How to Use totalitarianism in a Sentence

totalitarianism

noun
  • Without us, the world would be mired in the darkness of totalitarianism rather than the light of liberty.
    Marc A. Thiessen, The Mercury News, 10 July 2019
  • This is really the essence of totalitarianism, and The Death of Stalin satirizes the hell out of it.
    Sean Illing, Vox, 27 Mar. 2018
  • The moment at which a totalitarianism gets serious is the moment at which the army fires into the crowd.
    Jackie Mansky, Smithsonian, 14 Apr. 2017
  • For Ruff, the theme of totalitarianism fed into both his work and daily life.
    Clive Martin, CNN, 5 July 2017
  • The greengrocer, under totalitarianism, doesn’t and can’t have an opinion; the putting up of the sign doesn’t appear to be subject to debate.
    Masha Gessen, The New Yorker, 24 June 2020
  • America is the shining city on a hill, a beacon of hope against the darkness of totalitarianism.
    Tara Kavaler, The Arizona Republic, 28 Sep. 2022
  • So Russian totalitarianism comes from the grassroots, not from the top down?
    Simon Shuster, Time, 9 Oct. 2017
  • The list then takes a turn for the macabre, with George Orwell’s 1984, a dystopian novel foretelling the societal tolls of totalitarianism, coming in third place.
    Katherine J. Wu, Smithsonian Magazine, 14 Jan. 2020
  • The United States claimed to be waging a war against tyranny and totalitarianism.
    Gary Younge, The New York Review of Books, 28 Sep. 2023
  • In the end, though, freedom is reduced to mainly what totalitarianism is not.
    Andy Lewis, Los Angeles Times, 20 Apr. 2021
  • By its nature, totalitarianism conspires to keep the conscience in a state of slumber.
    Sam Sacks, WSJ, 15 June 2018
  • By the middle of the 20th century, when the free world faced the twin perils of fascist and communist totalitarianism, the tacit had become the explicit.
    John Hood, National Review, 28 Aug. 2019
  • Few images of totalitarianism are as powerful as the vision of a regime trying to conceal the demise of its cherished leader.
    Ankit Panda, The New Republic, 23 Apr. 2020
  • Over the past couple of years, some have compared the human tragedy unfolding there to North Korean totalitarianism and South African apartheid.
    Jimmy Quinn, National Review, 3 Sep. 2020
  • Neither Hayek nor Mao could have imagined the knowledge-fueled totalitarianism that Mr. Xi has in mind.
    Andrew Browne, WSJ, 17 Oct. 2017
  • The story ends in 1945 thanks only to the focus on Europe and the democracy-versus-totalitarianism framing, which crops empire out of the picture.
    Daniel Immerwahr, The Atlantic, 4 Apr. 2022
  • Gradually, the society of the resettled succumbed to the seduction of totalitarianism, like the surface of a lake caught in a cold spell.
    Jiayang Fan, The New Yorker, 17 June 2019
  • People on the left see fascism as the endpoint of right-wing reactionary thinking, and people on the right see fascism as nanny-state totalitarianism.
    Sean Illing, Vox, 15 Dec. 2018
  • Few characters validated the outsider as much as Spider-Man or the X-Men, or addressed the fears of totalitarianism head on like a horror movie, or pushed the boundaries of speech like the comics who performed blue.
    Andy Lewis, Los Angeles Times, 20 Apr. 2021
  • The first step in the march toward totalitarianism is discontent, folks.
    Fox News Staff, Fox News, 11 Sep. 2022
  • On the right, some think the pandemic is wildly overblown and being used to introduce totalitarianism.
    TheWeek, 6 Aug. 2020
  • In this form of partial totalitarianism, people have had time to adjust and experience each step in the decline from their previous way of life as a new normal.
    Andrei Kolesnikov, Foreign Affairs, 7 Apr. 2023
  • Part of what had drawn Gates to the Republican Party was the Reagan-era doctrine of confronting totalitarianism.
    Jane Mayer, The New Yorker, 2 Aug. 2021
  • There was idealism in the protests but also cynicism and a touch of totalitarianism.
    Ted Van Dyk, WSJ, 18 Oct. 2018
  • Posters calling for the liberation of Hong Kong from Chinese rule, and for the victory of democracy over totalitarianism, were plastered on the walls.
    Nicholas Goldberg, Star Tribune, 1 July 2021
  • The real menace now is not communism but the rise of totalitarianism.
    Erin Corbett, Fortune, 27 June 2019
  • Set in a dystopian future version of London, the novel hit bookshelves in 1948 with a strong warning against totalitarianism.
    Rachel Ventresca, Fortune, 23 Apr. 2023
  • China is making a wrong turn toward totalitarianism under its new maximum leader, but the U.S. and the West should have confidence in freedom to prevail in the long run.
    Holman W. Jenkins, WSJ, 11 Dec. 2018
  • What made communism so dangerous was the theory of totalitarianism, which turned out to be wrong, but it was believed.
    How To Save A Country, The New Republic, 4 May 2023
  • Many of us see Israel’s war against Hamas as the same battle (albeit on a smaller scale, at least at this point) that took place between the Allies and the Nazis, even down to their tyrannical totalitarianism and their virulent antisemitism.
    Letters To The Editor, The Mercury News, 6 May 2024

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'totalitarianism.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Last Updated: