My friend is an English teacher from Ukraine and one of the people I meet via Engin. I found about this organization on DK, and I recommend it highly for people to support people in Ukraine learning English.
By Timothy Snyder, friend of Ukraine.
My emphasis bolded. Better to read the whole article….and pass it along!
The writing in this forum, my Substack "Thinking about..." is free. You are welcome to pass it along to others. In this particular case, I would urge you to share it with anyone in your life whom it might help. Thank you.
Quite a few Americans like the idea of strongman rule. Why not a dictator who will get things done?
I lived in eastern Europe when memories of communism were fresh.
And I have friends who have lived under authoritarian regimes, including political prisoners and survivors of torture. Some of the people I trusted most have been assassinated.
So I think that there is an answer to this question.
Strongman rule is a fantasy. Essential to it is the idea that a strongman will be your strongman. He won't. In a democracy, elected representatives listen to constituents. We take this for granted, and imagine that a dictator would owe us something. But the vote you cast for him affirms your irrelevance. The whole point is that the strongman owes us nothing. We get abused and we get used to it.
We dream that a strongman will let us focus on America. But dictatorship opens our country to the worst the world has to offer. An American strongman will measure himself by the wealth and power of other dictators.
Have you noticed this happening before 2016?
Unaccountable to the law and to voters, the dictator has no reason to consider anything beyond his own personal interests. In the twenty-first century, those are simple: dying in bed as a billionaire.
As the fantasy of strongman rule fades into everyday dictatorship, people realize that they need things like water or schools or Social Security checks.
Once this process begins, it is hard to stop. At the present stage of the strongman fantasy, people imagine an exciting experiment. If they don't like strongman rule, they think, they can just elect someone else the next time. This misses the point. If you help a strongman come to power, you are eliminating democracy. You burn that bridge behind you. The strongman fantasy dissolves, and real dictatorship remains.