Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

by Anne Applebaum

The novelist Ignazio Silone was exactly the age that I am now when he wrote “The Choice of Comrades,” an essay in which he tried to describe, among other things, why he was still engaged in politics, despite so many disappointments and defeats. Silone had joined and left the Communist Party; he may, some believe, have first collaborated with fascism before rejecting that too. He had lived through wars and revolutions, had been under illusions and then been disillusioned, had written as both an anti-Communist and antifascist. 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. He was also living in an era when people lived, as they do today, with both the far right and the far left, with different kinds of extremists all shouting at the same time. Many of his compatriots reacted by declaring that “all politicians are crooks” or “all journalists lie” or “you can’t believe anything.” In postwar Italy, this form of skepticism, anti-politics, and whatever-ism had even acquired a name, qualunquismo. Silone had seen the impact. “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...