Twilight of Democracy

Why intellectuals and elites, the people who should know better, turn toward authoritarianism. Applebaum writes partly from personal knowledge, having watched friends across Europe and America make the turn, and asks what draws the educated and comfortable to leaders who promise order at the cost of freedom. The book is short, sharp, and uncomfortably specific. A study of the betrayal of liberal democracy by some of its own former defenders.

A historian and journalist whose Pulitzer-winning work on Soviet history turned, in recent books, to the present drift of free societies. Twilight of Democracy examines why intellectuals and elites turn toward authoritarianism. Autocracy, Inc. documents how today's autocrats cooperate across borders as a network rather than isolated strongmen. She writes about how democracies decay from the inside and how dictatorships sustain one another from without.