“On Tyranny” - Chapter 20: “Be as courageous as you can”
“If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, all of us will die under tyranny.”
Snyder frames this last chapter as an epilogue, “history and Liberty.” He leads off with Hamlet as an example of “a virtuous man who is rightly shocked by the abrupt rise of an evil ruler.”
It’s worth letting that sink in for a while. Throughout this short text, the author has presented the case for the past as prologue but also the understanding that nothing is inevitable. This book is a guide to navigating worst-case scenarios and I feel it is all the more valuable for that.
I genuinely do feel the darkest is yet to come. I believe Social security will cease to function in a matter of months, if not weeks. The economy is tanking but it’s in a slow-motion freewill. Nothing is going to happen linearly. There’s too much chaos at work for that to be the case.
However, it is also the case that there is a tremendous amount of dysfunction behind the scenes. The recent Signal leak is a glaring example of the incompetence of these on-air personalities masquerading as policy experts. That the Regime is characterized by infighting and continuously mixed messages may sound like cold comfort, but it is toe the advantage of any countermovement. Exploiting such weaknesses and exposing their base to them should have the tonic effect of emphasizing further just how badly they’ve been duped. How far this will reach or how well this will work remains to be seen.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders are drawing huge crowds across the country to come to their town halls and listen to the truth of the situation. Beto O’Rourke and Tim Waltz are doing so in Texas, welcoming all, regardless of party affiliation. There darkest days are not yet here, but these shafts of light are bright enough to show us how to avoid traps set in our paths.
Nevertheless, preparing for the worst is very simply the smartest move.
Hamlet laments that “The time is out of joint”, and Snyder concerts. It is hard to say that it is not. Snyder notes that “we have forgotten history for one reason and if we are not careful, we will neglect it for another.”
In contrast to what I said above, that nothing is inevitable, it is true that many, if not most, Americans have succumbed to what Snyder terms “the politics of inevitability.” In this case, the almost Spenglarian idea that history will progress toward the singular goal of liberal democracy. Internalizing that, “we lowered our defenses, constrained our imagination, and opened the way for precisely the kinds of regimes we told ourselves could never return.” This became so after the end of communism in Europe thirty-five years ago.
In his critique of the politics of inevitability, Snyder points out that politicians who support it “do not deny that there is a past, a present, and a future”, but that “they portray the present simply as a step toward a future that we already know, one of expanding globalization, deepening reasoning, and growing prosperity.”The result is that these leaders were trafficking in erroneous teleological idealism, if not outright misunderstanding that nothing is fixed in time; fixed teleologies become ossified perceptions and the dissonance with reality is jarring and traumatic. As Snyder says, “The politics of inevitability is a self-induced intellectual coma.”
He points out that once Americans adopted this perspective, this idea that “If everything in the past is governed by a known tendency, then there is no need to learnt the details.” And it is here that we come face to face with the cost of ignoring history. It is not a matter of being doomed to repeat it, though there is that, nor is it that history may not repeat, but rhymes. It is both those homilies, and more, because the price being paid for adopting an ahistorical perspective as “the politics of inevitability” is the additional of a fatalism for the people and an assumed “divine mandate” for the rulers.
This has “stilted the way we talk about politics in the twenty-first century” and stifled policy debate and tended to generate party systems where one political party defended the status quo, the other proposed total negation.” There is adopted a sensibility that there is an undeniable “natural order of things” and that “What appeared to be critical analysis often assumed that the status quo could not actually change, and thereby indirectly reinforced it.” I disagree somewhat: the reinforcement of this was direct. I see direct lines of cause and effect between the adoption of this mindset (and others) and the results of that adoption. It may note be immediate, but there are effects that ripple across the fabric of societies and very often have deleterious effects.
Indeed, in his paragraph that surveys neoliberalism and disruption, Snyder effectively shows the results of how such thinking has affected the polity. The use of “neoliberalism” as a political term/idea, “was usually a kowtow before an unchangeable hegemony. (Emphasis mine. JB)” and that the application of “disruption” applied to politics, “carries the implication that nothing can really change, that the chaos that excites us will eventually be absorbed by a self-regulation system.”
“The whole notion of disruption is adolescent: It assumes that after the teenagers make a mess, the adults will come and clean it up.” We are seeing this play out in real time with an entire ruling power, a regime of adolescent, stunted intellects that neither know nor care about the consequences of their policies or legislation because they are so convinced of the rightness of what they are doing.
This dovetails with Snyder’s second antihistorical assessment of the past, that he calls the “politics of eternity.” “Like the politics of inevitability, the politics of eternity performs a masquerade of history, though a different one. It is concerned with the past, but in a self-absorbed way, free of any real concern with facts. It’s mood is a longing for past moments that never really happened during epochs that were, in fact, disastrous.” We don’t have to look too far afield with the current regime in which the occupier of the White House looks to the McKinley administration of the late nineteenth century and the Gilded Age as a Golden Age to return to.
I might opt for calling this “the politics of nostalgia”; a pining for ersatz eras of glory bathed in golden light for the ruling classes, and ignoring the wretched conditions under which the vast majority lived and labored. Such politicians, “bring us the past as a vast misty courtyard of illegible monuments to national victimhood, all of them equally distant from the present, all of them equally accessible for manipulation.” I might go farther and point out that the mistiness is precisely what characterizes the thinking of these politicians. This is not a philosophy; it is a weird, emotional search for what never was that they would now wish into existence with grievances and a sense of entitlement to revenge for perceived attacks on their preconceived notions of what Snyder calls their “purity of the nation.”
