Informed, Prepared, Committed
/a short summary of 3 key books
Having lived a long life from the days of “We like Ike” through the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement and the Watergate crisis, the election of our first Black president, the real possibility of electing a woman to the White House, and the chaos and uncertainty of 2025, I’ve seen a lot. And I’m nervous. If you are a regular visitor to the Speakeasy, you know I turn to books when I’m confused or worried, and I share my learning here.
Today I’d like to offer a very concise introduction to three books I’ve summarized in the Speakeasy over the years, all focused on the dangers to our democracy, worst-case scenarios, and how to be prepared for national trauma. I’m going to make this really short, with links to broader material, because I know American lives today are fraught with distraction and uncertainty. It’s hard to concentrate, and the interruptions are constant. So let’s take a very brief look at:
Signs of a democracy in danger: How Democracies Die
Signs of civil war: How Civil Wars Start
How to be prepared: On Tyranny
I’ll offer you an extremely shortened version of each of these three books along with links to the longer summaries. Maybe this will be a manageable read for you in a day of chaos and disruption.
How Democracies Die
According to Harvard professors Livitsky and Ziblatt, “Democracies now die without a shot having been fired.” Now they die at the hands of an elected leader, sometimes eroding in barely visible steps, often legal, approved by legislature, and accepted by the courts – portrayed as efforts to improve democracy.
So, what are the four warning signs of an authoritarian leader? He throws out the rules and the referees; de-legitimizes his opponents; condones or even encourages violence; and tilts the playing field in his own favor. To accomplish these ends, the authoritarian leader punishes opponents while protecting allies; uses tax and intelligence authorities to his own ends; fires civil servants and replaces them with loyalists; and sues the media for defamation. He turns a blind eye to White nationalism; embraces physical assault as a political option; employs violent language and images; encourages or directs gerrymandering; and seizes real or imagined “crises” as “rally ‘round the flag” moments to gain popularity and massive power.
A would-be autocrat, we are told in this book, is willing to curtail the civil liberties of rivals and critics and will not tolerate criticism of himself. The authors write: “With the exception of Richard Nixon, no major-party presidential candidate met even one of these four criteria over the last century... Donald Trump met them all.” (Note that this was in the first Trump administration.) The result of such leadership, they say, is polarization, with neighbors becoming wedded to incompatible, mutually exclusive world views.
The leader bullies the legislature, and impeachment becomes a partisan tool. Anti-system groups reject democracy’s rules altogether. The opposition is now seen as an existential threat. Democratic institutions are weaponized, and checks and balances are circumvented. We have a gridlocked government, and then military rule is imposed – and perhaps even an actual “coup” arises.
The authors warn that our guardrails were already ineffective back in 2018, and we are possibly headed down the path of Italy in 1922, Germany in 1933, Peru in 1991, and Venezuela in 1998. You can read my short summary of Levitsky and Ziblatt’s book here, or my original, full precis here.
The Likelihood of Civil War
In her book, How Civil Wars Start, Barbara F. Walter, who has been studying civil wars worldwide for 35 years, tells us we can now accurately predict where and when a civil war might break out. Today, she says, they begin with vigilantes of different ethnic and religious groups, especially in areas with deep racial and geographic divisions.
Walter explains the stage between democracy and autocracy: anocracy, or partial democracy. Being in the middle, between the two, poses the greatest risk of civil war. We were already in the danger zone in 2022, she said, when her book was written. Like Levitsky and Ziblatt, she says ignoring the guardrails of democracy introduces anocracy. Feeling like “winners” and “losers,” the nation divides into factions, trying to dominate each other. And those are the two best predictors of civil war: anocracy and factionalism.
Opportunistic leaders tap into fear and resentment, and citizens, feeling threatened, turn to such leaders for protection, unwittingly playing along with the move toward violence. When groups feel a loss of entitled status, they turn to violence. The biggest threat to groups who feel entitled is simply demographics: changing population due to immigration. When they lose all hope, they are ready to fight. When they lose an election in a factionalized anocracy, the chance for violence rises significantly.
Most civil wars start gradually, with extremist militias meeting quietly for years, accelerating fear and hatred. The greatest accelerant now, she says, is social media, where people clearly prefer posts that incite, offer falsehoods, and build outrage and anger. Algorithms channel users to narrower and more extreme material. Social media quickly and persistently heightens ethnic, social, religious and geographic divisions, shaping a toxic view of “the other,” building factionalism.
