Pulitzer Prize-winning historian explains the lure of authoritarianism

Anne Applebaum leans conservative, but hasn't voted Republican since Sarah Palin became John McCain's running mate in 2008.

The historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer was born in the U.S. but now lives in Poland. She has been watching as elements of the political right have made one wrong turn after another, embracing authoritarianism and illiberal practices, morphing into what she calls the "new right." 

"Although they don't like the term, the new right are more Bolshevik than Burkean. The new right does not want to conserve what exists …  these are men and women who want to overthrow, bypass or undermine existing institutions, to destroy what exists," the acclaimed historian writes in Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism. 

Her book traces the lure of authoritarianism not simply through the populist strongmen who dominate world politics today but through the intellectuals who support them. 

"Authoritarianism appeals, simply, to people who cannot tolerate complexity."

Anne Applebaum spoke to IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed to explain why authoritarianism is so tempting.

Here is an excerpt from their conversation.

At the base of it, what is the lure that authoritarianism holds, specifically for those on the right of the political spectrum? 

"I think that authoritarianism has allure for people on the right and on the left. And in fact, I've spent a lot of my career writing books about left-wing authoritarianism. I wrote a book about the Gulag. I wrote a book about the Ukrainian famine, which was a Soviet policy towards Ukraine. And so I don't think this is some special problem of the right. But I do think that we, who live in liberal democracies, have long underestimated the appeal of the one party state, of the single ruler, of the leadership cult. 

"For many people, democracy is a difficult and complicated, and often unsatisfying political system. So it's a system in which people are arguing all the time. There's no final solution or answer. Sometimes democracies become very weak — ours in particular, I think the American democracy has been weakened by dirty money, by the influence of lobbyists. You know, democracy requires a lot of its citizens. It requires that you be involved in politics, that you join parties, that you join civic organizations, that you vote. And for a lot of people, it's a difficult and exasperating, and even enervating form of politics."

"Over the past several decades, I think in particular since the Second World War, we've become rather complacent about our democracies. We assume that once you have a democracy it will always stay that way. No effort has to be particularly made in order to preserve democracy. And we forgot, really, that there is this human tendency, that democracies in history have almost all fallen and almost all been undermined, sooner or later, in predictable and repetitive ways.

"One of the messages that I hope my book transmits is to remind people that democracies are historically weak and that there's nothing inevitable about them. History is not a progressive straight line, always moving onward and upward. It's cyclical and you can go backwards as well as forwards."

Your book made me want to understand the psychology of people who come to identify with authoritarian politics and politicians. And again, I know there isn't one answer for everybody involved, but how do you think most people whose stories you examine in the book justify it to themselves?

"This is not a political science tract; it's a very subjective examination of the problem. And I do talk about a few biographies in the book. Usually the connecting theme is some kind of radical disappointment. In a couple of cases, it's personal disappointment. 

"There's one person who I write about — he's the chairman of Polish state television, which is a kind of propaganda organ of the Polish ruling party. And he's someone who was a solidarity activist, an anti-communist activists in the 1980s. He comes from a prominent anti-Communist family. His brother is the editor of the most important liberal newspaper in Poland. So he's taken exactly the opposite path."

"And in a way, they represent this deep political division that we have in Poland. But he's also somebody who felt that he was owed more by democracy. And he was disappointed. He thought he should have been prime minister by now, or something prominent, or something important. And his radicalization partly reflects his personal anger at the system that he didn't become as famous as he thought he should become. And he's now enacting his revenge on what he sees as the political class that didn't recognize him and his talents."

"But you also have people for whom this is more of a theoretical problem. Another person in the book who I talk about is Laura Ingraham, who's a Fox News presenter whom I knew very slightly some years ago, whom I think is someone who is genuinely disappointed with modern America. She doesn't like the way it's changing. In her case, some of it is about demographic change. Some of it's about what she would call moral change or decline.

"She's a very religious person. America is much more secular than it used to be. It becomes more secular every year. And she sees this as a kind of deep decline. She is disappointed and she feels that something radical needs to happen in order to bring back … an America that she remembers from 30 years ago or 40 years ago, or thinks she remembers. So usually what links people is this deep dissatisfaction, which has promoted them or propelled them in a radical or extremist direction."

In your book, you draw a distinction between what you call 'reflective nostalgia' in conservatism and something you see as far more dangerous — something you call 'restorative nostalgia'. I'm wondering if you could tell me why you see restorative nostalgia as dangerous?

"Those are not my terms; they're borrowed from a Russian philosopher and thinker called Svetlana Boym. And she wrote a book called The Future of Nostalgia, which is a wonderful title. Her point was, there are different ways of thinking about the past or feeling, fondness or attachment to the past. And some people look back at the past and, they like the yellowed pages of old photo albums or they like visiting musty old churches. I probably put myself in that category. I'm a historian. I write history books. And so I think a lot about what the past must have been like.

"And then there's another kind of nostalgic who doesn't just miss the past or wonder about the past, but who actually wants the past back as exactly as it was. And usually this is an idealized vision of the past. You know, back when we were great again, or back when the traditions were still in place, or back when we were still whole. And this is, by the way, a very common feeling in societies that are rapidly changing or modernizing."

So is that desire to recuperate the past based largely on an imagined past?

"It's partly an imagined past. It's partly an idealized past. It's partly based on a particular reading of history. In America, it's about white picket fences in small towns — a picture that, you know, excludes what Black Americans were doing at that time, or doesn't have a role for women, for example, of a kind that they play today.

"Usually it has an idealized basis. And that's what gives it its power. It's a kind of utopian vision of the past."
 

*Q&A was edited for clarity and length. This episode was produced by Greg Kelly and Nahlah Ayed.