Twilight of Democracy

I
New 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

ANNE APPLEBAUM’s 2018 Atlantic article “A Warning from Europe” inspired this book and was a finalist for a National Magazine Award. After seventeen years as a columnist at The Washington Post, Applebaum became a staff writer at The Atlantic in 2020. She is the author of three critically acclaimed and award-winning histories of the Soviet Union: Red Famine, Iron Curtain, and Gulag, winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

The book to buy for insight into what Trump's rise and rule really mean here and abroad for democracy in our time."
Ron Elving, NPR

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.
Sheri Berman, Washington Post

An often sobering, sometimes shocking, but never despairing account of the rise of authoritarianism in the West.
Los Angeles Review of Books

Anne Applebaum is a leading historian of communism and a penetrating investigator of contemporary politics. Here she sets her sights on the big question, one with which she herself has been deeply engaged in both Europe and America: How did our democracy go wrong? This extraordinary document, written with urgency, intelligence, and understanding, is her answer.
Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny

Friendships torn. Ideals betrayed. Alliances broken. In this, her most personal book, a great historian explains why so many of those who won the battles for democracy or have spent their lives proclaiming its values are now succumbing to liars, thugs, and crooks. Analysis, reportage, and memoir, Twilight of Democracy fearlessly tells the shameful story of a political generation gone bad.
David Frum, author of Trumpocracy and Trumpocalypse

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