The real tyranny? Institutional groupthink disguised as truth

Timothy Snyder’s “On Tyranny” has become a pocket-size gospel for progressives in the age of Trump — a secular catechism of 20 rules to resist looming fascism. It’s pitched not just as a historical analysis but as an urgent survival guide, borrowed from the dark lessons of the 20th century. The message is clear: Authoritarianism is always just one election away, and Donald Trump is its orange-faced harbinger.

Such moral urgency unmoored from historical context tends to collapse into political theater, however. “On Tyranny” is not a serious book. It is an emotive pamphlet that relies less on the actual historical complexities of rising tyranny than on the reader’s willingness to conflate MAGA hats with brownshirts.

Snyder believes a tyrant is always the populist outsider, never the insider who manages democratic decline in a suit and tie.

Such historical flattening is the first and most obvious flaw in Snyder’s argument. He leans heavily on the atrocities of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia to suggest that Trump’s rise follows the same trajectory. But this is not serious analysis — it’s emotional manipulation. It’s one thing to warn against patterns; it’s another to flatten every populist movement into a prequel to genocide.

Snyder, a Yale historian, surely knows better. But “On Tyranny” depends on your feeling like you’re living in 1933 — whether or not such historical parallels are actually true. And they’re not.

A democratic mandate

Snyder warns against the rise of a single leader claiming to represent the will of the people and establishing a one-party state — equating the 2016 Republican sweep of the White House and both chambers of Congress to Hitler’s consolidation of the Third Reich. Such a comparison isn’t just blatantly false; it’s a cruel dismissal of the democratic will of the people for merely voting in Republican candidates.

Surely Snyder didn’t accuse Barack Obama of fascist one-party rule when he and the Democrats swept the White House and Congress in 2008. Such electoral outcomes aren’t a harbinger of fascism. No, no! That was a mandate from the American people, democratically spoken, demanding change from the status quo. Voters sent that message loud and clear in 2008 — as well as in 2016 and 2024.

Snyder’s false equivalency counts on fear rather than critical thinking — any semblance of which would entice Democrats to pause for a moment of self-reflection and listen to what the American people are saying through the electoral process. But Snyder’s one-sided alarmism silences the electoral voice — merely because it rallied behind Trump.

Civic theater

Snyder’s advice to citizens reads like a secular sermon: “Defend institutions.” “Stand out.” “Be calm when the unthinkable arrives.” On the surface, it sounds noble — defiant, even. But strip away the aesthetic of resistance, and what’s left is a deeply superficial understanding of civic virtue.

What exactly are we defending when we’re told to “support the press” or “protect truth”? In practice, Snyder’s rules amount to an uncritical loyalty to legacy institutions that have forfeited public trust — media outlets that gaslight, bureaucracies that bloat, and experts who contradict themselves while silencing dismissive voices.

Snyder dismisses the possibility that institutions can rot from within, that the loudest defenders of “truth” are often its gravest opponents. Instead, he offers something simpler: the feeling of resistance while catering to the institutional elites.

The real culprits

The irony of “On Tyranny” is that the tactics Snyder warns against — censorship, moral panic, political conformity — have not come from MAGA rallies but from the very institutions Snyder holds up as guardians of democracy. It wasn’t Trump who quashed dissenting speech on COVID-19 or colluded with social media companies to throttle viewpoints that didn’t conform with the government’s narrative. It was the political elite and their complicit peddlers in the mainstream media and social media companies.

Unfortunately for Snyder’s brand, tyranny doesn’t always wear a red hat. Sometimes it comes in the name of “safety,” or “science,” or “social justice.” Sometimes it cancels you over a social media post, not because you’re dangerous, but because you’re not sufficiently obedient.

If Snyder were genuinely concerned with authoritarianism in all its forms, he might have warned against this progressive impulse to control thought and punish deviation. Instead, he gives it cover — because the real threat, in his mind, is always the populist outsider, never the insider who manages democratic decline in a suit and tie.

Less performance, more courage

Snyder is right about one thing: democracies don’t die overnight. But they do die when fear replaces thought, when virtue becomes branding, and when citizens outsource their moral judgment to bureaucracies and mainstream news.

“On Tyranny” offers the illusion of courage but none of the substance. It is performance art disguised as resistance. To preserve freedom, we should defend institutions and champion truth. But that requires holding corrupt actors in such institutions accountable, whether it be within the federal government or legacy media. That was the democratic mandate communicated loud and clear in 2024, and if Snyder were genuinely concerned about defending democracy, he would listen.