Twilight of Democracy
The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism
(Sprache: Englisch)
"A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and journalist explains, with electrifying clarity, why some of her contemporaries have abandoned liberal democratic ideals in favor of strongman cults, nationalist movements, or one-party states. Across the world today,...
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"A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and journalist explains, with electrifying clarity, why some of her contemporaries have abandoned liberal democratic ideals in favor of strongman cults, nationalist movements, or one-party states. Across the world today, from the U.S. to Europe and beyond, liberal democracy is under siege while different forms of authoritarianism are on the rise. In Twilight of Democracy, prize-winning historian Anne Applebaum argues that we should not be surprised by this change: There is an inherent appeal to political systems with radically simple beliefs, especially when they benefit the loyal to the exclusion of everyone else. People are not just ideological, she contends in this captivating extended essay; they are also practical, pragmatic, opportunist. The authoritarian and nationalist parties that have arisen within modern democracies offer new paths to wealth or power for their adherents. Describing politicians, journalists, intellectuals, and others who have abandoned democratic ideals in the UK, U.S., Spain, Poland, and Hungary, Applebaum reveals the patterns that link the new advocates of liberalism and charts how they use conspiracy theory, political polarization, social media, and nostalgia to change their societies"--
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INew Year s Eve
On December 31, 1999, we threw a party. It was the end of one millennium and the start of a new one, and people very much wanted to celebrate, preferably somewhere exotic. Our party fulfilled that criterion. We held it at Chobielin, a small manor house in northwest Poland that my husband and his parents had purchased a decade earlier for the price of the bricks when it was a mildewed, uninhabitable ruin, unrenovated since the previous occupants fled the Red Army in 1945. We had restored the house, or most of it, though very slowly. It was not exactly finished in 1999, but it did have a new roof as well as a large, freshly painted, and completely unfurnished salon, perfect for a party.
The guests were various: journalist friends from London and Moscow, a few junior diplomats based in Warsaw, two friends who flew over from New York. But most of them were Poles, friends of ours and colleagues of my husband, Radek Sikorski, who was then a deputy foreign minister in a center-right Polish government. There were local friends, some of Radek s school friends, and a large group of cousins. A handful of youngish Polish journalists came too none then particularly famous along with a few civil servants and one or two very junior members of the government.
You could have lumped the majority of us, roughly, in the general category of what Poles call the right the conservatives, the anti-Communists. But at that moment in history, you might also have called most of us liberals. Free-market liberals, classical liberals, maybe Thatcherites. Even those who might have been less definite about the economics did believe in democracy, in the rule of law, in checks and balances, and in a Poland that was a member of NATO and on its way to joining the European Union (EU), a Poland that was an integrated part of modern Europe. In the 1990s, that was what being on the right meant.
As parties go, it was a little
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scrappy. There was no such thing as catering in rural Poland in the 1990s, so my mother-in-law and I made vats of beef stew and roasted beets. There were no hotels, either, so our hundred-odd guests stayed in local farmhouses or with friends in the nearby town. I kept a list of who was staying where, but a couple of people still wound up sleeping on the floor in the basement. Late in the evening we set off fireworks cheap ones, made in China, which had just become widely available and were probably extremely dangerous.
The music on cassette tapes, made in an era before Spotify created the only serious cultural divide of the evening: the songs that my American friends remembered from college were not the same as the songs that the Poles remembered from college, so it was hard to get everybody to dance at the same time. At one point I went upstairs, learned that Boris Yeltsin had resigned, wrote a brief column for a British newspaper, then went back downstairs and had another glass of wine. At about three in the morning, one of the wackier Polish guests pulled a small pistol out of her handbag and shot blanks into the air out of sheer exuberance.
