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Who paved the way for the populists? Anne Applebaum's book ignores the real drivers of dissatisfaction with liberal democracy

Orban will need more than a flag to hide behind with Biden around. Credit: Laszlo Balogh/Getty

Orban will need more than a flag to hide behind with Biden around. Credit: Laszlo Balogh/Getty


July 24, 2020   7 mins

On December 31, 1999 the journalist and historian Anne Applebaum and her husband Radosław Sikorski — a former defence and foreign minister in Poland — threw a party in the Polish countryside. Guests flew in from London, Moscow and New York; among them were journalists, diplomats and civil servants. Most shared a distinctive worldview. “You could have lumped the majority of us,” Applebaum says, “roughly, in the general category of what Poles call the Right — the conservatives, the anti-Communists… Free-market liberals, classical liberals, maybe Thatcherites.”

The mood at the party was euphoric. This was the high tide of strident End of History triumphalism. Communism had been swept aside in favour of globalisation, free markets and the unipolar American world.

Something changed, though, in the intervening years. Many of Applebaum’s friends came to abandon the principles which they had once held dear. Bitterness and rancour ensued. “I would now cross the street to avoid some of the people who were at my New Year’s Eve party,” Applebaum writes two decades later, in Twilight of Democracy — her new book which is both an elegy to the 1990s and an overview of the authoritarianism that is currently tearing apart the contemporary Right.

Applebaum and her husband — as well as some of the guests at the party — have stayed true to their previous centre-right inclinations. However, others have re-invented themselves as court intellectuals for a resurgent authoritarian Right. As populist movements have made headway across Europe, America and elsewhere, these former friends have enthusiastically climbed aboard.

The book concludes with another party — this time in August 2019 — at which the absence of old friends causes several morbid questions to hang in the air: what happened in the intervening years and why did so many abandon their liberal principles?

By way of answer, Applebaum takes aim at the political situation in various different countries. First, Poland which, in 1999, was “on the cusp of joining the West”. Today the country is ruled by Law and Justice, a nativist party that has built a conspiratorial myth around the 2010 Smolensk plane crash in which the president Lech Kaczyński was killed. Two Polish brothers, Jacek and Jaroslaw Kurski, both of whom marched with Solidarity in the 1980s, encapsulate the new divide. Jaroslaw edits a mainstream opposition newspaper while Jacek pumps out conspiratorial and xenophobic propaganda for state television.

Applebaum also takes us to Hungary, where Viktor Orbán and Fidesz have gutted democratic institutions right under the nose of the European Union. Government propagandists — again, often people Applebaum used to know as solid Right-leaning liberals — now foment conspiracy theories about Muslim immigration and the Jewish philanthropist George Soros. The director of Hungary’s Museum of Terror, Mária Schmidt, is an old liberal acquaintance of Applebaum’s who today rails against foreigners for their lack of “Hungarian-ness”.

Over in the United States, another of Applebaum’s old comrades, Laura Ingraham, is a courtier for Donald Trump. Like so many others who appear in the book, Ingraham’s Reaganite optimism has given way to a brutal cynicism. In her view, Western civilisation is doomed and “immigration, political correctness, transgenderism, the culture, the establishment, the left, the ‘Dems’, are responsible”.

Britain isn’t spared Applebaum’s scorn. Dominic Cummings is portrayed in a particularly menacing light for the unconservative zeal with which he seeks to transform Britain’s political institutions. The Conservative Party under Boris Johnson is described as “more Bolshevik than Burkean: these are men and women who want to overthrow, bypass or undermine existing institutions, to destroy what exists”.

It’s those who have lined up alongside the populist leaders of the new Right – the courtiers – who interest the author most: “the writers, intellectuals, pamphleteers, bloggers, spin doctors, producers of television programs and creators of memes who can sell his image to the public”. She describes these people as “clercs” — a fusion of ‘clerks’ and ‘clerics’, functionaries and evangelists — who are motivated by fear, resentment and envy towards those who are more successful than they are.

Some are driven by a resentful and nostalgic nationalism. Others, Applebaum believes, are “attracted to authoritarian ideas because they are bothered by complexity. They dislike divisiveness. They prefer unity.” As another friend, the former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum (who, rarely among Applebaum’s circle, has become more liberal with age) writes, some of the intellectuals of the new Right are motivated by a “desire to wipe the smirk off the condescending face of some resented critics”.

It’s the chaotic nature of the contemporary world, Applebaum believes, with its discordant rumble of social media forever in the background, that contains the locus of democracy’s demise. Many people today long for certainty, or else throw themselves into mass movements which attempt to negate the tensions that are inherent in plural and democratic life: “The jangling, dissonant sound of modern politics; the anger on cable television and the evening news; the fast pace of social media; the headlines that clash with one another when we scroll through them… all of this has unnerved that part of the population that prefers unity and homogeneity”.

This is bracing stuff. Yet it is rather unsatisfactory in explaining the recent upsurge in authoritarian and populist movements. Intellectuals have always been vain and attracted to silly ideas that may line their pockets or boost their standing. More interesting is why the populist Right – Trump, Orban, Law and Justice, the Leave Campaign – have generated such large followings. It is here that Applebaum’s arguments begin to fall short.

The author excludes from her analysis all those factors which risk painting the pre-populist era — a period of boundless optimism for her and her friends — in a negative light. She dismisses all materialist explanations for disenchantment with liberal democracy on the basis that former acquaintances who have thrown in their lot with Trump and other nationalists were “not affected” by the financial crash of 2008, do not live in communities ravished by opioids, and are not losing their jobs to migrant workers.

Fair enough. But she then applies the same broad-brush analysis to entire electorates, inserting the words “poor” and “deprived” in scare quotes when discussing western societies because, she writes, the downtrodden of today “have food and shelter”. They only lack “things that human beings couldn’t dream of a century ago, like air conditioning and Wi-Fi”, she writes. This will come as news to the nine million people in the United States – the richest country in the world — who have zero cash income. Moreover, real wages have barely improved for most American workers in decades.

Of course, the view you take of current events is invariably influenced by the vantage point from which you’re doing the viewing. While Applebaum and her friends were revelling in the triumph of liberal democracy in the 90s — breathing in the pieties of the new world from the rarefied atmosphere of Manhattan cocktail parties, diplomatic lunches and garden parties at the Spectator — deindustrialised regions in Britain, America and parts of Europe were being devastated by institutional breakdown, poverty and despair. But this is surely pertinent to any discussion of contemporary populism; as Michael Lind has written for UnHerd, “the heartlands of populism are often deindustrialised former manufacturing regions such as the North of England and the American Rust Belt”.

Moreover, while Applebaum may dislike Brexit, she provides little to back up her repeated insinuation that the 2016 referendum was somehow undemocratic. She also blames the result on “English nationalism” while offering no explanation as to why a majority in Wales voted to leave the European Union. Perhaps material explanations do matter after all.

Applebaum is a principled individual: she refused to vote for the Republican presidential candidate John McCain in 2008 on the basis that his running mate was the obnoxious know-nothing Sarah Palin.

Yet at times her judgement seems to falter. Why has she only recently concluded that Dinesh D’Souza — who was at that 1999 party — is bad news? D’Souza is a convicted criminal (illegal political donations) who makes hagiographic films about Donald Trump. He was sentenced in 2014, but had been spreading nonsense for decades. It was in his 1995 book The End of Racism that he notoriously claimed that “liberal antiracism” was a greater threat to blacks than racism, and that the purpose of segregation in the Southern states was to “protect blacks”. Two of D’Souza’s black colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute resigned in protest at the book.

Boris Johnson — another with whom Applebaum was previously on friendly terms — is a more intelligent and interesting character than Dinesh D’Souza. Yet she seems surprised that the man who was fired from the Times for making up quotes today exhibits an “outsized narcissism” and a “penchant for fabrication”.

This initial misreading of certain friends could perhaps be blamed on an error of focus; she has always viewed the threat to democracy as coming predominantly from the Left. In this, her myopia recalls something Hannah Arendt once wrote about the dangers of cultivating an “obsession” with totalitarianism to the extent that it can “blind” a person “to the numerous small and not so small evils with which the road to hell is paved”. As recently as 2014 Applebaum was arguing that Europe required more, not less, nationalism — a view that surely requires some revision if the arguments in this book are to be taken seriously.

Applebaum interestingly notes the similarities between the language of the European radical Right — of “elites” and “revolution” and “cleansing” — and that once used by the radical Left. But she fails to notice that her own writing drips with condescension for those who exist outside of her political haut monde. “The ancient philosophers always had their doubts about democracy,” she writes (with seeming approval) before launching into a brief discourse about how the American electoral college was originally envisioned as “a group of elite lawmakers and men of property who would select the president, rejecting the people’s choice if necessary, in order to avoid the ‘excesses of democracy’”.

Elsewhere, in seeking to explain the radical Right, Applebaum briefly resurrects the work of Theodor Adorno and his speculations about the “authoritarian personality” being located in “repressed homosexuality”. But the antidote to populism, whatever it is, is unlikely to be found in haughtiness; nor in Freudianism, nor any other cod-psychological speculations.

Applebaum may be correct to reject a myopic Marxian view that attempts to pin everything on the economy when explaining why “everybody got very angry” between 2015 and 2020. But even crude economic reductionism offers a better guide to present events than some of her own explanations, which recall Virginia Woolf’s fatuous post-World War One belief that “on or about December, 1910, human character changed”.

The post-Cold War era that the author pines for was undone, ultimately, by its own ideological hubris. It wasn’t Dominic Cummings or Vote Leave that invented political lying. The financial crisis, the Iraq war, a rapacious model of capitalism that undermined communities and precipitated industrial decline — all have chipped away at faith in democracy over the years. The populist demagogues we hear so much from today have in fact walked through a door left enticingly open for them by the silver-tongued, sharp-suited, Atlanticist politicians that Anne Applebaum reveres.


James Bloodworth is a journalist and author of Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain, which was longlisted for the Orwell Prize 2019.

J_Bloodworth

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Christopher Chantrill
Christopher Chantrill
4 years ago

I adhere to a three class theory of western society: educated Gentry, which means people like Anne Applebaum; Commoners, who don’t get to dance across the world from one cool gig to the next; and Clients, usually the helpless victims that the Gentry cultivates with government programs.

If you look at the world in this way it doesn’t seem too amazing that the Commoners of the west, from the Red Wall in the north of England to the Trumpist gun-lovers in the US, might have decided that the educated Gentry doesn’t have their interests at heart.

I mean, the basic game in electoral politics is to persuade the voters that you care about people like them. When you say that they are a bunch of losers, it can’t be surprising that they stop voting for you.

Jeremy Smith
Jeremy Smith
4 years ago

Vast amount of money was transferred from Central Government (London, SE England) to the Red Wall during NuLab days. 2007/8 blew up the budget.
What are you going to do about Blackpool ? Makes vacations to Spain illegal?!
The economic reality (nothing new BTW) that global economic cycles make certain regions of a country economically uncompetitive.

Andrew Harvey
Andrew Harvey
4 years ago
Reply to  Jeremy Smith

The response to places like Blackpool should have been to get some people there to move to London where the jobs are. Instead, those jobs went to cheaper Poles, Spaniards, etc. leaving the non-London/Southeast population to live off public sector non-jobs or benefits. It’s not exactly am original observation to see that open borders and a welfare state is a counterproductive combination.

