Beware the one-party state

This is lesson 3 from Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. I’ve covered lessons 1 and 2 elsewhere.

This chapter has one of the most frightening descriptions of the road from democracy to dictatorship that I have ever read:

The hero of a David Lodge novel says that you don’t know, when you are making love for the last time, that you are making love for the last time. Voting is like that. Some of the Germans who voted for the Nazi Party in 1932 no doubt understood that this might be the last meaningfully free elections for some time, but most did not. Some of the Czechs and Slovaks who vote for the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1946 probably realized that they were voting for the end of democracy, but most assumed that they would have another chance. No doubt the Russians who voted in 1990 did not think that this would be the last free and fair election in their country’s history, which (thus far) it has been. Any election can be the last, or at least the last in the lifetime of the person casting the vote.

I live in a mostly Democratic city in an otherwise extremely Republican state. The state government has been trying for years to disenfranchise Houstonians by various means, up to and including just appointing party loyalists to positions that were previously democratically elected—for instance, the school superintendent of HISD, Mike Miles.

I do vote in elections, but I have never considered running for office. I don’t think I have any particular knack for it, nor any particular desire. But I know people who have run for elections, and I greatly admire them.

In short, I don’t know what the best way for me to address this issue.

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