I enjoyed Anne Applebaum's perspective - as an American married to a Polish political figure, I think she has a unique view of not just politics in America but globally.

A lucid guide to the ways in which many advanced democracies have corroded, fractured, and devolved into corruption and factional infighting. Applebaum's position as a onetime centrist conservative makes her something of a unicorn in the current climate, able to remember a time as long ago as the late 1990s when the right was filled with optimism. But it also provides her with a clear vantage point of the frightening speed and ease with which her onetime comrades curdled into authoritarianism and vile conspiracy-mongering. Sharp political and historical analysis from an unusually personal perspective.

Timely, melancholic, and illuminating. Applebaum makes the political both personal and poignant – only wish these case studies had been longer, as I felt some of her connections and ruminations could have delved deeper and been tied together more cohesively at the end.

This is a disturbing book. It's meant to be disturbing. Many books have been written over the past few years examining the dark shifts taking place in the world's democratic countries."How Democracies Die," for one, and "The Retreat of Western Liberalism," for another. Applebaum's book covers similar ground but she brings something new and important to the subject.

Applebaum is a highly regarded, prize winning author and reporter. I'm most familiar with her from her writings for The Washington Post and The Atlantic. She is serious, smart, and perceptive. She is also, unlike so many other previous books on the topic, a conservative: a "McCain Republican," as she puts it, and she is profoundly dismayed by what that party, and others like it around the world, has become.

The book opens with a New Year's Eve gathering at her house in 1999 in Poland, where she and her husband live. The party is attended by numerous thinkers, writers, educators, diplomats, journalists, and such. Mostly conservative in their thinking and deeply committed to (and optimistic about) democracy, they entered the new millennium with shared confidence and hope.

Within the span of a few years, however, thing change. Applebaum finds she does not -- cannot -- talk to many of these same people who were her friends. She will even cross the street to avoid encounters, as they will to avoid her. Individuals who considered themselves as center-left or center-right were now spokesmen for or participants in authoritarian governments.

4.5 This is a disturbing book. It's meant to be disturbing. Many books have been written over the past few years (let's pick 2016 as a randomly chosen starting point) examining the dark shifts taking place in the world's democratic countries."How Democracies Die," for one, and "The Retreat of Western Liberalism," for another. Applebaum's book covers similar ground but she brings something new and important to the subject.

Applebaum is a highly regarded author and reporter. I'm most familiar with her from her writings for The Washington Post and The Atlantic. She is serious, smart, and perceptive. She is also, unlike so many other previous books on the topic, a conservative: a "McCain Republican," as she puts it, and she is profoundly dismayed by what that party, and others like it around the world, has become.

The book opens with a New Year's Eve gathering at her house in 1999 in Poland, where she and her husband live. The party is attended by numerous thinkers, writers, educators, diplomats, journalists, and such. Mostly conservative in their thinking and deeply committed to (and optimistic about) democracy, they entered the new millennium with shared confidence and hope.

Within the span of a few years, however, thing change. Applebaum finds she does not -- cannot -- talk to many of these same people who were her friends. She will even cross the street to avoid encounters, as they will to avoid her. Individuals who considered themselves as center-left or center-right were now spokesmen for or participants in authoritarian governments.

In trying to discern what factors led to this, the book covers a lot of ground, drawing examples from countries Applebaum has lived in and people she's known. She talks about toxic forms of nostalgia, and the urge to power, of cynical actors and manufactured apocalyptic visions, of bots and social media, corrupted courts and compliant political institutions, of "soft" dictatorship and "Medium-Size Lies," of fictitious conspiracies and the undermining of faith in institutions, of aggrieved senses of entitlement and arguments about how nations define themselves and who gets to contribute to the process of definition. In short, all the tools that can be brought to bear to crack open the fissures inherent in and necessary to democracy.

The book has so much power because Applebaum speaks as much from her heart as she does her head. The writing throughout is clear and engaging, as one would expect from a gifted journalist. It is filled with names that are familiar (who knew that Laura Ingraham once dated Donald Trump?) and unfamiliar. But mostly it is grounded in a warning that democracy is not guaranteed to last, that it must be protected. As Applebaum puts it, "Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all of our societies eventually will." It is on us to prevent this.

I can't recommend this important book enough.

The interesting thing to me in reading this book was the fact that the author has traveled in well-connected circles and knows intimately the political characters of whom she speaks. She bookends her account with two parties at her home in Poland, one at the New Year's Eve celebration in 1999, the second in the summer of 2019. Half of the people who attended the first party are no longer speaking to those who attended the second. Thus are the divisions of our times, not only in the USA. There are many revealing bits of late 20th-century/early 21st-century European history told as only an insider could divulge. The book gave me new ways to think about the slide toward authoritarianism and examples of how it has occurred fairly recently in , for example, Hungary and Poland. (The author is American but is married to a Polish government official and lives in Poland.) She clearly connects her examples to aspects of the current administration in the USA. Her political background is as a conservative Republican, which makes her dismay the more telling. The book was wonderfully well-written, which is what you'd expect from a Pulitzer-prize-winning author.
Many thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for my unbiased opinion.

