Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism
Anne Applebaum
Copyright © 2020 by Anne Applebaum
Published in the United States by Doubleday, New York
“The emotional appeal of a conspiracy theory is in its simplicity. It explains away complex phenomena, accounts for chance and accidents, offers the believer the satisfying sense of having special, privileged access to the truth. For those who become the one-party state’s gatekeepers, the repetition of these conspiracy theories also brings another reward: power.” [Emphasis added]
Anne Applebaum has placed our growing polarization and, by extension, our recent insurrection, in the context of the larger world. A former correspondent for the Washington Post and now an author writing for The Atlantic, Applebaum takes us to Poland, Hungary, the United Kingdom, and Spain, then circles back to the United States.
A TV commercial from Spain: “It is dawn in the Basque countryside. A man is walking, and then running, in slow motion. He climbs a fence. He crosses a field of wheat while brushing his hands, as in a Hollywood movie, across the tops of the sheaves. All the while, music is playing and a voice is speaking: ‘If you don’t laugh at honor because you don’t want to live among traitors … if you look toward new horizons without despising your old origins … if you can keep your honesty intact in times of corruption …’
“The sun rises. The man climbs a steep path. He crosses a river. He is caught in a thunderstorm. ‘If you feel gratitude and pride for those in uniform who protect the wall … If you love your fatherland like you love your parents …’ The music climaxes, the man is on top of the mountain, the voice finishes: ‘then you are making Spain great again!’ A slogan appears on the screen: Hacer España Grande Otra Vez.
“The man was Santiago Abascal, and this was an advertisement for Vox.” With tweets, Instagram, YouTube, and WhatsApp, Vox worked hard to make followers “feel as if they were part of something big, exciting, growing — and homogenous … In 2019, Vox was Spain’s fastest-growing political party, and Abascal is its leader.”
Applebaum details the complicated realities of Spanish politics: a growing Catalan movement for autonomy; a large-scale feminist response to a controversial rape case; a far-left party challenging the center-left; the removal of the former dictator Franco’s remains from his grand mausoleum to a cemetery; then the government’s violent suppression of the Catalan succession movement: “When the dust settled, Vox — the only party that gave voice to a loud, strident, antiseparatist Spanish nationalism — was suddenly a player in national politics.”
Vox bundled together “opposition to Catalan and Basque separatism; opposition to same-sex marriage; opposition to feminism; opposition to immigration, especially Muslim immigration; anger at corruption; boredom with mainstream politics; plus a handful of issues, such as hunting and gun ownership, that some people care about and others don’t; plus a streak of libertarianism, a talent for mockery, and a whiff of restorative nostalgia.
“It wasn’t an ideology on offer, it was an identity: carefully curated, packaged for easy consumption, cued up and ready to be ‘boosted’ by a viral campaign. All of its slogans spoke of unity, harmony, and tradition. Vox was designed, from the beginning, to appeal to people who were bothered by cacophony. It offered them the opposite.” [Emphasis added]
Connecting the international dots, Applebaum notes “the language and tactics of Trump’s election suddenly seemed to offer something new to a lot of people who had been on the fringes of politics, not just in America but around the world …”
Applebaum survived the shocking change in our politics. As 1999 ended and the new century began, Applebaum, her husband and many friends celebrated in their house in Poland. They were free-market conservatives and anti-Communists: “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 … in a Poland that was a member of NATO and on its way to joining the European Union (EU) … We had rebuilt our ruined house. Our friends were rebuilding the country …
“Nearly two decades later, I would now cross the street to avoid some of the people who were at my New Year’s Eve party. They, in turn, would not only refuse to enter my house, they would be embarrassed to admit they had ever been there. In fact, about half the people who were at that party would no longer speak to the other half …”
“Another of my guests … appears to spend her days as a full-time Internet troll, fanatically promoting a whole range of conspiracy theories, many of them virulently anti-Semitic … She follows and amplifies the leading lights of the American ‘alt-right,’ whose language she repeats and promotes … One of my former friends, though deeply committed to a political party with an openly homophobic agenda, has a gay son … we have found ourselves on opposite sides of a profound divide, one that runs through not only what used to be the Polish right but also the old Hungarian right, the Spanish right, the French right, the Italian right, and, with some differences, the British right and the American right, too.”
