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.

They knew that any political system built on logic and rationality was always at risk from an outburst of the irrational.

Authoritarianism appeals, simply, to people who cannot tolerate complexity:

It is anti-pluralist. It is suspicious of people with different ideas. It is allergic to fierce debates. Whether

In the United States and the United Kingdom, the new right has broken with the old-fashioned, Burkean small-c conservatism that is suspicious of rapid change in all its forms. 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 what exists.

Arendt observed the attraction of authoritarianism to people who feel resentful or unsuccessful back in the 1940s, when she wrote that the worst kind of one-party state “invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”

These modern-day clercs understand their role, which is to defend the leaders, however dishonest their statements, however great their corruption, and however disastrous their impact on ordinary people and institutions. In exchange, they know that they will be rewarded and advanced.

Jacek Kurski is not a radically lonely conformist of the kind described by Hannah Arendt, and he does not incarnate the banality of evil; he is no bureaucrat following orders. He has never said anything thoughtful or interesting on the subject of democracy, a political system that he neither supports nor denounces. He is not an ideologue or a true believer; he is a man who wants the power and fame that he feels he has been unjustly denied.

And yet all of them depend, if not on a Big Lie, then on what the historian Timothy Snyder once told me should be called the Medium-Size Lie. To put it differently, all of them encourage their followers to engage, at least part of the time, with an alternative reality.

More to the point, it offered a means of defining a new and better elite. There was no need for competition, or for exams, or for a résumé bristling with achievements. Anyone who professes belief in the Smolensk lie is by definition a true patriot—and thus qualified for a government job.

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

Reflective nostalgics miss the past and dream about the past. Some of them study the past and even mourn the past, especially their own personal past. But they do not really want the past back. Perhaps this is because, deep down, they know that the old homestead is in ruins, or because it has been gentrified beyond recognition—or because they quietly recognize that they wouldn’t much like it now anyway. Once upon a time life might have been sweeter or simpler, but it was also more dangerous, or more boring, or perhaps more unjust.

Restorative nostalgics don’t just look at old photographs and piece together family stories. They are mythmakers and architects, builders of monuments and founders of nationalist political projects. They do not merely want to contemplate or learn from the past. They want, as Boym puts it, to “rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps.” Many of them don’t recognize their own fictions about the past for what they are: “They believe their project is about truth.” They are not interested in a nuanced past, in a world in which great leaders were flawed men, in which famous military victories had lethal side effects. They don’t acknowledge that the past might have had its drawbacks. They want the cartoon version of history, and more importantly, they want to live in it, right now. They don’t want to act out roles from the past because it amuses them: they want to behave as they think their ancestors did, without irony.

she reminded me that the “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.

Major demographic change—the arrival of immigrants or outsiders—is a form of complexity that has traditionally inflamed that authoritarian impulse, and it still does.

In Hungary, as Mária Schmidt acknowledged, there are scarcely any foreigners and yet the ruling party has successfully stoked xenophobia. When people say they are angry about “immigration,” in other words, they are not always talking about something they have lived and experienced. They are talking about something imaginary, something they fear.

Most of all, the dominance of national television broadcasters—the BBC in Britain, the three networks in the United States—and broad-based newspapers that relied on broad-based advertising revenues meant that in most Western countries, most of the time, there was a single, national debate. Opinions differed, but at least most people were arguing within agreed parameters.

Democracy itself has always been loud and raucous, but when its rules are followed, it eventually creates consensus. The modern debate does not. Instead, it inspires in some people the desire to forcibly silence the rest.

“A new and better age will not be inaugurated until the Second Coming of Christ, who is the only one capable of cleaning up the mess. No amount of human effort can hasten that day, or ultimately save a doomed world.” Until Judgment Day itself, in other words, there is no point in trying to make society better, and indeed it is probably going to get worse.

They conceived of the nation not as an ethnic clan but as the embodiment of a set of ideals: justice, honesty, objectivity, the neutrality of the courts.

the questions that lie at the center of this book: How is a nation defined? Who gets to define it? Who are we?

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.’ ”

Because all authoritarianisms divide, polarize, and separate people into warring camps, the fight against them requires new coalitions.