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- [00:01]
Benjamin Wittes
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- [00:32]
Caroline Cornett
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- [01:03]
Anne Applebaum
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- [01:47]
I'm Caroline Cornett. Internet Lawfare with an episode from the Lawfare archive for May 4, 2025 Since President Donald Trump took office, many have warned that the United States is experiencing a shift towards authoritarianism. Last week, more than 200 retired diplomats and national security experts, including former Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas Greenfield, signed an open letter on the Trump administration's assault on American democracy. Also, a survey of 500 political scientists found that the majority believe America is sliding into some form of authoritarianism. For today's archive episode, I selected an episode from July 27, 2020, in which Benjamin Wittez sat down with Anne Applebaum to discuss her book, Twilight of the Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism. They talked about why authoritarian ideologies are growing in countries as diverse as Hungary, Spain, in the US the role of social media in their rise, how conservative ideology fractured the way it did, and how the modern wave of authoritarianism is different from earlier iterations.
- [03:04]
Benjamin Wittes
I'm Benjamin Wittes, and this is the Lawfare Podcast July 27, 2020. Anne Applebaum is a longtime columnist, writer, writer, historian, and she is the author, most recently, of the Twilight of the Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism. It is a brief book, but one with broad scope. Why authoritarian Ideologies are on the ascendance in countries as diverse as Poland, Hungary, Spain, the United States and Great Britain. Ann joined me in the virtual Jungle studio from London in what turned into a wide ranging conversation about the themes of the book. Why are all of these authoritarian ideologies on the rise now? What is the role of social media in their rise? What are the major themes that they have in common and how different are they location by location? How did conservative ideology come to fraction fracture the way it has over so brief a period of time? And how is the modern wave of authoritarianism different from earlier iterations of it? It's The Lawfare Podcast. July 27. Anne Applebaum on the twilight of Democracy. Anne, a lot of the conversations with you about this book have started at your New Year's Eve party, where you begin the book and we'll talk about that. But I want to start in a different place. I want to start with Julian Benda, which is a theme that recurs throughout the book and your discussion of the fracturing of intellectual life. And so I want to start with who was Julian Benda and how does his work that you discuss interact with the the book that you've written here?
- [05:09]
Anne Applebaum
So Julian Benda was a French intellectual and who wrote a book that in retrospect looked very prophetic. And the book was called, called La Trison des Clerk. The Treason of the Clerks or the Treason of the intellectuals is sometimes how it's translated. And it was a book that talked about the phenomenon of intellectuals aligning themselves to radical political movements. And at the time he was writing, he was talking about, this is the 1920s and 1930s. He was talking about people aligning themselves both to the far right, as it then was, fascist and proto fascist movements in Europe and to the far left, the communist and, and eventually Stalinist movements in Europe. And the book was about some of the people, why they were, why they found it appealing, and the way in which intellectuals were attracted to power and what they had to do to get there. And what he was mostly worried about was people losing their objectivity, their ability to make judgments, you know, and their sense of truth, what was true and honest in their work, and instead throwing all of that over in order to take sides in a political argument. And he predicted that this phenomenon would eventually. There's a phrase in the book where he says it will lead to millions of deaths. And indeed it did a few years later. And the book was one I read many years ago and I picked up again a year or two ago when thinking about how to write about not the same phenomenon in my own time, but a kind of parallel phenomenon which is of, again, of intellectuals being attracted to radicalism and why does it happen? And I found the book a kind of useful starting point. You know, it explains, you know, why for someone who, you know, lives the life of the mind, cares about ideas, you know, why being part of politics is so exciting and uplifting, and why, in particular, radical politics are attractive in the book. In my book, there are few characters, people who, you might say, followed that pattern.
- [07:13]
Benjamin Wittes
So it's interesting that you describe having read that book years ago and returned to it recently. I have exactly the same experience. I read it in college. It kind of lurked in the back of my mind for, I guess it's, you know, 30 years now. And I recently returned to my tattered old copy of it from college. And I also feel like I have friends and former friends who are clerks in precisely the pejorative sense. That I don't speak French, but I think doesn't quite translate from the way Benda used the phrase to English. So tell me a little bit about those friends. You open the book at this hopeful New Year's Eve party in your, I don't know, your manor house in Poland, and describe how fractured that world, the world of people you were celebrating the new millennium with has become. Talk about it. What happened to your philosophical, personal and political friend group?
