Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism by Anne Applebaum

By Paul Markowitz

This thoughtful and compelling work by the noted historian Anne Applebaum combines a historical analysis of authoritarianism in the post WWI period in Eastern Europe with personal yet significant anecdotes from the last twenty years.  In retrospect only Anne Applebaum could have written this book.  No one could better integrate her knowledge of recent Central and Eastern European history, having written extensively on this issue with such award-winning books as Gulag, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe and Red Famine: Stalin’s War on the Ukraine with recent political developments from a personal and political perspective.

Her knowledge does not lie entirely in the academic realm since she is married to Radoslaw Sikorski who has served as Poland’s Defense and Foreign Minister in earlier Polish administrations.  Applebaum herself has lived on and off in the United States, Great Britain and Poland.  She is a dual citizen of the United States and Poland and speaks fluent Polish and Russian.  She thus weaves her knowledge of European history with her personal involvement with people and parties in the United States, Britain, and Eastern Europe. 

Applebaum begins her book with a party she and her husband throw at their rural home in Poland in 1999 where many of their friends from the U.S., Britain and Poland convene to enjoy conversation and conviviality after the fall of the Soviet Union.  She ends the book with a similar affair she and her husband throw in 2019.  She compares and contrasts the changes in many of her friends and their thinking during these critical years.  Some of her guests from 1999 have in fact become hated enemies and totally unwilling to converse under any conditions.  Applebaum was never an ideologue of any strain but a deeply centrist free trade, free market globalist in keeping with her former position of editor of The Economist magazine.

Her theme in this combination of historical analysis and personal insight is in a nutshell - that given the right conditions any society can turn against democracy and that in fact, as history suggests, all of societies eventually will.  One could extrapolate from her thesis and point out that in the great scheme of things democracy is merely a blip in human history.  For even some of our great Founding Fathers warned the country against the “excesses of democracy”.  In this analysis the author more than suggests that Hannah Arendt, in her study of authoritarian personalities, has accurately described “the new right” as a group who wish to overthrow, bypass or undermine existing institutions - to in fact destroy what exists.

Applebaum then proceeds to recount the rise of Victor Orban in Hungary and the Law and Justice Party in Poland.   These she purports are today examples of a one party state that have adopted a way of organizing society begun by Lenin in 1917.  For good measure she throws in a dollop of Putin’s Russia and Duterte’s Philippines as further illustrations. She then proceeds to list some common patterns of this thought process that can include conspiracy theories, anti-semitism, fear of immigration or merely an overwhelming wish for the return to greatness of their respective country.

She finally moves on to the special cases of Britain and America.  With these she mixes in her historical analysis with personal insights of some of the key players involved.  Brexit is seen as Britain’s movement in the direction of anti-democratic rhetoric as is Donald Trump’s America as personified by Steve Bannon, the philosophical father of Trumpism.  In this scenario, with Vladimir Putin as the role model, Trump and Bannon pick up anti-Establishment language with dark overtones with the support of such disparate characters such as Franklin Graham and Laura Ingraham. Simultaneously the Republican Party is abandoned by the likes of David Frum and David Brooks.

The author sees certain factors as leading to these most disconcerting changes- major demographic changes, growing inequality, wage decline and finally a wish for a single narrative.  Different opinions have in fact morphed into different facts.  Applebaum sees parallels in history with the return of similar tropes with a description of the classic example of the Dreyfus Affair in 1884.  She describes the story as one perpetuated by the alt-right with all of its anti-semitic overtones, anti-scientific rhetoric and with free use of the term “treasonous behavior”.  She more than suggests that Marine Le Pen in France, the Law and Justice Party in Poland and Trump’s America are merely resurrections of this historical parallel from over one hundred years ago.

Applebaum hardly sees the future through an optimistic lens.  As the pandemic has hit, Orban in Hungary and others throughout the world have used it as a provocation to increase the power of the state and curtail civic rights and freedoms.  With the United States rapidly withdrawing from its support for global solidarity and as a democratic beacon to the world, things no doubt will get worse before they get better.

Paul Markowitz is a California-based writer.