Geoff Cooper
Geoff Cooper
4 years ago
Reply to  Andrew Harvey

But isn’t that exactly what the EU seems to be trying to maintain? You can have generous universal welfare systems or open borders, you cannot have both. Most intelligent four year olds would be able to work that out!

Basil Chamberlain
Basil Chamberlain
4 years ago
Reply to  Geoff Cooper

The EU has open borders within and closed borders without; surely the idea was to try eventually to harmonise salaries and living standards across the bloc (so that open borders and generous welfare systems could co-exist). A tough call when so many poor post-Communist countries entered the bloc; but it worked fine with Spain and Portugal in the 1980s.

Antonino Ioviero
Antonino Ioviero
4 years ago

Or say they are White and “privileged” and therefore should not complain about their social conditions.

chrisjwmartin
chrisjwmartin
4 years ago

You’ve successfully reïnvented Marx’s division of society between bourgeoisie, proletariat, and lumpenproletariat.

Adrian
Adrian
4 years ago
Reply to  chrisjwmartin

I thought the division was between bourgeoisie and proletariat (on page one of communist manifesto) with petit-bourgeoisie and lumpenproletariat invented on page two, given that people so obviously didn’t fit into the original divisions, so their very opposites had to be invented to stop the theory looking ridiculous.

When a theory posits some absolute (e.g. nice monotheistic God who hands out sweeties) you run into the problem “but life isn’t like that”, and you have to invent the opposite, pronto.

chrisjwmartin
chrisjwmartin
4 years ago
Reply to  Adrian

The Communist Manifesto itself is just a short summary”those terms weren’t invented on the spot for the Manifesto as you suggest”but other than that, agreed.

steve eaton
steve eaton
4 years ago
Reply to  chrisjwmartin

Or, possibly to the common model of society from at least as far back as the middle ages. The cleric, the warrior, and the peasantry.

chrisjwmartin
chrisjwmartin
4 years ago
Reply to  steve eaton

Indeed.

john.hurley2018
john.hurley2018
4 years ago
Stewart Slater
Stewart Slater
4 years ago

I think the problem with much of the commentary on recent events by the likes of Anne Appelbaum is that it is motivated by a belief the “people like us” should always be in charge, without considering whether “people like us” actually did a good job when they were.

Fraser Bailey
Fraser Bailey
4 years ago
Reply to  Stewart Slater

Yes, this is a point that cannot be made to often. These people were in charge for 20 or 30 years and the result was disastrous: Iraq and Afghanistan etc. widening economic inequality and ever increasing debt. the 2008 financial collapse, a further decline in the standard of education, the privileging of criminals over the law abiding, mass immigration that nobody wanted…the list goes on and on.

Steve Craddock
Steve Craddock
4 years ago

I need some help here. In a democracy being popular is good because you lots of votes and win elections. But someone somewhere decided that was a bad thing because it meant unpopular politicians and with their unpopular policies didn’t get a look in. I wonder if we look back we will see the first populist labelling was carried out in recent times by the losing party in an election or their supporters and it was applied to the winning party? Most mature western democracies were built with checks and balances the most obvious one being a limited term of office. So the ‘populist’ winner may be popular today but can they do a consistently good enough job to be re-elected next time. If only their opposition werent so indolent and actually had some good policies that people liked; but hold on if that was the case at the next election wouldn’t they be the populist ones?

Alex Mitchell
Alex Mitchell
4 years ago
Reply to  Steve Craddock

I’ve never quite understood the vitriol associated with the term ‘populist’ in a democracy, which is mostly predicated on popular = policy. It seems a variant of the sneering at the hoi polloi so popular with the chattering classes. “It may be popular, but only with those dreadful oiks who don’t understand”. According to Google’s dictionary it is ‘the quality of appealing to or being aimed at ordinary people’. The horror!
Of course popular often equals bad – just look at reality TV – but this negativity does seem self-fulfilling. If you want populists to win, just sneer at the ‘ordinary’ people.

Abelt Dessler
Abelt Dessler
4 years ago
Reply to  Alex Mitchell

There is a number of reasons for that.

The politically engaged have figured out that modern democracies rely on a large cadre of unelected officials to carry out its business. Such officials are expected to be expert and objective. So it came to pass that one way to exercise power without being held accountable to the general public was to occupy the positions these officials do.

Of course, one reason why accountability to the general public is undesirable is because the views held by such officials might be at odds with the general population, but perceived by them to be superior, morally, intellectually or both. Being held to account means being thwarted.

Therefore, people of certain political leanings, not all necessarily “left”, but who all share the view that any world that they did not have a hand in creating is inherently “bad”, started converging towards these positions of power without accountability, and creating their own influence network or “empires”.

And since most people tend to try and adjust to the world around them rather than wanting to change it in order to get by, the need for “leaders”, “intellectuals” and “vanguard” is manufactured in order to coerce them to accept their views, still away from democratic scrutiny.

So the non-elected institutions, the media, the professions are progressively occupied by people whose ultimate aim is to change the world based on theoretical notions, rather than the practical concerns of the general population. Therefore, when the pesky populace doesn’t get with the program, it needs re-educating to the ways of these “superior” beings or ostracizing if they don’t comply. And it is no longer acceptable to just work together on the things both sides agree upon, because that will validate the views of the other side on the objects of disagreement. As a consequence, those who don’t fall in line are demonised, in order to prevent their more reasonable views (still at odds with this “intellighentsija”, however you spell it) from ever getting a fair hearing.

This is why, in my opinion, a lot of gold-plating of reasonable ideas (e.g. gun control in the US) with batshit crazy ones (e.g. abolish the police) deliberately takes place in order to deter people who may agree with the first kind of proposition but disagree on other propositions (e.g. Universal Income) from ever getting a platform legitimised by a shared achievement.

