Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

Applebaum discusses the history of the idea of American exceptionalism. She argues that American exceptionalism means that Americans have had a strong sense of optimism. This optimism was traditionally questioned by people on the left, like the anarchist Emma Goldman and the Weather Underground, a radical organization that wrote the treatise Prairie Fire, from which this chapter receives its title. Applebaum explains, “In their minds, America could not be special, it could not be considered different, it could not be an exception” (147).

In recent years, this attitude has been taken up by people on the right like the political commentator Patrick Buchanan. In Buchanan’s case, it was a sense of cultural despair and “a belief that America’s role in the world is pernicious, if not evil” (150). Applebaum argues that this new form of right-wing thought in the United States culminated in the presidential campaign of Donald Trump. Trump’s inaugural address exhibited both the right-wing evangelical concern about the moral state of the nation and a left-wing distrust of the establishment (153).

According to Applebaum, this rejection of American exceptionalism leads to a moral equivalence. This view “sees no important distinction between democracy and dictatorship” (158). Further, Applebaum argues that it has become the dominant rhetoric of the Republican Party in the United States. Applebaum describes her own “break” with the Republicans in 2008, when she saw the direction the Republicans were going in. This direction was exemplified by the political commentator Laura Ingraham, who abandoned what Applebaum describes as the optimism of Reagan for “apocalyptic pessimism” (165). Ingraham and the guests on her TV show have villainized leftists and the Democratic Party and have even been open to violence for political events (167). Applebaum sums up the attitude of people like Ingraham: “Any price should be paid, any crime should be forgiven, any outrage should be ignored if that’s what it takes to get the real America, the old America, back” (171).