“There should be no checks. There should be no balances."

Anne Appelbaum on Putin, Trump and the tyrannical wave

I was delighted to be joined on the Lowdown this week by Anne Applebaum, one of the best chroniclers of the rise of tyranny we have. You can listen here on Apple

Or here on Spotify

And if you don’t have either of those there are links to Amazon, and every other conceivable podcast provider here.

Anne has just released a sobering and brilliant book Autocracy Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. It shows in alarming detail how authoritarian regimes work together to suppress dissent and spread propaganda.

We talked about

• How dictators don’t see the regional or great power conflicts so beloved of academia. Rather they focus on the threat to their status and enormous wealth that liberal ideas bring.

• How Russia may be economically weak, but because it is prepared to use violence and subversion to an extraordinary degree, it can destabilise large parts of the world

• How we simply don’t know what is happening in Moscow and cannot say whether the regime is strong or close to collapse

• Why Trump became so pro-Putin

Below is a long read from me on Applebaum’s fascinating memoir The Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends.  She uses her personal experience to describe the movement of the worst elements of late 20th century conservatism from democracy to authoritarianism, Brexit and Trump.

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Anne Applebaum: how my old friends paved the way for Trump and Brexit

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 Hungary into a one-party state, 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. The company of Poles, Brits, Americans and Russians could say that they had rebuilt a ruined world.

Unlike the bulk of the left of the age, they had stood up against the Soviet empire and played a part in the fall of a cruel and suffocating tyranny. They had supported free markets, free elections, the rule of law and democracies sticking together in the EU and Nato, because these causes – surely – were the best ways for nations to help their people lead better lives as they faced Russian and Chinese power, Islamism and climate change.

They were young and happy. History’s winners. “At about three in the morning,” Applebaum recalls, “one of the wackier Polish guests pulled a pistol from her handbag and shot blanks into the air out of sheer exuberance.”