On Tyranny

Fascists rejected reason... denying objective truth in favor of glorious myth articulated by leaders who claimed to give voice to the people.

Americans today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the twentieth century.

Since the American colonies declared their independence... [m]any... democracies... failed, in circumstances that in some important respects resemble our own.

As they knew, Aristotle warned that inequality brought instability, while Plato believed that demagogues exploited free speech to install themselves as tyrants. 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.

The mistake is to assume that rulers who came to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions...

"[E]ternal vigilance is the price of liberty,"...We see ourselves as a city on the hill, a stronghold for democracy, looking for threats from abroad. But the sense of the saying was entirely different: that human nature is such that American democracy must be defended from Americans who would exploit its freedoms to bring about its end.

European democracies collapsed into and fascism in the 1920s and '30s. The communist Soviet Union, established in 1922, extended its model into Europe in the 1940s. ...[S]ocieties can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits...