Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism.

• Author: Nash, Jonathan

Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

Anne APPLEBAUM

Doubleday Publishers, 2020, 224 pages, ISBN: 9780385545808

In her book, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, Anne Applebaum explores a political shift that many democracies face today. In her analysis of global democracies, Applebaum explains why authoritarianism is on the rise and how it is being welcomed by many. She argues that the world is becoming more authoritarian, and democracy is starting to slip, especially with the recent election of US President Donald Trump. Through her writing, Applebaum hopes to bring awareness to this phenomenon with the hope of recognizing it and resisting it.

Anne Applebaum is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, who has worked for several magazines and newspapers. These include The Spectator, The Evening Standard, Slate, The Daily and Sunday Telegraph, The Economist, The Independent, The Washington Post, and currently The Atlantic. Her career provides her with great access to the top decision-making circles both in Europe and the United States during critical times, including the fall of the Berlin Wall, or the Brexit referendum and its aftermath.

The book contains six distinct chapters that could exist as individual pieces. The first chapter serves as an introduction, by explaining how democracy rose up and is now starting to fall in Poland. She also introduces an essential theme of the book, individuals that she labels the new generation of "clercs," or "clerks" who assist in the disruption of democracy and support authoritarian policies. Both on the left and right, these pseudo- intellectuals undermine the core principles of democracy, "manipulate discontent" and serve as ideologies of the new, anti-democratic world. In her next chapter, Applebaum explains how anti-democratic sentiment can exist on both the far left and the far right. She gives the examples of Lenin's Soviet Union on the far left and Hitler's Nazi government on the far right. In this chapter, Applebaum mentions how clercs can use the media to spread narratives that assist the rise of authoritarianism. She earmarks Jacek Kurski, the director of state television in Poland, and how he used his media outlet to circulate conspiracy theories about communism. She compares him to his brother and tries to make the case that Jacek deliberately chose this darker path of conspiracy paddling, despite having the same upbringing as his brother who...