Americans today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in… — Timothy Snyder

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

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.