Journalist and sometime historian, Ann Applebaum offers in this monograph her assessment of contemporary polarized politics in Europe and the United States. Like many from both sides of the political spectrum, she sees in the current state of affairs a dangerous drift towards authoritarianism. What makes this narrative different from many out there is that the author was once friends with many of those in Europe and the United States that now espouse an anti-democratic, stringently nationalist, and xenophobic politics. In this sense, one could describe this as an insider’s account, and certainly the author’s orientation and approach to the issue is markedly conservative, even as she disavows the hate mongering, nihilistic positions of the so-called alt right.

Rightly, the author notes that history has shown that authoritarianism is neither “intrinsically ‘left-wing’ or ‘right-wing.’” It attracts people from both sides of the political spectrum “who cannot tolerate complexity…It is anti-pluralist. It is suspicious of people with different ideas. It is allergic to fierce debates.” The author also associates the current right-wing drift toward authoritarianism with a restorative nostalgia, that is, a desire to recreate a caricature of the past, one that has only a minimal relationship to the real past with all its nuances and contradictions. Consequently, the proponents of this mythical past often advance conspiracy theories to explain its demise and what she terms “medium-sized lies” to advocate its return. They take advantage of new technologies and social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to target their message for a specific demographic. For example, to garner support for Brexit from British animal lovers, Brexit enthusiasts used Facebook’s targeted advertising opportunities to show them photographs of Spanish bullfighters.

The above insights are hardly new, but as noted earlier there is an intimate quality to her revelations that is absent in most monographs. Her discussions of the shifting views of Boris Johnson, Laura Ingraham, Mária Schmidt, and others includes accounts of former hobnobbing at parties with these individuals and painful personal breaks as former friends adopted extreme right views that brooked no disagreement. Readers may find such intimacy alluring, but they should be wary as it comes with its own cartoon-like nostalgia and ideological baggage.

Repeatedly the author waxes on about the Reagan/Thatcher era as emblematic of democratic government and fails to acknowledge the serious errors of these administrations. For example, one hears no mention of the Iran-Contra Scandal that took place during Reagan’s second term, not does the author mention the deleterious effects that his policy of deinstitutionalization had on mentally ill patients, their families, and communities. As for Thatcher, there is no mention of her endorsement of the violent suppression of striking miners. In short, the author seemingly commits the same sin of which she accuses authoritarian supporters: failing to acknowledge the nuances and complexities of all governments, including those she supported.

Perhaps these oversights could be overlooked if not for the ideological baggage with which they are accompanied. For example, the author claims when we speak of the “poor” or the “deprived” in the West, “it is sometimes because they lack things human beings couldn’t dream of a century ago, like air conditioning or wifi.” Apparently the author is unaware that 21 percent of children in the United States live in households with incomes below the federal poverty level or that 16 million children in this country struggle at some time during any given year with hunger. As for lack of access to the wi-fi/internet, although this may sound insignificant, in an increasingly connected world, lack of access places one at a distinct disadvantage economically, limiting the jobs one is qualified to fill.

Sadly, the ideological baggage that underpins this study does not end here. For example, the author writes: “In the past century and a half, the most despairing, the most apocalyptic visions of American civilization usually came from the left.” As proof, she discusses at length the nineteenth-century anarchist Emma Goldman who advocated violent resistance to capitalism and the 1970s Weather Underground. Undeniably both of these groups believed in using violence as a means to an end. Still, neither of these groups as had the long-term, nefarious impact that the racist, right-wing Ku Klux Klan (in its multiple incarnations) has had on American society. Yet, she provides no detailed discussion of the lynching campaigns or terror that members of this group perpetrated against African Americans. Instead, she claims, “There is no need to rehearse here the history of the Ku Klux Klan…or to describe the myriad of individuals and militia movements who have plotted mass murder and continue to plot mass murder, in the name of rescuing the fallen nation.” The result is a lopsided history of extremism in this country that leaves the reader wondering: What does democracy mean to the author, if she considers attacks on businesses and business leaders more “apocalyptic” than attacks on minorities, the marginalized, and the underrepresented? At best, it suggests that she is out of touch with the experiences of most Americans, who have neither direct access to leaders of the left or right, and who increasingly live in despair, worried that their children will not even have the few opportunities that they had. For this reason, despite some thought-provoking discussions, I cannot recommend this book.