Twenty years ago, could you have predicted that an American president would vehemently attack our democracy? That a Donald Trump and a sycophantic gaggle of Republicans would claim, without any evidence, that, in state after state, their own Republican-elected officials had helped the Democrats steal an election. That they would inspire extremists of all stripes, white racists, Q conspiracy theorists, to invade the Capitol, kill police, prepare to lynch the Republican Vice-President, and murder Congresspeople, willing to do whatever necessary to stop the certification of the Biden electoral college victory and extend the Trump presidency.
We’ve watched Republicans jettison the Constitution, deny their decades-long support for NATO and fervent anti-Communism. Silent, as Donald Trump viciously attacked former Republican heroes like John McCain and patriotic Gold Star Families, and relentlessly condemned the FBI and CIA while embracing Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-Un.
Applebaum appreciates this transformation: “Some of my New Year’s Eve guests … now support a nativist party called Law and Justice … not just xenophobic and paranoid but openly authoritarian … Law and Justice took over the state public broadcaster … firing popular presenters and experienced reporters … running straightforward ruling-party propaganda, sprinkled with easily disprovable lies … They fired diplomats with experience and linguistic skills. One by one, they wrecked cultural institutions too … to make the government more partisan, the courts more pliable, more beholden to the party … After two decades of profound Polish-Jewish conversations and reconciliation — after thousands of books, films, and conferences, after the construction of that spectacular museum — the government earned international notoriety by adopting a law curtailing public debate about the Holocaust …”
She’s part of this story: her husband had served as Poland’s defense minister for a coalition led by Law and Justice. Later, he left the party and served as foreign minister for the center-right Civic Platform. For many years, as his Jewish wife, Applebaum, writing history and journalism for British and American newspapers, had managed to avoid being the object of anti-Semitism. As Law and Justice changed, she was blamed for what they claimed were the negative articles she published abroad.
“I was featured on the covers of two pro-regime magazines, wSieci and Do Rzeczy (former friends of ours work at both), as the clandestine Jewish coordinator of the international press and the secret director of its negative coverage of Poland; one of them invented details about my family in order to make it seem more sinister …”
She asks: “Were some of our friends always closet authoritarians? Or have the people with whom we clinked glasses in the first minutes of the new millennium somehow changed over the subsequent two decades? There is no single explanation, and I will not offer either a grand theory or a universal solution. But there is a theme: Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all of our societies eventually will.” [Emphasis added]
“[Our Founders] 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 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 …” [Emphasis added]
Now, in case you’re wondering, Applebaum is more than willing to take on what she regards as the dangers coming from the left: “An authoritarian sensibility is unquestionably present in a generation of far-left campus agitators who seek to dictate how professors can teach and what students can say …
“Unlike Marxism, [Lenin’s] illiberal one-party state is not a philosophy. It is a mechanism for holding power, and it functions happily alongside many ideologies. It works because it clearly defines who gets to be the elite — the political elite, the cultural elite, the financial elite …
“But although the cultural power of the authoritarian left is growing, the only modern clercs who have attained real political power in Western democracies — the only ones operating inside governments, participating in ruling coalitions, guiding important political parties — are members of movements that we are accustomed to calling the ‘right’ … [Emphasis added]
Applebaum looks at this new right in Eastern Europe, Britain and here in the States: “The people described range from nativist ideologues to high-minded political essayists; some of them write sophisticated books, others launch viral conspiracy theories. Some are genuinely motivated by the same fears, the same anger, and the same deep desire for unity that motivates their readers and followers … Some are cynical and instrumental, adopting radical or authoritarian language because it will bring them power or fame. Some are apocalyptic, convinced that their societies have failed and need to be reconstructed, whatever the result. Some are deeply religious. Some enjoy chaos, or seek to promote chaos, as a prelude to imposing a new kind of order … to alter the rules of democracy so that they never lose power. Alexander Hamilton warned against them, Cicero fought against them. Some of them used to be my friends …”
“This form of soft dictatorship does not require mass violence to stay in power. Instead, it relies upon a cadre of elites to run the bureaucracy, the state media, the courts, and, in some places, state companies. These modern-day clercs understand their role, which is to defend the leaders, however dishonest their statements, however great their corruption, and however disastrous their impact on ordinary people and institutions. In exchange, they know that they will be rewarded and advanced …”
This perfectly describes the Trump administration, which made the combination of incompetence and corruption an art form – cabinet secretaries who formerly made money undermining and destroying the very missions of the departments they were now overseeing; political zealots who had contempt for the public good; those who used public money for their private interests; and a President who had his Secret Service detail pay inflated rates for protecting him at his private properties while he golfed.
