Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

by Anne Applebaum

In the years it was out of power, the leaders of Law and Justice and many of its supporters and

promoters slowly came to embrace a different set of ideas, not just xenophobic and paranoid but openly authoritarian.

Law and Justice won a slim majority in 2015,

improperly appointing new judges

Law and Justice took over the state public broadcaster—also

State institutions were another target.

they wrecked cultural institutions too.

Museum of the History of Polish Jews—an

There was very little pretense about any of this. The

decades of profound Polish-Jewish conversations and reconciliation—after thousands of books, films, and conferences, after

law curtailing public debate about the Holocaust.

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

Although they hate the phrase, the new right is more Bolshevik than Burkean: these are men and women who want to overthrow, bypass, or undermine existing institutions, to destroy

only two such illiberal parties have monopolies on power: Law and Justice, in Poland, and Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party,

in

Hun...

you can also describe it in positive terms: it represents the end of the hateful notions of meritocracy, political competition, and the free market, principles that, by definition, have never benefited the less

successful.

Since at least 2005, Poland has been led solely by presidents and prime ministers whose political biographies

began in the anti-Communist Solidarity movement.

Still there has been no retreat, no acknowledgment that the constant drumbeat of hatred might inspire another assassination.

Big Lie, the vast ideological constructs that were Communism and

fascism.

By contrast, the polarizing political movements of twenty-first-century Europe demand much

less of their followers.

In Hungary, the lie is unoriginal: It is the belief, now promoted by the Russian government and many others, in the superhuman powers of George Soros, the Hungarian Jewish billionaire who is supposedly plotting to destroy Hungary through the deliberate importation of migrants.

It suggests that Soros is the chief instigator of a deliberate Jewish plot to replace

white, Christian Europeans—and Hungarians in particular—with brown-skinned Muslims.

the Hungarian government has put Soros’s face on posters, on the floors of subway trains, and on leaflets, hoping that it will scare Hungarians into supporting the government.

Immediately, Macierewicz began to institutionalize the Smolensk lie.

And yet the decision to put a fantasy at the heart of government policy really inspired much of what followed.

Those who could accept this elaborate theory—could accept anything.

Anyone who professes belief in the Smolensk lie is by definition a true patriot—and thus qualified for a government job.

Medium-Size Lie:

nonexistent Muslim migrants, the EU, and, again, George Soros.

And it arose not because of mystical “ghosts from the past” but as the result of specific actions of people who disliked their existing democracies.

They disliked them because they were too weak or too imitative, too indecisive or too individualistic—or because they personally were not advancing fast enough within them.

There is nothing special, in this sense, about the lands between Moscow and Berlin.

The divide that has shattered Poland resembles

the divide that split Weimar Germany.

I visited Venezuela at the beginning of 2020 and was struck by the myriad ways in which it resembled not just the old Marxist-Leninist states, but also the new nationalist regimes.

More recently I have come to suspect that “democracy,” at least as an international cause, was far less important to a certain kind of nostalgic conservative than the maintenance of a world in which England continued to play a privileged role: a world in which England is not just an ordinary, middle-sized power like France or Germany; a world in which England is special—and perhaps even superior. That was part of why some of the nostalgic conservatives were always suspicious of the Single Market that Britain did so much to create.

there was no “Brussels mafia” forcing Britain to do things it didn’t want

But none of those advantages outweighed, in the end, the embarrassment and annoyance of having to negotiate regulations with other Europeans, a give-and-take process that did, of course, sometimes force the British to make concessions.

Nevertheless, America was a large partner, a global partner, a fitting partner for the exceptional English. If the Americans were keen on spreading democracy, then the English were happy to join them.

And he supported Brexit with the same sunny insouciance, and the same disregard for consequences, that he had long demonstrated in his journalism and his personal life. He went on telling jokes and stories.

He calculated that Brexit would lose.

But supporting it would, he thought, make him a hero among the Eurosceptic Tories whom his writing had done so much to cultivate.

The family farm,

for the nostalgic conservatives.