The mistake is to assume that rulers who came to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions — even when that is exac… - Timothy Snyder

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

It turned out that the Germans were not, in fact, a master race. Hitler had accepted this possibility when he invaded the Soviet Union: “If the German people is not strong enough and devoted enough to give its blood for its existence, let it go and be destroyed by another, stronger man. I shall not shed tears for the German people.” Over the course of the war, Hitler changed his attitude towards the Soviet Union and the Russians: Stalin was not a tool of the Jews but their enemy, the USSR was not or was no longer Jewish, and its population turned out, upon investigation, not to be subhuman. In the end, Hitler decided, “the future belongs entirely to the stronger people of the east.

This is pluralism: not a synonym of relativism, but rather an antonym. Pluralism accepts the moral reality of different kinds of truth, but rejects the idea that they can all be placed on a single scale, measured by a single value.

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