So, when the disconnect becomes large enough between the politically motivated (but influential) few and the less political (I don’t believe in truly apolitical people, more likely they are not prepared to look at the political implications of the decisions informed by their views) many, and there is some common cause for the many to coalesce around, that’s when you have “populism”.

Of course, society being interconnected as it is, there are a lot of people riding on the coat-tails of either group, so when this plays out it becomes apparently more complex than “the elite vs the people” as individuals will have different personal resons to side with either, and the fact that some views are not popular with the masses does not implicitly make them “wrong” (rather “wrong at that moment in time”, but this is a subject for a different discussion). However, what is unquestionably wrong is that there are people enabled to exercise power without even nominal scrutiny.

Jeremy Smith
Jeremy Smith
4 years ago
Reply to  Abelt Dessler

We can solve the problem(s) by asking the people to pass basic citizenship tests. If they fail they don’t get to vote.

Abelt Dessler
Abelt Dessler
4 years ago
Reply to  Jeremy Smith

Is this what you got from my post? Sounds like you are part of the problem…

Jeremy Smith
Jeremy Smith
4 years ago
Reply to  Abelt Dessler

Yes, requiring an educated polity is “part of the problem”.

Abelt Dessler
Abelt Dessler
4 years ago
Reply to  Jeremy Smith

That’s not what you said. You talked about a “test”, ono whose passing parameters will, no doubt, be set by you and your friends. Also: define educated. Does a postgrad qualification in Engineering suffice, or is it all “Social Sciences”? One of the best educated governments in the history of humankind is the one that introduced the policy of “apartheid” in South Africa…

You are indeed part of the problem because not only do you believe that there is an objective “right” way of doing and seeing things, but that it also happens to coincide with yours.

There is a reason why the Soviets also pushed for an educated polity (which is no bad thing, but not necessarily good either), but it wasn’t so that they could realise how bad the regime was: what you want is a population that rubber-stamps your views without scrutiny and without bringing different points of view to the table, courtesy of your approved indoctrinators.

Jeremy Smith
Jeremy Smith
4 years ago
Reply to  Abelt Dessler

By education I mean fundamental understanding of civics (who is your local MP; workings of UK GOV; structure of UK constitution).

Abelt Dessler
Abelt Dessler
4 years ago
Reply to  Jeremy Smith

In that case: fair enough, but I don’t see how that will change how people vote, if “populism” is a concern.

I grew up in a Republic in the E.U. with pure proportional representation voting, I’ve lived through at least two changes in the voting system and I’ve never seen politics playing out any differently in my native country, just the faces changing once in a while, but given that I’m almost 50 years old, that is physiological. Procedural issues might excite the anoraks, but it’s the political culture that makes all the difference. And that is not a matter of education, at least not in the formal sense.

Jeremy Smith
Jeremy Smith
4 years ago
Reply to  Abelt Dessler

politics is tribal.

Abelt Dessler
Abelt Dessler
4 years ago
Reply to  Jeremy Smith

Are we doing statements of the obvious or non-sequiturs? The fat man walks alone…

Adrian
Adrian
4 years ago
Reply to  Abelt Dessler

“just the faces changing once in a while, but given that I’m almost 50 years old, that is physiological”
Nice one, made me laugh. Is that one of your own or a quotation?

Abelt Dessler
Abelt Dessler
4 years ago
Reply to  Adrian

Thanks. It’s my own, although I didn’t really put that much thought into it, I thought it was just a fact of life…

Abelt Dessler
Abelt Dessler
4 years ago
Reply to  Abelt Dessler

Apparently, my long and detailed post in reply to Alex Mitchell has been marked as spam, in spite of the 3 upvotes it got and the discussion that followed. Looks like this place is no stranger to the silly games that go on in other websites, so: thanks to all those who engaged with me. Life’s too short to jump through invisible hoops.

Abelt Dessler
Abelt Dessler
4 years ago
Reply to  Alex Mitchell

Right, since my original comment was flagged as spam, here it is again, without breaking it into paragraphs, which apparently triggers spam detection. If it gets blocked again, then I must conclude that there is foul play and draw my own conclusions. – There is a number of reasons for that. The politically engaged have figured out that modern democracies rely on a large cadre of unelected officials to carry out its business. Such officials are expected to be expert and objective. So it came to pass that one way to exercise power without being held accountable to the general public was to occupy the positions these officials do. Of course, one reason why accountability to the general public is undesirable is because the views held by such officials might be at odds with the general population, but perceived by them to be superior, morally, intellectually or both. Being held to account means being thwarted. Therefore, people of certain political leanings, not all necessarily “left”, but who all share the view that any world that they did not have a hand in creating is inherently “bad”, started converging towards these positions of power without accountability, and creating their own influence network or “empires”. And since most people tend to try and adjust to the world around them rather than wanting to change it in order to get by, the need for “leaders”, “intellectuals” and “vanguard” is manufactured in order to coerce them to accept their views, still away from democratic scrutiny. So the non-elected institutions, the media, the professions are progressively occupied by people whose ultimate aim is to change the world based on theoretical notions, rather than the practical concerns of the general population. Therefore, when the pesky populace doesn’t get with the program, it needs re-educating to the ways of these “superior” beings or ostracizing if they don’t comply. And it is no longer acceptable to just work together on the things both sides agree upon, because that will validate the views of the other side on the objects of disagreement. As a consequence, those who don’t fall in line are demonised, in order to prevent their more reasonable views (still at odds with this “intellighentsija”, however you spell it) from ever getting a fair hearing. This is why, in my opinion, a lot of gold-plating of reasonable ideas (e.g. gun control in the US) with batshit crazy ones (e.g. abolish the police) deliberately takes place in order to deter people who may agree with the first kind of proposition but disagree on other propositions (e.g. Universal Income) from ever getting a platform legitimised by a shared achievement. So, when the disconnect becomes large enough between the politically motivated (but influential) few and the less political (I don’t believe in truly apolitical people, more likely they are not prepared to look at the political implications of the decisions informed by their views) many, and there is some common cause for the many to coalesce around, that’s when you have “populism”. Of course, society being interconnected as it is, there are a lot of people riding on the coat-tails of either group, so when this plays out it becomes apparently more complex than “the elite vs the people” as individuals will have different personal resons to side with either, and the fact that some views are not popular with the masses does not implicitly make them “wrong” (rather “wrong at that moment in time”, but this is a subject for a different discussion). However, what is unquestionably wrong is that there are people enabled to exercise power without even nominal scrutiny.

