In a time of uncertainty and instability, urgent reminders

By JoAnne Young

 

This will haunt us for years to come. It may haunt our children and their children.

We wonder, is it too late? How long can we carry on? 

 

One historian, beyond Heather Cox Richardson, has written about our descent into authoritarianism and those other words we’d rather not see in writing. Timothy Snyder, a history professor at the University of Toronto and formerly at Yale, has expertise on European history, Ukraine and democracy. In 2017 he wrote On Tyranny Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. I found it important and disturbing at the time. Even then, though, I had no idea how important. Then wandering through a bookstore in Savannah, Georgia, in February, I stumbled onto a graphic version of the book published in 2021, even more readable than the original. 

 

Many of you may be familiar with On Tyranny and know how profound its lessons have become. We are much farther down the road Snyder warned us about nine years ago. I realized reading the graphic edition, illustrated by Nora Krug, (Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships) how I needed to review Snyder’s lessons, and continue to keep his words handy. 

 

In interviews, Snyder highlighted three lessons that were at the top of the list in his mind. 

 

* Do not obey in advance. 

 

 Speaking with Amanda Lang on the Canadian podcast WONK, Snyder said that’s exactly what Amazon’s Jeff Bezos did in October 2024 when he abruptly ended the Washington Post’s practice of endorsing presidential candidates close to election day, thus blocking the newspaper’s endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris. 

 

     It was a teaching moment for second term Candidate Donald Trump. 

 

 “ ...  doing what Trump wants in advance only makes it more likely that Trump will have power, and only teaches him that you are easy to intimidate,” Snyder said. “You are giving him the authoritarian power he would not otherwise have.” 

 

* Defend institutions. 

 

Institutions such as courts, newspapers, the law, universities, help us to preserve decency. They do not protect themselves. They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning. It is a vain hope, Snyder writes, for an institution to think a gesture of loyalty would bind the new system to them. The Washington Post has lost millions of dollars and at least 250,000 subscribers since Bezos’ decision, and has laid off a third of its staff, causing more subscriber desertions. 

 

* Beware the one-party state.

 

Nebraska should take this lesson to heart. The state has a Republican trifecta in its governor,  elected Constitutional officers (auditor, attorney general, treasurer, etc.), and Legislature. Its one-house Legislature at this time has 33 Republicans on the 49-member roster of senators, a supermajority, which can easily sustain a Republican governor’s vetoes, and break a filibuster. 

“A party emboldened by a favorable election result or denying an unfavorable one, might change the system from within,” Snyder writes. 

 

Snyder warns about defending the rules of democratic elections. This state’s voters in a recent primary chose a Trump supporter as its Republican candidate for Secretary of State, the office in charge of elections and state rules and regulations. Scott Petersen won the primary against Secretary of State Bob Evnen with 54.6% of the vote. 

 

Petersen has said he supports “meaningful voter ID with citizenship verification.” He also supports protections for poll challengers and observers, expanding post-election audits, data sharing and cleaning up voter registrations. 

 

Elections get “cooked” at the state level, Snyder says, before voters start paying attention. Bureaucratic burdens make it harder for people to show up. 

 

* I paid particular attention to lessons 9 and 17: Be kind to our language and listen for dangerous words. 

 

 Politicians feed their clichés to television, where they are repeated. Each story is “breaking” until it is displaced by the next. “So we are hit by wave upon wave but never see the ocean.”

 

More than half a century ago, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and George Orwell’s 1984 warned of domination of screens, suppression of books, narrowing of vocabularies. Snyder suggests being alert to words that refer to extremists and terrorists, and the use of patriotic vocabulary. 

 

He does offer some hope, saying people are learning and capable of reacting. We shouldn’t be wanting to go back to 2015 or even 2024. We should be looking to start new things. There are always surprises in store, both positive and negative, he said, like a prism in which we don’t see all the colors but they are there. 

 

The March 28 No Kings protests after the killings by ICE of Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, suppression of the Epstein files and the Iran war, were said to have drawn more than 8 million people, the largest single-day total in American history. 

 

Individual acts of courage are important. Elect people who understand the need for policies based on the public good, and who understand congressional responsibility. Support media that are physically present locally. Focus on the notion of what our country is supposed to be about. 

Be as courageous as you can. 

 

We have learned that the Constitution is not enough on its own to protect our democracy. 

 

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