On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder

In Shakespeare's drama Hamlet, the hero is a virtuous man who is rightly shocked by the abrupt rise of an evil ruler. Haunted by visions, overcome by nightmares, lonely and estranged, he feels that he must reconstruct his sense of time. "The time is out of joint," says Hamlet. "O cursed spite,/That ever I was born to set it right! " Our time is certainly out of joint. We have forgotten history for one reason and, if we are not careful, we will neglect it for another. We will have to repair our own sense of time if we wish to renew our commitment to liberty.

Until recently, we had convinced ourselves that there was nothing in the future but more of the same. The seemingly distant traumas of fascism, Nazism, and communism seemed to be receding into irrelevance. We allowed ourselves to accept the politics of inevitability, the sense that history could move in only one direction: toward liberal democracy. After communism in eastern Europe came to an end in 1989–91, we imbibed the myth of an "end of history. " In doing so, we lowered our defenses, constrained our imagination, and opened the way for precisely the kinds of regimes we told ourselves could never return.