With the recapture of the Capitol, it immediately became apparent that, if we are to understand how and why the insurrection surprised so many, we had better understand the roots of a resentment that had grown exponentially over the past years. Applebaum reminds us of her experience in Poland and focuses on the Kurski brothers.
Jacek Kurski is “the director of Polish state television and the chief ideologist of the would-be one-party state.” His brother, Jarosław Kurski, edits the most influential liberal Polish newspaper: “they believe in two very different ideas of Poland. They are two sides of the same Polish coin.”
Jarosław served as the press secretary to Lech Wałęsa, the leader of Solidarity, who eventually won the Presidency. Jarosław realized that “doing politics was really about … awful intrigues, searching for dirt, smear campaigns.” While Jarosław joined Gazeta Wyborcza, a newspaper founded during Poland’s first partially free elections, Jacek was fascinated by Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczyński, twin brothers, and co-founders of Law and Justice.
Applebaum notes: “To understand Jacek, you need to look beyond political science textbooks and study, instead, literary antiheroes. You could look at Shakespeare’s Iago, who manipulated Othello by playing on his insecurity and his jealousy … he sued his brother’s newspaper several times … He coauthored a fiery book and made a conspiratorial film about the secret forces lined up against the Polish right …
“He came to specialize in so-called ‘black’ PR. Famously, he helped torpedo the presidential campaign of Donald Tusk … in part by spreading the rumor that Tusk had a grandfather who had voluntarily joined the Wehrmacht, the Nazi army. Asked about this invention, Jacek reportedly told a small group of journalists that of course it wasn’t true, but ‘ciemny lud to kupi’ — which, roughly translated, means ‘The ignorant peasants will buy it.’
Sound familiar? How about Roy Cohn, Lee Atwater, Roger Ailes, Steve Bannon, Roger Stone? Donald Trump?
“In 2015, Kaczyński plucked Jacek out of the relative obscurity of fringe politics and made him the director of state television … Try to imagine what would happen to the BBC if it were taken over by the conspiracy website InfoWars: that will give you a rough idea of what happened to Telewizja Polska, Poland’s public broadcaster … news broadcasts ceased to make any pretense of objectivity or neutrality. Instead, they produced twisted news reports and carried out extensive vendettas against people and organizations whom the ruling party didn’t like. As it turned out, these vendettas were not just ugly, they were lethal. For months on end they ran a vicious, repetitive campaign against the popular mayor of Gdańsk, Paweł Adamowicz, accusing him of everything from corruption to treason. And someone was listening: On January 13, 2019, a recently released criminal, who had been watching state television in prison, leapt onto a stage at the climactic moment of a charity concert and plunged a knife into Adamowicz’s chest. The mayor died the next day …
Think FOX, these last few years dedicated to the Trump agenda. To understand our multiplying divide about COVID, about vaccinations, watch Sinclair Broadcasting, FOX, OANN, Newsmax TV, Infowars.
Applebaum continues: “From Orwell to Koestler, the European writers of the twentieth century were obsessed with the idea of the Big Lie, the vast ideological constructs that were Communism and fascism … The Brownshirts and Blackshirts marching in formation, the torch-lit parades, the terror police — these forced demonstrations of support for Big Lies were so absurd and inhuman that they required prolonged violence to impose and the threat of violence to maintain. They required forced education, total control of all culture, the politicization of journalism, sports, literature, and the arts.
