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.

Hannah Arendt, the original philosopher of totalitarianism, identified an “authoritarian personality,” a radically lonely individual who “without any other social ties to family, friends, comrades or even mere acquaintances, derives his sense of having a place in the world only from his belonging to a movement, his membership in the party.”

Jacek—deprived of respect for so many years—finally got his revenge. Even after he formally stepped aside as television director—for some inside his party he began to go too far—he remains right where he thinks he should be: at the center of attention, the radical throwing Molotov cocktails into the crowd. His frustration, born of his inability to advance in a political system that favored rationality and competence, has now been overcome. The illiberal one-party state suits him perfectly; the uglier it becomes, the more fear he will inspire, the more power he will have. Communism isn’t available anymore as an enemy to fight. But new enemies can be found.

When people have rejected aristocracy, no longer believe that leadership is inherited at birth, no longer assume that the ruling class is endorsed by God, the argument about who gets to rule—who is the elite—is never over. For a long time, some people in Europe and North America settled on the idea that various forms of democratic, meritocratic, and economic competition are the fairest alternative to inherited or ordained power. But even in countries that were never occupied by the Red Army and never ruled by Latin American populists, democracy and free markets can produce unsatisfying outcomes, especially when badly regulated, or when nobody trusts the regulators, or when people are entering the contest from very different starting points. The losers of these competitions were always, sooner or later, going to challenge the value of the competition itself.

More to the point, the principles of competition, even when they encourage talent and create upward mobility, don’t answer deeper questions about national or personal identity. They don’t satisfy the desire for unity and harmony. Above all, they do not satisfy the desire of some to belong to a special community, a unique community, a superior community.

Nostalgics, the Russian artist and essayist Svetlana Boym wrote in her elegant book The Future of Nostalgia, come in two forms. Some are captivated by what she called the “reflective” nostalgia of the émigré or the aesthete, the nostalgia that appeals to collectors of yellowed letters and sepia photographs, the nostalgia of those who like old churches even if they never go to services. 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.

In order to manifest a sharp change in political affiliation, all you have to do is switch channels, turn to a different website every morning, or start following a different group of people on social media.

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.

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.

We have long known that in closed societies, the arrival of democracy, with its clashing voices and differing opinions, can be “complex and frightening,” as Stenner puts it, for people unaccustomed to public dissent. The noise of argument, the constant hum of disagreement—these can irritate people who prefer to live in a society tied together by a single narrative.

Berlin observed that not all of the things that human beings think are good or desirable are compatible. Efficiency, liberty, justice, equality, the demands of the individual, and the demands of the group—all these things push us in different directions. And this, Berlin wrote, is unacceptable to many people: “to admit that the fulfilment of some of our ideals may in principle make the fulfilment of others impossible is to say that the notion of total human fulfilment is a formal contradiction, a metaphysical chimera.”

The result is a hyper-partisanship that adds to the distrust of “normal” politics, “establishment” politicians, derided “experts,” and “mainstream” institutions—including courts, police, civil servants—and no wonder. As polarization increases, the employees of the state are invariably portrayed as having been “captured” by their opponents.

There can be no neutrality in a polarized world because there can be no nonpartisan or apolitical institutions.

If, in the past, most political conversations took place in a legislative chamber, the columns of a newspaper, a television studio, or a bar, now they often take place online, in a virtual reality where readers and writers feel distant from one another and from the issues they describe, where everyone can be anonymous and no one needs to take responsibility for what they say.

A generation of young people now treats elections as an opportunity to show their disdain for democracy by voting for people who don’t even pretend to have political views.

As Stenner puts it, “The more the messages conflict with one another, the angrier these people feel.”

The Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk expressed the same idea in the speech she gave upon receiving the Nobel Prize in 2019: “Instead of hearing the harmony of the world, we have heard a cacophony of sounds, an unbearable static in which we try, in despair, to pick up on some quieter melody, even the weakest beat.”

It wasn’t an ideology on offer, it was an identity: carefully curated, packaged for easy consumption, cued up and ready to be “boosted” by a viral campaign. All of its slogans spoke of unity, harmony, and tradition. Vox was designed, from the beginning, to appeal to people who were bothered by cacophony. It offered them the opposite.

This form of moral equivalence—the belief that democracy is no different, at base, from autocracy—is a familiar argument, and one long used by authoritarians.

Guns, weapons, even nuclear warheads were dangerous to democracies, but not nearly as dangerous as this particular form of cynicism: “To destroy a society,” she wrote, “it is first necessary to delegitimize its basic institutions.” If you believe that American institutions are no different from their opposite, then there is no reason to defend them. The same is true of transatlantic institutions. To destroy the Atlantic alliance, the community of democracies, she wrote, “it is only necessary to deprive the citizens of democratic societies of a sense of shared moral purpose which underlies common identifications and common efforts.”

For some people, loud advocacy of Trump helps to cover up the deep doubt and even shame they feel about their support for Trump. It’s not enough to express tepid approval of a president who is corrupting the White House and destroying America’s alliances. You have to shout if you want to convince yourself as well as others. You have to exaggerate your feelings if you are to make them believable.

As it turned out, people with fundamentally different backgrounds could get along just fine, because most people’s “identities” stretch beyond this simple duality. It is possible to be rooted to a place and yet open to the world. It is possible to care about the local and the global at the same time.

It is possible that we are already living through the twilight of democracy; that our civilization may already be heading for anarchy or tyranny, as the ancient philosophers and America’s founders once feared; that a new generation of clercs, the advocates of illiberal or authoritarian ideas, will come to power in the twenty-first century, just as they did in the twentieth; that their visions of the world, born of resentment, anger, or deep, messianic dreams, could triumph. Maybe new information technology will continue to undermine consensus, divide people further, and increase polarization until only violence can determine who rules. Maybe fear of disease will create fear of freedom.

Or maybe the coronavirus will inspire a new sense of global solidarity. Maybe we will renew and modernize our institutions. Maybe international cooperation will expand after the entire world has had the same set of experiences at the same time: lockdown, quarantine, fear of infection, fear of death. Maybe scientists around the world will find new ways to collaborate, above and beyond politics. Maybe the reality of illness and death will teach people to be suspicious of hucksters, liars, and purveyors of disinformation.

No political victory is ever permanent, no definition of “the nation” is guaranteed to last, and no elite of any kind, whether so-called “populist” or so-called “libera...

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.

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, 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.’