On Tyranny

The Founders of the American republic feared that it would fall to tyrants, as did so many republics before it. Like the Founders, today’s American citizens look to history for guidance when trying to resolve “the problem of tyranny within American society: over slaves and women, for example” (10).

In European history, three major democratic movements have occurred: “after the First World War in 1918, after the Second World War in 1945, and after the end of communism in 1989” (11). Not all such democracies survive; many fail “in circumstances that in some important respects resemble our own” (11).

A newly global economy increases instability and inequality; as a result, “European democracies collapsed into right-wing authoritarianism and fascism in the 1920s and ’30s” (11), while Soviet communism also arises. The Fascists “rejected reason in the name of will, denying objective truth in favor of a glorious myth” (12), while the communists “rule by a disciplined party elite” that declares a “monopoly on reason” (12).

Americans are as vulnerable as Europeans to such fates, but “one advantage is that we might learn from their experience” (16).