“By contrast, the polarizing political movements of twenty-first-century Europe demand much less of their followers. They do not espouse a full-blown ideology, and thus they don’t require violence or terror police … And yet all of them depend, if not on a Big Lie, then on what the historian Timothy Snyder once told me should be called the Medium-Size Lie. To put it differently, all of them encourage their followers to engage, at least part of the time, with an alternative reality … [Emphasis added]
“In Hungary, the lie is unoriginal: It is the belief, now promoted by the Russian government and many others, in the superhuman powers of George Soros, the Hungarian Jewish billionaire who is supposedly plotting to destroy Hungary through the deliberate importation of migrants … It suggests that Soros is the chief instigator of a deliberate Jewish plot to replace white, Christian Europeans — and Hungarians in particular — with brown-skinned Muslims … an existential challenge to the nation itself …
In Poland it’s “the belief that a nefarious plot brought down the president’s plane in April 2010. The story has special force in Poland because the crash did have eerie historical echoes. The president who died, Lech Kaczyński, was on his way to an event commemorating the Katyń massacres, a series of mass murders that took place in 1940, when Stalin slaughtered more than twenty-one thousand Polish officers … Dozens of senior military figures and politicians were also on board, many of them friends of mine. My husband knew almost everybody on the plane, including the flight attendants …
“At first the tragedy seemed to unify people; after all, politicians from every major party had been on the plane … The truth, as it began to emerge, was not comforting to Law and Justice or to its leader, the dead president’s twin brother. The plane had taken off late; the president was likely in a hurry to land, because he wanted to use the trip to launch his reelection campaign. He may have been up late, and drinking, the night before. As the pilots approached, they learned that there was thick fog in Smolensk, which did not have a real airport, just a landing strip in the forest; they considered diverting the plane, which would have meant a drive of several hours to the ceremony. After the president had a brief phone call with his brother, his advisers apparently pressed the pilots to land …
“Mária Schmidt wasn’t at my New Year’s Eve party, but I’ve known her for almost that long. She’s a historian, the author of some valuable work on Hungarian Stalinism … We first met in 2002, when she invited me to the opening of the Terror Háza — the House of Terror museum — in Budapest, which once gave me an award. The museum, which she still directs, explores the history of totalitarianism in Hungary …
“[Now] the Hungarian state … pumps out propaganda blaming Hungary’s problems — including the coronavirus, which the country’s hospitals were ill-equipped to fight — on nonexistent Muslim migrants, the EU, and, again, George Soros. Despite her opposition credentials and intellectual achievements, Schmidt … was one of the primary authors of that lie … After 1989, she became a prime beneficiary of Hungary’s political transition: her late husband made a fortune in the post-Communist real-estate market, thanks to which she lives in a spectacular house in the Buda hills. Although she has led a publicity campaign designed to undermine the Central European University founded by Soros, her son is one of its graduates …[and] she followed, step by step, the Communist Party playbook when she took over Figyelő, a once-respected Hungarian magazine: she changed the editors, pushed out the independent reporters, and replaced them with reliably loyal pro-government writers …”
In December, 2018, Figyelő put András Heisler, the leader of the Hungarian Jewish community, on the cover with twenty-thousand-forint Hungarian bills floating over his image …
“Yet Schmidt, who spends a lot of time criticizing Western democracy, is not offering anything better or different in its place. Despite being dedicated to the uniqueness of Hungary and the value of ‘Hungarianness,’ Schmidt has lifted much of her profoundly unoriginal ideology wholesale from Breitbart News, right down to the caricatured description of American universities and sneering jokes about ‘transsexual bathrooms.’ Yet there is no cultural left in Hungary to speak of, and in any case Orbán, who has put the Hungarian Academy of Sciences under direct government control, terrified academics into silence, and forced the Central European University out of the country, is a far greater threat to academic freedom than anyone on the left in his country …”
Applebaum admits: “Nor, in the end, did I learn much about Schmidt’s motives. I am sure that her national pride is sincere. But does she really believe that Hungary is facing a dire existential threat in the form of George Soros and some invisible Syrians? Maybe she is one of those people who can usefully persuade themselves to believe what it is advantageous to believe. Or maybe she’s just as cynical about her own side as she is about her opponents, and it’s all an elaborate game.
I love the description of those who “usefully persuade themselves,” an arranged marriage of self-interest and self-hypnosis. Perhaps that’s the best explanation for the many Republican politicians who surely know that Trump lost and Biden won, but nonetheless told the Big or Mid-size lie. Those who insisted that Biden was a dangerous socialist, intent on turning us into Venezuela.
