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Summary
Summary
NATIONAL BESTSELLER * "How did our democracy go wrong? This extraordinary document ... is Applebaum's answer." --Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny
The 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. 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.
Author Notes
ANNE APPLEBAUM's 2018 Atlantic article "A Warning from Europe" inspired this book and was a finalist for a National Magazine Award. After seventeen years as a columnist at The Washington Post, Applebaum became a staff writer at The Atlantic in 2020. She is the author of three critically acclaimed and award-winning histories of the Soviet Union: Red Famine, Iron Curtain, and Gulag, winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Responsible conservatism has drifted into bigotry, antidemocratic ideology, and revenge psychology, argues this deeply personal analysis of the populist right. Historian and journalist Applebaum (Red Famine) calls out erstwhile center-right friends and colleagues who once supported democracy, meritocracy, free markets, and internationalism for accommodating xenophobia, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and illiberal one-party rule. Focusing on her adopted homeland of Poland, Applebaum decries former allies who now support the ruling right-wing Law and Justice Party's undermining of the independent judiciary and media. She also faults Tory acquaintances in Britain for backing Brexit, and Fox News pundit Laura Ingraham for abandoning Reaganite conservatism for "apocalyptic pessimism." Applebaum paints contemporary right-wing politics as a psychosis of "resentment, envy, and... the belief that the 'system' is unfair--not just to the country, but to you," and of psychic anxiety about "clashing voices and different opinions." Her armchair psychologizing--as when she suggests that the "loud advocacy" of Ingraham and other Trump boosters may help "to cover up the deep doubt and even shame they feel about their support for Trump"--sometimes feels too glib and dismissive of the divisive issues that energize populist movements. Still, this anguished and forceful jeremiad crystallizes right-of-center dismay at the betrayal of the conservative tradition. (July)
Guardian Review
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. 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.
Kirkus Review
Equal parts memoir, reportage, and history, this sobering account of the roots and forms of today's authoritarianism, by one of its most accomplished observers, is meant as a warning to everyone. Known for her historically grounded commentary and such well-received histories as the Pulitzer Prize--winning Gulag (2003), Atlantic staff writer Applebaum, a reflective, deep-thinking conservative, explores the "restorative nostalgia" and "authoritarian predisposition" of the far right in the U.S. and Europe. Her motivation in writing is a fear of the possible "fall of liberal democracy." Sadly, she writes, "given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all of our societies eventually will." Well-acquainted with many of the figures she discusses, Applebaum analyzes the forces that have caused so many of them to turn ugly, revanchist, and unreasoning. She takes her examples mostly from Europe--Hungary, Poland, Spain, and Britain in particular--but also from Trump's America. Sometimes too discursive, sometimes overlong (as on Laura Ingraham), the book is nevertheless critically important for its muscular, oppositionist attack on the new right from within conservative ranks--and for the well-documented warning it embodies. The author's views are especially welcome because she is a deliberate thinker and astute observer rather than just the latest pundit or politico. In the spirit of Julien Benda, Hannah Arendt, and Theodor Adorno, Applebaum seeks to understand what makes the new right "more Bolshevik than Burkean." Needless to say, any attack that places Viktor Orbán, Boris Johnson, and Donald Trump in the company of Lenin and Stalin is worthy of close attention. The author is highly instructive on what is happening in the increasingly grim realm of the far right: a hardening of bitterness and unreasoning vengefulness and a resulting shift of the spectrum that puts a growing number of conservatives like Applebaum in the center. A knowledgeable, rational, necessarily dark take on dark realities. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
With this latest work, renowned historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Applebaum (Gulag; Iron Curtain) issues a clarion call about the current state of democracies. She sees threats that can transform democracy into authoritarianism--and shows how they emerge over time. While the work primarily focuses on Eastern Europe, there are echoes of current situations in Great Britain and the United States. The underlying root of the problem is a perceived mistrust in government and the amplification of mistrust. Enablers of mistrust rely on conspiracy theories (such as birtherism) to create audience buy-in, she maintains, as simplistic arguments outweigh complexity. Mistrust is also directed at minority populations: the othering effect. Taking advantage of a fractured media structure, these opinions creep into political dialog. Then, promising an elixir to solve these problems, strongmen can take over with empty solutions and promises. This work is personal for Applebaum because Poland, her adopted home, has turned into a single party authoritarian state following this pattern. She also touches on the history of authoritarianism in Hungary and Spain, and how leaders have used nostalgia and social media to sway beliefs. VERDICT Highly recommended; the currency of this work is both engrossing and petrifying.--Jacob Sherman, John Peace Lib., Univ. of Texas at San Antonio
Excerpts
Excerpts
