A Pulitzer Prize–winning historian explains, with electrifying clarity, why elites in democracies around the world are turning toward nationalism and authoritarianism.
From the United States and Britain to continental Europe and beyond, liberal democracy is under siege, while authoritarianism is on the rise.
In Twilight of Democracy, Anne Applebaum, an award-winning historian of Soviet atrocities who was one of the first American journalists to raise an alarm about antidemocratic trends in the West, explains the lure of nationalism and autocracy.
In this captivating essay, she contends that political systems with radically simple beliefs are inherently appealing, especially when they benefit the loyal to the exclusion of everyone else.
Despotic leaders do not rule alone; they rely on political allies, bureaucrats, and media figures to pave their way and support their rule. The authoritarian and nationalist parties that have arisen within modern democracies offer new paths to wealth or power for their adherents. Applebaum describes many of the new advocates of illiberalism in countries around the world, showing how they use conspiracy theory, political polarization, social media, and even nostalgia to change their societies.
https://www.anneapplebaum.com/book/twilight-of-democracy/
Twilight of Democracy – When Politics Ends Friendships
At every step, the west suffered from a toxic mix of hubris, naivety and ineptitude. It undermined its political offer to former communist states from the moment the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union collapsed, through what Krastev calls its “casual condescension”. The liberal democratic state could not be improved on, eastern Europeans were told: just import it and adopt it. This new identity was implanted from abroad. As a result, it “would never be fully theirs”.
The “no alternative” mantra provided the foundations for the wave of populist xenophobia and reactionary nativism that took a decade or more fully to develop. But even in the 1990s, in the Soviet Union but not only there, politicians had started to fake their allegiance to democratic institutions. “Most of them found faking democracy perfectly natural since they had been faking communism for at least two decades.”
Initially, former dictatorships tried to copy the west. Some succeeded more than others. Disillusionment resulted from not just a sense of being told what to do, but also from the realisation that the masters weren’t actually that good at the job. “Confidence that the political economy of the west was a model for the future of mankind had been linked to the belief that western elites knew what they were doing.” The financial crisis of 2008 shattered any remaining illusions.
The new nationalists turned imitation from a defensive to an offensive tool. Viktor Orbán in Hungary pretended to be a member of the family of nations with the EU, while undermining it at every turn. Vladimir Putin’s ambitions were greater. Russia built Potemkin replicas of western institutions in order to undermine them. “The Kremlin’s new retaliatory form of imitation was meant to discredit the west’s over-praised model and make western societies doubt the superiority of their own norms and institutions.”
Courts and elections were rigged and seen to be rigged. That constituted a
win-win – Putin prevailed in all instances, while his people tired of
institutions that ostentatiously were not delivering checks and balances on
executive power. Sowing disenchantment abroad was the logical next step. The
same applied to the notion of truth. He knew that everyone knew he was
lying. That was the point. “Paying no price for telling easily exposable
untruths is an effective way to display one’s power and impunity.”
The imitator resents the imitated. Equally, the imitated begins to resent the imitator. What happens when they join forces? Which takes us to Donald Trump, who “persistently rejects America’s messianic self-understanding as well as the idea that the United States is a beacon of liberty and justice for all mankind”. In Trump’s worldview, and that of his base, Americanisation of the world hasn’t helped America. China and Chinese jobs have prevailed, while “native” populations have suffered. Imitation has had its day. There is no one to imitate any more.
Book Review — A Slim Investigation of the “Clerks”
...“In ancient Rome,” Applebaum writes, “Caesar had sculptors make multiple versions of his image. No contemporary authoritarian can succeed without the modern equivalent: the writers, intellectuals, pamphleteers, bloggers, spin doctors, producers of television programs, and creators of memes who can sell his image to the public. Authoritarians need people who will promote the riot or launch the coup. But they also need the people who can use sophisticated legal language, people who can argue that breaking the constitution or twisting the law is the right thing to do. They need people who will give voice to grievances, manipulate discontent, channel anger and fear, and imagine a different future. They need members of the intellectual and educated elite, in other words, who will help them launch a war on the rest of the intellectual and educated elite, even if that includes their university classmates, their colleagues, and their friends.”
