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.

Named a BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR by The Washington Post and The Financial Times

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

How did our democracy go wrong? This extraordinary document . . . is Applebaum s answer. Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny

[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. The Washington Post

Often sobering, sometimes shocking, but never despairing.  .  .  . One of the many welcome aspects to [this] book is its acknowledgment that democracy, like any other form of government, is not forever. It cannot be a machine that would go of itself; it is a machine that, instead, goes only as long as its users care for it. Los Angeles Review of Books

There is no single reason that liberal democracy is in such a precarious state, Applebaum notes.  Crisp, elegant prose. The Christian Science Monitor

Thought-provoking and gracefully written. The American Interest

If anyone is well placed to write about the global rise of authoritarian regimes and their polarization of society, it is Applebaum. The Arts Fuse An illuminating political memoir about the breakup of the political tribe that won the Cold War. Literary Review (London)

Engrossing.  .  .  . This is a political book; it is also intensely personal, and the more powerful for it. The Guardian

[Applebaum] deploys the roles of both historian and hostess to impressive effect. A penetrating