Totalitarianism: the symptoms are already there, now we have to find the disease

In the years just before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, people from the entire political spectrum in Europe celebrated a remarkable victory. They felt a common goal and often forged personal friendships. But over the next few decades, the euphoria evaporated, and the common goal gradually disappeared. Extremism increased and eventually friendships soured.

In her book Twilight of Democracy – The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends Anne Applebaum describes this history in an unusual way by tracing the life courses of individuals who were caught up in the public events of the last decades. When politics becomes polarized, which side do you choose? If you are a journalist, intellectual, or opinion leader, how do you deal with the re-emerging authoritarian or nationalist ideas in your country? When your political leaders appropriate history, invent conspiracies, or erode the media and the legal system, how do you relate to that?

Twilight of Democracy is an essay that combines the personal and the political in an original way by an author who can count many relevant people in the US, the UK and (Central and Eastern) Europe among her relations. That makes the book very special. Applebaum's work has long focused on anti-democratic trends in Europe. She was one of the first journalists to sound the alarm about Russian interference in the 2016 US elections.

Some quotes

The people I write about in this book may not be as successful as they would have liked, but they are not poor or provincial. They have studied at the best universities, often speak several languages, they live in big cities – London, Washington, Warsaw, Madrid – and travel a lot.

Many of them were friends with whom we had celebrated the start of the new millennium, and are now opponents, supporters of authoritarian politicians. What has caused this change? Were those friends always secret supporters of authoritarian political movements? Or have they changed during the last two decades?

There is no single explanation, nor do I intend to develop a grand theory or a universal solution. But there is a theme:

Given the right circumstances, any society can turn against democracy.

In fact, if history is anything to go by, all our societies will sooner or later.

An authoritarian predisposition, a predisposition that favors homogeneity and order, can be dormant without manifesting itself openly. The opposite, a 'libertarian' predisposition, a predisposition that favors diversity and differences, can also be dormant. Stenner's definition of authoritarianism is not political, and is not the same as conservatism. Authoritarianism simply appeals to people who cannot tolerate complexity: this instinct has nothing to do with "left" or "right." It distrusts people with different views. It is allergic to heated debates. Whether people who are afflicted with this instinct base their political views on Marxism or nationalism is irrelevant. It is a Mindset, and not a collection of opinions.

The New Right does not want to preserve the existing. In continental Europe, the New Right shows contempt for Christian Democracy, which used its political base in the church to found the EU after the nightmare of World War II. In the United States and Britain, the New Right has broken with the old-fashioned Burkean "little c" conservatism that is suspicious of any kind of change. Although they hate the name, the New Right is more Bolshevik than Burkean: these are men and women who want to overthrow, circumvent or undermine existing institutions. They want to destroy what exists.

This book is about this new generation of intellectuals and the new reality they are creating, starting with some of them I know in Eastern Europe, and then moving on to the different, but parallel, story of Britain, another country with which I have close ties, to end with the United States, where I was born. with a few stops elsewhere. The people I describe range from nationalist ideologues to intellectual political essayists. Some of them write sophisticated books, others launch viral conspiracy theories. Some are genuinely motivated by the same fears, the same anger, and the same deep desire for unity that motivates their readers and followers.

Some have been radicalized by furious encounters with the cultural left, or disgusted by the weakness of the liberal center. Some are cynical and instrumental, using radical or authoritarian language because it brings them power or fame. Some are apocalyptic, convinced that their societies have failed and need to be reconstructed anyway. Some are deeply religious. Some enjoy chaos, or try to cause chaos as a prelude to a new order. All are seeking to redefine their nations, rewrite social contracts and, in some cases, change the rules of democracy so that they never lose their positions of power. Some of them were once my friends.

Monarchy, tyranny, oligarchy, democracy – all these ways of organizing a society were already known to Plato and Aristotle more than two thousand years ago. But the illiberal one-party state that we now find all over the world (think China, Venezuela, Zimbabwe) was first developed by Lenin in Russia, starting in 1917. In the textbooks on political science, the founder of the Soviet Union will undoubtedly be remembered as the inventor of this form of political organization. It is this model that many contemporary autocrats use.

