Book Review and Summary - 'Twilight of Democracy' by Anne Applebaum
The following piece, written by PhD researcher Andrew P. Keltner, is not only a timely short summary of one of the best books on authoritarianism written in the past five years, but is as well, the book review for GCAS’s upcoming Peer Review Journal release on Authoritarianism and Power.
The book Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and The Parting of Friends by Anne Applebaum is the most recent installment in the journalists and authors oeuvre. Applebaum’s work has focused primarily on the rise of anti-democratic politics in Europe and most recently, the united States. Before Twilight of Democracy, she wrote Gulag: A History, which won a Pulitzer Prize, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eatern Europe, 1944-1956, and Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine. She is also known for being one of the first journalists to raise awareness about Russia’s involvement in the 2016 elections. Before continuing the review, it should be noted that some people reading this might know the book as Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Allure of Authoritarianism, which it is known of in the uSA (and I am not sure of elsewhere) and has roughly thirty-five additional pages in comparison to the version which I found in Romania — which has fewer pages and a different title, which at this point I have not been able to make rhyme or reason of.
The book’s opening quote is from Julien Benda in his book La trahison des clercs, or The Treason of the Intellectuals, and states: “Our age is indeed the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds. It will be one of its chief claims to notice in the moral history of humanity.” This is important to note in that it is the central concept of Benda’s work, and for Applebaum in her book. That concept being: ‘clerc’ — a neologism coming from the words ‘clerk’ and further back, ‘clergy’. As Applebaum paraphrases for Benda, the:
“...far-right and far-left idealogues who sought to promote either ‘class passion,’ in the form of Soviet Marxism, or ‘national passion’ in the form of fascism, and accused them both of betraying the central task of the intellectual, the search for truth, in favor of political causes.” (pg. 18)
The first chapter New Year’s Eve begins with a memoir-esque writing style in which she describes, obviously, a New Year’s Eve party she held in Poland on the Eve of 1999, or Y2K. She goes into detail about the rather political groups of people, from foreign diplomats to Polish government officials, among an assortment of journalists, socialites, etc. I believe you get the picture. The reason for this set-up is for the audience to understand the community of people with whom Applebaum was engaged at the time, many of whom, as the title of the Romanian version suggests, were friends with whom she ‘parted ways’. Of those people, over time, Applebaum began to see a tendency to shift towards more authoritarian values. For practical reasons, Applebaum uses the definition of authoritarianism as: “...nothing intrinsically ‘left-wing’ or ‘right-wing’....It is anti-pluralist. It is suspicious of people with different ideas. It is allergic to fierce debate.” (pg. 16)
This definition, seemingly, is partly understood by the research of behavioral economist Karen Stenner who found that roughly one-third of a country's population has an authoritarian predisposition. From this premise, Appelbaum begins her book’s appeal to demonstrate that authoritarianism is not a political attitude nearly as much as it is one that is built on nostalgia, misinformation, and competition, among others.
The second chapter, How Demagogues Win, tells of the rise of right-wing politics from the early 2000s into the present day in Poland, Hungary, and, partly, the united Kingdom, with of course, references to other moments and places in history. What Applebaum asks us to consider is the modern illiberal state. A type of political system which is not based on any philosophy, but is based on the maintenance of power. Of course, given her past, she mentions how this illiberal state, now mostly publicly understood as existing in Venezuela, China, and Zimbabwe, was originally based on Leninist thinking. One of the best lines in the book is: “... the new right is more Bolshevik than Burkian: these are men and women who want to overthrow, bypass, or undermine existing institutions, to destroy what exists.” (pg. 20).
This sentiment then gets further reiterated by how the new right in the uK viewed Margeret Thatcher in her dealings over the Falkland War. Mentioning “that act of defiance, that determination to be the decider and not just the negotiator, that really won their admiration” (pg. 64). This feeling of nostalgia, back to a British Empire, which existed before Thatcher, and continues to exist today is one of the biggest reasons that right-wing authoritarianism happens. Which further exists, as she describes, in the uSA where a nostalgic form of isolationist, capital-based, anglo-centric culture is based — Make America Great Again type rhetoric.
However, before Brexit and the rise of both left and right authoritarianism, we read of Applebaum’s recording of how these similar things first occurred in Poland and Hungary. While living in Poland Applebaum tells us of an occurrence, called the Smolensk Tragedy, in which then Polish President, Lech Kaczyński, who had been part of a rise in rightist politics and founder of the Law and Justice Party, died in an airplane crash. While the cause of the crash remained a bit of a mystery, the interesting thing that occured in the media and with the help of Lech Kaczyński’s brother Jarosław Kaczyński, was that the right-wing government used this mystery to fuel radical doubts, unfounded at the time and to this day, which gave them an upper hand in the media and the public. We can think of an extremely mischievous and cynical type of propaganda that has the intent to undermine truth, which in other words can be considered a nefarious endeavor.
Further, we see that this is not the only occurrence in which a crisis or small tragedy was used for rightist politicians to assume media control in an effort to both create propaganda and then pacify the people so that politics might be implemented. We can think of Orban and the Christian Democratic Party created a ‘fake’ immigration crisis, silenced academics, and created a scare amongst Hungarians about the loss of ‘Hungarianness’, and anything anti- George Soros, as Applebaum suggests. I believe in both instances of Poland and Hungary she is convincing in her analysis of how those parties and politicians functioned to distribute information that they could manage into policy.
Knowing this, Applebaum moves onto Chapter 3 The Future of Nostalgia, which really starts to highlight a lot of the commonly understood problems we see in contemporary politics, and of which were briefly mentioned before. One of the first glances she gives us is of her experience in seeing her friends start to actively challenge the ideas of western liberalism. While this in itself is not a bad thought project to undertake and certainly one that is worthwhile for the practical and philosophical inquiry, the sake of something for itself only, in the case of authoritarian behavior is not practical or philosophical. The way Appelbaum sees the political and intellectual shift is one much less based on raising questions, but one much more based on convincing people there is a truth outside of the mainstream contemporary politics. What it seems to construct is a world wherein centrism is quite radical. One of the political, philosophical, and historical truths that is brought up in Chapter 3 is that the ancient Greeks equally saw civil war and civil peace as parts of the democratic process. While this is true, and we must take this as a naturally occurring part of historical development, it should be noted that when these clercs, or propagandists, act, they seem to be doing so in bad faith. That is, they are not exactly sure what they are doing, but act as if the reason for their actions will lead to something, they only do not know what. This is best exposed on page 63 wherein the author describes times around right-wing politicians in the uK would make inside jokes that by some outside accounts might seem over the top. However, as Applebaum states: “the irony never ended.” Of course, this might be seen as just pure humor, but one has to ask as well: ‘if everything was simply a joke, then what did they take seriously?’
Perhaps there was no reason for them to take anything seriously as long as they could be convincing. If you can be the jester, then the opponent loses power. What it shows, I believe, is a high sense of security and confidence to be able to work so effortlessly and only through folly to win the places they did. Now, this is the right-wing side of the spectrum. Very different from what we see on the left hand side, who seems to be a much more radically serious group. Either way, the extreme of being too serious or too lackadaisical should not be underestimated in getting people to believe what you have to say.
However, back to the topic of nostalgia. And more importantly, nostalgia and aesthetics, which seems to be a huge part of right-wing propaganda and is majorly influenced by conservative philosopher Roger Scruton, who in his book England: An Elegy wrote that his book was to: “pay a personal tribute to the civilization that made me and which is now passing from the world” (pg. 82). This image-making of the pastoral world of the uK seems like a dream that was corrupted by outside forces, whether it be the uSA, China, or other European countries. The problem with Scruton’s view is that these beautifully bucolic pasts hardly existed with the quantity in which some people would like to believe. Sure, there was peace and beauty, but we oft forget that people died of preventable diseases, women in childbirth, water was not clean, not to mention some of the civil rights that did not exist. The main problem with this nostalgic type of thinking is that it makes a non-achievable world seem like it was a past reality, and if real-world problems can be reversed somehow, then the world might go back to that way. But of course, we cannot all live in this utopian farmland. It cannot exist. This is the point I think most right-wing followers might find the most difficult thing to understand.
Now, if the past is a problem for the conservatives, then the future is the problem of the leftists. Who often thinks that following a dogmatic political organization, based on Leninism and what Applebaum tells us, is not Marxism. For, as in Chapter 4 Cascades of Falsehood, Applebaum again refers to Karen Stenner when describing authoritarian predispositions and how those might look in the 21st Century. For it should be noted that both writers do not see an authoritarian predisposition 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 make them angry. They seek solutions in new political language that makes them feel safer and more secure.” (pg. 106).
This is an important quote to understand, because, while the past paragraphs have focused on the political tendencies of the right-wing, we have only briefly glanced over how authoritarianism finds itself in the left-wing. To begin, it is mentioned numerous times throughout the book that this rise in right-wing politics that started in the 1990s and gained traction in the 2000s was more of a reaction to communist politics that existed in the decades before. The reactionary politics and the development of right-wing authoritarianism is an answer to left authoritarianism. Then, those against newly-formed right-wing models are seen as either leftist sympathizers, or in the least, against central ideas to right-wing politicians such as nationalism, isolation, ethnocultural heritage, etc. The arguments that come from these different ideas lead to: “[I]nstead of hearing the harmony of the world, we have heard a cacophony of sounds, an unbearable static in which we try, in despair, to pick up on some quieter melody, even the weakest beat” (pg. 116). Which was stated by Polish novelist, Olga Tokarczuk during her speech upon receiving the Nobel Prize in 2019.
This ‘cacophony’ of sounds leads to the new generation of clercs in their positions being able to “reach people who want simple language, powerful symbols, clear identities. There is no need, nowadays, to form a street movement in order to appeal to those of an authoritarian predisposition” (pg. 117-118). What is much more common now is the use of computers and anonymous accounts being able to reach whomever they choose given their skill set allows them to do so. This new form of ‘clerc-ing’ and the ability for very little of those with technology seems to properly give us the next chapter of the book Prairie Fire, which is an accurate title to describe it.
Much of Chapter 5 is dedicated to the issues of how both rightist and leftist politics have gained momentum in the last half decade, roughly. Applebaum addresses that “the most despairing, the most apocalyptic visions of American civilization usually came from the left” (pg. 145). The chapter's title Prairie Fire is a reference to the book Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism by the Weather Underground, a leftist organization most influenced by Leninist-Maoist belief systems. They, roughly 50 years ago, started the American trend to believe that the only future was a complete reset and total change from classical liberal democracy. What is funny here is that they are not alone, in fact, the group of people that most likely agree with them on such terms like ‘the uS system being rotten to the core’ and like-minded beliefs is actually not their more moderate leftists, but in fact much more agreed upon by the Christian far-right, paleoconservatives, they can be called. A politics of nationalism, christian ethics, regionalism, and traditional conservatism. A famous example is from Pat Buchanan, a former politician who worked under Nixon, Ford, and Reagan, in which he described the united States as a “multicultural, multiracial, multilingual, ‘universal nation’ whose avatar is Barack Obama” (pg. 151) as opposed to Russia, which was an “ethnic nationalist state of a sort superior to America” (pg. 151). This, then being juxtaposed to Emma Goldman, the anarchist writer and activist, roughly the larger portion of a century before who stated that the uS was a place where “...the American dream was a false promise and American itself a place of ‘sorrow, tears, and grief’—beliefs that led her, initially, to extreme forms of protest” (pg. 146).
What is hilarious here is that both sides, while hating each other, love politics derived from Russia! Of course, these are not the same Russias, they are the diametrically opposed Russias, but it is so funny to see that so much of America’s extreme political consciousness is based on the dichotomy of Russia when it comes to these extreme political groups!
We see this in how Trump’s right was in love with the strong arm of Putin and how their adversaries on the left were/are equally in love with Leninist, and Marxist, notions of how a state and economic system should be run. For example, when Trump made comments like: “[H]e’s running his country and at least he’s a leader...unlike what we have in this country (pg. 155).”; and “Putin is a killer, but so are we all…” (pg. 155). Applebaum then, as some do, the conclusion that in the uS:
“[I]f everyone is corrupt and always has been, then whatever it takes to win is okay.
This, of course, is the argument that anti-American extremists, the groups on the far-right and far-left fringes of society, have always made. American ideals are false, American institutions are fraudulent, American behavior abroad is evil, and the language of the American project—equality, opportunity, justice—is nothing but empty slogans….
….This form of moral equivalence—the belief that democracy is no different, at base, from autocracy—is a familiar argument, and one long used by authoritarians.” (pg. 155-156).
In Applebaum's story of uS history, she sees both the leftist and rightists as deciding to go after similar enemies, her example being the Weather Undergrounds and Trump's attacks on the Department of Justice, FBI, and CIA type of clerc-hood, all the while being clercs of their own prerogative. Applebaum quotes Jeane Kirkpatrick, Reagan’s UN Ambassador as stating: “To destroy a society it is first necessary to delegitimize its basic institution”, and “it is only necessary to deprive the citizens of democratic societies of a sense of shared moral purpose which underlies common identifications and common efforts” (pg. 156-157).
There, however, is something more troublesome about the manners in which these extremists operate and that is related to what I will reference as bad faith, in the Sartrian sense, but what Applebaum sees more as related to a form of despair. She uses two examples to sum her points in the second to last chapter. One is of a friend, Laura Ingraham, a former Fox personality, who sees the uS as a place where most institutions, if not all, are against what people on the right see as the real ‘old’ America. But on the other side, one of Applebaum’s friends from Poland recounted for her a story of his time as an advocate for the Stalinist regime in Poland, wherein he was at a university “...shouting from a tribune at some university meeting in Wrocław, and simultaneously felt panicked at the thought of myself shouting…. I told myself I was trying to convince [the crowd] by shouting, but in reality, I was trying to convince myself” (pg. 171). Something we can think maybe passed through Ingraham and like-minded extremist media personalities. This aptly titled chapter, while sharing its title with the Weather Underground, is even further back related to a quote from Mao Tse-tung, being: “a single spark can start a prairie fire”. The coincidence that these extreme political characters, currently, who are suffering from either bad faith, or cognitive dissonance, or something like the Dunning-Kruger effect, or a combination of the three should not be lost. The rational world, the moderate minds, are stuck between two sides who desire their form of authority to preside over all else.
Chapter 5, The Unending of History, starts with a story of pre-World War France in which a man named Alfred Dreyfus, a captain in the French army, was considered guilty of espionage as a double agent helping Germany. In fact, he was not a spy, the spy was another man, a major in the army. Dreyfus was court-martialed and punished with public humiliation. The fact, at the time, of whether he was guilty or not was so much understood by whether it was factual or not, but took on a much different demeanor. Dreyfus spoke German and was a Jewish man, those who were certain of his guilt used yellow journalism to make anti-semitic tropes and proto-memes to maintain what they thought was the truth. Meanwhile, it came to light that Dreyfus was in fact, not guilty, but what is interesting is that those people who were certain of his guilt did not change their minds once truth prevailed. Those who maintained his guilt later had members join the Vichy government and actively seek to destroy the lives of those who were their intellectual opponents.
Applebaum here uses her understanding of history, which she sees different from that one which is more commonly found in the uS, which she describes that because of “.... our unusual reverence for our Constitution, our geographic isolation, and our two centuries of relative economic success, modern Americans have long been convinced that liberal democracy, once achieved, was impossible to reverse” (pg. 142). However, as we are told, the founding fathers did not see things this way, they felt history was more circular and that tyranny might not be as far away as some would like to believe. For, as the author states “.... American history, to most modern Americans, does not feel circular. On the contrary, it is often told as a tale of progress, forward and upward, with the Civil War as a blip in the middle” (pg. 142).
This belief, the denial of right and wrong, on either side of the political spectrum, in an effort to hold tight to one’s political ideals, disregarding historical knowledge, is prevalent enough, for the author to believe that we are at a point in history not too dissimilar to that from what happened in France and the Dreyfus scandal.
With this bleak outlook, Applebaum leaves us finally with a note on nihilism, originally coming from the novelist Ignazio Silone, who wrote the book The Choice of Comrades. The author explains that in Silone’s book he mentions how many of his communist contemporaries in the 1950s said things along the lines of ‘all politicians are crooks’, ‘all journalists lie’. This is best understood as a form of nihilism, as Silone states “a disease of the spirit which can be diagnosed only by those who are immune from it or have been cured of it, but to which most people are quite oblivious since they think it corresponds to a perfectly natural mode of being: ‘That’s how it has always been; that’s how it will always be.’” (pg. 187-188)
Applebaum ends: “We always knew, or should have known, that history could once again reach into our private lives and rearrange them. We always knew, or should have known, that alternative visions of our nations would try to draw us in. But maybe, picking our way through the darkness, we will find that together we can resist them” (pg. 189)
Of course, it can be said that Applebaum’s book might not be the most didactic of ventures considering she bases a lot of her analysis on first-hand experiences. However, she is nonetheless convincing and summarizes quite well what a lot of other intellectuals and laypeople do have on their minds and from timely sources found in, primarily, Benda and Stenner. The naysayers of her analysis might very well be people who would disagree with her on political terms, but choose to attack her academically. From the book, some of the most important concepts are clercs, nostalgia, corruption, and nihilism. The mixing of these four gives us a rather meager view of the future, for example, a bureaucratic but ideologically radical political movement. People who work with paper, law, media, influence, all putting their efforts to appear intellectual, but picking and choosing when to do so with the intent to destroy the competition and win a monopoly on political attitudes and ways of being. Be it left or right politics, there is a cold political war on the grand scale and small battles all over between the two.