- [08:27]
Anne Applebaum
So, first of all, the party is a metaphor. I mean, I don't give a lot of parties. I'm not a great hostess, not a book about parties. And in fact, it was kind of a scruffy party. You know, it wasn't fancy, and there were no caterers or anything like that. And the house is a manor house, but we bought it when it was a ruin. And in 1999, I think we'd finished it enough to have a party. And there was a very large room that had no furniture in it, and that's where the party was. So, so that's, that's. That's the backdrop. And the group of people who were there, you know, again, there was nobody there at the time who was particularly famous or, or, you know, or fancy. What it was was a, you know, some journalists, some very junior politicians. My husband was then a junior minister in a Polish government. A few people came from England, a couple of people came from New York. You know, people wanted to travel because it was the millennium, and so people wanted to go to some kind of exotic party. And so for some people, you know, the Polish countryside, middle of nowhere, was pretty exotic. I Mean, it in fact remains pretty exotic. So some of the people at the party, and it has to be said, none of them were close friends. They were just people who we knew. Some of them have subsequently, a few of the Polish guests subsequently in, you know, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years later, have reemerged as sort of journalists and publicists who work on behalf of what's an increasingly extreme, actually political party in Poland, which is right now the ruling party and which is openly xenophobic, which is openly conspiratorial. It uses conspiratorial conspiracy theories as a, as a tactic and which from time to time is openly anti Semitic. And one or two of the people who were in my house 20 years ago are among the people who use that kind of language. One of the women who was there is now a kind of prominent conspiracy theorist who writes over and over again about a theory, famous plane crash that took place in Poland a decade ago killed the president in which she, I mean, it's never quite clear actually what she thinks happened, but she thinks there's a massive cover up and the Polish state and the Polish government may be in cahoots with the Russians or maybe other people have covered it up and denied it. So she's one of the people who propagate the conspiracy theory. And I, you know, tried to write about what were the forces that had changed them. And as you say, I did not come up with one single answer. I came up with multiple answers. And the answers are a little bit different. In Poland and in Britain and the United States and, and Spain and some of the other countries that I refer to in Poland, some of the people were, had been, you know, by the time it got to be 2019, had been disappointed by the political transition in Poland and they felt that it was not what they had wanted or they were, or it had not benefited them personally or not in the way that they felt it should. Some people had become wary of or anxious about Western influence, which they felt was damaging or destroying something essential about Poland. So as I said, I examine some of the people and go through a little bit what I think some of their motives are.
- [11:33]
Benjamin Wittes
And yet, as you survey the countries in question and you spend time on Poland, on Hungary, on Spain, on Britain, the UK and the United States, you do identify, at least in a loose sense, some major common themes. Common themes being things like disinformation, things like conspiracy thinking, themes like xenophobia even. Whereas in the case of Hungary, there really aren't immigrants in any substantial number. And by Doing this. You describe, I think, a constellation of thematic content around the new authoritarianism. And so I guess I'd love for you to distill that and say, if there is a common core to the new authoritarian ascendancy, at least west wide, if not worldwide, what are the constituent elements of it?
