Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy.

 

- In very lucid prose journalist and historian Anne Applebaum has written an extremely powerful book exploring the fate of liberal democracies over the last half century - how they've swung between left and right, liberalism and authoritarianism, and what gives rise to these ever-present forces.

- It's a personal journey in many ways, involving friendships often ripped apart by changing political dynamics and allegiances. An American by birth she's lived and worked for many years in Europe and the UK and has always been part of the political elite. Her husband was a senior politician in Poland and held international roles in the UN. 

- She explores dissenting movements and constant frictions in Poland, Hungary, Venezuela and Spain in particular, before moving on to Britain and the US. Her analysis is always astute and detailed. She castigates the awful, ruthless, far right and corrupt Orban government in Hungary, and its Tory sympathisers in the UK. It's one of the world's ugliest and vicious regimes yet they, thankfully a minority, support it.

- As a former conservative herself (as an editor for the centre-right Spectator) and a colleague of Boris Johnson at the time, her story of the rise of anti-EU sentiment and the Brexit debate is simply riveting. She condemns the whole Brexit campaign and its lies. Boris is not spared.

- In today's world she believes something else is going on that propels the fierce political divisions we're seeing. It's 'the contentious, cantankerous nature of modern discourse itself'. So many people can't handle it, can't understand it, and want a simpler, united, traditional society. Simple visions and explanations give birth to QAnon conspiracy theories and take a psychological and emotional hold.

- Her chapter on America and its constitution, its birth and fundamental optimism, is superb. The radical leftist forces of opposition to this exultation of capitalist ‘exceptionalism’ versus the Christian right’s antipathy to what it perceives as secular moral depravity. 

- Of course this leads to Trump and how the Republicans have split. Applebaum's former friend Laura Ingraham, now a Fox News host, and her whacky Trumpism, is thoroughly annihilated.

- The extreme woke left is not exonerated however. So-called 'cancel culture' on the Internet, the extremism that sometimes flares up on university campuses, the exaggerated claims of those who practice identity politics are a political and cultural problem that will require real bravery to fight. 

- The final chapter takes us back to the Dreyfus affair in 1894 and how the primitive antisemitism that drove it divided French society in a way that sounds familiar today. 

- Nothing much has or will change.