On Twilight of Democracy

Anne Applebaum's Twilight of Democracy, published in 2020, asks a question that is at once political and intensely personal: why do people who once believed in liberal democracy turn against it? Applebaum, a historian of twentieth-century authoritarianism, approaches the question through her own experience, having watched friends and acquaintances across several countries, people she had known as committed democrats, drift toward the authoritarian and nationalist movements rising around them. The book is part analysis, part memoir of broken friendships, and the personal angle gives it an unusual intimacy and force.

Her central interest is in what she calls, borrowing an older term, the clercs, the writers, intellectuals, journalists, and functionaries who lend their talents to authoritarian movements and provide the ideas, justifications, and propaganda that such movements need. Authoritarianism, she argues, does not rise on the strength of its leaders alone; it requires a supporting cast of educated people willing to rationalize it, to staff it, to make its case in respectable language. Applebaum is fascinated and disturbed by why such people make that choice, and she finds the explanations are often less about deep ideology than about resentment, ambition, disappointment, and the appeal of belonging to a movement that promises to restore a lost order or to reward those who feel overlooked.

Underlying the specific stories is a broader argument about the appeal of authoritarianism itself. Democracy, with its openness, its uncertainty, its endless argument and compromise, its refusal to deliver final answers, is genuinely hard to live with, and Applebaum argues that some people find it unbearable. They are drawn instead to the simplicity authoritarian and nationalist movements offer: a single explanation for what has gone wrong, a clear enemy to blame, a restored hierarchy in which they have a secure place, an escape from the noise and complexity of pluralism. The longing for certainty and order, she suggests, is a permanent human temptation that democracy can never fully satisfy and that authoritarianism is always ready to exploit.

The book belongs in a library of the republic because it addresses a dimension of democratic decline that the institutional analyses can miss: the psychological and social pull that turns individuals against open society, and the role that educated elites play in enabling authoritarian movements. It is a study of complicity and temptation, of why the defense of democracy cannot be taken for granted even among those who should know better.

It sits in the modern cluster alongside Levitsky and Ziblatt, Snyder, and Mounk, complementing their structural accounts with attention to the human motives that drive people toward unfreedom. Twilight of Democracy is in copyright and widely available in print and digital editions. It is short and vivid, written with a reporter's eye and a historian's depth. Read it for the uncomfortable inquiry into why people abandon democracy, told by someone who watched her own friends do it.