On a similar note, Snyder’s third rule is “Beware the one-party state.” An effective multi-party system ensures that no one group will be able to completely turn the state into a machine for advancing their own private interests. Secondly, Snyder implores reader to “Defend institutions.” Institutions are only as strong as the people who make them up, and authoritarians always try to dismantle democratic institutions in order to avoid checks and balances on their power. This is essentially the worst thing people can do, because tyranny functions by winning obedience and then implementing oppressive and antidemocratic policies that harm the same people who are passively obeying. Snyder’s first rule is “Do not obey in advance.” Throughout history, not only have significant portions of the public generally supported tyrants like Adolf Hitler, but most of the rest of the population has simply put their personal disagreements aside and reluctantly obeyed the government. Snyder argues that American democracy now faces the same threat of collapse, and he offers Americans 20 ways to help preserve it.

In fact, people throughout history have made this same mistake, wrongly assuming that their democracies will survive, only to watch authoritarian governments destroy them in as little as a few years and set their nations on a path toward ruin and, in extreme cases, horrific campaigns of violence like the Holocaust. And while Americans tend to assume that democracy is inherently stable and their government institutions are strong enough to withstand antidemocratic attacks, this is not true. In his Prologue, Snyder echoes this fear and notes that democratic regimes have always fallen to tyranny ever since the very concepts of democracy and tyranny were invented in ancient Greece. Indeed, this bestselling book began as a Facebook post after Trump’s election, when many Americans were starting to worry that Trump’s political ideology and rhetorical style closely resembled those of 20th-century fascists and contemporary dictators around the world.

In On Tyranny, a short guide to 20 different strategies that citizens can use to defend democracy against an authoritarian government, historian Timothy Snyder looks to 20th-century Europe in an effort to help 21st-century Americans cope with Donald Trump’s presidency.

Book on tyranny by timothy snyder