Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

by Anne Applebaum

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 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 the “excesses of democracy.”

Hannah Arendt, the original philosopher of totalitarianism, identified an “authoritarian personality,” 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.”

Authoritarianism appeals, simply, to people who cannot tolerate complexity: there is nothing intrinsically “left-wing” or “right-wing” about this instinct at all. It is anti-pluralist. It is suspicious of people with different ideas. It is allergic to fierce debates. Whether those who have it ultimately derive their politics from Marxism or nationalism is irrelevant. It is a frame of mind, not a set of ideas.

Authoritarians need the people who will promote the riot or launch the coup. But they also 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.

The emotional appeal of a conspiracy theory is in its simplicity. It explains away complex phenomena, accounts for chance and accidents, offers the believer the satisfying sense of having special, privileged access to the truth. For those who become the one-party state’s gatekeepers, the repetition of these conspiracy theories also brings another reward: power.

Unity is an anomaly. Polarization is normal. Skepticism about liberal democracy is also normal. And the appeal of authoritarianism is eternal.

“authoritarian predisposition” she has identified is not exactly the same thing 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 makes them angry. They seek solutions in new political language that makes them feel safer and more secure. What factors, in the modern world, might provoke people to react against complexity?

Major demographic change—the

Long divided by borders and history, some of the intellectuals and ideologues behind these new movements have now found a set of issues they can unite around—issues that work across borders and are easy to sell online. Opposition to immigration, especially Muslim immigration, both real and imagined, is one of them; promotion of a socially conservative, religious worldview is another. Sometimes, opposition to the EU, or to international institutions more generally, is a third.

If the left located its gloom in the destructive force of capitalism, the power of racism, and the presence of the U.S. 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.

It doesn’t take a weatherman to see which way the wind blows, and the winds blow off the high plains of this country, through the prairie and lighting a fire that will burn all the way to Washington in November.

He had seen the excesses of two different kinds of extremist politics. Still, he thought the struggle was worth continuing. Not because there was a nirvana to be obtained, and not because there was a perfect society to be built, but because apathy was so deadening, so mind-numbing, so soul-destroying.

Political regimes come and go,” he wrote, but “bad habits remain”—and the worst habit is nihilism, “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.’

The liberalism of John Stuart Mill, Thomas Jefferson, or Václav Havel never promised anything permanent.