Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism
by Anne Applebaum
View on GoodreadsApplebaum's part-memoir, part-analysis of how former liberal-democratic allies — many of them personal friends across Poland, Hungary, the UK, and the US — drifted into authoritarian apologetics.
Core ideas
- The "clerks" theory: every authoritarian regime needs credentialed intellectuals to launder its claims, and there's always a supply of ambitious, resentful, or disillusioned ones available.
- Nostalgia for a simpler past, especially racial or religious, is the connective tissue across otherwise different national movements.
- The conversion is rarely about new evidence; it's about social belonging and the appeal of a story in which the speaker is heroic rather than ordinary.
Published2020
Pages224
ISBN9780771005855
ReadOct 2022
