[Book Review] The Twilight of Democracy.

More than one therapist has noted that victims benefit from their victimhood. Sympathy is the likeliest payoff: as long as people think you’re not too hard done by, they will lend an ear, a hand, maybe even some money. Gaining from your victimhood is one reason to prolong the circumstances, which is why victimhood is perpetual. You simply have to find the resolve to walk away; this involves not just removing yourself from the situation, but from your own personal identification with it. Such a move is legitimately hard, fully saying goodbye to your old self terrifying. Many converts simply sublate their own psychological complexes into a new shape, so militant atheists can become the most doctrinaire Catholics. It’s a way of changing without having to change. Facing up to your failings, how you played into the situations you were in, and why you stayed. That’s the difficult part.

Anne Applebaum’s Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and The Parting of Friends is a potted history of the international modern right, from the fall of the Soviet Union to Jan 6. Along the way Anne is our erstwhile guide. The cast covers continents: we meet the players from Poland, Hungary, Britain, and, most of all, the US. They were all Applebaum’s colleagues, acquaintances, friends; they met while organising the demise of the Soviet Union, smuggling money across the Iron Curtain. Now they find themselves on either side of an unbridgeable ethical divide. Applebaum stands for rationality, justice, objectivity, a neutral law; her friends convinced that their countries are in a twilight, that the ‘real America is disappearing’ or that ‘something essential about England was dead and gone.’ Where they started out as liberal democrats, committed to the rule of law and open competition, now they praise a mythical ‘organic community’ fostered by Fidez in Hungary, or the ‘Christianity’ Putin’s Russia. Witnessing all this is the baffled Applebaum. How could her old friends, people she wrote for, and supported, and partied with, how could they betray their principles?

We meet the players at the end of the 90s, at a party for the end of the millennium at Anne’s farmhouse in rural Poland. We meet the movers and shakers of the American right at a party — Bill Kristol, David Frum, Laura Ingraham are in attendance — we’re taken to boozy, old school, journalist lunches at the Spectator. At each of these was Applebaum, but it’s never really registered in the book Whatever transpired from those parties, she had no real part in it. That’s the subtext of the book. It wasn’t really her fault, so why are her friends mad at her?

An idea drilled into me during analysis is that our lives are shaped by avoiding issues or actions we would rather not face up to. What transpired over the period 1979-2016 was the rise of the liberal right. A group committed to competence, competition, and open markets. Call it neoliberalism. But also with the rise, came a fall. Inequality soared in countries which adopted neoliberal policies, wage growth fell far behind productivity growth; in parts of Britain (Wales, the North East) real incomes haven’t grown for twenty years. Outsourcing the state to private companies deprived governments of the capacity to act, even when they had democratic mandates to change things.

The book features many portraits of individuals. We meet Simon Heffer (her old editor at the Spectator), Boris Johnson, David Frum, Anita Gargas, Maria Schmidt, Daniel Hannan, Laura Ingraham. One positive of the book is how it skillfully weaves their trajectories. But they remain individuals; no wider story is told. There is some risable pop psychology about ‘authoritarian personalities,’ but nothing about how these are activated, or how we could spot them. It’s almost as it Applebaum can’t bear to tell a wider story, a story she would have to narrate her part. The Applebaum’s of the world act as if ideology is akin to a mathematical proof, or assembling an imaginary hoover. That if we get the Ideas correct, then we cannot be wrong. There is no use in an idea if you do nothing with it; knowledge is fundamentally about action, and how we legitimate ourselves to each other. The characters in this play went mad because of the failure of ideas, not because history ‘activated’ their authoritarianism.

In the end we are left simply with the observation: everyone Ann Applebaum used to know has gone mad.