What is Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism about?

Anne Applebaum opens Twilight of Democracy with a party she and her husband hosted on New Year's Eve 1999, celebrating the new millennium with a hundred friends and colleagues in Poland. By 2019, when she began writing this book, half of those people were no longer speaking to her — estranged not by personal quarrels but by politics. Many had moved toward authoritarian nationalist parties in Poland, Hungary, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The book is an attempt to understand how that happened.

Applebaum's central argument is that authoritarian movements attract a particular psychological type she calls the "clerisy" — educated, ambitious people who feel that meritocracy has failed to give them the status they deserve, and who find in nationalist-authoritarian politics a new hierarchy in which loyalty to the leader is rewarded regardless of talent. She identifies this pattern across Europe and America, tracing it through specific individuals she has known: journalists who became propagandists, intellectuals who found late meaning in nostalgia, politicians who discovered that conspiracy theories moved voters more reliably than policy.

The book is partly a work of political analysis and partly a personal essay. Applebaum reflects on the breakdown of her own friendships and the ideological evolution of people she once regarded as principled conservatives. She argues that the nostalgia driving much authoritarian politics is not for a real past but for an imagined one — one in which the clerisy occupied its rightful place and the disruptions of pluralism, immigration, and cultural change had not yet arrived. Authoritarian leaders, she argues, are skilled at channeling that nostalgia into political energy.

At roughly 180 pages, this is a lean and relatively focused book. Applebaum is not attempting a comprehensive theory; she's tracing a specific social and psychological dynamic through people she knows. The analysis is most persuasive when applied to the European cases she knows best — Poland and Hungary especially. Its application to American politics is less granular but follows similar lines. The honest admission that she is writing about friends and former friends gives the book an unusual texture: it is not a detached diagnosis but a reckoning.