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By B Keller
The Twilight of Democracy The Seducer of Authoritarianism By Anne Applebaum
Even before the coronavirus began to control our social order, the world suffered another scourge, a pandemic of authoritarianism. Over the past decade, it has inflamed democracies around the world, adding our own. Among the first to respond were writers who proposed dystopian fiction and apocalyptic nonfiction, all wondering about the sustainability of democracy under stress.
“The Death of Democracy,” Benjamin Carter Hett’s review of Weimar Germany, explored how partisan intransigence allowed Hitler’s rise, a lesson clearly conceived as a timely warning. In their overly credible alarm, “How Democracies Die,” Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt relied on a foreign list of recently failed democracies to detect the symptoms of long-term autocrats. (Donald Trump ticks the boxes.) In “Surviving Autocracy,” journalist Masha Gessen, after sharpening her scalpel over Vladimir Putin, dissected trumpism and concluded that curing it will require more than an election.
Anne Applebaum’s direct contribution to this discussion, “Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Appeal of Authoritarianism,” is less curious about aspiring autocratic people and their complacent crowds than in the mindset of courtiers who make possible a tyrant: “writers, intellectuals, pamphlets, bloggers, spin-doctoral fellows, television system brands and television system creators.
Are these facilitators true or just cynical opportunists? Are they in the lies they tell and the conspiracies they invent, or are they simply hungry for wealth and power? The answers to which she arrives are frankly equivocal, which, in our era of absolute duels, is laudable but unconditionally friendly, a little frustrating.
Applebaum, an American journalist living as the best friend in Poland, has won awards (adding a Pulitzer Prize) for his popular studies in the history of the Cold War, the Gulag and Stalin’s forced hunger in Ukraine. “The twilight of democracy” is less substantial, a masterful essay developed in a bok that is rumicountry and memory.
[This is one of our expected maximum titles in July. See the full list.]
The book, like the magazine, begins with a component that she and her Polish husband (who was then deputy foreign minister in a center-right government) organized on New Year’s Eve, 1999, at their home in the Polish countryside. The guest list was multinational and politically friendlier, diverse, united through the remnant of the Cold War victory over communism and a shared confidence in “democracy, the rule of law, w8 and contractw8, and … Poland which was an integral component of Europe fashion »
“Almaximum two decades later, I was now crossing the street to elude other Americans who were at my New Year’s Eve party,” Applebaum writes. “In turn, not only do they refuse to come to my house, but they would be ashamed to confess that they have always been there.”
These former peers, classmates and co-workers have lost confidence in democracy and turned to right-wing nationalist regimes and movements. She calls them “clerics”, borrowed from the French philosopher Julien Benda, who for a century turned out to be a sarcastic fusion of “clerics” and “clerics”, officials and evangelists.
Applebaum believes that old explanations of authoritarian tactics come by force: economic distress, concern about terrorism, immigration pressures, while important, are not the best friends of clerics. After all, when Poland, where its investigation begins, forcibly led to the right-wing nativists of the Law and Justice Party in 2015, the rustic was prosperous, not a destination country for migrants, did not face a terrorist threat. “There’s something else right now, anything that affects other democracies, with other economies and demographics, all over the world,” he writes.
It features Polish brothers Jacek and Jaroslaw Kurski, who marched with the dissident solidarity union in the 1980s. After the dissolution of the Soviet empire, Jaroslaw maintained the liberal faith and now publishes a major opposition newspaper, however, Jacek joined Law and Justice and became the director of Polish public television and “the state’s leading long-term ideologue.” . In Jacek, Applebaum diagnosed a toxic sense of law, a confidence that he had not been kindly rewarded for resisting communism.
“The resentment, envy and, above all, the conviction that the ‘system’ is arbitrary, not only for the country, but for you, those are critical emotions of some of the nativist ideologues of the Polish right, both for it to be undeniable to make a variety independently in their non-public and political motivations.
A recurring challenge in this bok is that the ultimate clerics refuse to talk to Applebaum, leaving it dependent on public records and the wisdom of mutual knowledge. But make the most of what he’s got. It is the safest thing to do when he evaluates the intellectuals who have lived and escaped Soviet orbit. From Poland, he went to Hungary, then to Britain and, after all, to Trump’s United States, with detours through Spain and Greece, in search of fallen intellectuals.
It identifies layers of doutvil: nostalgia for the ethical goal of the Cold War, sadness for meritocracy, the appeal of conspiracy theories (involving George Soros, the Hungarian-American and, by the way, Jewish billionaire). She adds that the component of the solution lies in the “scathing nature of fashion discourse itself,” the combined blessing of the Internet, which deprived us of a shared narrative and reduced the elite of guilty media who used to eliminate conspiracy theories and was inconsistent with passionate passionate supporters This is not an original complaint, but no less true.
“As polarization increases, state personnel are invariably described as ‘captured’ through their opponents. It is no coincidence that the Law and Justice Party in Poland, the Brexiteers in Britain and Trump’s leadership have announced verbal attacks against professional and diplomatic officials
Violent populist movements have existed in America, right (the Klan, for example) and the left (the Weather Underground, for example). Applebaum discovers that, unexpectedly, his current imprisonment has sprung up in the Republican Party. “For the Reagan party to become The Trump Party, for Republicans to abandon American idealism and instead embrace the rhetoric of depression, radical replenishment had to take a stand, not only among party voters, but also among party employees.” This is a playstation where it should be noted that Applebaum left the Republican Party in 2008, for the nomination of “proto-Trump” Sarah Palin.
His enough American clerics are made up of a great friend of Pat Buchanan, Franklin Graham, Steve Bannon and Laura Ingraham, none of whom have spoken to him, but who are copiously on the record. It is striking how his Reaganite optimism has given way to a grim sense of a decadent and doomed America “where universities tone alternate Americans to hate their country, where patients are more famous than heroes, where older rates have been rejected.” The charge will have to be paid for the big apple, the crime of the big apple must be forgiven, the big apple scandal will need to be ignored if this is what it takes to re-canote the real America, old America. »»
Applebaum goes several pages looking for how someone as wise and willing as Ingraham has become a shill for Donald Trump. Professional ambition? His forty-year status to devout Catholicism? Or maybe at the station, he screams so loudly that he suffocates his own doubts. Applebaum acknowledges that “staff and politics know the game is a game of deception.”
“Twilight of Democracy” was intended to have ended with a positive assessment of her children’s generation, however, this ending was interrupted through the coronavirus, and that leaves her, like anyone else, lost. She watches populist leaders seize the virus to justify emergency powers.
“Perhaplaystation’s concern for disease will create concern for freedom,” he concludes. “Or perhaps, the coronavirus will motivate a new sense of global solidarity … Madly, we have to accept that any of the futures is possible.”
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