A Spetzari
A Spetzari
4 years ago
Reply to  Steve Craddock

Completely agree. Focusing on the populists themselves seems to be focusing on the symptoms not the illness.

Fraser Bailey
Fraser Bailey
4 years ago

Thank you, James, for a welcome alternative view fo Applebaum and the globalists. (Of course, this article can be linked to Freddy’s excellent interview with John Gray to some extent). Applebaum embodies the sneering ‘elites’, and although there are aspects of what is going on in Poland and Hungary that I find a little disturbing, you can’t blame people for seeking an alternative to the destruction of their society and traditions.

I guess I was once a globalist, and I was certainly once very pro-EU. But around 2002/3 I started to wake up and to realise that globalism did nothing for most ‘normal’ working people, and that the EU was anti-democratic. As such, I have enjoyed watching the rise of populism.

Jeremy Smith
Jeremy Smith
4 years ago
Reply to  Fraser Bailey

It is beyond dispute that the current Polish government has turned the plane accident in Russia into an article of faith. Foreigners (Russians) and domestic traitors (liberals, gays, etc.) are responsible for the crash not the pilot and political pressure to land the plane despite very poor visibility.

Fraser Bailey
Fraser Bailey
4 years ago
Reply to  Jeremy Smith

Yes, and those are the ‘disturbing aspects’ that I refer too

Ian nclfuzzy
Ian nclfuzzy
4 years ago

The definition of chutzpah is to murder your parents and then claim mercy from the judge on the basis you’re an orphan.

Applebaum and her neoliberal sect cheerled for the rape of post-Soviet countries and now bleat about them going populist.

She’s got some nerve.

Your time would be better spent reading The Light that Failed, a much more insightful view of why Eastern Europe has embraced hyper-democracy (aka populism).

Diarmid French
Diarmid French
4 years ago

At the last four general elections I, I suspect like many others, had to hold my nose and vote for what I felt was the least worst party because none of them even remotely reflected my own views on many topics.

I hoped, being retired, that my choice might be the best one available for the greater good of my country and for those things that would deliver the greatest good to the most people; not to forget my own children.

After the fourth application of a strong nasal spray I realised that I was completely missing the point. I was soaking up the BS without looking closely enough at the motivation of the people who wanted my vote or those in high places who supported them. Naively I thought that at least some of them had the best interests of the electorate at heart. Silly me…

No, it’s all the usual suspects; position, power, ego and of course wealth. The first of these allows better access to the “Golden Trough” and, equally importantly, gives the ability to help those who already feed there and those who aspire to do so and who may be able to reciprocate at a later date. You know the thing; former chancellors who are worth £600,000 pa for one day a week, former EU commissioners who are suddenly able to buy very expensive property and even those not so successful who can get $600,000 pa for running a US charity; I could go on.

The worst of these troughs is the Quangocracy. The perfect place to reward those of lesser profile and dubious ability for services rendered and where, for the most part, they can hide away unseen. Bad luck PHE, Corona virus rather exposed your shortcomings. I won’t even start on the “Charity” industry except to say that, for the executives, it clearly starts at home.

I no longer see a great political divide, what I see is the fear and panic of those that are terrified that a populist upsurge may destroy their very comfortable existence and the lengths to which they will go to protect it.

I am now a committed Populist.

Jeremy Smith
Jeremy Smith
4 years ago
Reply to  Diarmid French

Great!
What are you going to do about Blackpool? Make vacations in Spain illegal?!

Basil Chamberlain
Basil Chamberlain
4 years ago

Surely when Ms Applebaum uses the word “clercs”, she is not fusing “clerks” with “clerics” but evoking “La Trahison des Clercs”, the famous 1927 polemic by Julien Benda, in which he accused the intellectuals of his day of having lost the capacity for disinterested reason and becoming apologists for nationalism and racism. Benda defended the rationalism of classical civilisation and the universalism of Christianity against narrow chauvinism, against the cult of “la terre et les morts”. He was satirising the leading French nationalist intellectuals of his day, Charles Maurras and Maurice Barrès, when he wrote that “History will smile to think that this is the species for which Socrates and Jesus Christ died”.

Judy Englander
Judy Englander
4 years ago

Applebaum appears to have missed the point. The mainstream Left has become so extreme that the only feasible answer from the Right is to move further to the right.

A Spetzari
A Spetzari
4 years ago
Reply to  Judy Englander

I think James has missed that one too. That is why there is a polarisation.

Could not disagree with it more – people should be sticking to their principles and not countering their opponents increasingly extreme views with like for like.

Jeremy Smith
Jeremy Smith
4 years ago
Reply to  A Spetzari

“…people should be sticking to their principles..”
LOL

Abelt Dessler
Abelt Dessler
4 years ago
Reply to  A Spetzari

The problem is that the Right willingly surrendered control of the Culture and all soft-power to the Left, so what were once reasonable, middle of the road positions (even centre-left ones) are being pushed out by extremists with bigger megaphones, on the grounds that from the extremes, the centre looks extremist.