The measure of “anocracy” is our polity score, which fell to +7 in 2019 when Trump refused to cooperate with congress on the impeachment inquiry. On January 6, 2021, our score dropped to +5, the lowest since 1800. (Remember: Anocracy, measured by this polity score, is partial democracy, the status in which civil war is three times more likely to begin.) Walter explains that a focus on racial and ethnic differences in the 1960s, followed by a clear demarcation of religious views on abortion, gay rights, and such in the 1980s and 1990s, set us up for factionalization. In the twenty-first century, social media sealed the deal. She says we were poised for the dismantling of democracy by 2020 due to a faction’s cynical bid for power (when 66% of Republican legislators voted against certifying the duly elected president).
The Trump administration capitalized on the feeling of alienation of the white working class when they saw “other” beginning to live the American dream. A large faction of “sons of the soil” are now arming themselves, using social media to organize. Nearly 50% of white Americans now feel “racially resentful,” and they are gravitating toward the Republican party. Our country is now a factionalized anocracy quickly approaching open insurgency.
A second civil war will be waged in the shadows, using encrypted networks, with combatants gathering in small, hidden groups, planning online. Americans will feel compelled to pick sides in order to survive. Ethnic cleansing often accompanies civil war, we are told; we were at the fifth of eight stages of that trajectory in 2022. U.S. gun sales have soared, mostly a conservative response to election of liberals, although left-wing terrorism is also rising. Americans are losing faith in each other.
So, how to prevent civil war? South Africa offers a good example of factions having insisted on working together respectfully. What can the U.S. do? Walter offers a few practical steps we might take: End gerrymandering, letting all citizens vote and making every vote count; return to effective teaching of civics and history; protect citizens who are playing within the rules; understand that polarity does not cause war until it becomes factionalism – disgruntled groups based on ethnicity, religion, or a sense of “loser.”
This is how our next civil war will likely unfold: social media drives conspiracy theories, which drive factionalism, and that drives civil war. We must regain control of our public discourse, the author says, and mediate it. And then embrace “e pluribus, unum,” from many, one, accepting that “white” will soon be the minority in this country. I invite you to read my more comprehensive summary of How Civil Wars Start here.
Let’s get Ready
Timothy Snyder’s concise little book called On Tyranny helps us prepare for the possibility of civil war and/or the demise of our democracy and all the steps along the way. This Yale history professor offers a simple little guidebook for preserving democracy. To avoid the possibility of tyranny in our own nation, he says, we can learn from the past, warning that globalization, which instigated both communism and fascism in the past, is a clear threat to our democracy now. Don’t rely on our democratic heritage to save us, Snyder says; be ready to act intelligently through these 20 basic steps.
Do not obey in advance. Do not voluntarily extend your service to the new leader, an act that cannot be reversed. People tend to anticipate what the new superiors want and adapt instinctively. Don’t. People are remarkably receptive to new rules if so instructed by a new authority.
Defend institutions. They don’t protect themselves. When a leader comes to power through an institution, promising to destroy that institution, believe him. Don’t assume that a gesture of loyalty will bind you or your institution to the new system.
Beware the one-party state. Snyder advises, “support the multi-party system and defend the rules of democratic elections. Vote... while you can. Consider running for office.” Don’t focus only on outside threats. Even promising democracies have collapsed when a single party seizes power from within. Any election might be our last. Globalization increases the threat of oligarchy.
Take responsibility for the face of the world. “Notice the... signs of hate. Do not look away, do not get used to them.” Both Stalin and Hitler used visual signs of hatred to get citizens to turn on each other. Conversely, ensure symbols of loyalty include – not pridefully exclude – fellow citizens.
Remember professional ethics. “Authoritarians need obedient civil servants.” In the Nazi regime, Snyder explains, lawyers and doctors, businessmen and bureaucrats surrendered the very professional ethics that could have made it much harder to carry out atrocities. “Professional ethics must guide us precisely when we are told that the situation is exceptional.”
Be wary of paramilitaries. In the effort to undermine democracy, people and parties will form a paramilitary wing of a political party or secure a personal bodyguard or encourage spontaneous citizen uprisings. Hitler’s storm troopers created a climate of fear and changed the rules of politics by superseding local authority (which was absent). An outside organization can transcend the law and then undo the law. We’ve seen such violence, including the January 6 riot that could have ended our constitutional system. When emotions and the ideology of exclusion meet armed might, they can transform our police and military. Be wary of that.
