“Americans today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the twentieth century. One advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so.”
- Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny (2017)
At the risk of stating the obvious, the now to which Professor Snyder refers was eight years ago.
Notes and Sources
Turn Your Back During the State of the Union: https://healingamericasnarratives.com/march-4-2025-state-of-the-union-turn-your-back-initiative/
Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, (Crown, 2017), 13.
Each of these issues and others deserve a lot of attention. Generally speaking, they are all created by a mindset and behaviors that value money, things, and beliefs more than people and other living beings. This mindset and these behaviors treat the planet as a resource to be used (up) for profit and they treat life as a zero-sum game with material winners and losers. Generally, the folks who unreflectively work at winning this game see the world through an unhealthy me-centric or group/us-centric worldview. If you don’t think this is true, you can check it out. It’s called current events in the context of history.
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die, (Broadway Books, 2018), 206-208.
Two primary unwritten political conventions (or norms) are mutual toleration (we play by the Constitutional rules whether we are in power or out, and we work to hold onto power or win it back in the next election); and institutional forbearance (“avoiding actions that, while respecting the letter of the law, obviously violate its spirit”). Levitsky and Ziblatt, 102-107.
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