Book review - Anne Applebaum on how her old friends paved the way for Trump and Brexit
Sometimes the point isn’t to make people believe a lie – it’s to make people fear the liar
Anne
Applebaum can look at the wreck of democratic politics and understand
it with a completeness few contemporary writers can match. When she asks who
sent Britain into the unending Brexit crisis, or inflicted the Trump
administration on America, or turned Poland and Hungary into one-party states,
she does not need to search press cuttings. Her friends did it, she replies.
Or, rather, her former friends. For if they are now embarrassed to have once
known her, the feeling is reciprocated.
Applebaum’s latest
book, Twilight
of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting
of Friends, opens with a scene a novelist could steal. On 31 December
1999, Applebaum and her husband, Radosław Sikorski,
a minister in Poland’s then centre-right government, threw a party. It was a
Millennium Eve housewarming for a manor house in the western Poland they had
helped rebuild from ruins. The company of Poles, Brits, Americans and Russians
could say that they had rebuilt a ruined world. Unlike the bulk of the left of
the age, they had stood up against the Soviet empire and played a part in the
fall of a cruel and suffocating tyranny. They had supported free markets, free
elections, the rule of law and democracies sticking together in the EU and
Nato, because these causes – surely – were the best ways for nations to help
their people lead better lives as they faced Russian and Chinese power,
Islamism and climate change.
They were young and
happy. History’s winners. “At about three in the morning,” Applebaum recalls,
“one of the wackier Polish guests pulled a pistol from her handbag and shot
blanks into the air out of sheer exuberance.”
Applebaum was at the centre of the overlapping circles of guests. For the Americans, she was a child of the Republican establishment. Her father was a lawyer in Washington DC and she was educated at Yale and Oxford universities. Now her Republican friends are divided between a principled minority, who know that defeating Trump is the only way to save the American constitution, and the rest, who have, to use a word she repeats often, “collaborated” as surely as the east Europeans she studied as a historian collaborated with the invading Soviet forces after 1945…. read more:
