Around the time of Donald Trump’s first election victory, Timothy Snyder published a book that was small enough to fit in my back pocket, but which packed a War and Peace-sized wallop. I’m sure most of you are already familiar with both the author and the book but for those who aren’t, Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University, and On Tyranny is a distillation of the lessons he’s extracted from his study of the rise of authoritarian states in Europe toward the middle of the last century, particularly the emergence of Nazism and the stunning ascent of Hitler as its all-powerful leader.
The book is sub-titled Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century and is presented as a kind of guide to the warning signs that the pattern represented by Germany of the 1930s was repeating itself in our time. Trump’s election in 2016 set off alarm bells which Snyder and many others were committed to making sure would be heard before it was too late.
As it turned out, our democracy survived Trump’s term in office, somewhat bloodied by the January 6th insurrection, but still standing. His incompetence and inexperience, combined with the fact that all the levers of power were not yet in his hands, thwarted Trump’s efforts to dismantle the safeguards that had been in place for two-and-half centuries. A divided Congress, the continuing presence of enough independent judges and determined pushback from large segments of the voting public combined to frustrate his efforts.
I know many of you are tired of hearing those alarm bells yet again, this time magnified a thousand-fold, and are eager to open your mental windows to expel the fetid political air of the last 8+ years, but I’m going to ask you stay with me a while longer to hear some of Snyder’s words which convey an even more ominous message today than they did in 2016.
As we all know, the 2024 election and the Supreme Court rulings on presidential immunity handed Trump all the levers of power to finally realize his authoritarian vision. In recent years, the conservative Heritage Foundation has been preparing Project 2025, the roadmap Trump has been following since his inauguration for dismantling the federal government in ways that concentrate even more power in his hands. Did anyone seriously believe his contentions during the campaign that he knew nothing about the plan and had nothing to do with its creation – yet another in the long list of lies since he announced his candidacy in 2015.
But even before he was sworn in, the country was already ignoring Timothy Snyder’s Rule #1 in his Resisting Authoritarianism 1.0 outline, which is what I want to focus on for the balance of this note:
- Do not obey in advance.
Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts this way is teaching power what it can do.
Snyder calls this phenomenon “anticipatory obedience.” We saw this in action at almost the instant when it was clear that Trump won the election. Although there were no new laws or executive orders to be followed, the tech and media giants like Mark Zuckerberg at Meta and Jeff Bezos at the Washington Post and Amazon were voluntarily abandoning their efforts to restrict the mis- and dis-information on their platforms, anticipating Trump’s desires in their efforts to remain in his good graces.
An even more wide-spread example of anticipatory obedience is the virtual stampede to dismantle DEI programs in universities and corporations (Target is the latest example), even though there was no legal requirement in place for them to do so. All praise to resisters like Costco, which voted to maintain its commitment to all aspects of DEI. I was already a fan of their corporate policies of fair treatment of employees, but this decision to stand as a model of resistance to these first baby steps toward authoritarianism deepens my respect for them. As Snyder points out, early actions of compliance with authoritarian wishes signal to the regime that they can move forward more boldly toward their goals. Once these gifts are offered to those in power, they are not easily reversed.
I’m feeling encouraged by the signs of resistance to the most recent – and illegal – efforts to freeze the operations of all branches of government, which forced the administration to back down on many areas of its mandate. If they were testing the waters on the extent to which they would be met by passive obedience, they received a clear message that their actions will be resisted at every step. It’s especially important that in these early stages of Trump’s authoritarian experiment, nothing be passively ceded.
And, please, if you haven’t already read On Tyranny, now is the time. There’s much more in it to trouble us than the tiny sample I’ve offered here.
