Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

by Anne Applebaum

Trump’s victory in 2016 was the victory of exactly this form of moral equivalence. Instead of representing the 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. “America has no vital interest in choosing between warring factions whose animosities go back centuries in Eastern Europe,” wrote Trump, or his ghostwriter, back in 2000. “Their conflicts are not worth American lives.” That’s not an indictment of the Iraq War. That’s 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.

And this is what Trump has proven: beneath the surface of the American consensus, the belief in our founding fathers and the faith in our ideals, there lies another America—Buchanan’s 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 this 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’s cultural despair resembles their cultural despair.

The surprise is not that this definition of America is there: it 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. For the party of Reagan to become the party of Trump—for Republicans to abandon American idealism and to adopt, instead, the rhetoric of despair—a sea change had to take place, not just among the party’s voters, but among the party’s clercs.

“It was cocktail hour on the opening day of the new, Republican-dominated Congress, and the long, chandelier-lighted parlor of David Brock’s town house in Georgetown was filling up with exuberant young conservatives fresh from events on the Hill.” That was the opening sentence, in 1995, of a New York Times Magazine cover story called “The Counter Counterculture.” The author was the late James Atlas, and one by one, he introduced a series of characters. There was young David Brooks, then of The Wall Street Journal editorial page. There was Brock himself, best known at the time for his vicious investigations into the personal affairs of President Bill Clinton. There were my friends David Frum—he is described as “a former Wall Street Journal editorial writer”—and his wife Danielle Crittenden, with whom, years later, I cowrote my Polish cookbook.

Laura Ingraham, who had been a clerk to Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas and was then an attorney at a tony law firm.

La trahison des clercs, parts of which later appeared as an introduction to a new English-language edition of Benda’s famous book.

“the ideal of disinterestedness, the universality of truth.”

How is a nation defined? Who gets to define it? Who are we? For a long time, we have imagined that such questions were settled—but why should they ever be?

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...

Because all authoritarianisms divide, polarize, and separate people into warring camps, the fight against them requires new coalitions. Together we can make old and misunderstood words like liberalism mean something again; together we can fight back against lies and liars; together we can rethink what democracy should look like in a digital age.