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.
Elegantly
written and urgently argued, Twilight of Democracy is a brilliant dissection of
a world-shaking shift and a stirring glimpse of the road back to democratic
values.
Politics
books
Twilight of Democracy by Anne Applebaum review –
when politics ends friendships
Shaming Boris Johnson and other friends who shifted
further right ... a personal survey of nationalisms, discussed alongside The
Light That Failed by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes
John
Kampfner
@johnkampfner
Thu 9 Jul
2020 07.30 BSTLast modified on Thu 9 Jul 2020 15.16 BST
Muslims
make up around 4% of Spain’s population. When asked to guess the percentage,
Spanish respondents regularly give pollsters an inflated number. A similar
discrepancy is found across all western democracies. Demographic alarm, whether
based on reality, fantasy or stoked with falsehood provides rich pickings for
the nativist movements that have swept the world in recent years.
Santiago
Abascal is leader of Spain’s Vox party. As Anne Applebaum points out in her
sweeping survey of political nationalisms, “the idea that Christian
civilisation needs to redefine itself against the Islamic enemy has a special
historic echo in Spain”. The fact that a large proportion of immigrants come
from Catholic Latin America is mostly ignored by the far right. Applebaum
points out that in one of Abascal’s many campaigning videos, he “mounted a
horse and, like the knights who once fought to reconquer Andalucia from the
Arabs, rode across a southern Spanish landscape. Like so many internet memes,
it was serious but unserious.” It has certainly been effective. Last November,
Vox made huge gains in the general election, becoming Spain’s third largest
party.
Applebaum
begins this engrossing account in her adopted Poland (she is married to a
Polish former defence and foreign minister). She recalls a New Year’s Eve party
she gave to celebrate the dawn of the millennium. “At that moment, when Poland
was on the cusp of joining the west, it felt as if we were all on the same
team. We agreed about democracy, about the road to prosperity, about the way
things were going.” Now she would cross the street to avoid some of her guests.
The feeling is mutual. This is a political book; it is also intensely personal,
and the more powerful for it.
She names
and shames a number of friends. Several, she says, peddle online antisemitic
conspiracy theories. These people have not lost their jobs or missed out on
housing as a result of migrants. They do not remotely fall into the category of
the “left-behinds”. They are highly educated and well travelled. Why,
therefore, do they embrace and disseminate the lies and half-truths trotted out
by Poland’s Law and Justice party? History lesson number one: authoritarians
need mass support, but, as with 1930s fascists, they also need the
collaboration of people in high places. “Given the right conditions, any
society can turn against democracy,” the author notes. “Indeed, if history is
anything to go by, all of our societies eventually will.”
The House
of Terror museum, which narrates the history of communist and fascist
oppression, is one of the first stops for visitors to Budapest. Applebaum
recalls that she first met its director, Mária Schmidt, at the museum’s opening
in 2002. In recent years, Schmidt’s trajectory, Applebaum argues, has followed
that of many: she blames foreigners for Hungary’s ills. The pair went from
friendship to daggers drawn. During an ill-tempered (and one assumes final)
meeting, Schmidt vented her fury towards all those seeking to undermine
“Hungarian-ness”. Usually the first on any Hungarian nationalist’s enemies-of-the-state
list is the billionaire philanthropist George Soros, whose Central European
University has been shut down. The western media and western diplomats “talk
down from above to those below, like it used to be with colonies”, Schmidt
tells Applebaum.
Twilight of
Democracy tries to deconstruct the psychology and motivation of such people.
For some it is the chance to be noticed; for others, it is revenge for slights.
Applebaum moves on to Laura Ingraham, another former acquaintance, who has
become host of a certain type of US political chat show. “She has, like so many
others in the Fox universe, depicted illegal immigrants as thieves and
murderers, despite overwhelming evidence that immigrants commit fewer crimes
overall than native-born Americans.”
Career
advancement may have guided her. But Applebaum believes it is more than that.
The answer, she argues, may lie “in the depth of Ingraham’s despair”. She sees
America, according to Applebaum, as “a dark, nightmarish place, where God only
speaks to a tiny number of people; where idealism is dead; where civil war and
violence are approaching; where the ‘elite’ is wallowing in decadence,
disarray, death”. How do these people actually believe this stuff? One senses a
note of frustration as she struggles to answer the question.
My empathy
with the author takes a dip when she turns her attention to Britain and a
dinner she had with Boris Johnson, when he was mayor of London. Not for the
first or last time, the wannabe prime minister confessed that leaving the EU
would be a disaster. Indeed, Applebaum recalls him saying that “nobody” wanted
it. But why was she friends with him in the first place? It was clear from the
get-go what Johnson was – a charlatan. Why were people on the centre-right so
titillated by him and his set?
It could be
that Covid-19 has disabused people of any idea that Johnson and his ilk have a
shred of competence in a crisis. Will authoritarians, populists or democrats
emerge stronger from the pandemic? It is worth turning to Ivan Krastev and
Stephen Holmes’s book to understand how liberal democracy went so badly wrong
after 1989, and how the right dominated the agenda.
The liberal
democratic state could not be improved on, eastern Europeans were told: just
import it and adopt it
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.
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