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.”

But the illiberal one-party state, now found all over the world—think of China, Venezuela, Zimbabwe—was first developed by Lenin, in Russia, starting in 1917. In the political science textbooks of the future, the Soviet Union’s founder will surely be remembered not just for his Marxist beliefs, but as the inventor of this enduring form of political organization.

Unlike Marxism, the illiberal one-party state is not a philosophy. It is a mechanism for holding power, and it functions happily alongside many ideologies. It works because it clearly defines who gets to be the elite—the political elite, the cultural elite, the financial elite.

The Bolshevik one-party state was not merely undemocratic; it was also anticompetitive and antimeritocratic. Places in universities, civil service jobs, and roles in government and industry did not go to the most industrious or the most capable: they went to the most loyal.

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.”

Why should different parties be allowed to compete on an even playing field if only one of them deserves to rule?

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 those who become the one-party state’s gatekeepers, the repetition of these conspiracy theories also brings another reward: power.

Over a crackly video link between Australia and Poland, 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.

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.” Nevertheless, unity is a chimera that some will always pursue.

Above all, the old newspapers and broadcasters created the possibility of a single national conversation. In many advanced democracies there is now no common debate, let alone a common narrative. People have always had different opinions. Now they have different facts. At the same time, in an information sphere without authorities—political, cultural, moral—and no trusted sources, there is no easy way to distinguish between conspiracy theories and true stories.

Gerson, a former George W. Bush speechwriter who is another person now estranged from former colleagues, describes the views of his former friends like this: “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.

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. The propaganda—the photographs of Putin paying homage to an icon of Our Lady of Kazan, for example, or the incorporation of religious services into his inaugurations—worked on Buchanan, who became convinced that Russia was an ethnic nationalist state of a sort superior to America, which he describes with disgust as a “multicultural, multiethnic, multiracial, multilingual ‘universal nation’ whose avatar is Barack Obama.”

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