One Book Has Become the Defining Bestseller of the Trump Era. How Did It Happen?
Every time I succumb to the brain-rotting allure of TikTok it seems as if I see the same guy : a wiry middle-aged dude with a grizzled gray beard and knit beanie standing in some vaguely rural setting. Often, he's talking about On Tyranny , a book by the history professor Timothy Snyder, published in 2017. In one video , he holds up the book to the camera and insists that if it were “required reading in every middle school across the country, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in now.”
That guy in the beanie is not alone. Publishers Weekly reported last month that On Tyranny is the top seller at a number of independent bookstores , where sales for titles on autocracy are booming. TikTok and other social media platforms abound with posts about On Tyranny , which offers its readers, as its subtitle explains, 20 lessons from the 20th century on how tyrannical governments take hold in democracies and what citizens can do to stop this. On Tyranny ’s bullet-point-style format and short chapters make it easy to break into nuggets of exhortation; a particular favorite is lesson No. 1, “Do not obey in advance,” urging individuals and institutions not to appease authoritarian governments before they are even asked to. Some fans on TikTok temporarily turn over their accounts to On Tyranny , reading one chapter aloud per video until they've narrated the whole thing.
On Tyranny , a brilliantly conceived and published title, isn't an unprecedented phenomenon. Bookstores have long placed racks of slender, impulse-buy books by their cash registers, and those titles have long been a mix of the serious and the frivolous. (In 1982, the two biggest point-of-sale bestsellers were Jonathan Schell's terrifying description of the consequences of a nuclear war, The Fate of the Earth , and Thin Thighs in 30 Days .) But it's not really brick-and-mortar retail merchandising that drives On Tyranny 's success. It's the internet—primarily testimonials on TikTok (and links to the TikTok store), but also quotes posted as memes on Facebook and other platforms—that has driven Snyder's book to sales of 1.4 million copies, and 250,000 this year alone. Social media is key to the success of most bestsellers these days, but the memeification of On Tyranny is particularly strange, given that Snyder blames our drift toward authoritarianism in part on the internet.
That On Tyranny is short and consists of simplified “lessons” dispensed in one of the internet's favorite formats, the listicle, might irritate some historians. Anyone who has even casually dipped into 20 th -century history will probably already be familiar with the European creep into authoritarianism that Snyder illustrates, with examples from the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and Czechoslovakia. But works like On Tyranny have their place. When it was initially published, one year into the first Trump administration, many citizens unfamiliar with that history wanted an easy framework to assess that regime's chaotic actions for signs of a similar slide into autocracy. Not everyone has the time, ability, or inclination to read longer works of political theory or history, as Snyder—whose university press title The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999 has definitely not sold 1.4 million copies—can surely attest. On Tyranny , as many TikTokkers have explained, is a “quick read” and not cluttered up with a mass of dates and details. Call it Hannah Arendt for Dummies , but recognize that's no insult—sometimes what readers need most of all is a basic explanation of a complicated concept.
Furthermore, the basic concepts in On Tyranny are solid. Snyder avoids getting into sectarian squabbles by holding up both fascist and communist totalitarianism as examples of tyranny. The social pressure to conform, the reluctance to tolerate even minor penalties for resistance, the degradation of language and truth, the gradual expansion of the surveillance state—all of these factors can and have signaled increasing authoritarianism. Many citizens understand that this process is more of a gentle slide than a tumultuous revolution, that their counterparts in the past made the dire mistake of regarding such changes complacently. On Tyranny can help them avoid making that same error.
When it comes to Snyder's recommended remedies, however, the book's hordes of online fans—especially the younger ones—might be perplexed. For example, On Tyranny urges its readers to avoid getting their news from the internet and to “subsidize investigative journalism by subscribing to print media.” You simply can't access the truth online, Snyder implies, when he writes: “Staring at screens is perhaps unavoidable, but the two-dimensional world makes little sense unless we can draw upon a mental armory that we have developed somewhere else.” Because when we learn from a screen, “we tend to be drawn in by the logic of spectacle”—here Snyder is referring to TV as well as the internet—we are too easily manipulated by any backlit content we consume.
Furthermore, while “protest can be organized through social media,” Snyder maintains that “nothing is real that does not end on the streets. If tyrants feel no consequences for their actions in the three-dimensional world, nothing will change.” So readers need to get out of the house and rub shoulders with like-minded people—and, most importantly, people they don't necessarily agree with on every issue, but who share their desire to defeat creeping authoritarianism.
Snyder's not wrong about most of this, though his notion that any information conveyed via a screen must be less reliable than information in print seems like a form of nostalgic revanchism. It's true that the more people conflate their online life with reality, the more they make the mistake of assuming that reality can be curated like a social media feed and that blocking or muting the people they disagree with will effectively erase them. The siloing of information and interactions on the internet does foster all sorts of hysterical, extremist, and paranoid thinking. As Snyder snappily puts it, “There is a conspiracy that you can find online: It is the one to keep you online, looking for conspiracies.” And privacy—something most of us surrender too readily—is anathema to authoritarianism.
But does it make much sense to tell 21 st -century readers that “email is skywriting. Consider using alternative forms of the internet, or simply using it less. Have personal exchanges in person”? It's true that the example of effective 20 th -century resistance movements Snyder offers up, like the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, did their resistance in the streets and in samizdat print publications, not on the internet. But then, they didn't have the internet. Many people now feel that their voices reach further when they post on social media than when they shout on the street, and that there isn't a significant difference between the two. After all, they might note, it is their posts that are spreading the word about On Tyranny .
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Only a few years ago, Snyder might have already received a thrashing in the online press for his blind spots in this respect, back when young critics loved to needle their elders for “not understanding the internet.” If we don't hear that complaint so much anymore, perhaps it's because we now understand the internet all too well. The current regime comes across as a manifestation of the worst of online culture—the bigotry, the unfounded self-confidence of the uninformed, the trolls, and the free-floating rage. No one is immune. Although On Tyranny was clearly published in response to Trumpism and has been updated to reflect recent political developments, Snyder never actually names the man, referring to him only as “the candidate” or “an American president,” in what was perhaps meant as high-mindedness but comes across as nothing so much as a book-length subtweet.
The internet, alas, is here to stay, and something tells me that the New York Times is not selling many $780-a-year print subscriptions to On Tyranny ’s TikTok admirers. Yes, nothing demonstrates the ferocity of the public's demand for change better than taking it to the streets, but there's no way forward in the battle against authoritarianism that doesn't require coming up with a viable online response—one that not only mounts a defense of democratic institutions and the rule of law but also articulates a winning alternative for the age of digital communications.
You won't find that in On Tyranny , for all its other virtues. Perhaps that's one reason why, earlier this year, Snyder joined two Yale fellow professors—one of whom is his wife—in leaving the US to accept positions at the University of Toronto . Snyder has written that he left mostly to support his wife, who wishes to protest the Trump administration's attacks on civil liberties, and that he considers motives like hers “reasonable.” Still, how to square this with Lessons 19 and 20 from On Tyranny : “Be a patriot” and “Be as courageous as you can”? Is weighing in on the current American mess from the redoubt of Canada really a more immediate engagement with the crisis than making TikTok videos? “Don't be a bystander,” urges a promotional e-card for On Tyranny , available on Snyder's website. But whether you're standing by or standing up depends a lot on where you think the fight is.
