ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

The Twilight of Democracy is a rather depressing title for a festival session, but I’ll take any opportunity to listen to Sally Warhaft, especially when she’s in conversation with a Pulitzer Prize winner!

This is the session blurb:

Pulitzer prize-winning author and historian Anne Applebaum deconstructs the psychology and motivations of today’s crazed conspiracy theorists and populists in Twilight of Democracy, an incisive examination of the longstanding struggle between democracy and dictatorship. Drawing on experience and high-level relationships forged across Europe and America, and an exemplary understanding of contemporary and historical politics, Twilight of Democracy is a confronting and illuminating analysis of a polarised world.

Warhaft began by asking about Applebaum’s departure in style from her previous books.  She’s an historian, she said, but she could not write this book as a history because it’s not possible to be entirely objective when you’re living through the moment and you’re part of it yourself.  So she wrote it partly like a memoir with a bit of history added, together with reflections about what she’s read, and what’s happening in the world.

Her theme is the transformation of the centre right into the far right, and how she felt as watched some friends go there.  (Not all of those people are still her friends.)

The centre-right was always a coalition of anti-Communists, comprising a wide variety of people.  Some were anti-Communist because they were concerned about the Soviet nuclear arsenal and the balance of power; others because they supported democracy and humans rights; while others were religious anti-Communists because communists were atheists.  But whatever their reasoning, in 1999 post-Soviet Poland everyone would have said they were democrats who were committed to free politics, the rule of law, democracy, free markets in a broad sense, and a set of liberal values.

Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy.  Applebaum writes about Poland, Britain and America but she says she could be writing about anywhere.  What was common to these three countries, however, was a similar experience, of winning the Cold War, and of experiencing a ‘high’ about the Centre Right being ‘right’.  After the Cold War ended there was a long period of rearrangement, when sensible people were in power (who she identified as John Major and Ronald Reagan).  The aim was to integrate the old USSR into the world.  But there were some who had thrived on the cultural war and they found the post Soviet world boring.  Things were not angry enough, and there was no path for cultural war politics.  There people liked ‘shouting politics’ and they were asking themselves, is there all there is?  Rebuilding roads in Eastern Poland??

At the same time there was also complacency about democracy in all our societies… There was an assumption that democracy could be taken for granted and we didn’t need to do anything.  We didn’t need to do anything about the institutions of democracy needing modernisation, and we didn’t think about the possibility of an anti-democracy backlash.  We thought we could leave politics to the professional politicians.  But successful democracies involve civic engagement and people who care about it.  Democracies need good people go into politics and it needs trust, and public life needs to be seen as a good thing to do.  But what’s happened is that good people went into business, and politics was shunned because it was ‘dirty’.  Disillusionment arose.

Most people don’t think much about the institutions of democracy at all.  But the nature of the institutions that you have influences the outcome.  If the votes in the recent US election were translated into the institutions of other countries there would be a very different result.  Biden and the Democrats would be more powerful, for example, if that vote took place in the UK.  In the US, however, Congress is basically powerless, and it wasn’t meant to be like that.  They need to restructure elections so they’re not so adversarial, but it’s hard to do that because Americans think their system is the best because it’s old.  The reality is that it needs reform.

Trump was basically elected on a fraud, i.e. the conspiracy theory that Obama was not American (the Birther Movement).  The vote for Trump signifies a fault line in American politics because millions of people really believe that the political system is fraudulent.  All through the election Trump questioned whether there could be a fair election, and has never acknowledged his loss.  he persisted with the constant message that the election was a lie, and now there’s a deep divide about the nature of knowledge and truth itself.

How did he succeed in that?  It succeeded because Trump identified, magnified and amplified levels of distrust and disappointment and cultural despair in America.

The same belief that politics is fraudulent occurs in Poland and the UK.  In Poland, the conspiracy theories are about the plane crash that killed the president, and in the UK it’s about Brexit.  The key component in undermining democracy is an invention of the system having failed and the political system being a lie, and then telling a plausible story that makes people ignore the rule of law and attack democratic institutions. The Capitol riot was not attacking the Democrats, it was attacking the system itself, to stop the new president being declared.  Aided and abetted by Fox News and Murdoch and social media, these forces are now opposed to the system.  

The Centre Right in the US seems short of allies. How can it build its strength back up? There are not many that we can identify as anti-Trump, pro democracy, and in favour of liberal values.  In fact, around the world, people know their names because there’s so few of them.  But there may be more than we know.  There may be republicans who are moderate and independent, and maybe they’ll emerge in the next elections.

Despite the title, Applebaum’s book is not really about democracy, it’s about the propagandists against it.  These are journalists working with intellectuals who work on behalf of extremist politics, who recognise public anxiety and exploit it.  They identify people who feel bombarded by disinformation and the chaos of modern politics, who just want a clear message.  These propagandists (often wealthy, and clever) have thrown in their lot with extremist politicians.  They flood Twitter feeds the way that the ancient Romans spread statues of Caesar everywhere.

Why do elites find authoritarianism attractive?  Sometimes it derives from a philosophy about rejecting the modern world, or a sense of disappointment about how things are.  It can be a dislike of demographic change, and a nostalgic desire to restore an old secure world and the economics that they understood.  But such ‘restorative nostalgia’ needs to be understood for what it is: it involves as act of violence because you have to destroy what exists, and for some people it’s that excitement of wrecking something that appeals.  And for some people, radical politics offers a career path, (such as the example of Lenin, blocked by the establishment and moving to a counter-establishment.)

The pandemic has brought the issue of authoritarianism to the fore.  Everyone wants to have sweeping statements about it but the nature of the pandemic has changed over time.  Early on it did seem that shutting borders and ending international travel might be conducive to the rise of authoritarianism.  (This has happened in some places with previous pandemics which have ended with rulers getting more power).  But it has turned out that countries doing the best at controlling the pandemic achieved it because there was public trust in the leadership, in bureaucrats and in public health officials .  That trust is more often found in democracies.  Populist governments like Trump’s did badly because there was no public trust.  Long term we may learn that in preparing for other disasters to come, building public trust and social solidarity is going to be as important as being wealthy.  Money and science aren’t enough, you need a political system that builds trust.  You also need ‘localness’, i.e. awareness of and connection with your neighbours and the community.

This was such an excellent session!