The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends by Anne Applebaum (2020)
So I’ve been on a massive Anne Applebaum kick for the last couple of weeks. A very long time ago I’d read her history of the Gulag, an extremely jolly read, and subsequently forgot about her.
The best political, and one of the best nonfiction books, of the year. This is a million miles away from the often tiresome hot takes of the internet punditry.
Then about a month I read her long-form piece History Will Judge the Complicit in the Atlantic – out of thousands of articles and essays I must have read (for my sins) on the Trump administration, this is absolutely the best by some distance. If you haven’t read it, do so – it starts slowly and forensically, accumulating evidence and categorising, and by the end builds to what amounts to a furious denunciation of collaboration and defense of liberal democracy. As Applebaum is an expert on authoritarianism and one-party states, she knows that of which she speaks.
The interesting thing is Applebaum’s background is the centre-right, and she has described herself as a (liberal) conservative. Even more interesting is she was personal friends with a wide range of people in Poland, the UK, and the US that flung themselves fully into radical authoritarianism – all of which were firmly in the centre and championed liberal democracy, in Poland specifically in the anti-communist movement of the late 90s.
In her new book, Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends she describes how this group – all of which attended her millennium-eve party – have fractured.
It’s a fascinating story, and Applebaum’s dissection in terms of (i) conspiracy theory – many of which are extremely wacky (ii) the revenge of a mediocre fraction of the elite, who never quite prospered in the way they felt they should have in a meritocracy and (iii) the often pernicious influence of social media is gripping. This is a million miles away from the (often tiresome) hot takes of the internet punditry.
The best political, and one of the best nonfiction books, of the year.