Anne Applebaum is an American journalist with academic aspirations - who won her spurs writing about the excesses of Stalinism in the borderlands which Timothy Snyder describes in Bloodlands (2014). She is a quintessential member of the “Anywhere” tribe – globetrotting between her American, London and Polish bases – and her latest little book The Twilight of Democracy – the seductive lure of authoritarianism (2019) starts, not untypically, with a party in her converted Polish castle to celebrate the new millennium. But these days many of those present at the event of 20 years ago no longer even speak to her - because they have become hardened nationalist ideologues. Who is it, she wonders, who has changed? Her or them?
The few who are still speaking to her are clear it is her….but she tells a different tale.
I was prepared to dislike the book but was won over by the chatty tone it adopts to the very serious issue of the rightward drift of Europe and America over the past quarter of century. Julien Benda was a French writer of the early part of the 20th century who wrote a famous book “The Treason of the Intellectuals” (1927) chastising right-wing intellectuals for their role in bringing France to its knees….(Mark Lilla has a good article here on the book) And Applebaum uses the same device - with caustic vignettes of erstwhile “friends” in all three countries. The basic idea is the one set out by Keynes in his famous quote about
"Madmen
in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some
academic scribbler of a few years back".
She might have explored this more systematically and suggested clear criteria to identify the key "scribblers" - falling back instead on those who just happened to be in her own and her husband’s gilded circle. The result is an entertaining, if risky, endeavor….Indeed, I don't think I;ve seen such a public falling out of the elite since Nobel-prizing-winning Elias Canetti's memoir "Party in the Blitz - the English years years" - with the significant difference that he waited a decade before publishing his posthumous diatribe!
But what a pity Applebaum didn't deliver on the promise of her opening quotation from Fritz Stern's marvellous book on "The Politics of Cultural Despair"... despite her apt quotations from the likes of Roger Scruton – whose “England, an Elegy” (2000) is as good an example of cultural despair as you will ever find….Nor does she even mention Sebastian Haffner whose “Germany – Jekyll and Hyde – an eye-witness account of life in Germany” (and even more his raw posthumous “Defying Hitler”) is a stunning account of how easily ordinary Germans took up the opportunities offered when Jews were suddenly in early 1933 evicted from their flats and jobs
It was, of course, the Dreyfus case which got the French right-wing forces marshalled - and Emile Zola's J'Accuse which disbanded them (at least until 1940). The question these days is where is our Zola? An Australian economist who reckons that a third of us have an authoritarian streak (although no references are given). The "authoritarian personality” was a major focus of academic interest in the immediate post-war period not only with Hannah Arendt (quoted) but, even more, Theodor Adorno - who doesn't however get a mention. I was introduced to political sociology in the early 1960s by a Romanian, Zevedei Barbu who had produced in 1956 a book which drew on both social psychology and sociology - Democracy and Dictatorship – so I’m sorry that Applebaum fails to pay any attention to this notion of the “authoritarian appeal”.
Her take on it - such as it is - is that the world has become so complex that we crave order. Which begs more questions than it answers. But her judgement of her erstwhile “friends” – that they were driven by frustrated ambition – rings rather truer and might have led to a more systematic discussion (linking up, for example, with Haffner's insights)
Chapter four opens with an important discussion of the dramatic change which has taken place in the last two decades in the dissemination of news. For a more systematic discussion about this I suggest people should read “The Power and the Story - the global battle for news and information" (2019) by John Lloyd which looks at how authoritarian states and the market have dealt recently with journalists - starting with chapters on China and Egypt.
One of my tests for a book is to go to the end and look at the bibliography and index. I trust those authors who refuse to follow the dreadful academic tradition of listing every book they know on a subject - and who have the confidence, instead, to select a small number of books they recommend for the reader’s attention. Particularly if they then add a few explanatory notes about each of the books. And this article suggested that I should use the index to check that the chapter headings promised in the book’s Contents are actually followed. Applebaum’s book – unusually for such a writer - has neither a bibliography or index.
Other reviews of the book; https://quillette.com/2020/08/01/twilight-of-democracy-a-review/ - from John Lloyd no less, the Head of the Reuter’s Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford
https://artsfuse.org/207714/book-review-twilight-of-democracy-a-slim-investigation-of-the-clerks/
Further Reading; In the past decade, we have been deluged by hundreds of books on the decline of liberal democracy and the various threats it faces – very little of it worth much.
- The book I recommend as a guide through this confusion is David Runciman’s How Democracy Ends (2017) which uses the metaphor of a “mid-life crisis” to explore 4 different ways in which democracy might end – a coup; catastrophes such as ecological or pandemics; technological takeover; or “improved systems”. One of its nice features is embodying guides to other books in the text itself....
- Four Crises of American Democracy – representation, mastery, discipline, anticipation; Alasdair Roberts (2018) does look to be the best of the more detailed analyses of the deficiencies of the contemporary American system. Roberts produced recently the quite excellent "Strategies for Governing"
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I was not at all taken with ”The People
v Democracy – why our freedom is in danger and how to save it”; Yashka
Mounk (2018) but I’m biased since he worked for Tony Bliar’s Foundation.
- Empire of Democracy – the remaking of the West since the Cold War 1971-2017 by Simon Reid-Hentry (2019) was promising enough for me to buy it but was subsequently the focus of a brilliant and critical master-class review by historian Richard Evans (click title for that).It too has an index but no bibliography.
Autocratization turns viral (Democracy report 2021 - from V-Dem institute) gives a useful update of how democracy continues to slip globally…
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