Anne Applebaum opens her new book, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, with a scene on the long winter night of Dec. 31, 1999, in a newly restored family house somewhere in the deep Polish countryside, where a big party is set to celebrate the coming of the new millennium. The closing scene is in the same house 20 years later, where the author has been spending the coronavirus lockdown. In the two decades that stretch between, many of the guests of Applebaum’s new millennium party—a colorful mix of conservative intellectuals, diplomats, and politicians—have become her political enemies, passionate supporters of Donald Trump and Poland’s anti-liberal counterrevolution.
“Were some of our friends always closet authoritarians?” she wonders. “Or have the people with whom we clinked glasses in the first minutes of the new millennium somehow changed over the subsequent two decades?” The book is an admirable quest for answers and goes a long way toward providing them. But it would have benefited from considering whether the questions Applebaum has posed are the right ones to begin with.
