At the recommendation of Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of The 1619 Project, we carry this slim, 126-page, pocket-sized book with us at all times. We recommend the time is now for Americans who are concerned about the hostile position that the office of the President of the United States in 2025 has taken against its citizens, to read Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: 20 Lessons from the 20th Century.

This is not about a single individual. What is happening in the United States has been in the making since this country’s 17th century origins – mass deportations, erasure of Black American history and all other histories that are not White, attacks on the judiciary, voter suppression, civil rights retrenchment. These actions emanate from a founding ideology called Manifest Destiny.

The doctrine was cultivated internally and advanced globally since 1844 during the political campaign and four-year term of James K. Polk, the 11th President of the United States from 1845 to 1849.

Manifest Destiny

This doctrine was the belief established in the 19th-century United States that White American settlers were destined to expand westward across North America, and that this belief was both obvious (“manifest”) and certain (“destiny”). The ideology is rooted in American exceptionalism, romantic nationalism, and White nationalism, implying the inevitable spread of the American way. It is one of the earliest expressions of American imperialism in the United States.

We referenced this doctrine in chapter 4, Shared Context: The Evolution of Race of our 2021 book, The Business of Race, and the role it played in the Indian Removal Act of 1830. On page 64 of the hardcover edition of the book we wrote: “The Indian Removal Act forcibly relocated tens of thousands of Indigenous people from their homelands east of the Mississippi. Their removal gave 24 million acres of land to White settlement and slave plantations.

“Andrew Jackson, the seventh President of the United States from March 4, 1829, to March 4, 1837, defended Indian removal by saying that it was ‘not greed of the White settlers that drove the policy, but the inevitable fate of an inferior people established in the ‘midst of a superior race.'”

What’s happening in the U.S. is not about one political party. That dichotomy is a distraction from the corporate takeover of the two largest parties that have dominated all three levels of government since the 1850s.

There are other political parties in the United States. But their voices and growth have been silenced by the donor class that has co-opted BOTH the Republican and Democratic parties for decades. We are not functioning as a “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” as delivered in the Gettysburg Address. We are functioning as a government of the corporations, by the corporations and for the corporations.

The United States has never been a democracy. The notion that the U.S. is a democratic nation continues to be a carefully crafted false narrative that has been relentlessly marketed to the world for centuries.

If the U.S. ever truly wants to be the democracy it has claimed but has never risen to, NOW is the time for the PEOPLE of the United States to act on what they want, not on what they reject.

“The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.”

TIMOTHY SNYDER, ON TYRANNY