...Americans and Brits have lived their lives enjoying the benefits of democracy yet, like Spaniards, Greeks, Hungarians, and the Poles, they are drawn to populist and nationalist authoritarian leaders. Why does this phenomenon cross cultures and borders? Applebaum wonders. She does not offer an answer, but offers a series of miniportraits and encounters with the clercs she knows or has observed.
...What drew the many people she portrays to support authoritarian regimes? Disappointment? Opportunism? Conviction? She’s not entirely sure. “Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all of our societies eventually will.” Many of her subjects — not only in Poland but elsewhere — refused to be interviewed by Applebaum. In the US, her one-time colleague, American pundit Laura Ingraham, also refused. It’s unclear to me why Applebaum didn’t delve more deeply into her subjects’ families, the role of their educations, and how and when their political views changed. Despite Applebaum’s very personal beginning, the reader doesn’t get to know anyone at the parties, including the author, in any depth.
https://artsfuse.org/207714/book-review-twilight-of-democracy-a-slim-investigation-of-the-clerks/
Review Of Anne Applebaum, ‘Twilight Of Democracy: The Seductive Lure Of Authoritarianism’
I suppose that many people throughout the world were, whether they realized it at the time or not, Fukuyamaists in roughly the first decade following the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. During this period, it really did seem like a nascent spirit of neoliberal modernity was spreading throughout the world and heralding the opening of nations and markets. From 2001 onwards, of course, all of this would begin to collapse. First there was 9/11, incorrectly perceived and promoted as a “clash of civilizations”, which triggered a series of misprosecuted US-backed wars throughout the Middle East. Then there was the devastating international financial crash of 2008, which paved the way for Brexit, Trumpism, and the host of reactionary nationalisms now plaguing the geopolitical community. Today, even Fukuyama is no longer a Fukuyamaist in the traditional sense given his recent acknowledgement that “certain things Karl Marx said are turning out to be true” and his expression of support for the return of basic socialized initiatives.
In light of these factors, reading journalist Anne Applebaum’s latest book, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism (2020), was a somewhat strange experience for me. Throughout this well-written little book, Applebaum justly indicts the rise of reactionary authoritarian nationalisms all over the world while expressing virtually unwavering faith in the Fukuyamaist neoliberal ideals of the past. In this regard, she is somewhat of a nostalgic, though, I would argue, one of the worst variety given that she seems virtually unaware of just how naïve her Centre-Right faith in the thoroughly discredited ideology of neoliberalism now appears. In essence, while Applebaum is a trenchant critic of the current symptoms that now register our global ailment, she fails to correctly diagnose the disease itself, which is the toxic, unsustainable system of neoliberal capitalism that kicked into high gear following the collapse of the Berlin Wall back in 1989.
Monarchy, tyranny, oligarchy, democracy—these were all familiar to Aristotle more than 2,000 years ago. But the illiberal one-party state, now found all over the world—think of China, Venezuela, Zimbabwe—was first developed by Lenin, in Russia, starting in 1917. In the political-science textbooks of the future, the Soviet Union’s founder will surely be remembered not for his Marxist beliefs, but as the inventor of this enduring form of political organization. It is the model that many of the world’s budding autocrats use today.
Unlike Marxism, the Leninist one-party state is not a philosophy. It is a mechanism for holding power. It works because it clearly defines who gets to be the elite—the political elite, the cultural elite, the financial elite.
- In monarchies such as prerevolutionary France and Russia, the right to rule was granted to the aristocracy, which defined itself by rigid codes of breeding and etiquette.
- In modern Western democracies, the right to rule is granted, at least in theory, by different forms of competition: campaigning and voting, meritocratic tests that determine access to higher education and the civil service, free markets.