- [12:52]
Anne Applebaum
So in Western democracies, where you have the emergence of, sometimes it's called, I think incorrectly, right wing populism, but I think it's really more, you know, an authoritarian. Political parties, there are some, there are some things they have in common. One of them is pessimism and sometimes a kind of extreme or apocalyptic pessimism of a kind that we used to hear from the far left. So, and, and it's a pessimism that is specifically blames liberalism and liberal thinking and liberal ideas for a lot of modern problems. These are people who feel that something essential has been taken away from their civilization, that there is, we are experiencing profound decline. Sometimes they believe it's irreversible. One of the people I quote in the book is a really great, actually conservative philosopher who was not at all political and was very sincere in what he wrote. Roger Scruton, who wrote a book about England called England An Elegy, which is a book which, which he describes as a funeral oration for my country, and a book in which he goes through all the things about England that are being lost and are gone and the, and the, the sad and shallow civilization that he thinks is replacing it. You know, a lot of conservative thinkers and, and writers have this in common, this belief that, you know, in profound contemporary decline. And they, and it's often coupled to belief. You know, there are, we have weak leaders. They are, you know, the great men of the past are gone. You know, we're now ruled by pygmies and by people who are not up to the job. And, and sometimes this is accompanied by a kind of nostalgia. And I talk about different kinds of nostalgia, a nostalgia for a past era that some of them then begin to seek to bring back. Modernity is terrible. What we need is what we used to have. And this is, by the way, a theme that goes across authoritarianisms in all kinds of places. I mean, Chavez in Venezuela talks about Simon Bolivar and recreating the Bolivarian Republic, and Putin talks about making Russia great again, and Trump talks about making America great again. And the Polish ruling party Law and Justice talk about bringing back some kind of Catholic traditionalist, I don't know, 1920s style of 1930s style of politics. And so this desire to Bring back some lost era is another element that they have in common. But in order to do that, in other words, in order to resurrect something that's been lost and to radically change the present, they have to convince, bring other people along with them. And so another one of the book themes, as you've said, is this theme of conspiracy theory and disinformation. Because one of the quickest and easiest ways to get people to doubt their societies and to cease to believe in their institutions is to, is to offer them a conspiracy theory, a powerful conspiracy theory that says, you know, it's all a lie and your leaders are covering things up from you. And this is something that people, you know, over the centuries have found easy to believe. And so, for example, in Poland, I referred already to the conspiracy theory that the President was murdered. And, and the idea, of course, that the president was murdered and he was murdered with the knowledge of the government and everybody from the media to the courts, to the police, to the prosecution service, everybody is covering up. If you believe that, you know, then you, then you really believe that your institutions are failed and then you can begin to accept some kind of really radical, anti democratic alternative. And by the way, we had the same phenomenon happen in the United States. I mean, I dismissed it, I underrated it, maybe you didn't, but I think a lot of people did. And this was, of course, the phenomenon of birtherism. You know, the argument that President Obama is an illegitimate president and everybody is covering it up and denying it again, courts, Congress, police, prosecutors, media, everyone is lying to you. President Obama is illegal and illegitimate. He was born in Kenya, he's not really American. And some very high percentage of Americans. It's sort of, I've seen figures up to 20 and 25% believe this. And Trump was, of course, the person who spoke for it, one of, I think, the loudest advocate of it. And again, if you can believe that, you know, then you must have, then you have to ask, you know, is your society authentic? You know, are these institutions, you know, worth it? Don't we need someone who can come tear them all down and replace them with something else? Because they're all full of liars. And, and the, the power of these conspiracy theories is, it's important because they're important to note that these are not full blown ideologies, you know, so it's not like communism where you're expected to believe a whole series of things about, you know, the history and the present and the future and economics and so on. No, all you have to believe is that the president was illegitimate. And then that opens the door to you listening to all kinds of alternative theories and alternative explanations of the world. And we so happen to be living in an era where we have some of. One of the. The best sort of mechanisms for delivery of conspiracy theory ever invented. And that is social media, which is media that is, you know, that functions the way gossip and village villages functions. You know, whichever is the most exciting story is the one that's passed along the fastest.
- [18:14]
Benjamin Wittes
So that's a really interesting, you know, because everything that you've said up until then is basically a theme of the rise of traditional authoritarian or totalitarian movements as well as these modern ones. But the media mechanisms are unique to this time period. And so I guess my, my question is, to what extent is that the explanation or a significant part of the explanation for why? Now I look at the landscape and there's no. And you ruminate a little bit about this in the book. There's no particularly obvious reason why this is happening now rather than 10 years ago or 20 years ago. Why 20 years ago are you and the folks who now are the clerks of the Law and Justice Party partying together in the millennium? And now the fracture has happened rather than the other way around.
