Twilight of Democracy: A Book Review

 Around the world, the crisis of liberal democracy has become one of the issues that most attracted the attention of intellectuals, opinion leaders, politicians, and citizens. The bibliography on these topics is extensive. In our opinion, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Allure of Authoritarianism, the latest book of the Pulitzer Prize-winner Anne Applebaum is one of the most successful and suggestive analyses of the contemporary crisis of Western liberal democracies. The rise of authoritarian leaders and regimes is an issue that should concern all of us. Throughout these pages, Applebaum clearly and concisely exposes the pitfalls of electing leaders with populist and violent profiles. The despotic chiefs do not obtain the power alone. For this reason, they need the support of political allies. The bureaucrats that administrate the State, and the media workers who oversee inflating and taking care of their image.

Based on the reflections of essayist and political philosophers such as Cicero, Julien Benda, Hannah Ardent, and Ignazio Silone; Anne Applebaum traces the attitudes of the supporters of antiliberal ideas that use conspiration theories, the aggressivity on the social media, and the polarization to redefine the ideals of the nation. The first chapter, titled New Year’s Eve is a narrative of situations in which we are involved in daily life: losing friendships for politics. In How Demagogues Win, the author explains the strategies taken by the extremists to manipulate and control the media and the voters to earn power. For instance, sticks out examples of this way to make politics are the cases of Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Boris Jhonson in the United Kingdom, the Polish party Law and Justice, and undoubtedly the case of Donald Trump in the United States. By the way, the Polish American journalist foregrounds the La trahison des clercs, a book written by the French novelist Julien Benda, translated to English as The Treason of the Intellectuals. In this essay, Benda complained about some of their colleagues being extremely nationalist and xenophobic. The Future of Nostalgia is a meditation on the crisis of democracy that is not an isolated problem and cloistered in the Eastern Europe of the USSR. On the contrary, it is a global problem.

From Greece, history seems to repeat itself in a circular motion. Currently, there is a liberal democracy, but then there can be an oligarchy, and then there can be a liberal democracy. So, there may be subversion from abroad, or there may be a coup, a civil war, a dictatorship, or perhaps an oligarchy again. It will be so because it has always been, since the original Athenian republic (Applebaum, 2021, p. 61).

Chapter four Cascades and Falsehoods tries to explain the reasons that the people in the Western hemisphere are so upset if they are living in countries where famine is non-existent, and the basic goods are practically assured. These feelings sometimes are very ignored by analysts and political manuals. The authoritarians exploit these sentiments to earn power.

Prairie Fire is the episode that tells that authoritarianism can entrench itself in any society, even if it is the most stable and prosperous democracy in the world. Already the signers of the Declaration of Independence of the United States had prevented the hazardous risks of tyranny and incompetence of the governors. For that reason, they thought of counterbalances mechanisms to limit the dominion of the other powers. Hence, in America, there are so many perspectives on national history. Some of these views believe that their country does not any international affairs to resolve, that the migrants are offenders, and that the rest of the world wants to take advantage of America. This skepticism justifies the arrival of Donald Trump to the White House and the rising of extreme nationalism that originated in Europe, but in the United States, it is founding many followers.

The Unending History, the final chapter of Twilight of Democracy, highlights one of the most earth-shaking points of this book: history is a repeating cycle, and the interpretations of historical knowledge are different. These thoughts migrate to situations such as the refugee crisis or the expansion of the Coronavirus pandemic. Anne Applebaum closes her impressive essay by telling us that there is no magic key to solving the problems of contemporary civilization. In short, combatting authoritarianism, the misinterpretations of liberalism, and building a democracy in the digital age full of lies is a task that only is achieved with teamwork.

References.

Applebaum, A. (2021). El ocaso de la de la democracia. La seducción del autoritarismo. Penguin Random House. Bogotá D.C.