Be reflective if you must be armed. Be ready to say no. Every large-scale shooting action of the Holocaust involved regular German police who didn’t want to look weak. They were afraid to stand out. The same is true of the Great Terror in the Soviet Union, when all local police were required to subordinate themselves to the NKVD. Don’t cave.
Stand out.“The moment you set an example, the spell is broken, and others will follow.” Righteous resistors to Hitler aroseafterthe war, but accommodation and admiration had been the rule before that. Drawn in by the promise of trade and territory, European countries offered no resistance to Hitler at first, and some actually cooperated. But Churchill did not cave. He resisted, inspired and won. “Had Churchill not kept Britain in the war in 1940, there would have been no such war to fight... he had to stand out.”
Be kind to our language. Separate yourself from the internet and TV in favor of books. We face wave upon wave of visual stimuli. We’ve been “warned of the domination of screens, the suppression of books, the narrowing of vocabularies, and the associated difficulties of thought.” Create a mental armory beyond screens. Be concerned with what is true and what is false. Read and learn.
Believe in truth. “The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights... truth dies in four modes”: open hostility to verifiable reality; endless repetition; magical thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction (such as lies about a pandemic taking care of itself); misplaced faith, such as in a self-deifying leader who leaves no room for individual discernment. When truth becomes “oracular rather than factual,” evidence becomes irrelevant; the drumbeat of propaganda allows no time to ascertain facts.
Investigate: A rising tyrant dislikes the investigator. We need print journalism to help us develop facts in our minds and consider meaning; screens rely on the logic of spectacle. Scandal whets our appetite for more scandal. Real life is not a reality show. Actual journalism is edgy and difficult, while derision is easy. Verify information for yourself, and do not send on fake news to others.
Make eye contact and small talk. Snyder says “this is not just polite. It is part of being a citizen.” He explains that the rise of each tyrannical regime is remembered by its victims in a “single tender moment.” Handshakes and smiles became so important, and avoidance of contact among those well acquainted grew fear. He urges us to “affirm everyone.”
Practice corporeal politics. Don’t get soft, physically or mentally. Engage people of various backgrounds in ideas about change, even if they don’t agree. Get out of your safe zone and meet new people in new places. “We are free only when it is we ourselves who draw the line between when we are seen and when we are not seen.”
Establish a private life. Hannah Arendt tells us that totalitarianism is “not an all-powerful state, but the erasure of the difference between private and public life.” It works to “draw the whole society away from normal politics and toward conspiracy theories... seduced by the notion of hidden realities and dark conspiracies that explain everything.” Don’t let tyrants, oligarchs and spooks determine what is relevant or interesting to us so we just go along to get along. Arendt says this is how society devolves into a mob.
Contribute to good causes. Take pride in such activities, and come to know others who do so as well, thus creating civil society. “In the twentieth century, all major enemies of freedom were hostile to non-governmental organizations, charities, and the like... Today’s authoritarians... are also highly allergic to the idea of free associations and non-governmental organizations.”
Learn from peers in other countries. “History, which for a time seemed to be running from west to east, now seems to be moving from east to west. Everything that happens here seems to happen there first.”
Listen for dangerous words. To destroy all rules, Nazis focused on the idea of exception, thus manufacturing a “permanent emergency... Citizens then trade real freedom for fake safety.” Don’t surrender; be on your guard. “People who assure you that you can only gain security at the price of liberty usually want to deny you both.”
Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. When the terrorist attack comes, do not fall for the authoritarian effort to consolidate power through false claims. An act of terror can institute a regime of terror. “Putin’s rise to power and his elimination of two major institutions – private television and elected regional governorships – were enabled by the management of real, fake, and questionable terrorism... After 2016, the United States became a country of staged crises, such as supposed refugee ‘invasions.’” Don’t let your natural fear and grief enable the destruction of our institutions. Courageously recognize and resist terror management right away. James Madison said, “a failed coup is usually practice for a successful one.”
Be a patriot. “A nationalist will say that ‘it can’t happen here,’ which is the first step toward disaster. A patriot says that it could happen here, but that we will stop it.”
Be as courageous as you can. “If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny.”
In the epilogue, Snyder warns: “We allowed ourselves to accept the politics of inevitability, the sense that history could move in only one direction: toward liberal democracy... we lowered our defenses.” We believed we are simply moving toward a future we already know, a desirable goal. Not so. Read my full summary of On Tyranny here, not significantly longer than the one you found today.