The bestseller list is a window into a country on edge

When Timothy Snyder published On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century in 2007, Donald Trump was still a Hillary Clinton fan who hosted The Celebrity Apprentice. Snyder's book, however, has become an unexpected staple of 2020 bestseller lists, even briefly hitting the No. 2 spot on Amazon over the weekend — and illustrating how book sales can reflect back at us the jitters of a nervous country.

It certainly isn't unheard of for older books to creep back up on the bestseller list from time to time: The 1965 sci-fi epic Dune, for example, hit the top spot on the Washington Post mass market paperback list earlier this year after stills from the forthcoming movie adaptation were released. In other instances, books that help explain an unfolding situation might surge on the bestseller list, the way anti-racist literature — like 2018's White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism — has boomed following the murder of George Floyd.

Books like On Tyranny reappearing on the bestseller list present an interesting case, though, because they are neither tied to a specific event nor are being used as obvious education tools. Rather, purchases seem to be driven by an attempt to justify to ourselves that we're right to be feeling scared.

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Though the book hit No. 2 on Amazon following Snyder's appearance on Rachel Maddow's show on Friday to talk about the disturbing situation in Portland, On Tyranny had been hovering on various lists throughout the spring and summer (you could find it on the Los Angeles Times list as far back as March). As CNN media critic Brian Stelter put it in his newsletter, Reliable Sources, the renewed interest in the book seems to directly reflect "fear on the left" that our democracy is slipping into authoritarianism. A similar skittish impulse was also likely the driver behind why George Orwell's dystopian classic, 1984, returned to the bestseller list shortly after Trump's inauguration.

Admittedly, there are too many variables for the bestseller list to be a perfect measure of the wider political climate. Still, political nervousness cuts both ways: As Stelter points out, "there's fear on the right, too, as symbolized by the No. 8 book on Amazon's list: Ben Shapiro's How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps."