Twilight Of Democracy

 

Anne Applebaum, “Twilight of Democracy:  The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism,” Doubleday, 2020

I read Charles Murray’s book Coming Apart two years ago.  Murray divided the entire population, especially America, into the cognitive elite vs. all-others.  Applebaum’s book Twilight of Democracy is concerned with just the elites, dividing the elites into the extreme left and right—neither talks to the other—but they do yell. She explains 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, authoritarianism is on the rise.  She contends that political systems with radically simple beliefs are inherently appealing, especially when they benefit the loyal to the exclusion of everyone else.  They use conspiracy theory, political polarization, social media, and even nostalgia to change their societies.  Anne Applebaum is an occasional guest on The Bulwark, a podcast I follow every week.

From Washington Post book review:

On Dec. 31, 1999, Anne Applebaum and her husband threw a New Year’s Eve party in rural Poland. In attendance were international journalists, Warsaw-based diplomats and friends from New York. But most of the partygoers were Polish friends and some colleagues of her husband, Radek Sikorski, who at the time was deputy foreign minister in the center-right Polish government. Polish journalists, civil servants and a couple of junior members of the government joined in the festivities. “You could have lumped the majority of us, roughly, in the general category of what Poles call the right — the conservatives, the anti-Communists,” Applebaum writes in her new book, “Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism.” “But at that moment in history, you might also have called most of us liberals. Free-market liberals, classical liberals, maybe Thatcherites [who believed] in democracy, in the rule of law, in checks and balances.  In the 1990s, that was what being ‘on the right’ meant.”

But two decades later, that celebration had come to reflect the shifting tides of history, as Eastern and Western societies have once again fallen prey, as Applebaum’s subtitle puts it, to the seductive lure of authoritarianism. Many of her guests have since joined forces with demagogues, and they no longer speak to those who have remained democrats. “I would now cross the street,” Applebaum admits, “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.” What led them to those decisions?

In “Twilight of Democracy,” Applebaum investigates the struggle between democracy and dictatorship, which seemed so discredited in Poland at the end of the Cold War. Her historical expertise and knowledge of contemporary Europe and the United States illuminate what is eternal and distinctive about the political perils facing us today. Applebaum, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of books on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, recognizes that history moves in cycles and exhibits certain patterns and tendencies, but, she argues, people have choices. She explores why important individuals, particularly intellectuals, make decisions that undermine democracy.

“Writers: pamphleteers, bloggers, spin doctors, producers of television programs, and creators of memes,” she writes, are crucial for demagogues to succeed because they “sell their image to the public.” Authoritarians “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.”

Drawing on the stories of historical figures and her former friends, Applebaum argues that the motivation in some cases is simply personal gain. In Eastern Europe, for example, she shows that intellectuals often teamed with demagogues in return for social status and material rewards.

Besides personal gain, Applebaum observes that “cultural despair” has pushed some intellectuals into the arms of demagogues. She draws on the work of German American historian Fritz Stern, whose 1961 book, “The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology,” argued that concern over Germany’s spiritual and national decay was an underlying force in the rise of Nazism. Applebaum notes that in the late 19th century, German art historian Julius Langbehn described the “democratizing” tendency as a cause of the dissipation of German culture. Similarly, in the United States today, right-wing intellectuals believe that Democrats and liberal elites present an existential threat to American national identity and Christian values. In Britain, Applebaum finds, the European Union “became a kind of fixation for nostalgic conservatives.” The notion of “Europe” became the embodiment of everything that “had gone wrong,” including “the mediocrity of British culture, the ugliness of modern capitalism, and the general lack of national vigor.” In Spain, intellectuals of the right-wing VOX party insisted that Christian civilization faced a looming threat from an “Islamic enemy.” Applebaum shows how such fears have led intellectuals to argue that any means — embracing corrupt, amoral leaders, attacking the judiciary and press, engaging in nepotism and corruption, accepting Russian money — justify the end of avoiding the apocalypse.

A third possible reason some intellectuals have fallen in with authoritarianism — a notion Applebaum considers but does not fully interrogate — is that many were never really democrats at all. During the Cold War, what united intellectuals on the right, like the guests at Applebaum’s party, may not have been their love of democracy but rather their hatred of communism. When communism collapsed, therefore, so did the ties that bound them together. Applebaum and the intellectuals with whom she stills feels a kinship did indeed hate communism because it was anti-democratic and anti-capitalist; but others on the right hated communism primarily because it crushed national identities, organized religion and traditional hierarchies. As it became clear that liberal democracy threatened these things as well, Applebaum’s former friends turned their backs on it, just as they had communism decades before.

To explain why average citizens prove susceptible to the lure of authoritarianism, Applebaum refers to the notion of an “authoritarian personality,” identified by the philosopher of totalitarianism Hannah Arendt. The person susceptible to authoritarian charms is, in Arendt’s depiction, “a radically lonely individual who, ‘without any other social ties to family, friends, comrades or even mere acquaintances, derives his sense of having a place in the world only from his belonging to a movement, his membership in the party.” This predisposed person innately “favors homogeneity and order and cannot tolerate complexity [and] is suspicious of people with different ideas.”

“Twilight of Democracy” offers many lessons on the long-standing struggle between democracy and dictatorship. But perhaps the most important is how fragile democracy is: Its survival depends on choices made every day by elites and ordinary people. “There is no road map to a better society,” Applebaum writes, “no didactic ideology, no rule book. All we can do is choose our allies and our friends with great care, for only with them, together, is it possible to avoid the temptations of the different forms of authoritarianism.”

My Notes:

Pg. 14:  Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy.  Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all of our societies eventually will.

The Constitutional Convention of 1787 created the Electoral College as a means of ensuring that a man with what Hamilton called ‘talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity’ could never become president of the US.  Although it eventually became a rubber-stamp body with no power—and, more recently, a mechanism that gives outsize influence to small groups of voters in a few states—the electoral college was originally meant to be something quite different: it was designed as a kind of review board, a group of elite lawmakers and men of property who would select the president, rejecting the people’s choice if necessary, in order to avoid ‘excesses of democracy.’

Pg. 22: Monarchy, Tyranny, Oligarchy, Democracy—all of these ways of organizing societies were familiar to Plato and Aristotle.  But the illiberal one-party state, now found all over the world—think of China Venezuela, Zimbabwe—was first developed by Lenin, in Russia in 1917.  It is the model that many of the world’s autocrats use today. 

Unlike Marxism, the 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. 

Pg. 58f:  When people have rejected aristocracy, no longer believe that leadership is inherited at birth, no longer assume that the ruling class is endorsed by God, the argument about who gets to rule-- who is the elite—is never over. 

 Pg. 109:  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. 

Pg. 110ff:  After 1945 and the start of the Cold War, most conflicting points of view were confined to the center-left and center-right in the US with anti-communism as a shared belief, particularly extending to bi-partisan foreign policy.  With the fall of the Berlin Wall, partisanship (began to return and has now severely divided the nation). 

All kinds of wonderful things flowed from the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century: mass literacy, the spread of reliable knowledge, the end of the Catholic Church’s monopoly on information.  The new technology made it possible for ordinary people to read the Bible, a change that helped inspire the Protestant Reformation—and, in turn, many decades of bloody religious wars that subsided only with the Enlightenment and the broad acceptance of religious tolerance.

We now are again living through a rapid shift in the way people transmit and receive political information—exactly the sort of communication revolution that has had profound political consequences in the past: radio (Hitler and FDR).  However, even though people have always had different opinions, now they have different facts.  A time now with few trusted sources of information, there is no easy way to distinguish between conspiracy theories and true stories.    

Pg. 116:  Now with the splintering of the center right and the center left, the rise in some countries of separatist movements, the growth in angry rhetoric, the proliferation of extremists and racist voices that had been marginalized for half a century, now persuade a chunk of voters to vote for someone who promises a new and more orderly order, just like the olden days.  There are numerous recent examples of how this works.  The destruction of congressional bipartisanship in the US in the 1990s; the arrival of the conspiracy-minded Law and Justice Party in the center of Polish politics in 2005; the Brexit vote in 2016: all of these polarizing moments radicalized a part of the population in their respective countries. 

Pg. 140f:  Viktor Orban, Hungary’s leader, is the only leader of a European country to have shut down an entire university, to have put academic bodies such as the Hungarian Academy of Sciences under direct government control, and to have removed funding from university departments that the ruling party dislikes for political reasons.  They have used a combination of political and financial pressure to put most of the private and public media under ruling-party control too.  Orban has stated that to accomplish these things it helps to have the support of the media.  But there is another group of Americans whose disgust with the failures of American democracy had led them to equally radical conclusions, and these also have an echo today.  If the left located its gloom in the destructive force of capitalism, the power of racism, and the presence of the US military abroad, the Christian right located its disappointment in what it perceived as the moral depravity, the decadence, the racial mixing, and above all the irreversible secularism of modern America.

Pg. 142:  With our 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.  The founders were not so certain and believe special measures were needed to prevent democracy from sliding back into tyranny. 

Pg. 144:  What really made American patriotism unique was the fact it was never explicitly connected to a single ethnic identity with a single origin in a single space.  Reagan’s city on a hill clearly evoked America’s founding documents and not American geography or an American race.  Reagan called on Americans to unify not around blood and soil but around the Constitution.

Pg. 148:  Both the left and the right are disappointed in American democracy.  The left locates its gloom in the destructive force of capitalism, the power of racism, and the presence of the US military abroad; the Christian right located its disappointment in what it perceived as the moral depravity the decadence, the racial mixing, and above all the irreversible secularism of modern America. 

Pg. 151:  Like those who live on the extreme edges of the American far left, some of those who live on the extreme edges of the far right have long been attracted to violence.  We had and have the Ku Klux Klan, Timothy McVeigh and Charleston shooter Dylan Roof.  In 2017 an Illinois militia set off a bomb at a Minnesota mosque in 2018, a man who believed Jews were plotting to destroy white America murdered eleven people at a Pittsburgh synagogue, and more.

Pg. 156ff:  Jeanne Kirkpatrick wrote that to destroy a society it is first necessary to delegitimize its basic institutions.  If you believe that American institutions are no different from their opposite then there is no reason to defend them.  The same is true of transatlantic institutions.  To destroy the Atlantic alliance, the community of democracies, 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.

Addenda:

Trump’s victory in 2016 was the victory of exactly this form of moral equivalence.  Instead of representing Reagan’s shining city on the hill, we are no different from the ‘killers’ of Putin’s Russia.  Instead of a nation that leads the citizens of democratic societies, we are ‘America First.’  Instead of seeing ourselves at the heart of a great international alliance for good, we are indifferent to the fate of other nations, including other nations that share our values.  Trump’s America First position is an indictment of America’s involvement in the world going back to the beginning of the twentieth century, an indictment of America’s involvement in two world wars and the Cold War, a return to the xenophobia and inward-looking isolationism of the 1920s, the era when Trump’s father was arrested for rioting with the Ku Klux Klan.

Trump has proven that beneath the surface of the American consensus, the belief in our founding fathers and the faith in our ideals, there lies another America—Trump’s America—one that sees no important distinction between democracy and dictatorship.  This America feels no attachment to other democracies; this America is not exceptional.  This America has no special democratic spirit of the kind Jefferson described.  The unity of Trump’s America is created by white skin, a certain idea of Christianity, and an attachment to land that will be surrounded and defended by a wall.  This America’s ethnic nationalism resembles the old-fashioned ethnic nationalism of older European nations.  This America’ cultural despair resembles their cultural despair.  This definition of America has always existed, the surprise is that it emerged in the political party that has most ostentatiously used flags, banners, patriotic symbols, and parades to signify its identity.  Republicans had to abandon Reagan’s idealism and adopt the rhetoric of despair.