Old-fashioned social hierarchies are usually part of the mix, but in modern Britain, America, Germany, France, and until recently Poland, we have assumed that competition is the most just and efficient way to distribute power. The best-run businesses should make the most money. The most appealing and competent politicians should rule. The contests between them should take place on an even playing field, to ensure a fair outcome.
Lenin’s one-party state was based on different values. It overthrew the aristocratic order. But it did not put a competitive model in place.
The Bolshevik one-party state was not merely undemocratic; it was also anticompetitive and antimeritocratic.
Places in universities, civil-service jobs, and roles in government and industry did not go to the most industrious or the most capable. Instead, they went to the most loyal. People advanced because they were willing to conform to the rules of party membership.
- They usually excluded the former ruling elite and their children, as well as suspicious ethnic groups.
- They favored the children of the working class. Above all,
- they favored people who loudly professed belief in the creed, who attended party meetings, who participated in public displays of enthusiasm.
the worst kind of one-party state “invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”
Lenin’s one-party system also reflected his disdain for the idea of:
- a neutral state,
- of apolitical civil servants and an objective media. He wrote that freedom of the press “is a deception.”
- He mocked freedom of assembly as a “hollow phrase.”
- As for parliamentary democracy itself, that was no more than “a machine for the suppression of the working class.”
This mockery of the competitive institutions of “bourgeois democracy” and capitalism has long had a right-wing version, too.
Hitler’s Germany is the example usually given. But there are many others. Apartheid South Africa was a de facto one-party state that corrupted its press and its judiciary to eliminate blacks from political life and promote the interests of Afrikaners, white South Africans descended mainly from Dutch settlers, who were not succeeding in the capitalist economy created by the British empire.
In Europe, two such illiberal parties are now in power:
- Law and Justice, in Poland, and
- Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party, in Hungary.
- Others, in Austria and Italy, are part of government coalitions or enjoy wide support.
- They dislike foreign investment and criticize privatization, unless it is designed to benefit their supporters.
- They undermine meritocracy. Like Donald Trump, they mock the notions of neutrality and professionalism, whether in journalists or civil servants.
- They discourage businesses from advertising in “opposition”—by which they mean illegitimate—media.
Notably, one of the Law and Justice (Poland) government’s first acts, in early 2016, was to change the civil-service law, making it easier to fire professionals and hire party hacks. The Polish foreign service also wants to drop its requirement that diplomats know two foreign languages, a bar that was too high for favored candidates to meet.* The government fired heads of Polish state companies. Previously, the people in these roles had had at least some government or business experience. Now these jobs are largely filled by Law and Justice Party members, as well as their friends and relatives. Typical is Janina Goss, an old friend of Kaczyński’s from whom the former prime minister once borrowed a large sum of money, apparently to pay for a medical treatment for his mother. Goss, an avid maker of jams and preserves, is now on the board of directors of Polska Grupa Energetyczna, the largest power company in Poland, an employer of 40,000 people.
You can call this sort of thing by many names: nepotism, state capture. But if you so choose, you can also describe it in positive terms: It represents the end of the hateful notions of meritocracy and competition, principles that, by definition, never benefited the less successful. A rigged and uncompetitive system sounds bad if you want to live in a society run by the talented. But if that isn’t your primary interest, then what’s wrong with it?...
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/poland-polarization/568324/
Book Excerpt From Chapter One
The Constitutional Convention of 1787 created the electoral college as a means of ensuring that a man with what Alexander Hamilton called “talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity” could never become president of the United States. Although it eventually became a rubber-stamp body with no power—and, more recently, a mechanism that gives outsize influence to small groups of voters in a few states—the electoral college was originally meant to be something quite different: it was designed as a kind of review board, a group of elite lawmakers and men of property who would select the president, rejecting the people’s choice if necessary, in order to avoid the “excesses of democracy.”
