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.

more recently, a mechanism that gives outsize influence to small groups of voters in a few states—the

Nevertheless, grim warnings about the influence of “Communism” retain an appeal for the right-wing ideologues of my generation.

all of them encourage their followers to engage, at least part of the time, with an alternative reality. Sometimes that alternative reality has developed organically; more often, it’s been carefully formulated, with the help of modern marketing techniques, audience segmentation, and social-media campaigns.

But in at least two European countries, Poland and Hungary, we now have examples of what happens when a Medium-Size Lie—a conspiracy theory—is propagated first by a political party as the central plank of its election campaign, and then by a ruling party, with the full force of a modern, centralized state apparatus behind it.

The emotional appeal of a conspiracy theory is in its simplicity.

Like the Polish government, the Hungarian state promotes a Medium-Size Lie: it pumps out propaganda blaming Hungary’s problems—including the coronavirus, which the country’s hospitals were ill-equipped to fight—on nonexistent Muslim migrants, the EU, and, again, George Soros.

special relationship being a phrase much used in London and barely mentioned in Washington, D.C. Tory

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.”

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.

Together they had fought against those who had been fascinated by Communism—and they had won. But once it was over there was a vacuum.

And only an ideologue could believe that Hungary’s European neighbors are annoyed by Orbán’s “Christianity.” In reality, they are annoyed by the cultivated xenophobia of the anti-Soros and anti-European campaigns, they are annoyed by the legal manipulations that have given the Hungarian prime minister nearly complete control of the press and the electoral process, and they are annoyed by his corruption and use of EU money to fund cronies. In the spring of 2020, they were outraged when Orbán used the coronavirus as an excuse to give his government near-dictatorial powers, including the power to arrest journalists who criticized the government’s response to the pandemic.

But he did respond to every question with some version of “whataboutism”—a rhetorical technique once made famous by Soviet officials, in which questions are answered by accusing the questioner of hypocrisy. To my queries about the Hungarian media—90 percent owned and operated by the government or by ruling party–linked companies—he answered that most U.S. media is “more favorable” to the Democratic Party, so the situation is similar. When I asked about the Hungarian government’s friendship with Russia, he asked whether Germany was really committed to the United States and NATO.

Britain’s place in the world, its role in the world, even its self-definition—who are the British? what kind of nation is Britain?—is up for grabs once again. In the new landscape created by the double medical and economic crises of 2020—and by Johnson’s own dangerous brush with the coronavirus—something very different may emerge.

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.

All kinds of wonderful things flowed from the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century: mass literacy, the spread of reliable knowledge, the end of the Catholic Church’s monopoly on information. But those same things also contributed to new divisions, to polarization and political change. The new technology made it possible for ordinary people to read the Bible, a change that helped inspire the Protestant Reformation—and, in turn, many decades of bloody religious wars. Martyrs were hanged, churches and villages sacked in a furious, righteous maelstrom that subsided only with the Enlightenment and the broad acceptance of religious tolerance. The end of religious conflict was the beginning of other kinds of conflicts, between secular ideologies and national groups.

It is not an accident that judges and courts are now the object of criticism, scrutiny, and anger in so many other places too. There can be no neutrality in a polarized world because there can be no nonpartisan or apolitical institutions.

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.

But all these changes—from the fragmentation of the public sphere to the absence of a center ground, from the rise of partisanship to the waning influence of respected neutral institutions—do seem to bother people who have difficulty with complexity and cacophony. Even if we weren’t living through a period of rapid demographic change, even if the economy were not in turmoil, even if there were no health crisis, it is still the case that the splintering of the center right and the center left, the rise in some countries of separatist movements, the growth in angry rhetoric, the proliferation of extremist and racist voices that had been marginalized for half a century would persuade a chunk of voters to vote for someone who promises a new and more orderly order.

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.

