Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

by Anne Applebaum

An authoritarian sensibility is unquestionably present in a generation of far-left campus agitators who seek to dictate how professors can teach and what students can say. It is present in the instigators of Twitter mobs who seek to take down public figures as well as ordinary people for violating unwritten speech codes. It was present among the intellectuals turned spin doctors of the British Labour Party who prevented any challenge to Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, even as it became clear that Corbyn’s far-left agenda would be rejected by the country. It was present among the Labour activists who first denied and then downplayed the anti-Semitism that spread within the party too. But although the cultural power of the authoritarian left is growing, the only modern clercs who have attained real political power in Western democracies—the only ones operating inside governments, participating in ruling coalitions, guiding important political parties—are members of movements that we are accustomed to calling the “right.” They are, it is true, a specific kind of right, one that has little in common with most of the political movements that have been so described since the Second World War. British Tories, American Republicans, East European anti-Communists, German Christian Democrats, and French Gaullists all come from different traditions, but as a group they were, at least until recently, dedicated not just to representative democracy, but to religious tolerance, independent ju...