Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Totalitarianism
By Anne Applebaum
Vintage Books (Paperback), 2021
In an easily digestible yet extremely informative 192 pages, journalist Anne Applebaum analyzed the growth of anti democratic governments in Europe and the United States since the end of the Cold War. She explored the root causes of this phenomenon and how it manifested itself through a series of case studies, assessing how selected individuals transitioned from “center right” players in functioning pluralist systems to populist warriors comfortable with authoritarian rule. Some were well known – Boris Johnson, Laura Ingraham – others not as much. Given that Applebaum (and her husband) ran in the same social and political circles as her subjects, “Twilight of Democracy” provided an insider’s view of their evolution, complete with sad tales of friendships strained and lost. But by keeping her primary focus on the elites, Applebaum missed an opportunity to explore their relationship to the unseen millions of common people who either share or shape their views to determine the true leaders of this movement.
Applebaum explored the broad roots of neo-totalitaranism - nostalgia, the desire for simplicity, the reliance on conspiracy theories to create simplicity - and then examined narrower factors that drove her protagonists - personal ambition, resentment at the success of others, belief that a meritocratic system is unfair or rigged, victimization, hatred of “wokeness” and marxism, ethno-nationalism and racism. Interestingly, most of this was that Applebauim’s subjects started out their adult lives at or near the top of the socioeconomic heap, like Poland’s Jacek Kurski, son of a scientist and a lawyer active in the Solidarity movement, noted Hungarian historian Maria Schmidt or Ingraham (Dartmouth, UVA Law, “white shoe” DC law firm). One might guess that their status makes their nostalgia “reflective,” i.e. they “dream about the past, study the past, even mourn the past..(but)..do not really want the past back.” (73)
And yet many of their supporters are “restorative” nostalgics who “want to live in a purposefully recreated past just as they think their ancestors did.” (74) These are also the people whose wrath Tucker Carlson feared when Fox News called Arizona for Joe Biden in 2020, who vote in every party primary and made Senator Thom Tillis fear losing his job if he did not support Pete Hegseth, who sent threatening communications to political opponents and who faithfully attended a Trump rally but booed when he mentioned COVID vaccines.
So, who were the leaders, the elite or the masses? In the aftermath of the 2020 Arizona call, Ingraham texted Carlson and Sean Hannity "we have more power than we know or exercise” (NPR) but Trump stopped mentioning the COVID vaccine, a real triumph for his first administration, in response to the “base’s” negative response. Exploring this relationship in more detail would have made “Twilight of Democracy” a fuller, more compelling read, but Applebaum still deserves great credit for her work, using her status as a member of the "center right" elite and taking something most Americans see as a purely domestic issue and putting it in global and historical contexts.