- [19:29]
Anne Applebaum
So it is my prejudice, and there are going to be many people who disagree with me, but it is my prejudice that, yes, the, the media revolution is largely part of it. You know, the way in which we now get and process political information is so profoundly different from the way that happened 10 years ago, let alone 20 years ago, that it has to have changed the way we see and understand the world, and it has to change our relationship to our institutions. I mean, every time there has ever been a media revolution of this scale in the past, it's had a similarly profound impact. And I should, I should add here that the impact is both for better and for worse. I mean, there's, you know, just like the invention of the printing press, you know, led to mass literacy and it led to the multiplication of different kinds of writing and, you know, led to the development of modern literature and all kinds of great things. It did also lead to a schism in the Catholic Church because, you know, previous to that, you couldn't have had people printing. You know, the monks had controlled all written information. And it led to a scythm. It led to the rise of Protestantism and, you know, to, to whip through European history in three seconds. I mean, that was one of the things that led to 100 years of war In Europe, again, whatever you think of, you know, there are many advantages. I'm not saying Protestantism is bad. I'm just saying that it had this cataclysmic political impact. And I think that's what we're living through now. I mean, there are also economic explanations for popular dissatisfaction, although, again, I said you have to explain why they. They occur now and not immediately after the financial crisis. There are demographic explanations, although again, those are also complicated because in some of the places where the xenophobia is growing the fastest and is the loudest, there aren't any immigrants. And so you have to explain to me why that is as well. I'm not, I'm not really convinced by that explanation either. But the thing that all of us have in common, Western countries as well as, you know, some Asian democracies like the Philippines or, you know, or Turkey or other countries where this kind of similar kind of authoritarianism has risen, they all do have this factor in common that they all have undergone this transformative media revolution, and they are all run by people who figured out how to master it. So that's know, I'm not saying it's the final, you know, the final explanation, but for me, to me, it's. It's just an overpowering one. And I feel that it's been really underrated as a, you know, as a. Even just as an organizing principle. I mean, if nothing else, social media allows people who were not previously in contact and who shared similar feelings of despair or pessimism about their countries, it allows them to be in touch with one another and to reinforce one another and to, you know, exchange ideas with one another and to organize themselves into new, you know, what, whatever you want to, you know, whatever online tribes or echo chambers or filter bubbles or whatever you want to call it. And that seems to me to have changed politics, you know, indelibly. I mean, forever. And I don't see. I don't see how traditional political parties can easily survive. I mean, the United States is a special case because our voting system makes it hard to create new parties. But in Europe, we've seen these massive transformations of party systems in almost every country. And that's, again, that's partly to do with the fact that people are rearranging themselves because they can now and again, there are advantages to that. I'm not denying that. There is also a lot of disruption.
- [23:04]
Caroline Cornett
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- [23:50]
Benjamin Wittes
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- [23:55]
Anne Applebaum
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Benjamin Wittes
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- [24:04]
Anne Applebaum
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- [24:06]
Benjamin Wittes
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- [24:09]
Anne Applebaum
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- [24:12]
Benjamin Wittes
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- [24:22]
Caroline Cornett
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- [24:49]
Benjamin Wittes
So Anne, one of the striking things about the book is that you make clear that these movements do not exist in isolation from one another, but in constant dialogue with and kind of iterative conversation with one another. So you have a Spanish political party that's using the slogan Make Spain Great again. You have the international celebrity of Viktor Orban and the degree to which lots of different of these sort of right wing authoritarian movements look to Orban as a exemplar. To what extent are these movements distinct from one another and to what extent are they really a kind of internationally cohesive? I mean, they're obviously not the socialist international right, and they don't think of themselves as an internationalist movement, and yet they kind of are.