Snyder emphasizes that national populists are “eternity politicians.” They laud the Nazi and Soviet models in the 1930s for their seeming unstoppability, while overlooking how and that these regimes fell. “Those who advocated Brexit, the departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union, imagined a British nation-state, which never existed. (Emphasis mine, again. JB) “The move to separate fro the EU is not a step backward onto firmer ground, but a leap into the unknown.”
Snyder provides of similar examples of separation in recent example in France, Poland, and Hungary where nationalists attempt to sway people with images of imaginary states that never were or “a glowing image of the 1930s.” He calls on the carpet an American president who “used the slogan “America First,” which is the name of a committee that sought to prevent the United States from opposing Nazi Germany in the 1930s.” He questions what is, when is the “Again” in their slogan “Make America Great Again.”
“It is, sadly, the same “again” that we find in “Never again.”” Snyder quotes that same president, the current occupier, as saying that a regime change as in the 1930s is desirable. He quotes that president: “You know what solves it? When the economy crashes, when eh country goes to total hell and everything is a disaster.” This president posited that was needed were “riots to go back to where we used to be when we were great.” It is my belief that he thinks the “we” here are the Brown Shirts.
Snyder notes that the politics of eternity are characterized by a seduction of mythologized past events that prevent “thinking about possible futures.” “...Dwelling on victimhood dulls the impulse of self-correction.” Defining a nation by its inherent virtue instead fo future potential leads to discussions of good and evil instead of leading to “a discussion of possible solutions to real problems.”
The most unnerving and yet most palpable aspect of the politics of eternity lies in this: “Since the crisis is permanent, the sense of emergency is always present; planning for a future seems impossible or even disloyal. Howe can we even think of reform when the enemy is at the gate?”
“If the politics of inevitability is like a coma, the politics of eternity is like hypnosis: We stare at the spinning of vortex of cyclical myth until we fall into a trance — and then we do something shocking at someone else’s orders.”
In his lead-up to his conclusion, Snyder discusses the transition from the politics of inevitability to that of eternity. We are on the cusp of this, I believe. There is a significant number of the population who have fallen under the hypnotic allure of eternity politics. But as Snyder points out, “The only thing standing between these positions is history itself. “History allows us to see patterns and make judgments…It reveals moments, each one of them different, none entirely unique. To understand one moment is to see the possibility of being the cocreaator of another. The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz thought that such a notion of responsibility worked against loneliness and indifference. History gives us the company of throe who have done and suffered more than we have.”
There is a big “But” here, though. In embracing the politics of inevitability, Snyder says, “we raised a generation without history.” I would say it’s more than one. That said, I have met many young people on the front lines who do have a historical sense; this against the tide that began under Reagan to remove Civics from curricula across the country in what I have only been able to conclude was a way to manipulate future generations into accepting the inevitability of the party’s hegemony, the strategic filtering of information such that successive generations would come of age knowing little of merit about the country’s past and only a golden hued yesteryear that never existed.
Snyder notes that “it must be hoped that [young Americans] will…become a historical generation, rejecting the traps or inevitability and eternity that older generations have laid before them. If young people do not begin to make history, politicians of inevitability and eternity will destroy it. And to know history, young Americans will have to know some. This is not the end, but a beginning.”
It is also a big ask. Given our current educational landscape and the fragmentation and unevenness of curricula across the country or even a city’s school district and with the furor over school vouchers in states like Texas, the idea of learning history has never been more at risk. That said, increasingly more Americans of all ages are learning that the current moment has antecedents. Horrible antecedents with devastating consequences.
We are seeing turnouts to rallies by progressive leaders, large numbers of protests and demonstrations across the country, and people coming together who are on opposite sides of political divides. This, for me, is the real beginning. If we are in a growing crisis, it is being answered by many people who are waking up to it. As rights and services are being summarily stripped and individuals being disappeared, more people are taking to the streets. They are making history; and in many cases, learning from it.
For my part, those of us gray haired and gray bearded folk, owe it to the younger generations to provide models of why it is important to know and learn from the past. Many of us are now getting little pats on the back for insights we’ve been sharing for decades but were ignored because they seemed “fringe” or “hypothetical” forty or even twenty years ago. The impulse to say “I told you so” is there, but more importantly, the urgency to move forward against the tide of the dismantiling of the government is more of the moment.
Snyder completes Hamlet’s quote. He began the chapter with “The time is out of joint. O cursed sprite/That ever I was born to set it right!” The last line is “Nay, come, let’s go together.”
Here is our courage; in lifting up our voices together. Regardless of where we are from, geographically, socially, or politically, there is greater courage in numbers, greater ability to speak truth to power and by speaking snd showing up, seizing it and subduing it. We need to be courageous and open-hearted to lift one another up. As services fail, as situations grow more precarious, it may fall to private individuals banding together to assist neighbors to get through the dark night ahead.
At the same time, we will need to make ourselves heard and known by strength of number to the oligarchs and fascists. This, this is where our courage will come from.
Bibliography
Snyder, Timothy. On Tyranny - Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Crown Publishing. New York. 2017..
I don’t have to add a lot here in terms of what we will likely be called on to do. You will read, again and again, how important it is to contact your reps, to volunteer your time, to march in protest, and to help where you can/as you can.
Two places to start with:
Mobilize at https://www.mobilize.us/. I have the landing page set to my area; populated with events, petitions, and volunteer opportunities, it’s practically one-stop shopping.
Indivisible at https://indivisible.org/ is another comprehensive hub. You can sign up for updates, download their guide to organizaing, find candidates to support, and more.
If you don't have a copy of "On Tyranny", you can purchase one here:
"On Tyranny" at Timothy Snyder's website where he lists several options. Support local bookstores and buy local or check it out from your local library.
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