Tyranny vs. Democracy: A False Dichotomy
January 20, 2022
Did you hear that police in North Korea regularly murder random people in broad daylight? It's caught on video, but no one does anything about it (except when it causes riots). North Korea is truly a tyranny with no respect for human rights.
Did I write North Korea? No, that’s an error– I meant the United States.
On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder contents that democracy in the US has gone into decline and offers advice derived from 20th-century European history for how to oppose this decline. His work presupposes that all countries can be categorized as either democracies or tyrannies, and that the United States (and UK) were democracies prior to ~2016. This is a false binary. The reality is, since 1945, almost every country claims it is a democracy and its enemies are tyrannies. Almost all countries have elections, purport to respect human rights, etc. The Soviet Union claimed it was more democratic than the United States and labeled its allies / satellite states people’s democracies. Iraq’s constitution under Saddam Hussein said the country was a democratic republic. Post-Soviet Russia was depicted as a democracy in US media when Russia was getting along with the US in the 1990s and early 2000s (including Putin’s early years), but was depicted as a tyranny again after relations started soured in ~2005. North Korea’s official name is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
The United States itself does many things that would be labeled tyranny if its enemies did it. It imprisons more people than any country in the world; it imprisons more people than China even though China has five times the population. The person who wins the Presidential election isn’t always the person with the most votes. Elections are rigged via gerrymandering, ensuring over 90% of the house of representatives are consistently reelected (and the same is done for most state and local positions). Elections are manipulated to ensure only the dominant two parties are competitive even though the majority of voters want additional viable parties (in Pennsylvania, a swing state, the Democratic party managed to get every single left-wing third party removed from the ballot in 2020). The Presidency holds the power to assassinate any citizen without trial, and has done so on multiple occasions. When Russia or Venezuela or any other country the US isn’t getting along with do these things it is cited as proof that its a tyranny. All of this predates 2016, by decades in some cases.
The truth is every country is ruled by a small elite of wealthy people. Elections and talk of democracy can create the illusion of popular rule and provide a safety valve for discontent (by redirecting it away from unrest into elections or lobbying), but they don’t alter that fundamental reality. Most political disputes are ultimately disputes between different factions of elites. Every nation has its own oligarchs. Each engages in a level of repression of dissent. All have a media that reflects elite views. The details vary over time and from country to country, but that core truth has been true for a long time.
The book itself practices the “its a democracy when I like it, a tyranny when I don’t like it” approach. The tyrannies Snyder selects consist solely of countries in central & eastern Europe the US mostly did not get along with (except for certain short periods). He does not cite or draw any lessons from US-backed juntas in Latin America, monarchies in the Middle East, or any of the numerous elected governments overthrown by the CIA. Lessons from these examples would actually be more relevant in the United States, as it is American, not European, security forces who would be coming after us (one could also draw on America’s own history of authoritarianism by looking at Cointelpro, Jim Crow, etc). Saudi Arabia is the rare nation that still does not have national elections or claim it is a democracy, yet it makes no appearance in this book on tyranny. It has also been an American ally / client state since the 1940s. Snyder only sees tyranny when it comes from sources he dislikes anyway (principally Trump, Nazis, and Communists).
Snyder’s US history is not accurate. In the prologue he argues the US founding fathers envisioned a democratic republic, which is not true. The Federalist papers explicitly attacked democracy, and treated democracies and republics as different things. The idea that the US is a democracy did not become widespread among mainstream politicians until the early 1800s, and was continuously disputed by dissident forces (such as the women’s movement) after that.
In chapter three Snyder claims that the US has “rarely faced a situation like the present: when the less popular of the two parties suppresses voting, claims fraud when it loses elections, and controls the majority of statehouses.” There are actually many time periods when the US was like that, it is not that rare. The constitution itself was the result of a similar process. The US was a one-party state for ~20 years under the Democrat-Republican party in the early 1800s, after the Federalist party died. For most of the time afterwards it has been more of a one-and-a-half party system than a full two-party system. On a state and local level, the majority of the US is a one-party state, as the same party wins consistently, and that has been true for much of US history. If you look at patterns in large chunks the same party tends to win the majority of federal elections for decades at a time:
1828-1860: Democrats.
1860-1932: Republicans.
1932-1968: Democrats.
1980-2008: Republicans.
From reconstruction through at least the 1910s the Democrats often claimed fraud when they lost elections, especially on a state or local level. In several cases they went further than Trump; if you thought 2020/2021 was bad lookup the Wilmington coup or the 1875 Mississippi election.
Similarly, voter suppression was much more extensive for most of American history than it is now, overtly disenfranchising whole categories of people. Jim Crow disenfranchisement of blacks was, in part, aimed at suppressing the People’s Party and its popular economic policies. It was also aimed at undercutting the Republican party in majority black districts, allowing the less popular of the two parties to win elections when it was otherwise certain to lose. Snyder’s claim that paper ballots are more democratic is refuted by the extensive history of paper ballot fraud in the 19th century.
