Anne Applebaum and the right’s authoritarian turn

I bow to no one in my admiration of Anne Applebaum’s histories of Soviet terror in Ukraine and eastern Europe and her journalism on the struggle against Putin.

But her best book to my mind is her memoir Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends. It is an inside account of the rise of the new right in Europe, the UK and the US written in a tone of horrified astonishment.

Applebaum believed in free markets, free societies and the defence of the West. In other words, she was a conservative, at least she thought she was.

She then watched as cosnervatives she counted as friends and allies changed beyond recognition. They became the eager bootlickers of authoritarian movements in Poland or Hungary. Or they led the UK out of the EU. Or they deplored Donald Trump, and then saw which way the wind was blowing, and rushed to serve him.

Since I wrote this piece the world has grown darker still.

Putin has invaded Ukraine, and a meaner and crankier Trump is about to return to the White House. But if you want to understand how our crisis began, there is no more intelligent guide than Applebaum’s memoir. Here is what I said about it when it was published.

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Anne Applebaum can look at the wreck of democratic politics and understand it with a completeness few contemporary writers can match.

When she asks who sent Britain into the unending Brexit crisis, or inflicted the Trump administration on America, or turned Poland and Hungary into one-party states, she does not need to search press cuttings.

Her friends did it, she replies.

Or, rather, her former friends. For if they are now embarrassed to have once known her, the feeling is reciprocated.

Applebaum’s latest book, Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends, opens with a scene a novelist could steal.

On 31 December 1999, Applebaum and her husband, Radosław Sikorski, a minister in Poland’s then centre-right government, threw a party. It was a Millennium Eve housewarming for a manor house in the western Poland they had helped rebuild from ruins.