Jeremy Smith
Jeremy Smith
4 years ago
Reply to  Abelt Dessler

if you make a list of the all the Great western writers (start with Dante?) how many of them would be considered Conservative (Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky) and how many would be considered liberal?
When it comes to culture the Left has an advantage, they want to try new things…the conservatives do not want to.
But you are fundamentally right.

Abelt Dessler
Abelt Dessler
4 years ago
Reply to  Jeremy Smith

Then, again, if “trying new things” was a hallmark of the Left, Adam Smith, The Republican Party (the one that abolished slavery) and Margaret Thatcher (who was no stranger to “trying new things”, whatever the cost) would also be considered “Left”.

Still, you observation is correct. The problem is that “trying new things” is valuable, but does not automatically mean “better”, hence the need for a conservative (lowercase) counterbalance to innovators to pump the brakes or even wind back the clock when the “new thing” proves not to work.

In other words, Jimi Hendrix was a great innovator, but most people who’ve seen him live said his performance was awful (minus a few notable ones, of course). On the other hand, Stevie Ray Vaughan is one of the most derivative guitarists to have ever got on stage, and yet hardly anyone has ever been disappointed by his shows. Of course, if you could have the best of both worlds, you’d have the Who…

There is also a famous interview to the late, great Frank Zappa (no stranger to trying new things himself) where he points out that all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff was being published when producers were old men chomping cigars with no knowledge of music, but now that you’ve got the trendy kids in charge (I paraphrase) you get 4-chord songs written by committee…

Basil Chamberlain
Basil Chamberlain
4 years ago
Reply to  Jeremy Smith

It would be a mistake to define the great writers in those terms. Great literature is bigger than politics.

Ian Wigg
Ian Wigg
4 years ago

Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Chaucer were apolitical in their writing?

Michael Dawson
Michael Dawson
4 years ago
Reply to  Jeremy Smith

The better ones mainly put their politics to one side, I’d guess. Or at least it did not define their work. Art and literature have not always been seen as inherently left-wing or liberal (in the political sense). Paul Johnson’s book about the birth of the modern world suggested this trend really started c1820.

A Spetzari
A Spetzari
4 years ago
Reply to  Abelt Dessler

Yes completely agreed. The far right is a threat, always has been (albeit less so in UK for a variety of reasons).

But what is concerning is that otherwise quite extreme views have taken hold in the general left to the point that they are no longer actually ‘liberal’ in the proper sense of the word.

Those views are also wedded to corporate mouthpieces. Which is all the more concerning as i am not sure it’s just a case of them following the $£€. Corporations in order to be seen to adhere to the movement have created departments and programmes within which propagate these views, however initially well-intentioned.

Adrian
Adrian
4 years ago
Reply to  Judy Englander

No. The problem started (accidentaly) with the free-market right.

‘Free’ markets are predicated on a state which controls the size of monopolies, but in the post cold war, globalised world, it became increasingly attractive to host countries to have larger and larger companies to compete with massive foreign companies.
So states did not cut those companies down to size. You end up with little innovation and huge resistance to change from the baronial industries that result. Good old fashioned, centre-right ‘Mom and Pop store’ capitalism disappears, to be replaced with the Feudalist/Communist style big companies. Innovation and growth falls. The result is a malaise.

Add to this the off-shoring of manufacturing jobs, and the bottom of the heap worker cannot point to a car that he, or his brother, or his wife produced and say “I am a valued member of my society, because we produced that”. You can feel a lot less resentful about depictions of city guys on TV driving big fast cars, if you built the car. You can feel a little bit of vicarious pride, feel like you truly belong in this picture.

Society, as an idea at least, starts to break down. Resentment builds up.

Is it a coincidence that the President of the United States of America, very recently starred in a television show where he mocked stupid city folk for not being able to do basic tasks?
Given that Trump represents the people who aren’t part of the fast-talking city-centred media set, is it a suprise that his voters don’t find his lack of eloquence a problem?

The older-wiser centre-left fall into the trap of fearing and despising the non-urban voters, mostly because these people only end up on a media filtered through the urban gaze. They ally themselves with the ultra-left young, ambitious, angry lefties who demand purity of thought and speech, or your job (they’d prefer your job). It seems to me to be predominantly older left wing city types who are being pulled down by the young firebrands, because they fear the 50% of Trump voters so much, they’ve lost sight of the bigger picture, such as tolerance being a good thing. The left fell into the trap of believing that they were important because the opposite of National Socialism is International Socialism. It isn’t. They made the mistake of equating trump with facism, because they weren’t getting the political system they felt they were entitled to. Now the old centre-left have no ideological defence when being torn down by ultra anti-Trumpists.

Unfortunately, the old left-right split is fading only to be replaced by the older nationalist-internationalist split, which festered at the turn of the century as the last global empire model was found wanting. The centre ground looked on in shock as national and international socialists tore the world up.

We are still a long way from 1930s Berlin (read “Goodbye to Berlin” to get a feel for how things panned out last time, and when to flee), but that period in history started with students shouting down their lecturers, long before they started sacking university professors for being on the wrong side of history.

davidfreedman.computerguy
davidfreedman.computerguy
4 years ago

The financial crisis, the Iraq war, a rapacious model of capitalism that undermined communities and precipitated industrial decline ” all have chipped away at faith in democracy over the years.

This reminds me of this kind of reporting: Hostilities broke out, riots happened, war took place?
Wasn’t the financial crisis caused by the actions of men (read: people)? Was the Iraq war a natural calamity, like an earthquake? Is a so-called rapacious model of capitalism conducted by automatons?
Unless you believe in predestination, or that we are forever just cogs in a huge clockwork machine, men must take responsibility for their individual actions.
We are surrounded, embedded, jellified in a thick goo of societal restrictions, but still, people can make individual decisions.We are the self-aware bugs in amber. Scarabs of the world, unite!

