On tyranny graphic novel install#

It would serve us well today to understand why.īoth fascism and communism were responses to globalization: to the real and perceived inequalities it created, and the apparent helplessness of the democracies in addressing them. The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. The communist Soviet Union, established in 1922, extended its model into Europe in the 1940s. European democracies collapsed into right-wing authoritarianism and fascism in the 1920s and ’30s. In the early twentieth century, as in the early twenty-first, these hopes were challenged by new visions of mass politics in which a leader or a party claimed to directly represent the will of the people. In the late nineteenth century, just as in the late twentieth century, the expansion of global trade generated expectations of progress. History can familiarize, and it can warn. Many of the democracies founded at these junctures failed, in circumstances that in some important respects resemble our own. Since the American colonies declared their independence from a British monarchy that the Founders deemed “tyrannical,” European history has seen three major democratic moments: after the First World War in 1918, after the Second World War in 1945, and after the end of communism in 1989. The bad news is that the history of modern democracy is also one of decline and fall. The good news is that we can draw upon more recent and relevant examples than ancient Greece and Rome.

It is thus a primary American tradition to consider history when our political order seems imperiled. If we worry today that the American experiment is threatened by tyranny, we can follow the example of the Founding Fathers and contemplate the history of other democracies and republics. Much of the succeeding political debate in the United States has concerned the problem of tyranny within American society: over slaves and women, for example. They had in mind the usurpation of power by a single individual or group, or the circumvention of law by rulers for their own benefit. In founding a democratic republic upon law and establishing a system of checks and balances, the Founding Fathers sought to avoid the evil that they, like the ancient philosophers, called TYRANNY.

On tyranny graphic novel install#

As they knew, Aristotle warned that inequality brought instability, while Plato believed that demagogues exploited free speech to install themselves as tyrants. Concerned that the democratic republic they envisioned would collapse, they contemplated the descent of ancient democracies and republics into oligarchy and empire.

As the Founding Fathers debated our Constitution, they took instruction from the history they knew. History does not repeat, but it does instruct.