I New Year's Eve On December 31, 1999, we threw a party. It was the end of one millennium and the start of a new one, and people very much wanted to celebrate, preferably somewhere exotic. Our party fulfilled that criterion. We held it at Chobielin, a small manor house in northwest Poland that my husband and his parents had purchased a decade earlier--for the price of the bricks--when it was a mildewed, uninhabitable ruin, unrenovated since the previous occupants fled the Red Army in 1945. We had restored the house, or most of it, though very slowly. It was not exactly finished in 1999, but it did have a new roof as well as a large, freshly painted, and completely unfurnished salon, perfect for a party. The guests were various: journalist friends from London and Moscow, a few junior diplomats based in Warsaw, two friends who flew over from New York. But most of them were Poles, friends of ours and colleagues of my husband, Radek Sikorski, who was then a deputy foreign minister in a center-right Polish government. There were local friends, some of Radek's school friends, and a large group of cousins. A handful of youngish Polish journalists came too--none then particularly famous--along with a few civil servants and one or two very junior members of the government. You could have lumped the majority of us, roughly, in the general category of what Poles call the right--the conservatives, the anti-Communists. But at that moment in history, you might also have called most of us liberals. Free-market liberals, classical liberals, maybe Thatcherites. Even those who might have been less definite about the economics did believe in democracy, in the rule of law, in checks and balances, and in a Poland that was a member of NATO and on its way to joining the European Union (EU), a Poland that was an integrated part of modern Europe. In the 1990s, that was what being "on the right" meant. As parties go, it was a little scrappy. There was no such thing as catering in rural Poland in the 1990s, so my mother-in-law and I made vats of beef stew and roasted beets. There were no hotels, either, so our hundred-odd guests stayed in local farmhouses or with friends in the nearby town. I kept a list of who was staying where, but a couple of people still wound up sleeping on the floor in the basement. Late in the evening we set off fireworks--cheap ones, made in China, which had just become widely available and were probably extremely dangerous. The music--on cassette tapes, made in an era before Spotify--created the only serious cultural divide of the evening: the songs that my American friends remembered from college were not the same as the songs that the Poles remembered from college, so it was hard to get everybody to dance at the same time. At one point I went upstairs, learned that Boris Yeltsin had resigned, wrote a brief column for a British newspaper, then went back downstairs and had another glass of wine. At about three in the morning, one of the wackier Polish guests pulled a small pistol out of her handbag and shot blanks into the air out of sheer exuberance. It was that kind of party. It lasted all night, continued into "brunch" the following afternoon, and was infused with the optimism I remember from that time. We had rebuilt our ruined house. Our friends were rebuilding the country. I have a particularly clear memory of a walk in the snow--maybe it was the day before the party, maybe the day after--with a bilingual group, everybody chattering at once, English and Polish mingling and echoing through the birch forest. 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. That moment has passed. 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. The estrangements are political, not personal. Poland is now one of the most polarized societies in Europe, and 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. Some of my New Year's Eve guests--along with me and my husband--continued to support the pro-European, pro-rule-of-law, pro-market center right. We remained in political parties that aligned, more or less, with European Christian Democrats, with the liberal parties of France and the Netherlands, and with the Republican Party of John McCain. Some of my guests consider themselves center-left. But others wound up in a different place. They now support a nativist party called Law and Justice--a party that has moved dramatically away from the positions it held when it first briefly ran the government, from 2005 to 2007, and when it occupied the presidency (not the same thing in Poland) from 2005 to 2010. In the years it was out of power, the leaders of Law and Justice and many of its supporters and promoters slowly came to embrace a different set of ideas, not just xenophobic and paranoid but openly authoritarian. To be fair to the electorate, not everybody could see this: Law and Justice ran a very moderate campaign in 2015 against a center-right party that had been in power for eight years--my husband was a member of that government, though he resigned before the election--and was in the final year headed by a weak and unimpressive prime minister. Understandably, Poles wanted a change. But after Law and Justice won a slim majority in 2015, its radicalism immediately became clear. The new government violated the constitution by improperly appointing new judges to the constitutional court. Later, it used an equally unconstitutional playbook in an attempt to pack the Polish Supreme Court and wrote a law designed to punish judges whose verdicts contradicted government policy. Law and Justice took over the state public broadcaster--also in violation of the constitution--firing popular presenters and experienced reporters. Their replacements, recruited from the far-right extremes of the online media, began running straightforward ruling-party propaganda, sprinkled with easily disprovable lies, at taxpayers' expense. State institutions were another target. Once in power, Law and Justice sacked thousands of civil servants, replacing them with party hacks, or else cousins and other relatives of party hacks. They fired army generals who had years of expensive training in Western academies. They fired diplomats with experience and linguistic skills. One by one, they wrecked cultural institutions too. The National Museum lost