G Harris
G Harris
4 years ago

Why is George Soros forever, and provocatively, referred to as ‘the Jewish’ philanthropist?

Presumably it still suits some to portray his ‘Jewishness’ as utterly inextricable from his apparent ‘philanthropy’, for good or ill.

George Soros is pretty much ‘a philanthropist’ in so much as the ‘non-Jewish’ Kochs are/were in the US ie they both try and use their power and money to unduly influence body politics to promote their own personal aims and interests way over and above the majority of those unable to do so and who, rather prosaically, just have to periodically make do with the democratic vagaries afforded by the ballot box.

Whether you’re ‘Jewish’, gay, straight bi, trans, pink, white, agnostic, atheist, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, black, brown, green, striped or whatever doesn’t make it right.

Ann Fullerton
Ann Fullerton
4 years ago
Reply to  G Harris

For George Soros, his Jewishness is only a social construct he indulges in when someone holds his feet to the fire. “I’m a Jew, better not attack my public image!”

In fact, during WW2 he happily got rich working with Nazis to rob his own people.

Philanthropist? Soros? Pull the other leg.

Re Anne Appelbaum’s elitist handwringing over populism. It seems her kind’s pet swear word for uh, democracy? You know, government of the people by the people for the people?

When as we all should know, democracy is government of the people by elitists for elitists. “We know what’s good for you fools better than you do yourselves.”

Such arrogance, Ms Appelbaum!
Re left wing/ right wing. There’s neither any more. Both are elite-controlled. Elitists have no more interest in the welfare of those of us they call deplorables than does their unpleasant hero Soros.

Re envying elitists. Honest now. Does any intelligent deplorable envy that crew? The Spanish say, “Take what you want says God, and pay for it. ” The Sikhs say: “Good deeds lead to the pleasures of rulership which lead to the agonies of hell.”

George Soros, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, the Clintons and their mates aren’t liberals. They’re newspeak liberals. They are more than welcome to responsibility for the deaths, the tears, the cruelty deriving from their ill-gotten billions.

They’re welcome to enjoy that frightening responsibility all by themselves.

Michael Baldwin
Michael Baldwin
4 years ago

At the heart of this kind of political analysis of this sort, by what are generally speaking somewhat privileged middle (regardless of their origins) or upper class intellectuals, who have generally speaking heard about council or “social housing” (some might call them “anti-social housing”) estates, but never actually seen one up close and personal, let alone lived in one, is a growing dislike of democracy.

The privileged (and one sees from the endless number of “jumped up” ex-working class in the modern faux Labour party, one doesn’t need to be born in that category) have since the dawn of time with few exceptions, believed that they were born to rule and enjoy that privilege and everybody else had been put on planet Earth basically to serve them.

I don’t actually blame the privileged for thinking in that way, because I suspect with few exceptions most persons alive would happily switch their lot to go up a social and economic notch – in the case of the lower classes, aspiring to be middle class, and the middle class aspiring to be upper class.

Everybody wants to go up, not down, and we have to be honest about human nature, that apart from the truly religious or seriously compassionate minority, like Jesus, Buddha or maybe Karl Marx or Tony Benn, we know that means having things and special treatment that other people don’t have, or have far less of.

So in fact, there has now become this growing trend amongst a large sector of privileged (if you’re not privileged in some way now, you simply don’t get heard, except in usually the tiniest way on social media, and subject to constant abuse from other “nobodies” very often even if you dare to speak up in that way) persons to use this term “populism”, when what they actually mean is democratic votes or elections are producing results they not only don’t like or approve, but are almost in terror of in cases, as for example, many such political intellectuals and journalists think that the resurgent nationalist vote in so many countries, leads us sooner or later back to Nazism.

For me, the greatest irony of this, is that the so called liberal intellectuals, almost exclusively university trained, such as at the Guardian and the BBC and their American counterparts, are actually some of the most dictatorial people in human history, in particular by their almost blanket denial of free speech, meaning they cannot abide any criticism of either themselves personally, or of the philosophies they espouse, like globalisation, which effectively seeks to abolish nation states, national identities, and the culture and way of life and identity of most of the people living there.

For almost all human history, every people of every country have believed in the idea they are a people, and that they were even expected to die in fighting to preserve their nation, their people.

But suddenly, in this historically speaking, 5 minutes to midnight moment, all their leaders nearly seem to have suddenly betrayed them, and not only not repelled, but relentlessly encouraged and facilitated what they see as mass invasion, which all these governments have labelled “essential economic immigration” and labelled anybody who opposed it as racists and barbarians.

Whether the masses are racists and barbarians is not the issue, but even if we accepted some validity in those claims, these same intellectuals and politicians who call ordinary people “racists” and “bigots”, happily vote in favour and support wars (carried out by those they condemn) on people who never attacked us, like Iraq, in which the most savage mass murder, torture and intimidation and terror is enforced on millions of innocent people.

No doubt once again, all excused by some “high minded intellectual ideal” such as we had to remove a “dictator” who was “oppressing his own people”, but without even calculating if a better regime will result (the so called “exit strategy”) from the apparently incidental mass murder, blinding and laming of millions of people in far away places whose shrieks of terror, agony and dismembered and scattered body parts they will never see.

To take this attitude, to order and support the mass murder and terrorisation of millions of people we will never see, and never harmed us, shows a near total detachment from reality, a near total lack of concern for the fate of other people in other parts of the world.

