Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

The book begins with Applebaum’s description of a 1999 New Year’s Eve party she helped host in rural Poland. The guests were mostly Polish, and many were colleagues of the author’s husband, Radek Sikorski, a center-right Polish politician. Applebaum notes that she and her guests would have been center-right or center-left and all generally “agreed about democracy, about the road to prosperity, about the way things were going” (3). However, now most of her Polish guests support a right-wing, nativist party that currently controls the Polish government, the Law and Justice party. In contrast to the democratic principles Applebaum feels her guests once held, the Law and Justice party they support demonizes Muslims and the LGBT community and has replaced many civil servants, administrators, and judges with party loyalists (5-6). These guests no longer associate with Applebaum, including a former close friend and her daughter’s godmother, Ania Bielecka (8). They have also developed conspiratorial and antisemitic views and, purely because of their politics, have become estranged from their own children.

Applebaum describes how the Law and Justice party tried without success to pass a law that would have limited historical discussion of the Holocaust and entered a dispute with the government of Israel (7). Applebaum herself was villainized for the number of anti-Law and Justice articles that appeared in the international press. She relates her experience to a memoir written by a Jewish Romanian writer, Mihail Sebastian, during World War II. Sebastian “described how, one by one, [his friends] were drawn to fascist ideology, like a flock of moths to an inescapable flame” (12).

Next, Applebaum notes that the people she is describing were not seriously affected by the 2008–09 global recession nor by the European migrant wave of 2015–16. Instead, they are well-off and cosmopolitan people. Applebaum claims there is “no single explanation” or “a grand theory or universal solution” to the transformation in her former friends (14). However, she does suggest her experience and the trends she has observed in politics in the West reflect a historic tendency of societies to turn against democracy.

Looking at the history of democracy, Applebaum notes how the ancient Greek philosopher Plato and the founding fathers of the United States worried about how a single leader could corrupt a democracy. In particular, Applebaum argues, the founding fathers “knew that any political system built on logic and rationality was always at risk from an outburst of the irrational” (15). Then, Applebaum looks at the efforts of modern philosophers like Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, and Karen Stenner, who have investigated the origin of authoritarianism in individuals. In particular, Stenner argued that authoritarianism is a predisposition in people, regardless of their politics, who are “suspicious of people with different ideas” and “allergic to fierce debates” (16). Next, Applebaum discusses those who support authoritarian leaders. Citing the French writer Julian Benda’s 1927 book La trahison des clercs (The Treason of the Intellectuals or The Betrayal of The Intellectuals), she terms intellectuals and writers who support authoritarians clercs. Specifically, she identifies the authoritarians of today on the left “in the instigators of Twitter mobs who seek to take down public figures as well as ordinary people for violating unwritten speech codes” (19). At the same time, she admits that only right-wing authoritarians have currently gained real power, in the form of a “new right” that wants “to overthrow, bypass, or undermine existing institutions, to destroy what exists” (19-20).