Then there are the benefits of compliance: “Thanks to Orbán, Schmidt has had for nearly two decades the funding and political support needed to oversee not just her museum but also a pair of historical institutes, giving her unique power to shape how Hungarians remember their history, a power that she relishes … always keeping on the right side of the ruling party …
A quick trip to the United Kingdom. Applebaum has known Boris Johnson since he was reporting from Brussels for the conservative Daily Telegraph: “His specialty was amusing, half-true stories built around a grain (or sometimes less than a grain) of fact that poked fun at the EU and invariably portrayed it as a font of regulatory madness. His articles had titles like ‘Threat to British Pink Sausages.’ They repeated (false) rumors that Brussels bureaucrats were going to ban double-decker buses or prawn-cocktail-flavored crisps. Although they were laughed at by those in the know, these tall tales had an impact. Other editors demanded that their Brussels correspondents find and file the same kinds of stories … Johnson was well aware of the impact and relished it. ‘I was sort of chucking these rocks over the garden wall and I listened to this amazing crash from the greenhouse next door over in England … everything I wrote from Brussels was having this amazing, explosive effect on the Tory party — and it really gave me this, I suppose, rather weird sense of power.’
“The ‘amazing crash’ in London also sold newspapers, which is part of why Johnson was laughingly tolerated for so long. But there was a deeper reason too: the not-entirely-accurate stories appealed to the deep instincts of a certain breed of nostalgic conservative … Nobody, in the 1990s, wished to have India back, and nobody does now. But there was a nostalgia for something else: a world in which England made the rules … They believed that it was still possible for England to make the rules — whether the rules of trade, of economics, of foreign policy — if only their leaders would take the bull by the horns, take the bit between their teeth, if only they would just do it …
“At the time, I thought that my friends also believed in spreading democracy and free trade across Europe, and perhaps they did … More recently I have come to suspect that ‘democracy,’ at least as an international cause, was far less important to a certain kind of nostalgic conservative than the maintenance of a world in which England continued to play a privileged role: a world in which England is not just an ordinary, middle-sized power like France or Germany; a world in which England is special — and perhaps even superior …
“[But] nobody in the EU imposed rules on Britain: European directives are agreed by negotiation and each one of them has been accepted by a British representative or diplomat. Although the United Kingdom did not win every single argument — no country did — there was no ‘Brussels mafia’ forcing Britain to do things it didn’t want to do. Though this was rarely mentioned, the Single Market had many advantages, even when the British sometimes lost arguments. It made Britain one of the most powerful players in the world’s most powerful economic bloc … But none of those advantages outweighed, in the end, the embarrassment and annoyance of having to negotiate regulations with other Europeans, a give-and-take process that did, of course, sometimes force the British to make concessions …
Applebaum reveals some remarkable similarities between Johnson and Donald Trump. Granted, Johnson is so much more literate and learned – I’m pretty sure Donald never read Conrad – yet they share a great interest in power, the requisite ability to grow a following, a penchant for vindictiveness, and a quite oversized self-absorption.
“I moved back to Poland in 1997 and started writing history books; he ran for Parliament. Later, he became mayor of London, but he got bored there too. In 2013 he told an interviewer that the mayor’s office felt far away from the House of Commons, the place where real things happened: “I’m so isolated, I’m like Colonel Kurtz. I’ve gone upriver,” he said, before hastily assuring the interviewer that that was the only thing he had in common with the psychopathic hero of Apocalypse Now …
“Quite a lot of people have since remarked on Johnson’s outsized narcissism, which is indeed all-consuming, as well as his equally remarkable laziness. His penchant for fabrication is a matter of record. He was fired from the Times (London) at the beginning of his career for making up quotes, and fired from the shadow cabinet in 2004 for lying. His aura of carefully studied helplessness also hides a streak of cruelty: Johnson wrecked first one and then another marriage — the second one had lasted a quarter century — and the lives of a number of other women with a series of extraordinarily brazen public affairs.”