Unlike Marxism, the illiberal party-state is not a philosophy. It is a mechanism to maintain power and it functions smoothly with various ideologies. It works because it defines very clearly who will belong to the political, cultural and financial elite. In the monarchies of pre-revolutionary France and Russia, the right to rule lay with the aristocracy, which defined itself through strict codes of procreation and etiquette. In modern Western democracies, at least in theory, the right to rule is granted on the basis of various forms of competition: campaigning and voting, meritocratic exams that determine access to higher education and the civil service, and free markets. Old-fashioned social hierarchies still play a role, but in modern Britain, America, France and, until recently, Poland, most people assumed that democratic competition is the right and most efficient way to allocate power. The most attractive and competent politicians must govern. The institutions of the state – the legal system and the civil service – must be occupied by qualified people. The competition between them must take place on a playing field where everyone has equal opportunities, in order to guarantee a fair outcome.

Lenin's one-party state was based on several values. It overthrew the aristocratic order, but did not replace it with a competitive model. The Bolshevik one-party state was not only undemocratic, but also anti-competitive and anti-meritocratic.

Jobs in universities, civil service, and industry didn't go to the most diligent or capable people: they went to the most loyal. People were promoted not on the basis of talent or effort, but because they were willing to conform to the rules of the party. Although these rules were different at different times, they were consistent in certain respects: they usually excluded the previous elites and their children and considered ethnic groups suspicious. They favoured the children of the working class, but especially those who openly professed their faith in the party, who attended party meetings and who took part in public displays of enthusiasm.

Unlike an ordinary oligarchy, the one-party state allows upward social mobility: the true believers can get ahead – a prospect that attracted people who were excluded by the previous regime. Hannah Arendt observed the appeal of authoritarianism to people who were hateful or unsuccessful in the 1940s, when she wrote that the worst kind of one-party state "invariably replaces all first-class talents regardless of their sympathies with those idiots whose lack of intelligence and creativity is the best guarantee of their loyalty."

As I write this, two illiberal parties have a monopoly on power: Law and Justice in Poland and Victor Orbán's Fidesz party in Hungary.

Both parties have taken important steps to dismantle the independent institutions and both have showered their members with privileges. Law and Justice has changed the legislation on the civil service so that it has become easier to fire professionals and replace them with party members. The top managers of Polish state-owned companies have also been fired. People with experience in leading large organizations were replaced by party members and their friends and relatives.

Not everyone who was a dissident in the 1970s became a prime minister, a writer of bestsellers or a respected intellectual after 1989, and for many of them that has become a source of intense resentment. If you are someone who feels he deserves to rule, then you have a strong motivation to attack the elite, take over the courts, and distort the press to realize your ambitions. Resentment, envy and, above all, the belief that the system is "unfair" – not only to the country, but also to you – are important sentiments among the nationalist ideologues of the Polish right, where it is difficult to distinguish between their political and personal motives.

The emotional appeal of a conspiracy theory is its simplicity. Complex phenomena are explained out of the way. It offers the believer the satisfying feeling of having privileged access to the truth.

The principles of competition do not answer deeper questions about national or personal identity, even though they encourage talent and create upward mobility. They do not meet the desire for unity and harmony. But above all, they do not meet the desire of some to belong to a special community, to a unique community, to a unique community, to a unique community. Superior community. This is not just a problem for Poland, Hungary, Venezuela or Greece. It can occur in some of the oldest and most solid democracies in the world.

Karen Stenner's research on authoritarian predispositions leads to the conclusion that people are often attracted to authoritarian ideas because they suffer from complexity. They hate division. Diversity of opinions and experiences makes them angry. They are looking for solutions in a new political language that gives them a sense of safety and security.

It seems that an aversion to immigrants arises in a country, without that country having immigrants. Hungary has hardly any foreigners and yet the ruling party has managed to stir up xenophobia.

Immigration, inequality and decline in incomes are not sufficient explanations for the emergence of the new classes of political actors.

Beyond the resurgence of nostalgia, the disappointment with meritocracy, and the appeal of conspiracy theories, part of the answer may well lie in the contentious, cantankerous nature of modern discourse itself: the way we read, talk, and think about politics today.

The noise of discussions, the constant hum of disagreement, can irritate people who prefer to live in a society connected by a single narrative.

The dominance of national television broadcasters (the BBC in Britain and the three major broadcasters in the US) and the broad-based newspapers meant that in most Western countries there was usually a single national debate. Opinions were divided, but most people argued according to shared parameters.

That world has disappeared.

The old newspapers and broadcasters created the possibility of a single national conversation. In many advanced democracies, there is no longer a common debate, let alone a common narrative. People have always had different opinions. Today, they have several facts.

Modern democratic institutions, developed in an era with very different information technology, offer little comfort to those who are irritated by the dissonance.

Democracy has always been noisy and raw, but when the democratic rules of the game are followed, consensus eventually emerges. The modern debate does not do this. On the contrary. It gives rise to the desire in some people to silence the other by force.