- [26:02]
Anne Applebaum
So I think increasingly they do think of themselves as an internationalist movement, and there have been a number of attempts in different spheres to organize conferences between their leaders and members so that they meet. I was at one that hasn't had an American origin, which I wrote about in the book, but there have been Others, there's something called the World Congress of Families, which actually has Russian funding that has brought together the leaders of a lot of these movements. And they, you know, they do meet one another in all kinds of informal ways, too. I think it's important, though, you know, given that we were just talking about the importance of the Internet, to note that a lot of these movements are actually connected at the grassroots even more profoundly than they are correct. You know, connected at the top. You know, the alt right and the international alt right copy one another, watch what one another is doing, borrow tactics sometimes, you know, share memes or share ways of doing politics. And that is happening, you know, organically, all the time. It happens on, you know, on Twitter, on Facebook, on Reddit, on 4chan. You know, they watch what one another is doing and they imitate the politics. And again, there are a few examples of that, too. I think one of the. One of the moments when you could see this most clearly was when there was the fire at Notre Dame, the cathedral in Paris. And this was immediately attributed by some people to Muslims who allegedly set off the fire. And there were these memes and accounts and, you know, supposed Facebook posts that were being passed around, around the European right, sort of proving that this was a Muslim attack on Christian culture. And then lots of photographs of France being taken over by Mother Islam and so on. And so this became a moment that was shared by a lot of people. So even though it's a little bit counterintuitive, given that these are, you know, these are nationalist movements, they've managed in the modern era to find a few things that they can agree on. One of them is dislike of immigration. Another is the dislike of, you know, modern acceptance of homosexuality and feminism. So a lot of them are advocate returning to some kind of traditional family roles. And those are things that above and beyond the normal things that nationalists disagree about, like, you know, what should be the border between France and Germany, or, you know, where's the border between Italy and Austria? Those are old, old arguments. Beyond all that, they now have these common themes that link them together. And I, and I do think they are an international phenomenon and it's fair to talk about them as such.
- [28:38]
Benjamin Wittes
And yet certain of these themes play much bigger in certain locations than others. So the recent Polish election, the presidential elections, as best as I could tell from afar, the Law and Justice Party ran it almost entirely as an anti gay campaign. I hadn't realized that LGBT issues were quite as, you know, were the central fault line of political division in Poland. But I Don't have the sense that, you know, Salvini in Italy is especially focused on LGBT issues. How did that come to play such a massive role in Polish politics?
- [29:27]
Anne Applebaum
So it was a central theme in the last election. It is not historically a theme of importance in Poland at all. It is not an ancient, you know, problem that we've been talking about for a long time. It has emerged recently, very recently. I think it's partly connected to. There are now some European wide Catholic movements that have been pushing the idea that, I mean, the expression they use is lgbt, is an ideology. It's not about people. They use the expression in Poland gender to mean gender ideology, which sounds confusing in English. And this they do share. I mean, this you can hear on the right in Spain, you can hear it on the right in France. You know, you can hear echoes of it in some other places. So it's not totally unique to Poland. But the way it gets used in Polish politics, I suspect, is as a kind of signaling messaging mechanism. You know, it's, it's, it's meant to appeal to people who need to be reminded, you know, which side of the barricades they're on. You know, are you on the side of, you know, the family, Poland, tradition and history, or are you on the side of, you know, foreigners, the west, big business and things you don't like? And it's a kind of wedge issue that seems to divide people. You know, it has to be said that it divides them very angrily on both sides. And there were people who were infuriated by the president's use of that language during the campaign. And there was a huge backlash against it. So much so that his daughter actually made a speech on election night that was meant to sort of mollify people. Something about, you know, tolerance and how people should all be treated. Well, something like that, you know, so it, it didn't, it's not, it's not like that kind of language has universal appeal, but it's a kind of, it's a signaling mechanism. I mean, it's a little bit, you know, the way politics is done nowadays can be pretty confusing because although it was central to the campaign, that doesn't mean that now, you know, the Polish state will arrest gay people, you know, or there will be some kind of punitive rules placed on them or something like that. No, now they will abandon the issue and they won't talk about it, or at least not much until the next election. I mean, it's, it's more of a signaling mechanism, you know, way of helping people identify which side of this polarized country they're on. But I agree, it's. It even. I'll tell you, it even feels odd in Poland because, you know, three years ago it wasn't part of Polish politics, and now somehow it is.
