Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

Applebaum notes that the “authoritarian-nationalist, antidemocratic wave” emerged in the past decade (55), not in 1989 with the fall of the Soviet Union when it might have been expected. She cites a Greek political scientist, Stathis Kalyvas, as saying that anti-democratic movements are the rule, not the exception. Since the fall of aristocracy, Applebaum argues, societies have tried to decide “who gets to rule—who is the elite” (59). Liberal democracy and capitalism now serve this purpose. Since they often leave people behind, Applebaum writes, some are “going to challenge the value of the competition itself” (59). She argues it is an issue not just for specific countries, but for democracies across the world.

Moving on to Britain, Applebaum describes how Boris Johnson, the future prime minister of Britain, used to write for the conservative English newspaper Daily Telegraph. For the newspaper, he deliberately wrote false stories about the bureaucracy of the European Union, for example claiming the European Union was going to try to ban double-decker buses. The stories about the European Union struck a chord with conservative English people who had “a nostalgia” for “a world in which England made the rules” (63). However, when he was mayor of London, Johnson would note that nobody in power wanted Britain to leave the European Union. Yet, later Johnson “supported Brexit with the same sunny insouciance, and the same disregard for consequences, that he had long demonstrated in his journalism and his personal life” (70). The fact that the voters’ referendum in 2016 decided in favor of leaving the European Union was a shock, even for Britain’s conservative Tory party, which had launched the campaign to leave. Poor leadership under the prime minister Teresa May kept Britain from staying in a European customs union or addressing the problem of the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland after Britain leaves the European Union.

Next, Applebaum discusses a distinction between two types of nostalgia made by the Russian writer and artist Svetlana Boym in her book The Future of Nostalgia. The first is reflective nostalgia, where people “study the past and even mourn the past, especially their own personal past” (74). However, unlike the second kind of nostalgia—restorative nostalgia—reflective nostalgia does not entail wanting the past back. People with restorative nostalgia actually want to restore the past. More precisely, they want to restore what they believe the past was (74-76). As an example, Applebaum discusses Rembrandt as Educator, a book by German art historian Julius Langbehn that displays what she terms “cultural despair”: “His book was permeated with nostalgia for a different, better time, a time when men were active and not passive, a time when great leaders could make their mark on the world” (77).

After the end of conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s tenure and the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, Applebaum argues, Tories felt assured that “Thatcher was right” (78). Although the later prime minister Tony Blair belonged to Britain’s liberal party, the Labour Party, Applebaum argues that he followed many of Thatcher’s ideas. However, Blair was unpopular with conservatives because he caused Britain to integrate economically with Europe and the rest of the world, gave more political independence to Scotland and Wales, and allowed citizens of Northern Ireland to hold passports to the Republic of Ireland (78-80). British conservatives like the philosopher Roger Scruton began to attack the European Union, even though Thatcher had supported it.

Applebaum argues that the British Tory party’s restorative nostalgia helped lead to Brexit, a political movement to separate Britain from the European Union. Conservatives like the Brexit supporter Dominic Cummings saw it as “the last chance to save the country, whatever it took, whatever price had to be paid” (88). However, while Brexit was hailed as a way to get rid of the European Union’s tyranny and restore British democracy, Brexiters “were disgusted by the actual democratic institutions of the United Kingdom in practice” (90). Other conservatives Applebaum knew, like Simon Heffer, voted for the UK Independence Party instead of the Tories (85). Meanwhile, both Brexiters and Labour Party members who opposed Brexit, like Jeremy Corbyn, hoped that Brexit would lead to a disruption of the country’s institutions (93-94).

Further, Applebaum notes, Brexiters became allies of undemocratic movements in other countries, including Hungary and Poland. Hungarian conservative organizations even recruited Brexiters like John O’Sullivan (96-98), who now works for the Hungarian government’s right-wing think tank, the Danube Institute (97). In Britain itself, Brexiters have talked about defunding Britain’s state-run media, the BBC, putting limitations on the courts, and making other changes to the government’s constitution (102-04).