It was that kind of party. It lasted all night, continued into brunch the following afternoon, and was infused with the optimism I remember from that time. We had rebuilt our ruined house. Our friends were rebuilding the country. I have a particularly clear memory of a walk in the snow maybe it was the day before the party, maybe the day after with a bilingual group, everybody chattering at once, English and Polish mingling and echoing through the birch forest. At that moment, when Poland was on the cusp of joining the West, it fel
The music on cassette tapes, made in an era before Spotify created the only serious cultural divide of the evening: the songs that my American friends remembered from college were not the same as the songs that the Poles remembered from college, so it was hard to get everybody to dance at the same time. At one point I went upstairs, learned that Boris Yeltsin had resigned, wrote a brief column for a British newspaper, then went back downstairs and had another glass of wine. At about three in the morning, one of the wackier Polish guests pulled a small pistol out of her handbag and shot blanks into the air out of sheer exuberance.
It was that kind of party. It lasted all night, continued into brunch the following afternoon, and was infused with the optimism I remember from that time. We had rebuilt our ruined house. Our friends were rebuilding the country. I have a particularly clear memory of a walk in the snow maybe it was the day before the party, maybe the day after with a bilingual group, everybody chattering at once, English and Polish mingling and echoing through the birch forest. At that moment, when Poland was on the cusp of joining the West, it fel
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Autoren-Porträt von Anne Applebaum
Anne Applebaum
Bibliographische Angaben
- Autor: Anne Applebaum
- 2021, 224 Seiten, Masse: 13,2 x 19,4 cm, Kartoniert (TB), Englisch
- Verlag: ANCHOR
- ISBN-10: 1984899503
- ISBN-13: 9781984899507
- Erscheinungsdatum: 17.07.2021
Sprache:
Englisch
Pressezitat
Named a BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR by The Washington Post and The Financial TimesThe book to buy for insight into what Trump s rise and rule really mean here and abroad for democracy in our time. NPR
How did our democracy go wrong? This extraordinary document . . . is Applebaum s answer. Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny
[Applebaum s] historical expertise and knowledge of contemporary Europe and the United States illuminate what is eternal and distinctive about the political perils facing us today. . . . Twilight of Democracy offers many lessons on the long-standing struggle between democracy and dictatorship. But perhaps the most important is how fragile democracy is: Its survival depends on choices made every day by elites and ordinary people. The Washington Post
Often sobering, sometimes shocking, but never despairing. . . . One of the many welcome aspects to [this] book is its acknowledgment that democracy, like any other form of government, is not forever. It cannot be a machine that would go of itself; it is a machine that, instead, goes only as long as its users care for it. Los Angeles Review of Books
There is no single reason that liberal democracy is in such a precarious state, Applebaum notes. Crisp, elegant prose. The Christian Science Monitor
Thought-provoking and gracefully written. The American Interest
If anyone is well placed to write about the global rise of authoritarian regimes and their polarization of society, it is Applebaum. The Arts Fuse An illuminating political memoir about the breakup of the political tribe that won the Cold War. Literary Review (London)
Engrossing. . . . This is a political book; it is also intensely personal, and the more powerful for it. The Guardian
[Applebaum] deploys the roles of both historian and hostess to impressive effect. A penetrating
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work of ethnography, a novel study of the intellectual tribe to which the author belongs. The Sunday Times (London)
The risk of twilight of our western democratic model, the uncertainty of what may follow a brighter dawn or a darker night require that all warnings be urgently considered. This book demands such consideration. The Irish Times
Critically important for its muscular, oppositionist attack on the new right from within conservative ranks and for the well-documented warning it embodies. [Applebaum s] views are especially welcome because she is a deliberate thinker and astute observer rather than just the latest pundit or politico. . . . A knowledgeable, rational, necessarily dark take on dark realities. Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
The risk of twilight of our western democratic model, the uncertainty of what may follow a brighter dawn or a darker night require that all warnings be urgently considered. This book demands such consideration. The Irish Times
Critically important for its muscular, oppositionist attack on the new right from within conservative ranks and for the well-documented warning it embodies. [Applebaum s] views are especially welcome because she is a deliberate thinker and astute observer rather than just the latest pundit or politico. . . . A knowledgeable, rational, necessarily dark take on dark realities. Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
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