Like Trump, “he also has an uncanny form of charisma, some genius quality that attracts people and puts them at ease, as well as an intuitive grasp of the mood of a crowd. Once, after not seeing him for several years, I ran into him somewhere in the City, London’s financial district. He was then mayor; he was riding his bike. I waved at him, he stopped, exclaimed over the amazing coincidence, and suggested that we go into a pub for a quick drink. As we opened the door, he mumbled something like ‘Oh no, I forgot this would happen’ as people swarmed over toward us and began demanding selfies. He did a few; then we sat down and chatted; then, when he got up, the same thing happened all over again …
“Round about the same time, I went out to dinner with Johnson and a couple of other people, and we wound up talking about a possible referendum on British membership in the EU, which was then in the air. ‘Nobody serious wants to leave the EU,’ he said. ‘Business doesn’t want it. The City [London’s financial district] doesn’t want it. It won’t happen’…
“Nevertheless, he chose Brexit in the referendum campaign. And he supported Brexit with the same sunny insouciance, and the same disregard for consequences, that he had long demonstrated in his journalism and his personal life …”
And so, for Johnson, the desire for power triumphed over rationality. Britain was unprepared for an exit from the European Union. And so was Theresa May, the Prime Minister, who lost the referendum she foolishly proposed. Then she couldn’t craft a political consensus on how to make the hard exit she endorsed. Losing three times, delaying Brexit twice, May had to resign. Ultimately the Tories required “a new leader, one who could bring the various wings of the party together, deliver Brexit, win back support. They also needed someone who could tell stories, make them laugh, bring back that feeling of English superiority. They went for the joker.” Boris Johnson. Meanwhile, the Brexit campaign to leave was stoked by as many myths as the MAGA campaign.
Applebaum continues: “‘Europe’ became, for some of them, the embodiment of everything else that had gone wrong, the explanation for the toothlessness of the ruling class, the mediocrity of British culture, the ugliness of modern capitalism, and the general lack of national vigor. The need to negotiate regulations had emasculated the British Parliament. The Polish plumbers and Spanish data analysts working in Britain were not fellow Europeans who shared a common culture but immigrants threatening the nation’s identity …
“Sometimes there was a racial undertone to this kind of English nationalism … Both the ‘establishment’ Conservative Vote Leave campaign, led by Johnson and his Tory colleague Michael Gove, as well as UKIP’s own campaign, led by Nigel Farage, told lies. If we left the EU, Johnson claimed, there would be an extra £350 million a week — an imaginary number — for the National Health Service … Farage appeared in front of a poster showing huge crowds of Syrians trekking toward Europe, even though there was no reason why any of them would end up in the United Kingdom …
“One link common to conservatives in the UK and USA were the online, targeted Brexit campaigns of Vote Leave spurred by data supplied by Cambridge Analytica, the same firm that piloted the Trump’s Facebook efforts … The Vote Leave campaign cheated, breaking electoral laws in order to spend more money on targeted advertising on Facebook. Animal lovers were shown photographs of Spanish bullfighters; tea drinkers were shown a grasping hand, marked with an EU flag, reaching for a British teacup, alongside an angry slogan: ‘The European Union wants to kill our cuppa.’ … All of the Brexit campaigns benefited from Russian trolling operations, though these mostly just echoed what Vote Leave was doing anyway. The atmosphere of the campaign was uglier than any in modern British history. At its height, Jo Cox, a female member of Parliament, was murdered by a man who had become convinced that Brexit meant liberation and ‘Remain’ meant that England would be destroyed by hordes of brown foreigners. Just like the murderer of Paweł Adamowicz, the mayor of Gdańsk, he had been radicalized by the angry rhetoric all around him …
Applebaum helps us better understand the disturbing increase in division, the roiling anger, the willingness to discard democracy. It used to be we understood revolution by charting the inequality and desperate poverty that led to them, but in Hungary, Poland, Spain, the UK, here in the States, while many may be hungry few are starving. And those in the streets of London and Washington are hardly destitute.
“They have food and shelter. They are literate. If we describe them as ‘poor’ or ‘deprived,’ it is sometimes because they lack things that human beings couldn’t dream of a century ago, like air-conditioning or Wi-Fi. In this new world, it may be that big, ideological changes are not caused by bread shortages but by new kinds of disruptions. These new revolutions may not even look like the old revolutions at all. In a world where most political debate takes place online or on television, you don’t need to go out on the street and wave a banner to assert your allegiance. In order to manifest a sharp change in political affiliation, all you have to do is switch channels, turn to a different website every morning, or start following a different group of people on social media.”