Snyder’s contention that weakening or eliminating the state’s monopoly of violence undermines elections is not supported by global history. A monopoly of violence makes it easier for the state to mistreat people and ignore public opinion, as it makes it harder for the victims to fight back (the state can use violence against you but you are forbidden from using violence against it). Worldwide, the parts of the state directly involved in exercising that monopoly on violence – the military, police, and intelligence (the “deep state”) – are the parts of society most likely to illegally nullify election results. In the central and Eastern European examples he uses the military did not play as prominent a role, but if he had looked at Latin America, much of Africa, or parts of Asia it would be at the forefront. Even if we stay in Europe, in Spain the fascists attempted to come to power through a military coup after losing elections. Paramilitaries, affiliated with labor unions or left-wing political organizations, fought the military and defeated the coup in two-thirds of Spain, initiating the Spanish civil war. Far from being a threat to democracy, paramilitaries in Spain were a key part of anti-fascist struggle. They made up the entirety of the anti-fascist army in the first phase of the war, and when they were replaced with a regular military the later bungled the war effort, leading to fascist victory.
Chapter 16, about privacy, starts off seeming like it will be a critique of mass surveillance (which was notorious under certain Central & East European states), but very quickly goes off track by trying to spin Hilary Clinton’s lack of transparency as legitimate privacy. “Violation of electronic privacy” was instituted on a mass scale in 2001 (although more limited versions long predate 2001) and became public after the Snowden revelations in 2013; 2016 itself was not “a step towards totalitarianism” in this regard. A lack of transparency makes it easier for the state to abuse people and for leaders to deceive the public. Imposing transparency on the government is not the same as mass surveillance of ordinary citizens; one increases the power of the state while the other reduces it. The “e-mail bombs” Snyder complains about revealed misconduct by the Democratic party and the Clinton campaign. They showed that the 2016 Democratic primaries were rigged, that the Democratic National Committee secretly campaigned for HRC behind the scenes while publicly pretending to be neutral, that a debate moderator secretly gave Clinton (but not her opponents) the questions ahead of the debate, and that the Clinton campaign quietly tried to encourage the Republican party to nominate one of the more extreme candidates (such as Trump) so that he could be used to scare everyone into supporting centrist Democrats. Had Trump done these sorts of things Snyder would understandably be outraged; imagine if a neutral election committee decided to campaign for Trump behind the scenes – Snyder would label it tyranny. Had Trump’s tax returns been similarly leaked it is unlikely Snyder would regard that as a violation of his privacy. Furthermore, Snyder contradicts himself. In chapter 11 he defended the media and portrayed Trump’s criticism of it as a sign of tyranny, but chapter 16 makes analogous criticisms of the press for covering Clinton’s “e-mail bombs.”
Chapter 19, “Be a Patriot,” is very poorly supported. Snyder claims that patriotism is a way to fight tyranny while also claiming that “it is not patriotic to dodge the draft.” Draft dodging can assist in weakening any regime. If a conscript complied with Nazi Germany’s draft he would strengthen it by enlarging its army; if he resists than he can at least deprive it of one soldier. Patriotism also tends to make it easier for the state to mistreat people and engage in war. Thinking of the government as “we” creates a common identity between ruler and ruled, which makes it harder for the ruled to resist as they mistakenly think of themselves as being on the same side as the rulers. It also means you are more likely to get defensive if someone points out an atrocity the government has committed; if you think of the government as “we” that is equivalent to accusing you of committing an atrocity (even if you were not personally involved). This, in turn, makes it easier for the government to commit atrocities. Snyder tries to create a false distinction between patriotism and nationalism, but it amounts to categorizing things as patriotism when he likes them and nationalism when he doesn’t.
The distinction between American and British “democracy” and the tyrannies Snyder examines is not as sharp as he claims, nor was 2016 the big turning point towards tyranny he makes it out to be. The US has long had its own secret police, the FBI, akin to the NKVD. Snyder depicts Britain as fighting for democracy alone against Germany in 1940, but it was the largest empire in the world in 1940. It was not alone, it had an array of client states (South Africa, Australia, Canada,, etc) as well as an enormous colonial empire to support it. They got that empire by invading and conquering people, much as the Germans were now doing. They treated most people in their colonies similarly to how the Nazis treated people under their rule, committing genocides and causing famines along the way. Not mentioned by Snyder is the fact that Winston Churchill was a hardcore colonialist who considered indigenous people in America and Australia a “lower-grade race” and claimed blacks were better off as slaves than in “African barbarism.” The war between Britain and Germany was a war to determine which white supremacist would exploit the dark skinned people of the world.
The Nazis themselves saw parallels between their own project and US & British policies on race, colonialism, and eugenics. They drew on US & British policies as a source of inspiration and a model. The Nazis sought to conquer other areas, exterminate “inferior” races, and import slaves; US westward expansion conquered other areas, exterminated native Americans, and imported slaves (British colonization of North America did much the same). The Nazis modeled their compulsory sterilization policy on America’s. Until 1933 the US was the world leader in eugenics; it passed the world’s first compulsory sterilization law in Indiana in the early 1900s. American eugenicists were in touch with their German counterparts, and played a significant role in spreading eugenic ideals to Germany.
Despite enormous flaws not everything in the book is awful. Anticipatory obedience is generally a bad thing. The epilogue’s critique of teleology and politics of eternity is correct; probably most historians would agree with it. The graphic edition has quality art that fits with the topic. However, the work as a whole is so ensconced in mainstream ideology and partisanship that it overwhelms the handful of good points it makes.