Likewise, the same sort of intellectuals and politicians who support and order this mass murder, are fully supporting the lockdown, which in reality is mass murder of the older generation (those who are the most likely to be “populists”/”nationalists”) under the guise of trying to save their lives, by denying these 12 million over 65s and 20 million over 55s normal medical care – tests, treatment, operations – by diverting almost the entire health service into treating a dubious disease, which has killed almost entirely only already weak old people, or a few others with serious underlying health problems; and once again, the same mostly young (under 65 or 60) and healthy journalists, politicians and intellectuals, support forcibly masking these same old people, making it difficult for them to even breathe in many cases – there is a picture of a passed out old woman in a face mask on Twitter, lying on the floor, who undoubtedly felt too afraid for whatever reason to go out in public without a mask – whether scared of the virus or social demonisation or both for refusing to wear one.

So it appears that both the media and politicians of this ilk are now, though as yet hidden behind obfuscating intellectualism, starting to openly admit that democracy was a mistake, the masses are too uncivilised to be allowed to choose their leaders, and especially choose policies, such as rejecting the EU or supporting the clearly outmoded nationalism. So even if elections can’t actually be fully abolished as yet, all the authorities can be infiltrated in such a fashion that they overrule the democratic will of the masses.

Thus do we see now over four years later, no real steps have been taken except superficially to extricate the UK from the EU, and moreover, the unending mass immigration, which was almost entirely what the Brexit vote was about, as was the election of President Trump, at the rate of nearly 1 million every three years in the UK, continues almost totally unabated, and almost no effort is made to stop the illegal immigration, which the government has long admitted it doesn’t even know how much there is of.

The question the “liberal intellectuals” really need to answer, is whether this dictatorship that they are clearly attempting to impose on the masses, counter to their democratic will (most remain unconvinced, especially after the lockdown, that Boris Johnson is really their champion, and seriously intends to either stop mass immigration or carry out any genuine exit from the EU) can actually be sustainable.

Will they be able to control the masses with the army and police and drones and so on, if (my guess is it more when, than not if) the rioting breaks out, and as we know, can spread like wildfire now due to modern instant communications and news?

Because if the liberal authorities, who are fully endorsing the forcible mask wearing and in fact mass murder of the old due to deprivation of medical resources, are not certain they can hold law and order together, and contain rioting and possibly revolution even, they had really better stop now.

I fear however they are totally incapable of doing that, because they seem to be trapped in their mental ideological bubble, totally “social distanced” from the lives of the masses, as in pre-revolutionary Russia and France.

It astounds me that so many of these people, who have even studied history, cannot see that they themselves are playing out the same behaviour as those fallen regimes, or indeed the fallen Roman Empire long before it, which all fell due to this same detachment from reality and responsibility for the masses, and selfish obsession with their own extravagant pleasures, as in the case of the Emperor Nero.

My best guess, is that if saner, wiser politicians and figures in the media, are not able to intervene in the almost totally government and media caused chaos, eventually to prevent such violent revolution and total breakdown of law and order, the generals in the military may feel forced to take over government, perhaps (hopefully) until genuine new elections can take place, with candidates hopefully more representing and caring about the public and more believing in democracy therefore, just as Mr Christian felt forced to mutiny on HMS Bounty, when the captain was so obsessed with his mission, he was starting to mass murder the crew and had lost any semblance of civilisation.

What has happened, is that a small minority of people in big business, the media, government and academia, have decided that only the rights and happiness of this small minority matters, and the rights and happiness of the majority don’t matter at all, indeed their actually lives don’t matter at all, so can easily be sacrificed as in this pandemic, as long as “the people who matter” are protected from being given the disease by the “vulgar masses”, who must therefore all be masked for their protection.

The problem is that the liberal intellectuals cannot admit this truth, because it reveals them instead of being virtuous, as they constantly claim and even believe themselves to be, but instead as dictators, and supporters of mass murder, selfishness incarnate; and thus we see clearly why their efforts have been progressively to deny ever more free speech, because they must silence anybody who might dare to tell this awful truth they are so relentlessly covering up, and may not even see in their nightmares.

That is also why there is such a pleasure addiction and obsession with luxury, just as at the fall of the Roman Empire, for the same reason, that excess and extreme pleasure and powerful drugs have to be used to blot out conscience, awareness of the injustices, tyrannies and horrors they have imposed on everyone else, while being regarded by “polite society” as worthy citizens again, just as in Roman times; just as Tony Blair was lately (the video was on the Daily Mail yesterday) interviewed by Emily Maitlis in which he supported the public all wearing masks, despite him having been thoroughly condemned by the Chilcott Enquiry for the mass murder disguised as legitimate war, which report it seems the BBC has completely ignored, and thus is treating him still as an honoured citizen.

I wish above all the elite could understand something that they clearly don’t, and it is a potentially catastrophic failure of understanding.

The masses do not and never have desired full equality.

What they want and have always wanted, is a peaceful world in which they can get what they need, a stable orderly and caring community of people like themselves to live out their relatively simple and mostly unintellectual personal and family lives in.

Meaningful adequately paid work, and protection from the seriously criminal minority.

If they are given those things, there won’t be any problem – but now the elite have threatened all of those things, they have prepared the ground for no other possible thing than mass rebellion, of which of course the Brexit vote and President Trump are merely the first major signs.

G Harris
G Harris
4 years ago

This Anne Applebaum is presumably the exact same Anne Applebaum who put her name to a petition recently decrying the very real, present and dangerous threat to the loss of free speech?

https://harpers.org/a-lette

What makes this petition all the more ‘amusing’, ironic, or whatever, however, is that a good many of these ‘right on’ signatories to this unofficial manifesto now claim that they might not have done so had they been fully aware of who the ‘other’ signatories were with their own, presumably ‘highly dubious’, divergent views.

Revolutions ultimately consume their own children, as the saying goes.

Sparta Cuss
Sparta Cuss
4 years ago

This entire article is based on the lie that electing your “betters” to lord it over you is democracy. One day the people will realize this.

Jasper Fuller
Jasper Fuller
4 years ago

Common sense analysis. Unfortunately, as we know,common sense is not so common. Can we have more of this please?