Thank you to our friends at People Power Health for bringing me back to On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, by historian Timothy Snyder — a book I drew on when writing Your Leadership Moment: Democratizing Leadership in an Age of Authoritarianism.

Snyder, a historian specializing in 20th-century Europe, particularly the rise of fascism and communism, offers a set of clear, urgent lessons from history. His goal is to equip ordinary people — not just leaders in formal positions — with practical tools to defend democracy in the face of rising authoritarianism. These lessons aren’t theoretical. They are grounded in lived experience and sharpened by the failures of the past.

Reclaiming democracy — and creating the conditions for it to thrive in our families, organizations and society — requires more than voting. It requires a more democratized form of leadership: one that makes leadership both universal and ordinary, accessible to people navigating everyday complexity, not just those with formal power.

Some of Snyder’s lessons feel especially resonant right now.

Individual Responsibility Matters

Tyranny thrives when ordinary people choose conformity and silence over resistance. These moments of choice — to stand up, to step back, to kneel in patriotic protest — are leadership moments, but they often aren’t grand or scripted. They’re fleeting and personal, but they matter. What you do in those moments either reinforces the status quo or cracks it open for something better.

Take the community health worker in Nigeria who respectfully questioned the country’s health system’s over-reliance on foreign donors, which often skewed priorities away from community needs. When he requested a meeting with the health minister, he was told: “I’ll give you 30 minutes to convince me why I should even be speaking to you.” That conversation turned into a 90-minute dialogue — and an invitation to help lead a national response.

Democratizing leadership lives here — in these small, unscripted moments. It’s not about heroism. It’s about showing up to the conversation before the vote, or staying with it after consensus breaks down. It’s where dignity and decision-making collide.

Be as Courageous as You Can

Snyder reminds us that resistance, like leadership, often starts small and lonely. But courage, like fear, is contagious. We’ve all felt that moment — the heart-leap of hopeful anticipation (or trembling fear) when you realize the next step is yours to take. The question is, would you recognize your next leadership moment when it comes? And would you know what to do when it does?

Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes it’s emotional honesty in a culture that rewards deflection. A cabinet official refusing to rush a flawed policy in response to public pressure. A young organizer choosing to stay in the fight after a brutal loss, rather than retreat into cynicism. Leadership doesn’t always look bold from the outside. Often, it just looks awake.

Democratizing leadership doesn’t insist on perfection. But it does ask us to resist false solutions and partisan comfort. To stay long enough in discomfort that something more honest can emerge. The courage here is quieter, but no less disruptive.

Language Shapes Reality

Propaganda and dehumanization are classic authoritarian tools. But authoritarianism isn’t always loud. Sometimes, it seeps in through the language we use without thinking. We accidentally reinforce authoritarian reality every time we call certain people “leaders” when what we really mean is authority figures. Calling someone the “leader of the free world” or a “political leader” often legitimizes power, not leadership. True leadership, as we know, is about mobilizing people to face difficult challenges — not hoarding authority.

This isn’t just semantics. The shift from saying “citizens” to “taxpayers” reframes people as consumers rather than participants. Calling a community “a market” flattens relationships into transactions. These aren’t neutral choices. They signal what kind of world we believe we’re in.

Do Not Obey in Advance

Authoritarians rely on what Snyder calls “anticipatory obedience” — people guessing what those in power want and complying before they’re even asked. Adaptive Leadership teaches us that compliance takes many forms: following direction, maintaining a broken status quo, protecting our own teams rather than challenging them, or deferring to the cult of expertise rather than trusting our own judgment. In authoritarian moments, one of the most radical acts can be to simply break ranks.

In some city agencies, staff have preemptively removed inclusive language or quietly scaled back community programs — not because they were told to, but because they assumed political fallout. No memo was issued. No mandate given. The retreat happened anyway.

That’s anticipatory obedience. And it’s common.

This is how authority calcifies: not through coercion, but through routine. Organizations often replicate authoritarian patterns not because they intend to — but because they’re optimized for control. They reward obedience, not inquiry. They confuse stability with health. Democratizing leadership calls us to challenge these defaults, even when they look like professionalism.

Learn from Peers in Other Countries

Snyder emphasizes that no nation is immune to authoritarian threats — but we’re also not alone. Around the world, communities have faced these challenges and found ways to resist. We can, and must, learn from them.

Two participants in recent programs reminded me of this in powerful ways.

One, from Liberia, warned against the blind dismantling of institutions — even for seemingly just causes — without deep forethought about what comes after. When institutions collapse, it’s those with the least institutional power who suffer most in the aftermath.

Another, from Kenya, put it bluntly. Reflecting on her own lived experience watching superpowers maneuver for influence across Africa, she said: “Whether the U.S., Russia, and China are fighting or making love, it makes no difference — the grass under them still dies.”

We could also learn from South Korea, where millions of citizens organized a peaceful protest movement that led to the impeachment of a corrupt president. No violence. No coup. Just consistent public pressure and the discipline to stay in the streets without burning them down.

These stories remind us that democracy isn’t just about resisting collapse — it’s about updating the operating systems that no longer serve. Sometimes that means tinkering. But more often, it means hospicing the old command-and-control mindsets so that something more life-affirming can emerge.

Be Calm When the Unthinkable Arrives

History warns us that democratic collapse is always possible. But history also shows us that informed, courageous citizens can, and do, lead every day — even when they don’t hold titles or formal authority.

For leaders, calm doesn’t mean passive. It means not mistaking speed for clarity. It means asking: What are we normalizing without realizing it? Where is silence starting to harden into complicity? What values are we trading for convenience?

Leadership moments — especially in democratic decline — aren’t about being right. They’re about being ready. Ready to step in, not to impose, but to hold difference creatively. Ready to speak when silence becomes complicity. Ready to remember that the promise of democracy lives in our willingness to wrestle, not just vote.

Democracy isn’t sustained by procedures alone. It’s held up by people — by their choices, their conversations, their discomfort, their persistence. It lives in what we practice every day: the questions we ask, the norms we challenge, and the silences we refuse to keep.

On Tyranny is a short book. But it’s not a small one. Each chapter is a provocation: What would you do if this were happening? And what makes you so sure it isn’t?

Democracy doesn’t just need defenders. It needs builders. And building it means making leadership a shared, daily practice — not a performance reserved for the few.