Applebaum reminds us of Karen Stenner’s research on political revolutions and authoritarianism: “the ‘authoritarian predisposition’ she has identified is not exactly the same thing as closed-mindedness. It is better described as simple-mindedness: people are often attracted to authoritarian ideas because they are bothered by complexity. They dislike divisiveness. They prefer unity. A sudden onslaught of diversity — diversity of opinions, diversity of experiences — therefore makes them angry. They seek solutions in new political language that makes them feel safer and more secure.
“What factors, in the modern world, might provoke people to react against complexity? Some are obvious. Major demographic change — the arrival of immigrants or outsiders — is a form of complexity that has traditionally inflamed that authoritarian impulse, and it still does … But the relationship between real immigrants and anti-immigrant political movements is not always so straightforward. For one, immigration, even from places with a different religion or culture, does not always cause a counterreaction. In the 1990s, Muslim refugees from the wars in former Yugoslavia arrived in Hungary without causing undue distress. Muslim refugees from Chechnya caused no major backlash in Poland either. In recent years, the United States absorbed refugees from Russia, Vietnam, Haiti, and Cuba, among other places, without much debate.
“Nor can the backlash against immigrants always be blamed on their failure to assimilate. Anti-Semitism grew strongest in Germany, for example, not when the Jews arrived but precisely when they were integrating, succeeding, even converting. More to the point, it now seems as if a country does not even need to have real immigrants, creating real problems, in order to feel passionately angry about immigration. In Hungary, as Mária Schmidt acknowledged, there are scarcely any foreigners and yet the ruling party has successfully stoked xenophobia. When people say they are angry about ‘immigration,’ in other words, they are not always talking about something they have lived and experienced. They are talking about something imaginary, something they fear …
“Alongside the revival of nostalgia, the disappointment with meritocracy, and the appeal of conspiracy theories, a part of the answer may lie in the contentious, cantankerous nature of modern discourse itself: the ways in which we now read about, think about, hear, and understand politics. We have long known that in closed societies, the arrival of democracy, with its clashing voices and differing opinions, can be ‘complex and frightening,’ as Stenner puts it, for people unaccustomed to public dissent. The noise of argument, the constant hum of disagreement — these can irritate people who prefer to live in a society tied together by a single narrative. The strong preference for unity, at least among a portion of the population, helps explain why numerous liberal or democratic revolutions, from 1789 onward, ended in dictatorships that enjoyed wide support …
Applebaum offers some concluding remarks: “It is possible that we are already living through the twilight of democracy; that our civilization may already be heading for anarchy or tyranny, as the ancient philosophers and America’s founders once feared; that a new generation of clercs, the advocates of illiberal or authoritarian ideas, will come to power in the twenty-first century, just as they did in the twentieth; that their visions of the world, born of resentment, anger, or deep, messianic dreams, could triumph. Maybe new information technology will continue to undermine consensus, divide people further, and increase polarization until only violence can determine who rules. Maybe fear of disease will create fear of freedom.
“Or maybe the coronavirus will inspire a new sense of global solidarity. Maybe we will renew and modernize our institutions. Maybe international cooperation will expand after the entire world has had the same set of experiences at the same time: lockdown, quarantine, fear of infection, fear of death. Maybe scientists around the world will find new ways to collaborate, above and beyond politics. Maybe the reality of illness and death will teach people to be suspicious of hucksters, liars, and purveyors of disinformation …
“There is no final solution, no theory that will explain everything. There is no road map to a better society, no didactic ideology, no rule book. All we can do is choose our allies and our friends — our comrades, as he puts it — with great care, for only with them, together, is it possible to avoid the temptations of the different forms of authoritarianism once again on offer. Because all authoritarianisms divide, polarize, and separate people into warring camps, the fight against them requires new coalitions. Together we can make old and misunderstood words like liberalism mean something again; together we can fight back against lies and liars; together we can rethink what democracy should look like in a digital age … [Emphasis added]
I’m so very grateful to Anne Applebaum for her essential “Twilight of Democracy.” She has managed to merge the political and the personal consequences of the growing impulse to authoritarianism. If anything, the traitorous attempt to seize the Capitol and upend the peaceful transition from one President to another demonstrates without any doubt that we all need to appreciate Applebaum’s clear-eyed analysis of what is happening to our world.