- [31:56]
Benjamin Wittes
So I want to talk about the uk I was struck in your discussion of the UK that with the exception of Boris Johnson, for whom you display, I think, essentially undisguised contempt, you treat with a great deal of sympathy the Roger Scrutons and think his name is Heffer, Simon Heifer, who are the kind of, you know, who are the equivalents of people who, in other countries, you're really quite. I wouldn't say savage, because you're never savage, but you. You really are tough on them. And these two intellectuals, British intellectuals, I detect a sort of residual fondness for, and I'm interested in why you seem to have more sympathy for the British nostalgia than for the sort of mythic pasts of these other countries.
- [33:03]
Anne Applebaum
Well, so those two people that we're talking about are both sincere. In other words, I think they really believe what they write. You know, both of them are English nationalists. They would. Neither of them would deny that's what they are. And they both feel sincerely. They're describing the world as they see it. And neither one of them has used that, the emotion that they feel about their lost country, neither one of them has used that to create a political project. You know, these. These are not in that sense that we talked about at the beginning. These are not clerks or people who are in the service of a political movement. And so, you know, I thought they were important to quote, because I thought they reflected something that's authentic in Britain. I mean, you know, modern Britain, modern England is different from what it was 100 years ago. And it, you know, there is a way of life that was common in England that is lost. And they both, you know, they both somehow acknowledge and reflect that. And so I felt that their, you know, their sense of loss was important to transmit. You know, I don't. I don't. I don't blame either one of them for, you know, they weren't the ones who were conducting dishonest political campaigns about Brexit, either one of them.
- [34:15]
Benjamin Wittes
So it's interesting because in. In the case of Hungary, for example, you have a. An account of this woman, Maria Schmidt, I think her name is. And. And I. I suspect the difference here is that she is actively running, at this point, a campaign of conspiracy theories and lies, despite a rather distinguished intellectual Pat past. They are not. Is, is that, is that the difference?
- [34:40]
Anne Applebaum
Yes. Marius Schmidt is running, you know, dis, you know, is this is the font, actually of quite a lot of Viktor Orban's conspiracy campaigns. I think she's invented a lot of them. And she's one of the people who's helped him take over the media in Hungary. She's a, she's an active figure in the destruction of independent political life in Hungary. You cannot say that, you know, you can't say that of Roger Scruton, I mean, who's recently died. You know, he was an independent intellectual and he had his views and he had his little following, but he was not a. He was not actively seeking to upend British politics in that same sense.
- [35:18]
Benjamin Wittes
One of the interesting themes in this book, which I was very striking to me personally, knowing your history in Poland, is how prominent antisemitism is in the discussion. You and I have known each other for, you know, a lot of years now, and I have always thought of you as somebody who is quite impatient with the Jewish community's rush to see antisemitism in Polish politics. And yet you have described in this book a whole lot of anti Semitic conspiracy theories about yourself, a kind of routine venturing into antisemitism of the conspiracy theories that you describe, as well as the Law and Justice Party. And so I, my, my question is to what extent. You know, normally when we think of conspiracy theorizing in Europe, antisemitism is always a big part of, is certainly, as you describe it, a significant part of it in Hungary and Poland in this era. To what extent is that a general, is that a more general theme of this, of this era, of authoritarian movements in Europe? And also to what extent do you think it's resurgent as opposed to people like you, having been in some denial about it earlier?