its excellent acting director, an internationally respected curator. He was replaced with an unknown academic, with no prior museum experience, whose first major decision was to dismantle the museum's exhibition of modern and contemporary art. A year later he would resign, leaving the museum in chaos. The director of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews--an institution unique in Europe, opened with great fanfare only a few years earlier--was suspended from his job with no explanation, horrifying the museum's international supporters and funders. Those stories were echoed by thousands of others that didn't make headlines. A friend of ours lost her job in another state institution, for example, after she had completed too many projects too quickly. Her new and unqualified director seemed to perceive her as a threat. There was very little pretense about any of this. The point of all of these changes was not to make government run better. The point was to make the government more partisan, the courts more pliable, more beholden to the party. Or maybe we should call it, as we once did, the Party. They had no mandate to do this: Law and Justice was elected with a percentage of the vote that allowed them to rule but not to change the constitution. And so, in order to justify breaking the law, the party stopped using ordinary political arguments, and began identifying existential enemies instead. Some were old and familiar. 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. Although they eventually changed the law under American pressure, it enjoyed broad support among the party's ideological base--the journalists, writers, and thinkers, including some of my party guests, who now say they believe that anti-Polish forces are plotting to blame Poland instead of Germany for Auschwitz. Later, the party also involved itself in a pointless spat with the Israeli government, an argument that seemed designed to appeal both to Law and Justice's angry, nationalist voters in Poland and Benjamin Netanyahu's angry, nationalist voters in Israel. Some of the enemies were new. After a brief period of attacking Islamic immigrants--difficult, in a country with almost no Islamic immigrants at all--the party focused its ire on homosexuals. A national weekly, Gazeta Polska --a couple of whose most prominent journalists were at my New Year's Eve party--printed "LGBT Free Zone" stickers for its readers to put on their doors and windows. On the eve of another parliamentary election in October 2019, state television showed a documentary called Invasion, describing the secret "LGBT" plan to undermine Poland. The Polish Catholic church, once a neutral institution and an apolitical symbol of national unity, began promoting similar themes. The current archbishop of Krakow, a title previously held by Pope John Paul II, gave a sermon describing homosexuals as a rainbow-colored "plague" that had replaced the "red plague" of Communism. His sermon was applauded by the Polish government and then removed from YouTube by online moderators, on the grounds that it constituted hate speech. This sequence of events now makes it difficult for me and some of my New Year's guests to speak about anything at all. I have not, for example, had a single conversation with Ania Bielecka, formerly one of my closest friends--the godmother of one of my children--since a hysterical phone call in April 2010, a couple of days after a plane carrying the then president crashed near Smolensk, in Russia, about which more in a moment. Bielecka is an architect whose other friends include, or anyway used to include, some of the best-known artists of her generation; she also enjoys, or used to enjoy, contemporary art exhibitions, even traveling a few times to the Venice Biennale, just for fun. She once told me she enjoyed people watching at the Biennale--all of the arty ladies in their elaborate outfits--as much as the exhibitions. But in recent years she has grown close to Jarosław Kaczyński, the leader of Law and Justice and the late president's twin brother. She now regularly hosts lunches for Kaczyński at her apartment--she is a great cook--and discusses whom he should appoint to his cabinet. I am told that the culture minister, the author of the assault on Polish museums, was her suggestion. I tried to see her a couple of years ago in Warsaw, but she refused. "What would we talk about?" she texted me, and then went silent. Another of my guests--the one who shot the pistol in the air--eventually separated from her British husband. Her eccentricity has been transformed into something else, and she appears to spend her days as a full-timeInternet troll, fanatically promoting a whole range of conspiracy theories, many of them virulently anti-Semitic. She tweets about Jewish responsibility for the Holocaust; she once posted an image of an English medieval painting depicting a boy supposedly crucified by Jews, with the commentary "And they were surprised that they were expelled," referring to the expulsion of the Jews from Britain in 1290. She follows and amplifies the leading lights of the American "alt-right," whose language she repeats and promotes. A third guest, the journalist Anita Gargas, has spent the past decade investigating, over and over again, a set of conspiracy theories involving the death of the late president, Lech Kaczyński, in the Smolensk plane crash, each time postulating a different explanation. She's employed by Gazeta Polska, the weekly newspaper that distributed the antigay stickers. A fourth guest, Rafal Ziemkiewicz, has made a name for himself as an outspoken opponent of the international Jewish community. He refers to Jews as "scabby" and "greedy," calls Jewish organizations "blackmailers," and regrets his former support for Israel. The notoriety he gained from this language appears to have bolstered what had been his faltering career, and he now appears frequently on party-controlled state television. I happen to know that some of these ex-friends are estranged from their children because of their political views. In a couple of cases, the estrangement is profound. One of my former friends, though deeply committed to a political party with an openly homophobic agenda, has a gay son. But that too is typical--these divides run through families as well as groups of friends. We have a neighbor near Chobielin whose parents listen to a progovernment, Catholic-conspiratorial radio station called Radio Maryja. They repeat its mantras, make its enemies their enemies. "I've lost my mother," my neighbor told me. "She lives in another world." To fully disclose all of my interests here, I should explain that some of this conspiratorial thinking is focused on me. My husband was the Polish defense minister for a year and a half, in a coalition government led by Law and Justice during its first, brief experience of power. Later, he broke with that party and was for seven years the foreign minister in another coalition government, this one led by the center-right party, Civic Platform. In 2019, he ran for the European Parliament and won a seat, though he is not currently part of the leadership of the political opposition. I have lived in Poland on and off since 1988, with large chunks of time spent in London and Washington, writing history books and working as a journalist for British and American newspapers. That makes me an exotic political spouse by Polish standards, though until 2015 most people were curious about me rather than angry. I never experienced any direct anti-Semitism, never felt any hostility; when I published a Polish cookbook--intended, among other things, to overturn negative stereotypes about Poland outside the country--the reaction inside Poland, even among Polish chefs, was largely positive, if a little bemused. I also tried quite hard to stay out of politics, mostly avoiding Polish television except to speak about my books. But after Law and Justice won, negative articles about the government began appearing abroad--and I was blamed. 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 theinternational 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. Similar stories appeared on state television's evening news broadcast, along with another, wholly invented story about how the Law and Justice Party had gotten me fired from a job that I didn't have. Eventually they stopped writing about me: negative international press coverage of Poland finally grew much too widespread for a single person, even a single Jewish person, to coordinate all by herself, though naturally, the theme recurs on social media from time to time. During my husband's European election campaign, some of his team were asked more questions about me and my "anti-Polish activity" than about him. Whether I like it or not, I am part of this story. When this all began, I felt a kind of déjà vu. I remembered reading a famous journal kept by the Romanian writer Mihail Sebastian from 1935 to 1944. In it, he chronicled an even more extreme shift in his own country. Like me, Sebastian was Jewish, though not religious; like me, most of his friends were on the political right. In the journal, he described how, one by one, they were drawn to fascist ideology, like a flock of moths to an inescapable flame. He recounted the arrogance and confidence his friends acquired as they moved away from identifying themselves as Europeans--admirers of Proust, travelers to Paris--and instead began to call themselves blood-and-soil Romanians. He listened as they veered into conspiratorial thinking or became casually cruel. People he had known for years insulted him to his face and then acted as if nothing had happened. "Is friendship possible," he wondered in 1937, "with people who have in common a whole series of alien ideas and feelings--so alien that I have only to walk in the door and they suddenly fall silent in shame and embarrassment?" In an autobiographical novel he wrote at the same time, the narrator offers friendship to an old acquaintance, from whom he is now divided by politics. "No, you're wrong," comes the response: "The pair of us can't be friends. Now or ever. Don't you get the smell of the land off me?" Today is not 1937. Nevertheless, a parallel transformation is taking place in my own time, both among the thinkers, writers, journalists, and political activists in Poland, a country where I have lived for three decades, as well as in the rest of the societies we have come to call the West. Everywhere, this transformation is taking place without the excuse of an economic crisis of the kind Europe and North America suffered in the 1920s and 1930s. The recession of 2008-2009 was deep, but--at least until the coronavirus pandemic--growth had returned. The refugee crisis of 2015-2016 was a shock, but it has abated. By 2018, refugees from North Africa and the Middle East had mostly stopped coming to Europe, thanks to deals done with Turkey by the EU and its mainstream politicians. In any case, the people I am writing about in this book were not affected by either of these crises. They are perhaps not all as successful as they would like to be, but they are not poor and rural. They have not lost their jobs to migrant workers. In Eastern Europe, they are not victims of the political transition since 1989, or of politics in any sense at all. In Western Europe, they are not part of an impoverished underclass, and they do not live in forgotten villages. In the United States, they do not live in communities ravaged by opioids, they do not spend much time in midwestern diners, and they do not, in fact, match any of the lazy stereotypes used to describe Trump voters at all--including some of the lazy stereotypes they have invented themselves. On the contrary, they have been educated at the best universities, they often speak foreign languages, they live in big cities--London, Washington, Warsaw, Madrid--and they travel abroad, just like Sebastian's friends in the 1930s. What, then, has caused this transformation? 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. Excerpted from Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism by Anne Applebaum All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.