Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

by Anne Applebaum

The same point is true of inequality and wage decline, another source of anxiety, anger, and division. Economics alone cannot explain why countries in different business cycles, with different political histories and different class structures—not just Europe and the United States but also India, the Philippines, Brazil—simultaneously developed a similar form of angry politics in 2015 to 2018. “The economy” or “inequality” does not explain why, at that exact moment, everybody got very angry. In a book called The Totalitarian Temptation, the French philosopher Jean-François Revel wrote that “capitalism is in deep trouble, no doubt about it. By the end of 1973 its medical report was looking more like a death notice.” This diagnosis, made forty years ago, sounds as if it applies to the present. And yet the impact of capitalism’s failures was somehow felt in 2016, not 1976.