- [36:52]
Anne Applebaum
You know, I don't think I was in denial about it because I didn't feel it or see it in the past. You know, it wasn't, it wasn't active part of politics. There were no major Polish political parties that talked about any, you know, on the contrary, you know, Poland over 20 years made huge efforts to speak to and kind of incorporate the views of the international Jewish community. One of the results is a really spectacular Jewish museum in Warsaw, probably, I mean, surely the best in Europe actually, which was the joint product of years of, you know, both money from the Polish government from Jews around the world. And a lot of people put their, you know, put a lot of effort into making it really Good. And plus education in schools. And so there was really, you know, I just don't think there was active anti Semitism in Polish politics. It's the, it, it started to appear in the last several years originally again in the way it appears in the US in sort of what seemed to be extremist or strange parts of the Internet and so on, you know, and then the, the Law and Justice Party began to weaponize it and use it. I mean, it's very rarely open in Poland. You know, it's more part, you know, it's more that, you know, there are Jewish interests in, buy in taking back property in Warsaw. They scare people about that. It's usually part of a constellation of foreign things that people should be afraid of. And that, I mean, one of the reasons why I think they use the gay issue in Poland is because the anti Semitism thing first of all, doesn't work quite so well when there aren't any Jews. And also the xenophobia doesn't work so well when there aren't any foreigners. But, you know, there are a few actual gay people. So you can, you can, it's a much more real thing, but it works as a kind of constellation of foreign conspiratorial, you know, elements. I mean, you get it in Hungary, you get it a little bit in Spain, you get it in France, you get it. I mean, you know, it even appeared in Britain, I should say, on the other side of the political spectrum, there was a wave of kind of anti Semitic rhetoric in the, on the far left of the British Labour Party as well. I mean, Jews as a representative of foreigners, of capital, of outsiders who are trying to undermine us. I mean, it kind of, it weaves in with other themes, but you need to have a, in order for it to have real power, it needs, you know, politics behind it. It needs a political party who's willing to push it and use it. And as I said, until, I mean, even, even the, the Law and Justice Party didn't use it until recently. I mean, it's, it's, it's a matter of the last kind of two or three years. And in, you know, in most European countries it was, it was taboo for a long time, so nobody used it. But you know, once people begin to use it, you know, then it, you know, it revives, it comes back into political life. I mean, I suppose what I was impatient with in the past was people who insisted on seeing fringe elements as central or who feared that, you know, old things were coming back, because that's actually not what this is. This is a, this is a new phenomenon. I mean, this is something that has been deliberately created and reconstructed and brought back to life knowingly. It is not a, it's not some kind of holdover from the 1930s. It's not as if Polish politics over the last 30 years were anti Semitic. I mean, it just wasn't, you know, it wasn't part of mainstream life. So, you know, and, and by the way, I think, you know, this is true of any country. I mean, we've seen in the United States that Trump brought back a form of white supremacism. I mean, guy from Queens talking about the Confederate flag, you know, and how, and how many people respect it. I mean, where does, you know, that's a deliberate revival of a kind of, you know, Southern old fashioned white supremacism that, that hadn't been, you know, visible in national politics in a very long time. So these things can be revived and used by people. And that's, you know, that's what we're, that's what we're seeing.
- [40:50]
Benjamin Wittes
So we need to wrap up, but I want to ask you to conclude with a reflection on the title. The Twilight of Democracy could be seen as a, as a reference to Wagner, it could be seen as a reference to Nietzsche, or it could be seen as a reference to the time of day. How should we understand the title the Twilight of Democracy?
- [41:17]
Anne Applebaum
I think we should understand it as a warning, you know, that, you know, this is what these moods and these emotions and these movements are the kind of phenomenon that, that have in the past led to the end of democracy. These are the, these are the kind of, you know, the signs that democracy is in trouble. That doesn't mean that democracy will end or that we have to be pessimistic. You know, we can prevent these movements and moods from overwhelming us, but, but we should be aware that they're there and we should be aware of how powerful they are.
- [41:55]
Benjamin Wittes
Ann Applebaum, thanks so much for joining us.
- [41:59]
Anne Applebaum
Thanks, Ben.
- [42:03]
Benjamin Wittes
The Lawfare podcast is produced in cooperation with the Brookings Institution. Our audio engineer this episode is Zachary Frank of the Goat Rodeo firm. You need to do your part to promote the Lawfare podcast. So tweet about us, share us on Facebook, pin us on Pinterest, upvote us on Reddit, make TikTok videos about us, share us on social media sites I haven't even ever heard of because I'm over 50. Rate us and review us on whatever podcast distribution you found us on. Buy our merch@thelawfairstore.com the Lawfare Podcast is produced and edited by Jen Patya Howell. Our music is performed by Sophia Yan. And as always, thanks for listening.
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Anne Applebaum
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