In 2019, a Michigan reporter uncovered a network of websites purporting to be local news sites. All of the sites had been set up at the same time, and they all looked like “normal” newspapers with familiar-sounding names: the Lansing Sun, the Ann Arbor Times, the Detroit City Wire. Each contained the same kinds of partisan stories—on how Michiganders support President Trump, for example—mixed in with stories about where to buy the least expensive gasoline. They had been designed, deliberately, to be pumped into hypercharged, conspiratorial, partisan echo chambers.

Cultural despair does not come easily to a nation that believed in the Horatio Alger myth and Manifest Destiny. Pessimism is an alien sentiment in a state whose founding documents, the embodiment of the Enlightenment, contain one of the most optimistic views of the possibilities of human government ever written.

Since 1776, some have always found the American project naive, frightening, oppressive, or false. Tens of thousands of Loyalists fled to Canada after the Revolution; the Confederate states seceded. For some, disappointment with America was so profound, and rage at America was so intense, that it led them to draw drastic conclusions and take drastic actions.

If the left located its gloom in the destructive force of capitalism, the power of racism, and the presence of the U.S. military abroad, the Christian right located its disappointment in what it perceived as the moral depravity, the decadence, the racial mixing, and above all the irreversible secularism of modern America.

Stranger still, a man who resisted false Soviet narratives for many decades fell hard for a false Russian narrative, created by Putin’s political technologists, that Russia is a godly, Christian nation seeking to protect its ethnic identity. Never mind that only a tiny percentage of Russians actually go to church, or that fewer than 5 percent say they have ever read the Bible; never mind that Russia is very much a multiethnic, multilingual state, with a far larger Muslim population than most European countries; never mind that Chechnya, a Russian province, is actually governed by sharia law, or that its government forces women to wear veils and tortures gay men; never mind that many forms of evangelical Christianity are actually banned.

These groups and movements were also inspired by a conviction that democracy is worthless, that elections cannot bring real change, and that only the most extreme and desperate actions can stop the decline of a certain vision of America.

2016, some of the arguments of the old Marxist left—their hatred of ordinary, bourgeois politics and their longing for revolutionary change—met and mingled with the Christian right’s despair about the future of American democracy. Together, they produced the restorative nostalgic campaign rhetoric of Donald Trump.

Trump had railed against American failure, and called for a solution Trotsky would have appreciated: “You know what solves [this]? When the economy crashes, when the country goes to total hell and everything is a disaster. Then you’ll have…riots to go back to where we used to be when we were great.”

Trump has no knowledge of the American story and so cannot have any faith in it. He has no understanding of or sympathy for the language of the founders, so he cannot be inspired by it. Since he doesn’t believe American democracy is good, he has no interest in an America that aspires to be a model among nations.

If everybody is corrupt and always has been, then whatever it takes to win is okay. This, of course, is the argument that anti-American extremists, the groups on the far-right and far-left fringes of society, have always made. American ideals are false, American institutions are fraudulent, American behavior abroad is evil, and the language of the American project—equality, opportunity, justice—is nothing but empty slogans.

The 1992 Kimball wrote that “the disintegration of faith in reason and common humanity leads not only to a destruction of standards, but also involves a crisis of courage.” The 2019 Kimball compared Democratic members of Congress to “that angry mob which sided with Barabbas in front of Pontius Pilate”—a statement that implicitly equates Trump with Jesus.

For at some point her Reaganite optimism disappeared and slowly hardened into the apocalyptic pessimism shared by so many others. This can be found in much of what she says and writes nowadays: America is doomed, Europe is doomed, Western civilization is doomed. Immigration, political correctness, transgenderism, the culture, the establishment, the left, the “Dems” are responsible.

The use of the word liberation, the direct equivalence drawn between Saddam Hussein, a man who carried out mass murders, and the democratically elected American governors, who were trying to keep their citizens safe from an epidemic—these were not the thoughts of someone who has faith in American democracy.

The history of ancient Egypt looks, from a great distance in time, like a monotonous story of interchangeable pharaohs. But on closer examination, it includes periods of cultural lightness and eras of despotic gloom. Our history will someday look that way too.