Twilight of Democracy: the Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends

Contributor(s): Anne Applebaum | As well as a work of memoir and reporting, it is a deep meditation on the central political dilemma of our time: Why did the wave of enthusiasm for liberal democracy, shared across the political spectrum in the 1980s and 90s, come to an end? How did we come to be so divided? Why did everyone get so angry?
Anne Applebaum, a historian of totalitarian regimes as well as an analyst of contemporary politics, offers an original interpretation of democratic decline. She charts the rise of autocratic and paranoid governments in Poland and Hungary, the cultural despair that fuelled Brexit, the media cacophony that has driven some Spaniards to return to old nationalist slogans, the apocalyptic pessimism that led many to support the election of Trump. Political leaders and historical figures appear in the story, but the book is focused above all on the dissatisfied intellectuals, philosophers, spin doctors and journalists who deliberately sought to create new defi