Anne Applebaum’s Twilight of Democracy: the Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends begins at her millennium party in Poland. Her guests were unified by their centre-right politics. However, in the decades since, they have followed very different political paths. Many of those friends chose to follow not the traditional ‘conservatism’ but ‘authoritarianism’, which values loyalty above all else (p17). Several of those who now espouse far right values refuse to speak to those who have remained democratic – and vice versa. Applebaum experienced this harshly in Poland (her husband is Radosław Sikorski, currently Polish Foreign Minister).
Narratives of justification
One such guest became obsessed with investigating the plane crash which killed Polish president Lech Kaczyński near Smolensk. The event was used by his Law and Justice party to create conspiracy theories that justified their cause, which became known as the “Smolensk lie” (p40).
Similarly in Hungary, the “Soros lie” (purporting that George Soros had encouraged Muslims to migrate to Hungary) was used by Viktor Orbán’s Hungarian Civic Alliance party (Fidesz) to whip up opposition to (non-existent) immigration (p47). Applebaum argued in vain with Orbán advisor Mária Schmidt who spread the Soros lie and (wrongly) maintained that Soros “owned” the US Democratic Party (p50).
Applebaum highlights Svetlana Boym’s two types of nostalgia – reflective and restorative. The former is innocent; the latter is used to reproduce a past which never existed (p75). These false reproductions of the past are often used to create imaginary enemies like immigrants or the current government.
As a committed European, it was hard for me to read Applebaum’s litany of Britain’s mistakes and lies leading up to Brexit (pp83-91). A common theme of the extreme right (and the left) was that Britain needed to be plunged into chaos to rediscover its backbone (pp92-93).
In Spain, the Catalan and Basque separatist movements were popular. The Vox party gained momentum with provocatively Trump-style anti-immigration politics in 2019, after calling to “Make Spain Great Again”.
US democracy under threat
On her homeland, the US, Applebaum quotes the Founding Fathers and Martin Luther King to reflect the optimism that American democracy was continually improving (p144). Despite challenges from anarchists, communists, and believers in a “Second Coming”, the USA continued its expected trajectory. But it was this mixture calling for reform who paved the way for Steve Bannon and then Donald Trump. In 2017, Trump delivered a speech in Warsaw. Referring to the WWII Warsaw Uprising, he said, “the West was saved with the blood of patriots… each generation must rise up and play a part in its defense” (p154).
Similarly to her millennium party guests, many of Applebaum’s American colleagues drifted to the far right, like Laura Ingraham, a Fox News presenter and Trump supporter (p171).
The outlook
Applebaum warns that we are in a dangerous time and must learn from history. The Dreyfus Affair in 1890’s France was a witch hunt which many educated and intelligent people justified. In the same way, 1990’s Poland tried to find a “lie” to justify Law and Justice’s actions (p178).
In the summer of 2019, there was another gathering of Anne’s friends. At this time Poland had blocked its borders to non-Poles.
Applebaum concludes with the hope offered by Italian politician and writer, Ignazio Silone. He says there is no road map to a better society, no didactic ideology, no rule book. All we can do is choose our allies and “comrades … with great care … to avoid … authoritarianism”. We cannot strive for a perfect system of government, but we must strive even in the dark (p188).
Postscript: On the plus side, Donald Tusk is now the centrist Prime Minister of Poland and Péter Magyar has replaced Orbán as Hungary’s Prime Minister. On the other hand, Trump is entrenching his position as dictator of the US, and Reform and Restore still poll large followings in UK.
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