Hamilton was one of many in colonial America who read over and over again the history of Greece and Rome, trying to learn how to prevent a new democracy from becoming a tyranny. In his old age, John Adams was once again reading Cicero, the Roman statesman who sought to halt the deterioration of the Roman Republic, even quoting him in letters to Thomas Jefferson. They wanted to build democracy in America on the basis of rational debate, reason, and compromise. But they had no illusions about human nature: They knew that men could sometimes succumb to “passions,” to use their old-fashioned word. They knew that any political system built on logic and rationality was always at risk from an outburst of the irrational.
In modern times, their successors have searched to define that irrationality and those “passions” further, and to understand who might be drawn to a demagogue and why. Hannah Arendt, the original philosopher of totalitarianism, identified an “authoritarian personality,” a radically lonely individual who “without any other social ties to family, friends, comrades or even mere acquaintances, derives his sense of having a place in the world only from his belonging to a movement, his membership in the party.” Theodor Adorno, one of a generation of intellectuals who fled Nazi Germany for America, investigated that idea further. Influenced by Freud, Adorno sought to find the source of the authoritarian personality in early childhood, perhaps even in repressed homosexuality.
More recently, Karen Stenner, a behavioral economist who began researching personality traits two decades ago, has argued that about a third of the population in any country has what she calls an authoritarian predisposition, a word that is more useful than personality, because it is less rigid. An authoritarian predisposition, one that favors homogeneity and order, can be present without necessarily manifesting itself; its opposite, a “libertarian” predisposition, one that favors diversity and difference, can be silently present too. Stenner’s definition of authoritarianism isn’t political, and it isn’t the same thing as conservatism. Authoritarianism appeals, simply, to people who cannot tolerate complexity: there is nothing intrinsically “left-wing” or “right-wing” about this instinct at all. It is anti-pluralist. It is suspicious of people with different ideas. It is allergic to fierce debates. Whether those who have it ultimately derive their politics from Marxism or nationalism is irrelevant. It is a frame of mind, not a set of ideas.
But theorists often leave out another crucial element in the decline of democracy and the construction of autocracy. The mere existence of people who admire demagogues or feel more comfortable in dictatorships does not fully explain why demagogues win. The dictator wants to rule, but how does he reach that part of the public that feels the same? The illiberal politician wants to undermine courts in order to give himself more power, but how does he persuade voters to accept those changes? In ancient Rome, Caesar had sculptors make multiple versions of his image. No contemporary authoritarian can succeed without the modern equivalent: the writers, intellectuals, pamphleteers, bloggers, spin doctors, producers of television programs, and creators of memes who can sell his image to the public. Authoritarians need the people who will promote the riot or launch the coup. But they also need the people who can use sophisticated legal language, people who can argue that breaking the constitution or twisting the law is the right thing to do. They need people who will give voice to grievances, manipulate discontent, channel anger and fear, and imagine a different future. They need members of the intellectual and educated elite, in other words, who will help them launch a war on the rest of the intellectual and educated elite, even if that includes their university classmates, their colleagues, and their friends.
Twilight of Democracy - The Seductive Lure of Authoritarian
https://www.anneapplebaum.com/book/twilight-of-democracy/
Applebaum’s work has focused primarily on the rise of anti-democratic politics in Europe and most recently, the united States.
BOOK REVIEW: Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism
https://theberkshireedge.com/book-review-twilight-of-democracy-the-seductive-lure-of-authoritarianism
Book Review and Summary - 'Twilight of Democracy' by Anne Applebaum
https://www.gcasreview.com/magazine-1/2021/1/30/book-review-and-summary-twilight-of-democracy-by-anne-applebaum
Book Review and Summary - 'Twilight of Democracy' by Anne Applebaum
https://www.gcasreview.com/magazine-1/2021/1/30/book-review-and-summary-twilight-of-democracy-by-anne-applebaum
