Anne Applebaum’s new work, Twilight of Democracy, is a disconnected and overwrought pamphlet (50,000 words) with an alarmist title unsustained by the contents.1 It must be respected as the heartfelt fears of a capable historian of the Soviet Empire, a former assistant editor of the London Spectator, and a well-known commentator in Britain and the United States and also in Poland, where her husband is a former foreign minister. (I knew her at The Spectator, and as far as I am concerned, our relations remain at least civil, though we have publicly disagreed rather sharply on a number of the issues raised by this book.)
The organizing principle of the book is that there is a relationship between the evolution over twenty years of the composition of the author’s friends and the political drift in Poland, Hungary, the United Kingdom, and the United States over the same period, from which the author deduces that the world is succumbing to authoritarian impulses. It is the author’s opinion that she and her truest friends have remained faithful to an international liberal democratic viewpoint while many of her friends of twenty years ago have fallen away and become nationalist supporters of authoritarian leaders and regimes in the four countries highlighted. It is as if some diabolical force has been inserted into their breakfast cereal or their drinking water, something that induced dangerously anti-democratic permutations in their political perspectives.
There are several fundamental problems with
