped by the events of World War II and the fight against Hitler and Mussolini. All could speak on a personal level of the mistakes made by our government during and after that tragic time—the Japanese internment camps, the resistance to letting Jews into the country during the war, the disaster of Senator Joseph McCarthy during the 1950s as he feasted on America’s fear and post war paranoia. Ferraro, Baker, Jackson and Glenn are all gone now, but I wonder what they would say about the state of the union today. The single living member of my short list, George Will, has nearly given up his voice, a conservative one, because of his enmity for the mindlessness of Mr. Trump.

All this said, I guess the real hard work belongs to the younger generation as well as to their own parents and even grandparents. You gotta be in it to win it, makes a lot of sense, no matter what your age. For Dr. Snyder, there is an implicit responsibility for all citizens to know their history, to be able to make judgements from intelligent resources—and above all to be ethical citizens of the world. Although Snyder tosses a first page nod to Aristotle and Plato, he gives preference to those writing about Europe’s mugging by Germany, Italy and their collaborators. Front and center are the works of Hannah Arendt, the writer/activist who coined the phrase “The banality of evil,” as well as Victor Klemperer, who wrote The Language of the Third Reich and Vaclav Havel, writer, philosopher and former president of the Czech Republic, who wrote The Power and the Powerless.

The chapters in On Tyranny are as follows:

Do not obey in advance. Defend institutions. Beware the one-party state. Take responsibility for the face of the world. Remember professional ethics. Be wary of paramilitaries. Be reflective if you must be armed. Stand out. Be kind to our language. Believe in truth. Investigate. Make eye contact and small talk. Practice corporal politics. Establish a private life. Contribute to good causes. Learn from peers in other countries. Listen for dangerous words. Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. Be a patriot. Be as courageous as you can.           

On Tyranny may well be one of the most important books of the next decade. It reaches back to the past with reason, intelligence and a keen knowledge of the present. It speaks with a forthrightness and boldness that made me catch my breath while reading, more than once.

After my third read, I bought copies of the book and presented them to my two grown daughters with the hope that their children will never have to use On Tyranny as a “how to” book.

On Tyranny is published by Tim Duggan Books, an imprint of Crown Publishing, a division of Penguin Random House. It is available on Audible as well.